 I'm Harold Pacius. We're back on the air with another edition of Pacius on the News. I think we've been doing this about 14 years now and on this station. And I think we've had probably 130 different interviews. So we we've put together for tonight, I think a special interview. It's the day after the election. And I wanted to get somebody very special, somebody very experienced. He happens to live in Maine, but he's had quite a career in journalism. His name is Matt Storen. We've had him on before. Good evening, Matt. Good evening, Harold. Good to see you. Matt, I'm going to tell a little bit about you, Matt. I first met Matt back in 1965. I was working at the White House. And in those days, the Portland newspapers and the Gusta and Waterville Sentinel, the Janet newspapers, had their own reporting group in Washington. They were stringers, but they actually replaced the famous May Craig. And Matt was one of them. He worked with a guy named Don Larrabee in Washington. Larrabee was a very well-known guy, ultimately president of the National Press Club. But Larrabee was from Portland, Maine, a graduate of Deering High School. He always wanted to be a reporter. And he ultimately was. And he ended up in Washington, D.C. And he hired Matt Storen. And Matt Storen went on from Don Larrabee, trained by Don Larrabee. But Matt went on to be the congressional correspondent for the Boston Globe, White House correspondent for the Boston Globe, and actually the Asian correspondent out in Asia for the Boston Globe. Then went on, later to be the editor of the Boston Globe, I believe on two separate occasions. Matt, is that correct? Well, no, I was a managing editor. And then I left for seven years and came back as editor. Okay. And in between, Matt was the editor of the New York Daily News. And maybe at some point during the show, he can tell you that at the time there was a fellow in New York who liked publicity, still likes publicity, and liked the publicity he'd be about him. And his name was Donald Trump. And he used to pick up the phone and call the editor of the New York Daily News, our guest, Mr. Storen, to tell him what he'd like to see about himself in the newspaper. And then Matt later became the editor of the Chicago Sun Times. So I've said, I've said a lot about you, Matt. I do want to add one other thing. Matt has lived in Maine twice now. He likes Maine. And I think you lived in Arosik at one time, did you? Yeah, Arosik, yeah. Arosik. And then now he lives in Camden with his wife. He's retired. He's the president of the well-known Camden Conference and a very well-known guy, well-known nationally. And we're delighted that you could be here and comment on the election. And let me just say before Matt begins that things seem to have narrowed down now in the last 24 hours. And the number, we all know, the number of electoral votes needed to be elected is 270. And Joe Biden has 253. Needs 17 more. His path is a lot easier than Mr. Trump's path. If Biden wins Arizona, where he's currently leading with about 100,000 votes in his favor, if he wins Arizona, which is currently counting absentee ballots, then he'll pick up 11 electoral votes. And then if he, oh, 10 electoral votes, and if he wins next door in Nevada, where he's currently leading, he picks up six and he has been elected president. In the meantime, the president of the United States has said that it's an illegitimate election. Fraud has been committed on the people of the United States. And he's going to sue and he's going to create a lot of issues. And we are in an election because of that, because he will not accept the results and he will not accept the way people voted. We are going to be in an election probably like nothing we've ever had in this country except perhaps once. And also an election that will define America as much as 1860, which is when Lincoln was elected and immediately we were in a war. So a lot of stakes for the American people. I don't want to engage in high verbally, but I like to read history. I'm sure our guest does too. And if you put this in historical context, we are on thin ice in this country. So having said that and shaking everybody up, Matt, what do you think? What's going on? Well, I must say, as you've alluded to, I've never seen anything like the last 12 hours or 18 hours, whatever it was from the time that Trump spoke last night at 2.15 a.m. But then again, we've, although we've had a few rascals in the White House over time, some would maybe say as recently as Bill Clinton, we have not seen anything like Donald J. Trump before. Some say, and I can't say absolutely with certainty that he's the first president who made no effort to build his constituency and has just divided, has been interested really and motivated in dividing the country, which is completely counterintuitive. And yet he has almost won and could still yet win re-election. I did, in preparation for tonight, I did a little list of winners and losers from this election. And I don't think it'll come as any surprise that the people who do polls for media and other services are big losers. I really, Harold, I can't foresee four years from now that media companies are going to want to invest near polls. Sure, they'll do some because I can't think of any other substitute. People want to have an idea of how the race is going. But they've just been, they were abysmal in this case, particularly in the state