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Running until the final general election results come in, the Deadline ElectionLine podcast spotlights the 2024 campaign and the blurred lines between politics and entertainment in modern America. Hosted by Deadline political editor Ted Johnson and executive editor Dominic Patten, the podcast features commentary and interviews with top lawmakers and entertainment figures. Now in the home stretch of the last 50 days, follow all the campaign news on the ElectionLine hub on Deadline.
“There’s been a loss of faith now in elections,” declares Stopping The Steal director Dan Reed of the aftermath of the 2020 vote.
“If two out of three Republicans already think that the last election was stolen, there’s going to be more and more less and less support for doing things the democratic way and voting for your president instead of …electing them by public acclaim, like some kind of Roman Caesar,” the Emmy winning filmmaker added on today’s Deadline ElectionLine podcast – as you can hear in full above.
No stranger to controversy with his 2019 Michael Jackson sex scandal documentary Leaving Neverland, Reed’s latest film for HBO debuted on Max on September 17. A detailed examination of Donald Trump’s insidious efforts to deny Joe Biden’s victory four years ago, Stopping The Steal spotlights the Republicans that rejected the former Celebrity Apprentice host’s unfounded claims the 2020 election was stolen.
Getting deep into the specifics and postulating about what could happen in 2024, Reed’s film talks to the likes of ex-Attorney General Bill Barr, then Veep Mike Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short, former White House director of strategic communications and assistant to the president Alyssa Farah Griffin (current The View co-host) , and ex-Arizona House of Representatives Speaker Rusty Bowers to learn what was happening behind closed doors and in the corridors of power. To that, with archival footage providing much of the narrative, Stopping The Steal is a slice of history and an cautionary tale.
“I think that’s the big story of our times,” Reed says of the fate of elections and democracy. “Before it was elections were a contest of ideas and policies and personalities, and now it’s also a contest of political systems. It’s democracy versus some weird other version of democracy.”
Also on today’s podcast, just a day after meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris at their DC HQ, the Teamsters national board decided on September 18 to endorse neither presidential candidate this cycle.
Maybe we could see this coming with union boss Sean O’Brien speaking at the RNC earlier this summer, but the decision to not endorse the VP shatters a long Teamster tradition of backing Democrats for the White House. O’Brien has been on a media tour this week to explain why the National Board is sitting on the fence. On the local and regional level, Teamsters (like Hollywood’s Local 399) have since jumped in to announce their support for Harris.
Deadline’s lead labor reporter Katie Campione joins us to talk about why the union is so fractured between supporting Harris, who embraces some key legislative priorities, and Trump, who would not commit to vetoing national right to work legislation.
Speaking of another dispute over reality: ABC News World News Tonight rebounded in the ratings earlier this week, after the network pushed back against the notion that the top-rated newscast had taken a hit following last week’s presidential debate, Donald Trump and his allies slammed the network after the event, co-moderated by anchor David Muir, with conspiracy theories and claims of an audience fall off. But the ratings trends may have more to do with the fact that ABC was in the midst of a blackout on DirecTV.
The carriage fight between ABC owner Disney and DirecTV is over, but the battle over the aftermath of a debate that saw a raging Trump lose more than his cool is still going on.
Stick with ElectionLine all the way through the VP debate, the last big battleground states push and to Election Day. Subscribe to the Deadline ElectionLine podcast on Spotify, Apple Music, iHeart and all podcast platforms.
