Trump Can Be Beaten

Republicans have tipped over into complacency.

Secret Pod: Sarah and I did the Secret show early this morning and it is a banger.

You can get it right here. This is a top-10 all-time episode. You’re going to love it.

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(Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

1. Confidence

My impression from the convention is that Republicans, from Trump on down, are absolutely certain he’s going to win.

Please know that I’ve been to a lot of conventions and the partisans are always confident. Up by 10 or down by 5, doesn’t matter. Party people tend to be believers, not skeptics or realists.

But at every convention I’ve seen since 2000, the general sense was that their candidate had an excellent chance to win: “Our guy is great, the other guy sucks, we can do this thing. We just gotta keep working.”

That is a different position than believing that the outcome is foreordained, or that victory is assured.

The mood at this convention was valedictory. As if the race was already over. Trump 2024 is acting like Reagan 1984. Like he’s riding a 17-point advantage in the polls.

And I am sorry, but this is the reality:

Republicans should be confident. Trump has a lead in the national polling average. His lead is growing. He’s ahead in all the swing states. He’s expanding the map by putting Virginia and New Hampshire in play. He’s the clear favorite.

But also: He has spent three weeks running against a zombie campaign. Everything has gone Trump’s way. And he still hasn’t been able to break 48 percent. He’s still only leading by +3 nationally.

If the vote was held today and you ran the election 100 times, Trump probably wins 80 of them. Maybe 85.

But these guys are acting like he’d win 100 out of 100. They are unconcerned that the vote is not being held today. And that they won’t be running against Joe Biden.

What I saw at this convention wasn’t confidence. It was overconfidence. It was complacency. I saw a party and a candidate who expect a coronation, not a campaign. Who believe that the general election will play out exactly as the primaries did.

What I saw was a tired, meandering old man playing the hits. Still trotting out Lee Greenwood and Franklin Graham.

What I saw was opportunity.

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Joe Biden is going to step aside. Donald Trump will not run against a zombie campaign the rest of the way. He will be challenged by someone young, scrappy, and hungry.

Trump is still the favorite. He has a lot of advantages and the emergence of a new Democratic candidate will not suddenly make the race 53-46.

But the Trump we saw last night can be beaten. And the fact that Republicans don’t realize this only adds to his vulnerability.

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2. Danger

The other thing I saw at the convention was danger.

I want to give Donald Trump a great deal of credit for one thing: He did not turn the attempt on his life into a fascist call for retribution.

That is what I had feared since Saturday. Trump didn’t do it. Is this is a low bar? Sure. But I’m sincerely grateful nonetheless.

That said, I am concerned about how Republicans will react if Trump loses.

Because that crowd seemed to find the idea of a Trump defeat utterly incomprehensible.

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I don’t mean that these guys think Trump is an overwhelming favorite.

I mean that there did not seem to be any recognition that defeat was possible.

You know how, in football, a team that’s favored by three touchdowns will still say, “Sure, but on any given Sunday. That’s why we play the games. Yadda yadda yadda.”

There was none of that. Zero.

I am concerned that this iteration of the Republican party lacks the ability to countenance a loss.

I fear for what a Trump administration would do if he wins. But I also fear for what this Republican party will do if he loses. Because they have moved past electoral politics and into the realm of messianic prophecy.

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3. Newhart

Bob Newhart passed away yesterday. This piece about his long friendship with Don Rickles is lovely.

Bob Newhart and Don Rickles occupied separate spheres in the comedy world of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, or so it seemed to viewers and listeners at home. Newhart achieved success overnight—not literally, of course, but about as close as anyone ever got in actual show business—with his début comedy album, “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.” Released in 1960, the record comprised a series of monologues with Newhart most often playing the ostensible straight man to an unheard interlocutor on the other end of a phone call. It hit No. 1 on the Billboard album chart—a first for a comedy LP—and would go on to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, beating out Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, and Frank Sinatra. A former ad man, Newhart had been doing standup for barely a year. He would become a fixture on television in the nineteen-seventies and eighties as the star of the CBS sitcoms “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart.”

Rickles, meanwhile, had been slowly climbing the night-club comedy ladder for years when, in the late nineteen-fifties, Sinatra took a liking to him and gave his career a boost. Rickles’s forte was insult comedy. Stalking back and forth on stage, he’d address audience members as “dummy” or “hockey puck,” make fun of their clothes, their dates, their ethnicities. He won Sinatra over from a night-club stage by calling out, “Make yourself at home, Frank—hit somebody.” Rickles, who died in 2017 at the age of ninety, never found a TV vehicle that worked well for him, but even millennials and Gen Z-ers who have never seen a Dean Martin roast know him as the voice of Mr. Potato Head in the “Toy Story” movies.

So two comedians, one Rat Pack-adjacent, one more of the Bob and Ray school, and yet they were best friends for half a century—maybe not an odd couple, but certainly not an obvious couple. That bond is the subject of Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio’s documentary short “Bob and Don: A Love Story,” a mix of interviews, archival footage, and home videos which plays a bit like a eulogy, albeit a funny one. Apatow, having spent “every day” of his childhood watching “The Bob Newhart Show” in reruns, didn’t hesitate to say yes to the project, the brainchild of Rickles’s manager, when he learned that Newhart, now ninety-four, was on board. In the director’s mind, there was a debt to be paid: “Bob is one of the main reasons I went into comedy,” Apatow told me. “He’s never asked me for anything before, and I’ve been waiting for him to ask my entire life.”

The older comedians met through their wives, Barbara Rickles and Ginnie Newhart, in the nineteen-sixties, one late night when both men were performing in Las Vegas. The two couples became a tight foursome, their chemistry so perfectly balanced that they would grumble if someone like Sinatra tried to horn in on a dinner. Despite the non-uxorious show-business milieu, both marriages endured and the couples frequently travelled together. “I love that they became friends because they both played Vegas and neither wanted to cheat on their wives,” Apatow said. Barbara Rickles died in 2021, four years after her husband, on what would have been their fifty-sixth wedding anniversary. Ginnie Newhart, who is interviewed in “Bob and Don,” died in April.

Born three years apart, Newhart and Rickles weren’t as mismatched as their stage personas and career paths might suggest.

Read the whole thing.