polls. I mean, even look at the state of Maine. It was just a general assumption that Susan Collins was in trouble. And she kind of won relatively easily. The national press also is a little bit of a loser in the sense that, of course, Trump has made it difficult for the press, virtually telling or exaggerating, telling lies or exaggerating almost every day of his presidency. I'll tell you, the day that the press secretary came out the day after the inauguration, John Spicer, and said that the crowd that attended the inauguration was, you know, the largest ever, or at least as large as Obama's, when clearly that wasn't true. On that day, because at that point, I think, okay, the inaugural speech was a little harsh, but a negative. But I think many people who perhaps had not voted for Trump were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Okay, that was Trump the candidate, and this is going to be Trump the president. But that day, I realized that it was basically like declaring war on the press. As the press might say the sky is blue and the Trump administration was going to say the sky is green. And so from that time, I was war, from that point on, because basically they threatened, and you know, this is my background, and so from my perspective, they threatened the very basis of the press in America. And I'm not saying the press is perfect by any means, but the basic rock foundation of the press is to report facts. And to, and you know, during much of our time in Washington, there was a general agreement on what the facts of a situation were, some might say they were good, some might say they were bad, but there was basic agreement. But on that day, when Sean Spicer came out and made those statements, I just said, this is going to be, you know, entirely different. And then just quickly, other losers, I think the House of Democratic Leadership, you know, the House has lost at least, the Democrats have lost at least five seats in the House. And I think they're going to be under a lot of stress, the leadership. And you know, you could say the American people have lost in the sense that we wind up as divided as we ever have been. And I think there is, I'm not entirely negative on everything that Trump is doing, but I think those are the, in addition to whoever loses the actual election. And we don't know that yet, for sure, although Biden's position is good. Those are some of the other casualties in my opinion. You know, Matt, you said he declared war on the press and he's tried to destroy the credibility of the press. And we have to remember, though, that about half the voters in the United States are Trumpists. You know, they're big supporters of Trump. And they like it when he tries to destroy the press. And they like it when he taunts them. So that seems to me, he knows what he's doing. He knows that he doesn't know, because I don't think he thinks about this, that it's harmful to a democratic society to suggest that we ought to get rid of the free press. But they love it when he does that. That's one of the reasons they like him. Yes. Even though I don't give him high marks for his mental acuity at this stage of his life, I have to say, when it comes to political messaging, he is a genius. And he picked up a theme that I don't think any other Republican that I know of could have picked up on. And that is basically he is saying, I am not a politician. And the politicians are both parties. And he often says both parties, you know, he doesn't like the Bushes and he doesn't like any Democrat and Obama he's obsessed by. But he's basically saying, they have screwed up your lives. And I am not a politician. I am not like them. And I'm the one person who can who can make this all good. And then it's kind of an emotional grievance laced argument that he makes to people. And he has he has, you know, reached a segment of the population. There are many different causes reasons that somebody might back Trump. But I think the underlying one is that I am not a politician. The reason your life isn't better or America's life isn't better. And you could argue about how well or ill America's basic condition is because these politicians for decades have screwed it up. It's very effective. Yeah. And I think it is very effective. And he also to the object of the public's grievances of his public grievances of the Trump's grievances, he does something else. And when he insults them, he insults everybody. He's insulted everybody that I can think of. And I want my my Trump, I have some Trump or friends who may be watching this. And I challenge them to show me where I'm wrong. I believe that Vladimir Putin is the only public person, the only person that public knows that Donald Trump has never in four years insulted in any way. I think he's the only one. So so so. But other everybody else, he's he's insulted. And and somebody suggests this to me. What Trump does is give the middle finger to all the people who have grievances who want to give the middle finger to people and then gives the middle finger to the educated class, the coastal class, I heard him say these coastal elites, he said it the other night. Yeah, I think he's talking about you, Harold. He's talking about me. He definitely is. And and I think he's he's he's right, you know, people with a with a higher education and they and pretty comfortable. I think there is resentment. And I think that and I think