Labor Day Special: Hacks On Tap

Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.

Happy Labor Day!

Today, we're bringing you a special episode from our friends at Hacks on Tap.

This episode is hosted by David Axelrod and John Heilman, and they're joined by Rah Emmanuel, the former White House Chief of Staff, Chicago Mayor, and Ambassador to Japan.

I've had Rah on a couple of times, and he always has great insights.

On this episode, he's discussing President Trump's threats to deploy the National Guard in Rahm's hometown of Chicago, the FBI's investigation into former National Security Advisor John Bolton, the collapse of the Ukraine peace talks, and the high-stakes redistricting battles in Texas and California.

It's an insightful conversation with three smart guys, so have a listen.

I'll be back in your feed on Thursday with a fresh new episode of On.

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Hey, pull up a chair.

It's Hacks on Tap with David Axelrock and Mike Murphy.

As you all know, Chicago is a killing field right now.

And they don't acknowledge it.

And they say, we don't need him.

Freedom, freedom.

He's a dictator.

He's a dictator.

A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator.

So, John Heilman, I'm on the record right now saying I really don't want a dictator.

I'm not into the dictator thing.

And I'm really not into, as a Chicagoan,

I am not into.

this false depiction of our city as a

hellscape.

I'm looking at the window at the lake and Grant Park and people,

you know,

enjoying

the final ends of summer.

And one of the guys who helped make Chicago great

is sitting right here, Ram Emmanuel, the former mayor,

collector of fancy titles, former White House chief of staff,

former congressman, former

chairman of the Triple C, former ambassador to Japan.

Okay, thanks for joining us today.

That's all we have time for.

Ram's title.

You got a couple.

You missed two titles.

What's that?

Oh, God.

Go.

Senior advisor to President Clinton and father of three.

Okay.

All right.

Good.

Great.

We got them all now.

Best or last.

The best is last.

Somehow, the Ari didn't get mentioned anywhere in there.

You think like Ari should get like brother of Ari should be like in the list somewhere.

No, don't insult Zeke that way.

Oh, okay.

Sorry, brother of Zeke.

The third Emmanuel Brother.

So when you guys look out the window, you're both in Chicago.

Do you see scenes of like Nam Pen in like 1974, Sidney Schoenberg, kind of killing field style, or is it a little different what you see?

So, you know what?

I mean, I have to say, this has been a great summer, and these last few weeks have been great.

And you walk along the river walk that Rahm had a lot to do with.

No mass graves?

And no, there's

a lot of people enjoying the day and drinking beer.

I will say that.

At 9 a.m., the breakfast at champions.

This is a great and vibrant city, and

it's still a wonderful tourist destination and so on.

But, Ram, one of the things that, you know, just since we are hacks on tap, one of the things that, you know, I think is

a trap that one has to avoid.

We do have violence problems.

We do have crime problems, just like every city.

Some of them are peculiar to ours.

You had to deal with it as mayor.

I mean, there is an element of Trump sort of baiting a trap here, isn't there?

That's why, I mean, I 100% agree.

And rather than have this legal brief prepared, you should brief as it relates to the National Guard and go to court.

But on the facts, you should say, look, we have made progress, but we have some persistent problems

like carjacking, like recruitment of officers.

Somebody that actually worked for President Clinton put 100,000 community police officers out on the street.

You want to permanently start recruiting officers.

That's a permanent problem, not a performative problem, for a performative act on the National Guard that will be here for a week.

You want to get these license plate readers so you can actually crack down on car attacking.

Be a partner.

I mean, Democrats just articulate: we're for more police on the street and getting kids, guns, and gangs off the street.

Invest in those areas and we will sustain the momentum we have and really build on it.

But, you know,

rather than say no, look at the data, say yes, and here's how you can help.

But the problem is, like the redistricting, President Trump never misses an opportunity to divide Americans rather than try to figure out how to make progress on solving some real problems we have.

And there's public safety issues in the sense of, as you know, it's a mindset, a psychology.

And rather than deal with it, he's in a permanent way and being a way to figure it out.

He's actually figured a way to divide Americans and not really solve it.

Well, it works for him, John.

It works.

This crime,

crime and

immigration are touchstones for him.

They're his go-to play, especially when things aren't going well on other stuff.

He happily goes back there and he's got Generalismo, Generalismo, Stephen Miller, you know, on point.

And

this shit has worked for him.

Well, yes, and no.

And here's what I mean.

Take them one at a time.

If you look at Trump's numbers on these issues, he's basically been on a whole bunch of things.

