Transcript: America This Week, Episode 71, January 12, 2024

Walter and Matt explore the last throes of pre-election madness, recap the DeSantis-Haley unlikability Olympics, and review "The Most Dangerous Game."

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how are you?

Walter Kirn: Good. Found out I don’t have a fistula. People who devoutly follow this show will remember that a Canadian dentist diagnosed me during a TV appearance as having a fistula in my lower left jaw.

I went to the dentist and told the receptionist I needed an emergency appointment because I’d been diagnosed over TV, and she said, “Oh, you’re like that guy on HGTV who somebody saw and wrote in and said, ‘I think you have cancer,’ and he did.”

Matt Taibbi: Helpfully, she said.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, exactly. Thanks, man. So Matt, I want you to cough away. I want to hear all your bronchial spasms amplified, and then we can get a helpful call at the end and find out that you have emphysema.

Matt Taibbi: Well, I can’t just do it on command. It’s going to have to be spontaneous, I apologize. But if it does come, if there are doctors out there among you, let me know how bad it is, how long I have to live, and I promise I won’t kick your ass if it turns out you’re wrong.

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: I promise nobody will kick your ass.

Walter Kirn: You’re sure it wasn’t just the Iowa freezing, as you say, nad nad freezing weather of-

Matt Taibbi: No, I got tested and everything, and... COVID is an unusual disease. It doesn’t feel like a regular illness. It feels like a mix of 90 different things, and they all happen in the first 72 hours, and then just suddenly the clouds part, and it’s like it never happened. It is the weirdest thing, man. I don’t know, but it happened. It’s over.

Walter Kirn: Glad you’re back with us.

Matt Taibbi: Thank you. Thank you.

Walter Kirn: Because this is really the official start of the 2024 presidential campaign.

Matt Taibbi: It is, and it’s already so bizarre. There are already so many things and themes that we’ve lived through before that let’s just say the media priesthood and the political establishment of pretending have not happened before, but they’re trying it again.

With Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, this is like the umpteenth time that we’ve been sold in this idea that somebody on the Republican side is actually going to somehow unseat Trump at the last minute, that there’s going to be a surge of organic support that knocks Trump off the GOP ballot so that we never have to deal with him again.