he plays to that and knows exactly who they who they're upset with. Right. And you know, I could give you because you're absolutely right. And a lot of that is unfortunate. But I could give you a also a positive interpretation of some of the same topic. And that is that compared to when you and I were in Washington, when as as people of a certain age know, the news was dominated by three major television networks, and by a few national newspapers, there was no internet, there was no social media, no cable news. There was a, if there was a bias, and maybe rather than bias, I might say a certain mindset that was shared by these gatekeepers of the news, a white non college educated voter, as well as a number of minorities, they were not heard. And in this new age that we live in, and I'm not crediting Trump with with this per se, but he played on it, he recognized it. They now have a voice. These people now have a voice in the body politic, and we may not like everything they say. But you know, on balance, I think you have to in a democracy, you have to say it's better for those people to feel they're being heard. But unfortunately, we're going through a period when it causes huge division. That's a very good point about being heard. And I think that back to this coastal elites, I think the people in the middle of the country definitely feel they're not being heard. The people in Iowa, and Kansas, and Tennessee, and look at West Virginia, enormous poverty in West Virginia. Nobody's really doing anything to help them. He says he's going to restore the coal business. And that's a con job. He's not going to restore the coal. Nobody can restore it, including the greatest man in the world, which of course he thinks he is. But nobody's going to restore it. But they go for this because I think you made the point. Because they think they are being heard through him. Right. I think, you know, through history, there have been a few populists who cried the same thing, but they didn't win the presidency. And they weren't, you know, dominating the media and the public discourse the way that Trump has. I mean, I think Yui Long was the person of that nature. Joe McCarthy for a while in an odd side thing. You know, dominated or had maybe last night. The Yui Long comparison is a very good one. He was a populist a lot like this fellow, only a much cleverer political guy, but had the same instincts for understanding the public and what would have appealed to him. And so much of politics is showmanship. And we've had presidents who weren't very good showmen, and they weren't very good effective leaders because they weren't showmen. This guy is what he is, is what he does. He's a showman when he tells people, I got a condo to show you in my new building, and it's got gold faucets, golden faucets. And he knows there are people that say this is going to be the best. It's got golden faucets. So he knows how to sell. Yeah. I think Ronald Reagan, this is not a direct quote, but he said something like, you know, people don't think an actor should be president. I don't know how you could be president without being an actor. He say that that fascinates me because I always thought that Ronald Reagan, who I thought he was into some substance, he knew a few things that he was committed to and he believed in, which was very important. He believed in certain things. This fellow doesn't believe in anything other than himself, but Reagan believed in things. And because he was an actor and he knew how to play president, he knew how to play the role of president. This, this fellow does not play president. He has one strong Republican told me who I'm sure voted for him. I believe President Trump has destroyed the dignity of the office of president of the United States. Surely he has and maybe forever because others will watch him. There'll be Democrats like him too. They'll say, this works. So, but the Huey Long thing, I think you're right on. So, yeah, he definitely, Trump is definitely lowered the bar on public conduct for sure. And, and, and that's what we're going to have for, yeah, I think you're right here. You know, we get, I heard him at one of his rallies on the news and they didn't beep it out. A four letter word to the crowd. And had you imagine Obama had Obama used a full letter word on television talking to a crowd. That would have been the end of them. The end. Any president. Right. Any president. Imagine, imagine Reagan doing that. Imagine the Bush is doing that. Right. Couldn't be done. But now it's all changed. And I think it's changed for the future. Let me, let me, let me ask you what you think about this division because seems to me about a 50 50 decision division based on this. Now, do you think that it's truly 50 50 or do you think that part of the 50% of the vote that Trump got are some people who say, I'm going to vote whoever for whoever is strongly anti abortion or whoever is strongly pro gun. Do you think part of it is that and not. Yeah, there are definitely, yeah, there are definitely people who are going to vote on that, on that basis. And of course, one reason why Trump probably closed the gap on Biden was the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court because he was fulfilling a promise and one that they had taken into consideration when they elected him. Right. But yeah, obviously, probably each side is made up of different constituencies. We know