He's been underwater on the economy, on inflation, on the whole, and on crime for months.

He was not underwater on immigration until mid-June.

What happened in mid-June was he did the L.A.

raid and you started seeing people getting plucked out of Home Depot parking lots and the most egregious ICE things started happening, right?

So he now underwater on all those issues.

It is true that he's still in a better position on crime and immigration than he is on the economy, but he's underwater on everything now.

And

the extremeness of the some of the extremity of what people are seeing seems to be provoking some revulsion in the middle of the country, Rom.

I'm sorry, I just want to finish the point, which is I don't think it's, it's not working like it's not like this is now his, well, everything else is going wrong, but this is this is really working for him.

I guess I should have said this is his comfort zone.

This is his go-to.

That's fair.

You know, this reminds me, replay the tape.

In 2018, the Republicans in the House are saying, go to the economy.

And he went to immigration, went to all the cultural issues.

And they end up the midterm was occupied.

The caravans.

He closed on the caravans in 18.

It didn't work for him.

Two points.

One is what do you know?

I saw this thing.

I don't know why, but

Bloomberg put it out, but it was

hamburger

ground beef today is the most expensive it's ever been in the history of the United States, six bucks and 12 cents a pound.

He does not want to talk about this.

Because there's a focus on the fact that he, I'll solve inflation in a day, like I'll solve Ukraine in a day, realizes he's a failure.

The second thing, to your point on both immigration and this issue, the border was a local point of chaos.

Yeah.

Trump's raids, et cetera, in Los Angeles, he became the focal point of disorder.

People do not like disorder and that's why the immigration and also and I think on this National Guard, these issues will not turn out to be the political cash cow that he thinks they are because he's making himself the focal point of the disorder and people do not like that dissonance and disorder.

Interestingly, yesterday, he seemed to sort of backtrack and say, well,

I'll send him if, yeah, I'll send him.

I don't have the clip, but he said, I'll, you know, I want to be asked.

I want Pritzker to ask me

to send them, and

which was an answer.

Well, here's his answer.

Here's the answer.

Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, Mr.

President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?

Instead, I say, Mr.

President, do not come to Chicago.

So he had a lengthy response to

Trump yesterday.

And Ram, I know you guys are friends.

You're also potential future rivals because you're both

mentioned as potential candidates for president.

But I thought he handled yesterday really well.

100%.

I thought he looked good.

Yeah, I will, if I can, just out of moment of pride, is, no, I'm glad he took everybody to the Riverwalk.

I know, I know, I know where you were going.

No, and it was great.

And he came in by the water taxi, too.

Yeah, the water taxi.

I heard that.

Great town, folks.

If you're listening, visit Chicago.

This, especially this time of year, it's just a wonderful place to be.

I think actually,

and I compliment J.B.

Van as a craftsman of politics, which is the visual tells, it's not the data about here's how much homicide's down, et cetera.

Come, if there's a problem.

You got to inform the people on the river walk.

You got to inform all the people that are enjoying looking at the architectural tour of the city.

The picture is the story.

He also had the entire leadership of the city, political leadership of the city and state behind him.

And he

and I think that he made the points that we made earlier about, yes, we have a problem and there are ways that you can help,

but not cutting every single program that has actually been effective in beginning to reduce crime in the city.

Right.

I mean, this is somebody that worked hard and as mayor increased our police force by over a thousand folks.

Every city is facing a challenge on recruitment.

Help there.

Put resources towards recruiting officers.

Even if you, and I don't think you'll send the National Guard to Chicago, they come and go.

Like in D.C., they're going to just flip in and out.

That's not a permanent, sustained effort.

Invest in license plate readers so you can deal with carjacking.

Invest in after-school programs if kids aren't on the street now that school is back.

And violence intervention programs, which actually are very, very effective.

But just, you know, there are Arne Duncan, the former Education Secretary, John, had a great piece in the Times yesterday about his own program, which he heroically runs

to try and

interdict violence and recruit people who were once gang members to

help,

you know,

before these things erupt.

And

they've had a palpable effect.

And there are other great programs in the city that do that, all of which are being defunded.

So there are things that Trump could do that don't have political currency for him, as he thinks sending troops does.

How do you guys think the Washington thing is working for him?

Well,

I believe that

this conversation has been totally devoid and devoid of and disconnected from any substance, any policy discussion that has anything to do with crime.

I believe one of the people on this, on this show, right now.

Our discussion or?

No, the discussion,

the public discussion.

I thought early in the show for you to start critiquing us.

Ram is very sensitive.

