In a distressed and scatterbrained rant during which he spit food out of his mouth, James Carville confided that he is “in a very, very dark tunnel right now” after Donald Trump’s election.
The Democratic strategist, best known for his work under former President Bill Clinton, published a video of himself through podcast network Politicon that shows him bemoaning the election results while seated in a chair.
Over the course of eight and a half minutes, the pundit said Republican Trump is like no “charlatan” America has ever seen before, suggested he might appoint self-proclaimed “Black Nazi” Mark Robinson to be the new secretary of education, and noted Trump had a higher share of the popular vote than Adolf Hitler ever received—though Hitler’s 36.77 percent vote share in 1932 is, in fact, lower than the vote share Trump got in all three of his presidential bids.
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“I just have to get over the fact that I’m 80 years old and I live in a country that has put a felonious bigot who has no idea of what the world is like, is the most parochial secular person that you could imagine,” he said early on, without finishing the sentence.
Carville filmed himself from a device positioned well below his head, framing himself against salmon-colored curtains with floral patterns.
The vantage point allows viewers to see specks of chewed food visibly shooting out of his mouth. (Close inspection suggests he may have eaten seeds of some sort.)
He expressed total shock that potentially a majority of American voters had opted for Trump’s rhetoric, claiming the country is in a state of “disorder” when border crossings are declining, inflation is near the Federal Reserve target, and employment is near historic lows.
“We won the surrogate battle 95 to 5, we had two ex-presidents out there,” Carville reasoned. “We had every rock star, cultural icon, athlete you can imagine. We had a superior field operation, the canvassing, the door-to-door stuff. We also raised more money. You look at all of the intangible advantages we had and it didn’t amount to anything… We had every advantage, but we had the perception of disorder.”
Even with that perception, Carville could not believe voters would turn to someone like Trump or what he campaigned on: “There’ve been plenty of criminals, charlatans, conmen, traitors, scumbags—we’ve had all of that before but I don’t, we’ve never had people embracing and endorsing this, it’s sickening.”
Carville seemed beside himself, suggesting he needs to think about how to salvage himself from despondence.
“I’m going to just—I have to re-evaluate,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll come up with something to make me feel good again, but right now today it’s hard, I’ll be honest with you, and the hardest thing is that I look across this country, and tens of millions of people fell for this s--t and it’s depressing. But I will snap out of it, but it’s very hard.”
Carville did find consolation in what he said was “the level of talent at the gubernatorial and senatorial level in the Democratic Party,” which he called “extremely high.”
“I hope that we figure a way out to elevate these guys,” he said.