that the Democrats, you know, range from a very moderate Joe Biden to, you know, the new squad on the house, Alexandra Cortez Cortez, I get her name. That she, you know, represents a very far left view of the world. So they're both made up of these coalitions. And I think also some voters, this, it seems like that this socialism charge that was laid on to the Democrats, it's hard to lay it right on Biden, but they made him the victim of it, partly because of AOC and her colleagues. I think that that probably a certain number of people who have always voted Republican and maybe were turned off by Trump's, to be, nevertheless, voted him on the basis that they're voting against the Democrats. And we know that happened four years ago. There are a lot of anti-Hillary votes. Right. Well, man. Yeah. Well, I think you're right. That's all this business of defund the police and was not helpful. No. AOC is not helpful. The Democratic socialists in the Portland are not helpful in terms of creating a blue wave. I'll tell you that. They are the obstacle, an obstacle to a blue wave. And so you're right. There are different constituencies in the Democratic Party, and there's a battle going on between moderates in the Democratic Party and the far left. And I know there's a battle going on in the Republican Party between the devoted Trumpists and the traditional. And traditional is one of the things that these Trumpists get upset about, between the traditional Republicans and the Trumpists. And that battle for the next four years is going to go on in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Right. The people in the Lincoln Project, who had a bunch of Republicans who were violently opposed to Trump, they're clearly expecting to get something out of the fact that he could be defeated. That's why they've been in it. Right. And they're not going to be, you know, huge fans of Biden tonight, but by January, they won't be. You're absolutely right. They won't be. And if he is defeated, he's not going away. Trumpism is with us permanently. And he's not going to go away. And he's going to be trying to get as much ink and video time as he can. And if he doesn't run four years from now, which I think he's likely to do, if he doesn't, then it's either going to be his daughter or son, Don Jr., that he will promote and they will be in Republican primary. And if you're a guy like Rubio, Marco Rubio, who has your eye on the prize as well, you're going to figure out how to head off the Trumps. Yes. Yeah. He would be potentially a hero to the Lincoln project people, the more establishment Republicans. And speaking of Biden, just a random thought here, I don't think, and I don't think anybody would argue he was the greatest candidate that we've seen come down the pike. He, you know, he's three times failed candidate for president. Right. Here he is now. You know, just in the last four years, he has aged physically, not saying mentally, you know, he still seems pretty sharp to me. But physically, he looks almost frail on television. And that didn't help him. But even though I would say I think he was maybe a below average candidate, he could be an excellent candidate for an excellent president for our time, because he is non-threatening in many ways to other people. First of all, I think the presumption will be that he will not try to run for a second term. And Kamala Harris will encounter a certain amount of negativity on that front. But he, you know, he does have good relations with a number of Republicans. Lindsey Graham, as you may have seen from time to time in an old video, says you couldn't find a better man than Joe Biden. He said wonderful things about him, and Lindsey Graham said terrible things about Trump and wonderful things about Biden. Yeah, I know that's good. And I do recall that during one of the segments in which Hunter Biden was in the spotlight when the early stages, I do remember that Lindsey Graham made it clear that he on his committee, the Judiciary Committee, was not going to investigate Hunter Biden. And I think that was just kind of a personal thing. So grasping at straws when I say this, but I think he may, if he wins, may turn out to be a better president than he was a candidate. That could be. And he'll have to work with his Republican friends in the Senate to get anything done. And the other thing, of course, is that that will be an impediment to the far left because nothing that doesn't get agreed to by the Senate will happen. So while we're talking about this split, I'm interested in your observation as a main resident about the split in Maine, which is demographic. It's here we have a kind of an affluent strip of the main coast, affluent, you know, higher education, lawyers, doctors, PhDs, college graduates. And it's not very deep off the ocean. You know, it goes all the way up from Kittery all the way up through your town, Camden to Bar Harbor and across the other side to Sullivan and places like that. And it doesn't go more than seven or eight miles inland. No, the entire state. Yeah. So what do you make of it? I can just ask you about this. In Donald Trump yesterday, got 16% of the vote in Portland, 27% in Freeport, 30% no more than 30% in Cumberland, got 27% in Brunswick, 23% in South Portland, 21% in Cape Elizabeth, Rockport, 31%, Camden, 22%, Bar Harbor, 22%, Northeast Harbor, 26%. If you go inland, you've go to Warren, not very far from