You're citing Arnie Duncan.

Ram is very sensitive.

You're citing Arnie Duncan.

And I'm like, yeah, sure, there's all kinds of great policy ideas.

Most of them have been inadequately funded in a lot of big cities around the country that could help with the issues at the core of the crime issues and the urban disorder issues that do exist in a lot of these places.

But I heard Rahm, I think, over the weekend saying, this is obviously not a crime.

These are not crime, the policies

in New York and Washington and putatively in Chicago and Baltimore.

These are mostly about Trump trying to pursue the immigration agenda to be able to get

ICE agents on the streets.

They can hit their quota number.

So they can hit their quota number.

So this is really, this is an immigration deportation policy masquerading as a crime policy, partly because of what we were talking about before, which is that people are very very uncomfortable politically out in the country with the way that Trump's been going after the trying to make those numbers.

Again, we go back to Home Depot.

When you got Joe Rogan against you, you got a problem if you're Donald Trump on immigration.

So what do you do?

You call it a crime policy thing, but you look at what's happening in Washington.

David, to your question, that shows this.

The people are taking into federal magistrate court on open container violations.

They're walking in front of federal judges with people they've arrested for

open cannabis.

Swarms of federal agents arresting people with

fucking bonkers.

Here's, look, I mean, I really,

you got to have a strategy of,

as I said, putting more cops on the beat and getting kids, guns, and gangs off the street.

They got to go back to prosecuting gun crimes, prosecuting gang members, give kids these after-school mentoring programs that have worked.

We have a great program that Maggie Daly started called After School Matters.

We plused it up under my tenure about 100,000 kids a day after the bell goes off at school have athletic, academic, artistic activities.

They work.

And then police officers, well trained, sustain that reduction.

Any one of those, the president can pick and you'd be solving that.

He's trying to get the goods through customs here, which is this is an immigration policy, a distraction from the price of groceries and gas at the store and all the other domestic issues.

And he gets to add a kicker.

It's wrapped in a package of division, which he loves.

Just I want to say once again, because I thought Maureen Dowd had a really good column on Sunday about this.

There is crime.

And I was on the L Ram a couple of weeks ago, and

some guy was blasting his music really loud.

And coming back, I was coming down from

the subway system.

There was a guy.

who got off the train on one of the stops before I got off and he said something to the guy on the way out and the guy flew out of his seat and dragged the guy back in the train and they it starts wailing on him the guy starts wailing back that that that's everybody on that train was discomforted by what they saw and there's that kind of stuff is real is real we should but Let's also be real about what it takes to deal with it and the fact that we haven't mentioned yet, like some of the worst cities in the country relative to crime are in red states.

And no one is saying, let's send the National Guard there.

Right.

In fact, the opposite, David.

In fact, what's happening in Washington is that those red states are sending their National Guard to the Capitol to be part of Trump's force.

And I just, before we talk, I want to actually, I want to ask you guys about the politics of this relative to Newsom.

Pritzker and now Wes Moore, who's been, who's now kind of emerging on this front.

But before we do that, just going back to the very first clip that we played, which is Trump saying, some people say they might want a dictator.

He goes on to say in that clip, well, I'm not a dictator.

I don't think I'm a big dictator.

I think I'm a guy with common sense.

I think I would like to hear both of you asked to answer the question of what you think this is all really about, because I think all these discussions about what crime policies would be best in these cities and states are totally beside the point of what they are.

You know, you're right.

You're right.

So the question is, it goes to dictator.

And again, without being hyperbolic about it,

the Capitol now has 2,000 armed federal agents on the street in the capital of Washington, D.C.,

carrying rifles and other arms.

Okay.

They're being brought in from red states around the country.

If you saw this in another country.

You know exactly what you were what and while at the same time he's firing a lot of people who lead federal law enforcement and deprofessionalizing federal law enforcement.

So what is this really about?

He also signed an executive order yesterday directing the Secretary of Defense to develop a standing sort of SWAT team of National Guardsmen

to deal with what he called civil disorder in the country.

Look,

you have to be sort of willfully ignorant to look at that and not say that these are elements of fascism.

These are elements of autocracy.

And, you know, you slide into these things.

You don't just arrive there.

And Ram, we've gone, I've said this to you.

We talk from time to time.

I've said this.

I said we have gone from zero to Hungary faster than I ever imagined.

Yes, exactly.

Can I make two points, though?

is one, we're talking about obviously the National Guard on the heels of what just happened in Texas and redistricting.

The common theme between both of those events is division in America.

Pitting one American against another.

