James Carville: 'Trump Won't Last Four Years. He's a Fat, Sick, Old Man'
James Carville: 'Trump Won't Last Four Years. He's a Fat, Sick, Old Man'
The DNC is 'irrelevant shit,' the legendary strategist told a shellshocked Hollywood crowd: 'Understand we have no power . . . we lost the Senate, we lost the Presidency'
It’s his trademark catchphrase, it’s the subtitle of his documentary, and it was his opening salvo to the crowd at WME on Wednesday night. “If you don’t think winning is everything, stupid,” James Carville asked, “how do you feel today?”
Speaking ahead of a screening of Matt Tyrnauer’s film Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid, the legendary strategist hammered on the fundamentals. “This is a business of not overthinking things,” Carville said. But Democrats continue to get in their own way, he added. “You hear this shit a lot. ‘We’ve got to be about principle. If we have principle and we get power, fine, but we got to be about principle first,’” he said. Wrong!
“The first principle is win a goddamn election,” he told the room, a mix of AMPAS members, backers of the doc and shellshocked Kamala Harris voters that included producers Ron Yerxa, Peter Frankfurt and Jamie Wolf; Propagate cofounder and CEO Howard Owens; Sundance doyenne Michelle Satter; and Steven Cloobeck, the hospitality exec who announced his run for governor of California on Tuesday. Many had already seen the film but turned out for the day-after debrief with Carville, desperate for him to pierce their anxious gloom with some explanations and marching orders for the next four years.
Carville offered both with his trademark partisan fire and uncensored humor — the legendary strategist, 80, is pretty much “cancel proof,” as Tyrnauer put it. Speaking for almost an hour about what drove Trump’s win and what Democrats can do to change the tide, Carville laid out:
The crucial question Kamala Harris had no answer for
Why she lost
What’s broken about party leadership and how to fix it
The grim future Carville sees coming for judiciary appointments
How Democrats lost men
The “sticky” progressive phrases that turned off voters, including “the three stupidest words in the English language”
What he thinks should happen to the DNC
The talent on the bench that could reinvigorate the Democratic party
Why he doesn’t expect four years of Donald Trump — but then who gets the power