where you live. Yeah, Warren's a Trump town. And every town in that area, every town from there to the New Hampshire border off the ocean was a Trump town. Unbelievable. Yeah. So what do you make of that? Well, of course, in every state of the union to some degree, there are haves and have nots. But it's interesting in Maine that geographically they are so defined. And here's another thing that I think is going on. You've been here much longer than I, but maybe my coming here, not just I personally, but I represent a type of person who, first of all, we've gone through a period of great affluence in terms of stock market gains and things like that. So a lot of people have some disposable income and Maine is a very attractive place. Unless you can't stand the winter, it's a very attractive place to look, to live. So people from New York and Boston and other farther points are coming up here, I think in increasing numbers. There's always been some. There were the old Yankee bluebloods who had their house in the family for generations. But now you're getting in this town. I mean, I hardly know anyone in Camden who is a native. There are some, I know, but and they come from all over. So I think with the pandemic, adding to some fuel to that fire, there's going to be more and more of that division. I suppose it's probably going to be close to a 50-50 thing, just like we're talking about the United States. I'm here, I'm talking politically, because geographically, as you say, there's a wider swath. But I must say in my experiences in Maine, personally, I don't see as many people who I think would, for instance, get a convoy to harass a Biden bus like happened down in Texas. I just don't think they think that way. So we're lucky, it's a little... Well, Matt, I was up in Lincoln, not long ago with my wife, visiting friends, and we drove on Route 2 between Old Town and Lincoln through all those towns along the Penobscot River. And there was rarely a house without a Trump flag, banner, or sign. I mean, they are devoted. This is a movement, no question about it. This is a devotion. Whoever really appealed primarily, not just secondarily, but primarily to a constituency, like, for example, the people in Lincoln. And now you're reminding me, by the way, the famous Sticky Lincoln dance. Well, I particularly in the 60s in Washington, for those of you who don't know, it was a massive hydraulic electric project that had been proposed by whom I no longer remember. It was Roosevelt, Sumner Wells, who worked for Roosevelt, I think. And Roosevelt, of course, was familiar with it, with that. And because Passamaquoddy project, which was the harness, Ocean Tides, was the first big one that Roosevelt tried to promote. And Dickey Lincoln came along, he was kind of a successor. That was in northern Maine. And its champion was Ed Muskie. And you covered Ed Muskie, didn't you? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So anyway, we got this divide. And the interesting thing about my trip to Lincoln, I know Trumpers around here, but they're not really Trumpers. They will vote for Trump. They will vote for any Republican, because they believe the Republican will lower their taxes. And some of my neighbors have good reason to lower their taxes. They pay a lot in taxes. So I never worried about it too much what they do. But you go up to Lincoln, none of those people are going to say, I'm foreign because of the tax bill. Most of them are not paying much, if anything, in taxes. So that isn't what gets them. It's the cultural part, not the economic part. And as you say, that's part of that coalition. And you have to remember what they have seen. Let's say a gentleman of age 45, what he has seen in his relatively short, short to us anyway, to you and me, lifetime. Gay marriage, affirmative action, an economy that flips up and down. I think maybe it sounds like a radical thought. Some of this began in the Vietnam War. And it is symbolized by, you can still go, including to the Camden Post Office, you go down there tomorrow morning and see an MIA POW Black Flag. Those flags, to my mind, represent the beginning of what we see now. And again, Trump is a symptom rather than the cause. But what he played to, and that is, who fought in the Vietnam War? I didn't. Now, I didn't have bone spurs. I had children. And I love them still. I don't know whether Trump loves his bone spurs. But that war was fought by the same people today that Trump is appealing to in general. I'm exaggerated to make the point. Not very well educated, not wealthy. In fact, the one part of that constituency that Trump doesn't particularly appeal to, of course, are African-Americans, because a lot of the grunts in Vietnam, I covered Vietnam for a while, and a lot of those grunts were black, but they also were generally sorry to be there, felt victimized by being there. And I remember as a correspondent, they say, what are you doing here? You don't have to be here. Right. But anyway, I think that's where it began. And those are the kind of forgotten people that as to use Trump's terminology, the forgotten people of America. So that raises another question. He did say that those people who went to war, those young Americans who went to war, those soldiers were suckers and losers. But he says so many things every day. That story didn't stick around more than 12 hours. No. And that was a big mistake on his part, which he