Rather than figuring out how to solve our problems, we'll have a debate about them.

You say that, I actually think you're wrong on this, John.

If I can, I actually think American people are hungry for a debate about how do you actually solve public safety.

That put that aside.

I don't disagree with you about that, Rob.

I think they're hungry for that debate.

They're not

straw man alert.

Go ahead.

Okay, common theme is division and divisiveness, just like what he's doing on the Federal Reserve.

Number two,

I actually think there's a thread here.

His big military parade for his birthday was a bust.

And he wants, he's going back to that first term when he saw Bastille Day in France, et cetera.

He loves kind of the imagery and the performative.

of the military.

It is in service of what David said.

And I think this National Guard, again, is both, it's not serving one thing.

It's both the divisiveness of America.

It keeps us distracted from dealing with real issues.

And then second, it allows him to have the performative around

kind of the military and him as the kind of the groom on the wedding cake of that military embellishment.

Yeah, I think

all of that is true, Ram.

Okay.

When you put it together with everything else, when you put it together with everything else, when you put it together with FBI agents showing up at John Bolton's house, when you put it together with him,

you know, as you point out,

sort of completely

firing career military people, firing professional law enforcement people, and substituting political hacks for them, when you see what happened at the Federal Reserve, where Trump had,

you know,

a hack

who he appointed to a key position in the federal housing administration, rifling through the files of his political enemies and making allegations that then get shipped to his

Justice Department that is completely politicized now.

And at his, he said yesterday, I'm the chief law enforcement officer of the country.

He's telling the Justice Department what to do.

These are not benign ceremonial things.

I agree.

agree right i'm about to agree i just and just and just and just to go back rom i'll say just i david said strong man a word

the country i think the country is hungry for a debate on crime i don't think they're that they're getting i don't think that's what trump is i agree with that's doing them okay no he what he's setting up is a faux debate on crime i said no in fact they do want to debate they do want to debate they do want a debate a real debate they know we're not focused on we got real challenges real problems and we're doing everything but dealing with them okay let's take take a break right here for a word from our sponsor, and we'll be right back.

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David, let me come back to, let me add just three things to your list very quickly.

Redistricting

Trump's drive to

get extra seats added on the basis of nothing other than his political desire to keep control of the House of Representatives.

Now his increasingly loud campaign against mail-in ballots.

And the other day, him coming out and saying that the 2020 census is invalid, right?

Those are also things that add up to

stop the steal 2026 with all of this armed, militarized stuff going on in the cities.

It's very, very.

We've said it a million times here.

He does not believe in rules and laws and norms and institutions.

He thinks there's for suckers.

The strong take what they want, however, they can get it.

And he will do anything that he can do to try and keep the House of Representatives from becoming a Democratic House, because then he'll have a source of accountability and a source of oversight.

And he knows what happened the last time, and he's worried about all of that, but just the basic oversight and accountability that the Republican Congress has surrendered, he will do anything to stop that from happening.

You know, a lot of this you can't do, a lot of things he's talking, John, about doing by executive order.

but what he is doing is sending a signal uh to all of these republican governors about what he wants done it'll be interesting to see rom how they handle you know mail-in voting how they handle uh how they handle voting machines i mean look i i said this to these uh prominent businessman i said i don't understand you guys i don't understand the republicans in the house and senate i don't understand the republican governors

literally we got screamed at and yelled at

for

them being called socialists to, God forbid, to give people health care security.

And you have a guy

firing the dealing with the independence of the Federal Reserve, calling the National Guards into cities that you don't have the authority to,

talking about whether it's the census or other type of areas and the bail-in voting.

Everything,

literally, that direct and as you said, kind of like a mosaic come together.

And he said it out loud.

I'm not a dictator, which is what he wants you to think he is.

But the fact is,

I am shocked at the silence and complicitness of a bunch of voices in not only the business community, the Republican Party, who are literally

make the three monkeys look like an active group.

I mean, they see no evil, hear no evil, speak.

You left out

what is a more most recent and

egregious thing that you would think would have them howling, and that is

that he basically coerced Intel into giving the government 10%.

When we, Rom, you remember when we stepped in, when we were working for Obama, he stepped in, and in order to save the American auto industry and to save Chrysler and GM, he took a temporary stake in those companies And made money, made a profit.

He's taking a, he's partially nationalizing the American microprocessor industry and telling Coca-Cola what kind of sugar to put in.

It's formula.

It's nuts.

They had pictures of Obama with Hitler's mustache and being called also on the other side of the political a socialist for health care for Americans.