denied, of course, saying. Yeah, but he denied it. He denies what we're in a period of videos. Everybody has a video camera on their iPhone, and everything he says is videoed. And then he denies he said it when you can play the video. But Matt, why does he get away with that? Saying that these guys that you just made a very good point about these guys being the people who fought. But then he says losers and suckers. Because within 12 hours he will say something else outrageous that makes you forget that he said that thing outrageously 12 hours earlier. I don't think that's a full explanation of how he gets away with it. It's one explanation. Distraction. He loves to create a new distraction when the first thing hasn't gone well. And plus, I imagine he regretted saying that. He thought that was the wrong thing to have said. But he'll never apologize, which would call more attention to it. He'll never apologize for anything. And so he does so much that's outrageous and tells so many lies and exaggerations that it becomes like white noise. It's just incredible. You said if Obama had said something like that, you remember Obama, and I think this was also taped by somebody, said that people who in here he was talking about the same group of less educated middle class or lower middle class people. They cling to their guns and their religion. And I think he had one other thing. And it was a very impolitic thing to say. And as you and I both know, it's often the true statements that are most impolitic. But, you know, there's a ring of truths to them. And I'm sure that Trump probably thought, oh, God, I shouldn't have said that. But he'll just get away with it because he does it every day. There's another thing that I think turns on some of the Trumpists and really fires them up. And that's this whole notion of political correctness, PC, that really, really fires them up. Can you talk about that a little bit? Political correctness and why people get so upset? My view is I think some of it is crazy, some of the political correctness. I think a lot of it's nuts to tell you the truth. Not all of it, but a lot of it is nuts. But I still go on. I watch the Red Sox. My face doesn't turn red. What is it that gets galls them? Yeah, well, first of all, it's only white males who in general take offense at it. So I think it's part of what we were talking about before, the changes in life that they have seen that suddenly things they used to say, they're not allowed to say now. Now, I think they'd probably accept the fact that the N word with regard to African Americans is completely off the reservation. But there are a lot of more gradations. And I agree with you that sometimes it gets pretty ridiculous. I mean, as I was alluding to before, some people say, you know, the worst thing you can do in Washington is tell the truth because it'll get you in trouble. But you know, these are things that I think represent to them, maybe not the most egregious examples of it, but they they represent to them a change in the cultural of American life that you used to be able to you didn't have to worry so much about what you said. Well, that the this PC thing really does get many of them. Many of them just really roaring. Yes, so, so upset. And as you say, a lot of these demands for political correctness are absurd. And you don't have to get too upset to say that's absurd. Yeah, no, the one thing that one of the things that I do agree with part of the Trump argument about American life is what they call the cancel culture, that if you say something that is mildly offensive, they want to get you fired, or they they want to have you banned from speaking on a university campus. I think that's the most ridiculous thing in a in a, you know, in America that they probably on the one hand they're arguing in favor of diversity, the the elites that we referred to before. And yet they don't want to hear diverse points of view. It's just ridiculous. It's it's crazy. And I said to somebody the other day, who was telling me how we need to be sensitive about these things. And I said, Yeah, you need do need to be sensitive about certain things, but not everything. I said, for instance, my family, my parents, came from Sparta, Greece. How do you think I feel when I hear the announcer saying that the Michigan State football team goes on, then the Spartans, are they kind of diminishing me in some way? Well, I'm very upset about it. I mean, it's so absurd. So well, if somebody went to Notre Dame, I didn't think the Spartans were sort of great, you, you are a Notre Dame man. That's right. I am indeed. Actually, it was Michigan, the University of Michigan that we didn't like. Actually, Michigan State was okay. Yeah. Okay. All right. So the, you know, where are we going to go for here? You say, Well, maybe if Biden is elected, that he has the personalities non-threatening to kind of help bring us together. But I don't see these people up in Lincoln, they're not looking for friends. They're, they're mad. They're furious. They want to strike out at people. And it's cultural. I don't know. Maybe we'll be like this four years from now. Will it ever end? No, I think you're, I think you're right. Whatever progress that President Biden, if there is one, could make my place in the halls of Congress and might take place among the more educated Trump voters. And I don't mean to really distinguish so much on education as affluence and education, you know, their version of the elites. But, you know, I don't see how the only way that this will pass if life gets better for these, the people we're talking about who are, tend to be white males living in more rural communities and not living in cities, who grew up with many, in many cases, pretty good paying blue collar jobs. They were members of a union. They worked many of them in manufacturing. And the technological revolution has robbed many, not all of them, but many of these people of their future, that they don't see how they are going to benefit financially over, say, the next 10 years, so that their families, so that their children can live better than perhaps they did. And that used to be part of the American story. And until we solve that problem, those people are going to be aggrieved. Our friends and neighbors in Maine, eight miles in, are going to be aggrieved. I mean, you know, if you need work done in Camden, you need, you know, a handyman or you need a plumber or something, they don't live here. They can't afford to live here. And, but at least those people have paying jobs, but a lot of them don't see that future anymore. All those manufacturing jobs that were lost. And we all thought, I thought, oh, global economy is great. We're, it's humming along. It's terrific. And really it was so easy to forget the jobs that were being lost in the Rust Belt. Do you think if we didn't have the pandemic, we didn't have the COVID-19, that Trump would have sailed to victory this year? Yes. I wouldn't have thought that, when would you say like last February, because Trump, for the reasons that we've been stating it, it seemed like Trump was so controversial. But now we, we again have seen that again, the same people we're talking about, the Trump voter doesn't care about a lot of that stuff. So without the pandemic, I'm sure you would have picked up more votes. And, and the thing I, the hardest thing you asked me before, you know, and I've seen anything like this, the hardest thing in American public life today, for me to understand is how the pandemic became politicized. Yes, that in part, but even more precisely, how individuals, the individuals who attend Trump rallies, and individuals who live in, in a number of the states that just resisted basically because they had Republican governors, I guess, made, you know, wearing masks became a political faux pas among people. That's something I just don't, I mean, your health is so basic and so essential to your life. I just don't understand it. I do realize that a number of these people live in such small towns where they know everybody that maybe they had a false sense of security, we now see that in many of those states in the more rural areas, even in the Dakotas, the cases are spiking. But I'm not sure that it's having the kind of effect that obliterates what I'm finding so hard to understand, which is the indifference to the danger. I think maybe the reason that they have this attitude is that they want to, some people want to assert that they're tough guys. And one of the things that's appealing about Trump is he, well, I'll give an example. He gave this Mussolini performance up on the porch of the White House when he came back from the hospital. And he stood and he jutted out his chin, Mussolini style. I guess it works for people like that. He jutted out his chin, and he took his hand to his mask and he ripped it off, ripped it off. And you could just sense people all over the country watching that on TV and cheering, you go get them, Donald. You go get them. So that does appeal to him in this thing. And he tells me what to do. I want to ask them, what about red lights? Why do you stop at a red light? Why do you just came in and stop at the red light? It's crazy, anyway. I get a little worked up as you do about that. All right, so we're nearing the end of this. We got another seven or eight minutes. And what is your hope that happens in the next four years? How do you think, you made a very good point of got to find some way to give people who feel ignored hope, give people who feel as though nobody's worrying about them, the feeling that not only we're worrying about you, but we have some ideas. Yeah. I think that I don't have any doubt that, again, if Biden were to win, that he personally would have some ideas there. I don't know how well he'll fly within his own party. And, you know, with the more liberal and younger members of the House, on the other hand, I do think it's possible he will be able to work with a few senators. And, you know, the Senate is still not completely out of the realm of possibility for at least a tie on behalf of the Democrats, because the Georgia races are still, one of them is wide open because they have to go to a runoff, a Democrat against the Republican lawfler, the wealthy woman who was appointed to the Senate. And, you know, that's probably a little pie in the sky. But I do think that Biden might have a chance to, if he can pull it off in his own party, not have a complete rebellion, if he pushes a program that benefits blue collar workers, he would pick up some support in the Republican Senate. But, you know, based on what we've seen the last four years, Mitch McConnell's attitude going back to the Obama administration, a highly, highly partisan attitude, I mean, it's nothing like the Washington that we saw in the 60s and 70s, where