This guy's, it's, I've never seen anything, and they're all silent.

Here's what Mitch McConnell said.

I don't have the,

I could find the

audio, but this is what he said about the auto bailout.

A government big enough to give us everything we want is a government big enough to take everything we have.

And the Republicans were at one in branding it as socialism.

They stopped branding it that way when those companies were saved and started flourishing and we got out of it, but

because it was a very successful intervention.

But this, now Trump's talking about taking over pieces of defense industry.

Right.

I mean, this is really profound and you don't hear crickets that that's my point is like literally all these voices that on whether it was also on the housing stuff we did or the stabilization or as you said the auto industry

people were screaming about socialism etc from nip on steel to taking a fee for nvidia to give china leverage over the United States to taking 10% of Intel.

These are, this is mimicking Xi sitting there smiling, saying, I never knew I had a compatriot.

And it's kind of this economic model that I built up here in China.

And we've replaced, at least I believe in Adam Smith's invisible hand.

Who knew we were going to replace it with Donald Trump's judgment?

No,

we're replacing it with Donald Trump's visible hand right in their pockets.

His visible, very swollen, puffy hand.

We'll get to that later.

Yes, can we come?

I want to come back back to the politics here because we are one of the, let's be hackish here, okay?

Because we haven't done that yet.

J.B.

Pritzker yesterday said to the press, you guys don't cover this as a horse race thing.

Don't talk about who's up, who's down.

Don't talk about politics.

Just focus on the substance of this.

And I say, thank you for

your concerns, cover Pritzker, but we're going to focus on the politics right now.

Especially here, yeah.

Right, exactly.

So I mentioned Wes Moore before, right?

So so far, we've seen Gavin Newsom

move from the,

hey, let's have Steve Ben on my podcast mode to, you know,

trolling Trump on Twitter, being full on in the fight, fight, fight, you know, fire with fire camp.

JB has been in that camp all along when he was, I think, the earliest major player in the party to compare the Trump second term administration to the Nazis back in like February in New Hampshire.

Now, as Trump considers going into Maryland, into Baltimore, we have another 2028 contender, Wes Moore, who's had a slightly different approach to this.

We have a little sound.

Let's play that.

As someone who actually deployed overseas and served my country in combat, to ask these men and women to do a job that they're not trained for is just deeply disrespectful.

So that was part of what he said.

The other thing he did was he invited Trump to do a ride along with him to sort of say, hey, you think there's bad crime in Baltimore?

Things are better here than you think that you are, President.

Trump, why don't you come up here and take a safety tour with me?

I wonder, Ram, what you think about that as a tactic and what you think about how all of this,

the ways in which the governors in particular are being put in a position to respond to Trump and how that plays him.

Yeah,

I said Gavin at the very top.

I said he's, you know, after Los Angeles, then he's now in the redistricting thing, full in.

There's a question about whether if that thing fails, that ballot initiative fails in November, whether that capsizes him.

But what do you think about all that?

I think for each of them, given as an observation and also discuss this my my view is rather than say we don't have a crime problem

say come and partner with us in building on the momentum we have and baltimore but that's the tactically i think just

put your hack hat on will you i am i think governor westmore went to his each of them are going to their strengths and what they think and so my hack hat says that each of them are in their lane and where their comfort zone is.

I happen to think

Wes Moore operated where he has the strongest suit that nobody else would go.

I think confronting, as Governor Newsom has done on the redistricting Texas, works to his kind of advantage.

So I think each is playing to their A game and correctly playing to their A game, which builds their kind of profile.

So I have been critical of Pritzker.

Not critical.

I've suggested I thought it was a bad idea for him to run for a third term in 2026 because,

you know, you have to deal with all the burdens of the governorship.

He'd be free to travel the country.

He has lots of money to do it.

But this underscores something.

The reason that this plays well with large segments of Democratic voters, I suspect, is because right now they feel helpless and they look at their leaders and they think they're feckless and unable to do anything.

And these guys have each been handed an opportunity.

I mean, Newsom is doing something.

You know, Pritzker

is confronting him directly.

And,

you know, Wesmore suggesting the same.

And so it does give you a chance to play off Trump.

And that

in a way that the people in Congress can't because they have no control.

As much as I think this is an attempt,

what's going on is an attempt to try to really get the goods through custom on immigration.

it allows trump to avoid dealing with the out of inflation out of control economic anxiety all these governors also have bad choices in their own budget and so fighting trump also allows them to kind of push some of the other issues yeah to the background for themselves so it also you know you know here in chicago here in illinois we have a big transportation budget shortfall that allows that to kind of recede as part of the news and this become more dominant so there's also an added benefit for you know they have all three bad choices in their budgets and other things that they have to confront.

Those go kind of and recede to the background.

This becomes part of the foreground.

It raises the question about,

you know, we jumped ahead here, but

why the business community is quiet, why the Republicans are quiet.

And

the answer is fear.

The answer is fear.

And that's where the Bolton raid, I mean, I don't know what's going to happen with with John Bolton.

This was looked at once.

But

listen to what Trump said

about the Bolton raid.

Are more raids like the ones on John Bolton's house coming?

More raids?

I don't know.

You'd have to ask the Department of Justice.

They raided my house.

I can tell you that.

They did a big raid on my house.

They took away everything

that wasn't pinned down, and they took away some of that, too.

No, they raided Mar-a-Lago.

They started that.

These were bad people that we had in our government.

They raided Mar-a-Lago.

They went into my wife's area.

They went into my son's area, my young son's.

And what they did was a disgrace.

I love it when he says, well, that's up to the Department of Justice.

And in like in the same

period of time, he's talking about, I'm the chief law enforcement officer.

So he thinks the Department of Justice is running errands for him.

You know, the other guy he targeted, and just and then I'll turn it over to you guys, but it was Chris Christie,

who you, Ram, are very friendly with.

I'm friendly with him as well.

You were on ABC with him for a period of time before you went off to serve in Japan.

Or was it after?

It was before.

Before.

It was before.

Now he's now Trump, now they're,

Well, listen to what Trump has to say about Chris Christie and Bridgegate.

Remember, Bridgegate.

Do you plan to investigate Chris Christie?

Say it well.

Do you plan to investigate Chris Christie?

Look, Chris is a slob.

Everybody knows it.

I know Chris better than anybody in the room.

I always felt he was guilty.

But what he did is he took the George Washington Bridge, which is very serious.

He closed down the George Washington Bridge.

And you have medical people, you had ambulances caught up.

You know, this thing was closed down.

And

obviously he knew about it, but he blamed the young lady that worked for him and another person, and they got into a lot of trouble.

She ultimately was, I don't know, exonerated, but she got out of it a little bit.

But she went through hell.

She was a young mother, nice person.

I knew her a little bit.

And another man went to jail.

And Chris got off.

And so when I listened to Chris speak his hate, I say, oh, what about the George Washington Bridge?

You know, tell me about the George Washington Bridge basically

there was an intimation that he's going to reopen right that case and the fundamental John Bolton was with you a week ago

criticizing him on the on the Putin stuff the message is clear the message is clear we're going to use the Justice Department and anything yeah all the tools yeah I do want to I don't know.

I'm about to say something I'm not sure about, but you had John Bolton write a book, had to get through clearance.

There's a whole security apparatus, etc.

That's years ago.

Them going into his house and his office,

even paranoid people have enemies.

Something tells me they've been tracking him in some way.

Because

this, there's actually, I mean, not that the other stuff isn't nerve-wracking and nervous about the Federal Reserve person or, you know, the National Guard in Chicago, Chicago.

But how they decided they went to a judge with information to get the capacity to do what they just did.

Ratcliffe.

Means that they were tracking something.

And I say this because the ability to write a book that has national security implications has to go through a level.

You're not just dealing with an editor.

They are over that.

All the supported material, what did you have, et cetera?

So that was cleared.

So, how they got to this,

one day I want to find the answer.

Ron, I believe John Ratcliffe has said that I believe it's public, that the

not in detail, but that the CIA provided some intelligence to the city.

Yeah, but that means they're tracking him.

I know.

I'm reinforcing your point with a little bit of detail.

Which is a very

troubling, ominous, scary.

This is it's not just what they say on CNN and being critical.

It's the other app or before they, what they, how they gather the material to go to the judge tells you that this gives Nixon's enemy list a kind of a vanilla or a whitewash painting.

This is an incredible

breach of not just norms, but American legal system.

David,

just given that that's the case, what Rah said is correct.

Let me just, again, return to the hack point that we departed from for a second, because of course these things all pick, again, fit into the mosaic.

Both of you are former colleague Dan Pfeiffer

said to me the other day that he thinks that the key division or dividing line in the party heading into 2026 and 2028 is Democrats who understand the existential threat

and are then willing to do things at scale to combating the existential threat that Trump and MAGA pose to American democracy.

And those who are in denial about it, who are kind of basically, maybe they pay lip service to it, but essentially they are still operating as if we are in ordinary times.