they're at least part of the time there was an effort to reach a compromise. Compromise is a dirty word in Washington now. So I guess this is kind of a convoluted way of saying, I don't actually see a light at the end of the tunnel. I think we're... Well, you're right about how it's changed since we were there. Totally changed. We were there in the best of times. And it changed in 1994 when Newt Gingrich came in and in the leadership. And he did change it. There's no question on purpose. And he says it and he takes pride in how he changed the tone of Washington. But going back to doing something for these people, I'm reading Jonathan Alter's history of the first hundred days of the Roosevelt administration. Fascinating book. Roosevelt had a lot of suggestions from people as to how to get people back to work and so forth. And he said the first thing he wanted to do was to help the farmers in the Midwest. And he did. And even smaller things like rural electrification, a lot of people in rural areas didn't have electricity. And he said, I'm going to push this for electricity through the REA, government help. And farm supports, all kinds of things for rural people. And he built part of his coalition on the rural poor in America who adored him. They had Roosevelt pictures up on the wall just like they probably have, oh, God bless me, Trump pictures on the wall now. But in any event, is this possible? You ought to make your suggestion to Mr. Biden. You know, you remind me of that great story, may or may not be true, that at Roosevelt's funeral, they asked, they saw a man, I believe he was African American, in tears. And they said, oh, did you know the president? And he said, no, but he knew me. Exactly. And so that's what you were talking about. You made a very good point. That's what you were talking about. How do the president of the United States get the people in rural America who are poor, almost all white, to say he knows me? And you're saying that's what's missing? That is. There's one wild card, I think, in our immediate future that would be bad for the country, but possibly maybe in longer term good for the country in the way in which we're talking. And that is, we are not out of this pandemic. It's actually getting worse in terms of the gross of the gross numbers of cases. It seems there are fewer fatalities per numbers of cases. But if it continues to get worse with the threat that it registers to our economy, and so that we're in more of a, hey, this is a real crisis, and which we got more buy in, perhaps, since we wouldn't have a president who was trying to politicize it, there might be the grounds there for a little more unified action. I mean, the, Tom Friedman has a column, I think, tonight, probably in tomorrow's print edition of the New York Times, in which he says America put somebody on the moon, couldn't discover a cure for cancer. I'm not quoting exactly what he said, but that was his point. And we need, it's amazing that the virus pandemic has not so far generated this kind of a byproduct, but we need some really existential crisis, probably, to kind of bring people together. You asked before, do I see any way in which people might come together, and my short answer was no. But it would require something like this. I mean, imagine this time last year, Harold, we hadn't heard of this virus, but we didn't even envision. I know that some experts did, and Bill Gates did, and people like that. We did not envision having a challenge like the COVID virus. Now, it could get worse. There could be something else that's out there. We could be one of our enemies, you know, probably China or Russia could launch some kind of a massive cyber attack that basically brings the country to its knees for a few days. Those are the only things that I see that could perhaps generate enough kind of public purpose to our country that would kind of bring people a little bit more together. It would be great to have Biden make the kind of speech you're talking about. I know you're out there, farmers, et cetera, et cetera, but I don't know if that would be enough. Yeah, of course, wars always help. People get very jingle whiskered. I remember after the invasion, the unfortunate invasion of Iraq, which was not beneficial. But after that invasion, traveling to certain places in the United States, everybody's flying an American flag. Everybody's very proud of the US military. That unfortunately helps. About run out of time here, it goes very, very quickly. You're a very interesting guest. We're going to have to do this again from time to time, Matt, because sometimes I want to ask you about journalism because you're a well-known national journalist. But other times, I want to sit and ask you about ideas because you think about things, and you have insights, and I appreciate it. Well, it's great talking with you, Harold, because you do know what you're talking about. Sometimes. Not everyone does these days. Yeah, right. Sometimes. All right. Well, thank you very much. We're going to wrap this up now. Everybody in the audience, I hope you enjoyed it. You can go online and look up some things about Matt Storn. Those of you whose families like mine were originally from Springfield, Massachusetts, you'll be interested to know that Matt is a product of Springfield, Massachusetts. Thanks very much, Matt. We're going to cover all the bases. Exactly. Bye-bye. Thank you, Harold.