Under regular order, do you think that's true is my question to both of you?

I think that

there has to be a real awareness of the stakes.

But an awareness of the stakes means, yes, fighting off

these incursions in the courts and wherever you can, but ultimately it means winning elections.

You can't ultimately stop this without winning and to win you still need to be able to focus on those things that are going to move the people you need to move to win.

Right.

And so, you know, this is, I don't, I think that this is a deadly serious situation.

I think Trump is a runaway freight train.

But no,

I think that

it's still true that people are living their lives.

Yes.

And his failure on the fundamentals of

the things that they had hoped he would do particularly as it

relates to the economy right is still probably more influential with people than some of this i agree with david on this one point i was say and i think the point is what is going to matter going forward is whether you think the cost of ground beef being the most expensive i've ever been or the stake of democracy And I happen to think if you want to win elections and you want to talk to where people live their lives, it's what's affecting their lives.

I'm not saying that democracy is not important.

I'm just saying you have to win elections and the cost of living and the cost of housing is a more

salient issue.

I want to be clear about what I don't think Dan was saying.

These people are going to foreground the democracy argument.

I'll give you a tangible example of this is Newsom, right?

A mid-decade gerrymander that's going to be a ballot initiative, a single ballot initiative on the ballot in November when nothing else is on the ballot.

Tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars are going to get spent on it, is an extraordinary measure.

That's like something Democrats normally wouldn't do.

They have, you know, they're the Democrats, California, California has had, has had two separate votes on nonpartisan redistricting commissions.

My question is, that's a thing where it doesn't, it's not democracy on the ballot.

Of course.

Well, I don't hear, I mean, I think it's bullshit to say,

it's bullshit for anyone to say, well, you know, we really, it's out of order and we shouldn't do that.

I think what Newsom is doing is the right thing to do.

And so I don't think that should even be up for debate.

There are people who are living in a different decade and a different country.

And

obviously, if you play by one set of rules and Trump plays by another,

that gives him an enormous advantage.

And so I mean, I agree.

If that's the point Dan was making, I totally agree.

I think the point is that Newsom is willing to do something

that is

take an extraordinary risk.

And this is, again, part of my question to both of you: is, do you think that that risk is basically whether he's a viable candidate in 2028 for president or not?

Because a loss on this thing would be a pretty big deal.

He's put a lot of chips on the table here pretty early, at least in my view.

So do you guys think that if he loses in November, he's toast

for 28?

No.

Why not?

I I don't think people are going to vote in a primary based on whether he got redistricting done or not.

We live and eat and breathe this.

That's not where the American would want.

And I think, Ram,

I think that

the effort,

I mean, I think there's a price and failure.

I think the effort is worth something for him in terms of the platform

that he's got.

Well, what do you think, John?

You're an Angelino.

I think that the amount of focus on this in the fall is going to be huge.

And he has, he is not, it's not like a redistricting effort.

This is like a, he's made this into a national issue.

And as I said, it's going to be, it's going to be an incredibly hard-fought and expensive race.

I think it would be a big blow.

I don't know if it would kill him, David.

I don't know if it will kill his 28, 28 prospects, but it will be a major hole in the hull of the ship of 2028.

John?

Yeah.

Imagine if he didn't do it.

That would be the blow.

So

to me, look,

I think he's doing exactly the right thing.

I think Democrats should

deal stuff with ranked voting because I think it's going to redistricting is going to get us basically at best to a status quo.

We got to keep pushing this because they're going to do stuff in 2028.

They're going to do stuff in 2020,

2030, rather.

We have to be ready.

That said,

it's not whether this on its own is good or bad.

If it did nothing, he'd get killed.

So these are the choices you have to make.

Plus, we still haven't heard from Indiana, from Missouri, from Florida.

We need to take a quick break right now.

We'll be right back with more Apacks on Tap.

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Even in our diminished times, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, they're just some of the biggest faces of their networks.

If you start taking the biggest faces off your networks, you might save some nickels and dimes.

But what are you even anymore?

What even is your brand anymore?

I'm Peter Kafka, the host of Channels.

And that was James Ponowosek.

the TV critic for the New York Times.

And this week we're talking about Trump and Kimmel, free speech, and a TV format that's remained surprisingly durable for now.

That's this week on channels, wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

We have Florida.

There's a bunch of states.

Florida is definitely going to do redistricting.

There's Indiana.

There's some other Republican states.

There's been discussion of Michigan, Maryland, Illinois.

It'd be hard to gerrymander because of that.

That's not going to happen.

So what do you guys think?

How do you think it nets out in the end?

When all the gerrymandering wars are done by the end of this year,

where do we net out?

Do you ever have a sense of that, Ram, former Triple C major domo?

I will, I've talked to,

I've talked to a number of leaders in the House in the last 48 hours.

And I said, you got a lot short term and long term.

Short term at best.

If we take the states that we could do redistricting, there's something interesting in Utah that just came from the judge.

Yeah, right.

Okay.

But right.

That could be a seed pickup.

Right.

But the fact is the Supreme Court is a horrible place on American politics.

And John Roberts will go down infamy for what he's done to our political system.

That said.

You have to start preparing for 2026, 2028, and 2030, and et cetera, because they are going to keep doing stuff.

And to me, at best on redistricting, we get to kind of even or minus three

from a kind of, but I think this is going to be a big national

election that's going to be the verdict on Donald Trump and the Republicans.

That said,

the best way to deal with opening up more seats and make them more competitive, get rid of primaries and go towards ranked voting.

That gives you a lot of other seats because there's because when I was DCC chair now a little over 20 years ago, around 20 years ago, we had like 40 plus seats.

You're down to less than 20 from a competitive standpoint.

We have to change this map and stop playing on their field and make them play on our field.

That's what I would do.

Just here's a shorter answer.

I think that if they do all those states, that they probably have,

they'll make gains and Democrats are going to have to win more seats than certainly the three that it looked like they'd have to win at the beginning of this process.

And I'm not sure.

The one thing I'm not sure about, you guys, is just how

whether the Republican gerrymanders will net all the seats that they think.

And I think I talked about this last week when we have Brownstein on.

Like these Hispanic voters in South Texas

are very sensitive to the economic issues.

That's a lot of what led them.

There were some cultural things, but that and the border.

And so they're, but the border was the issue.

And now Hispanics generally are being targeted by, you know,

so i i think that it's not going to be the slam dunk that they thought it was going to be so for whatever it's worth dave wasserman uh did a q a with puck um that where he says he thinks that if california succeeds and if newsom succeeds republicans probably net five or six um and if california fails republicans net 10 or 12.

and he still thinks that it's possible democrats win the house because of the overall national trends but that's that's the kind of range that dave waserman's laying out yes yeah well i agree with him if you look at midterms when one party controls both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue,

you have to have an energized opposition.

That is existing.

We can see it in all the specials and in the primaries.

You have to have independents break two to one for the opposition.

You're seeing that happening in the specials.

And you have to have a depressed turnout among Republicans.

And you can see in the polling, Republicans are not engaged like the level of Democrats.

So this has the makings, 18 months out, of a wave election.

And I believe in a wave election, even if they're trying to rig the jury, it will overwhelm the wall that they're building up.

It will not handle the wave that's about the tsunami that's about to come.

And it has the potential to be a tsunami.

Before we go to the mailbag, John, you had one thing you wanted to talk about with Rom.

I do.

I don't want Rom to leave without getting a chance to talk about Donald Trump's,

well, the state of Donald Trump's apparent physical decline.

And if you say it's...

that this is a partisan comment, I'm not being partisan at all.

It's like

we've noticed the hands, we've noticed the feet, and so with Alex Jones.

Alex Jones, not a liberal last time I checked.

Here's what Alex Jones had to say about Trump's impending health collapse.

I've seen a lot of signs of Trump declining the fear

that he's getting sick, that who knows what's going on.

His ankles are giant.

That usually means serious heart decline.

I mean, liver failure too, but his eyes aren't yellow.

So

he's saying,

I don't know if I'm doing a good job.

I don't know if I'm going to get into heaven.

I hear I'm not doing a good job.

This is the president of the United States calling into Fox News in the morning

saying this.

The inner monologue tells a lot.

Dr.

Jones, who weighs in.

I would not say that he's covered, that Alex has the medical capacity to be on the Obama exchange, that said, or be my cardiologist.

But the fact that the most revealing thing isn't the hands or the ankles and the can't tie the shoes.

That comment about

I want to go to heaven and I'm I hear I don't think I'm in good standing to get there if I were Donald Trump not that he's going to listen to my political advice I'd be worried about Dante's Inferno at this point I think it's a very revealing point

kind of introspective and he's not known for being introspective where his mind is about his own mortality and his place It's also part of his desire for the Nobel Peace Prize, et cetera.

But this thing that I want to go to heaven, I think really was the one time you've seen a mirror.

And I wouldn't say self-awareness, but a reflection into his psyche and his mindset.

And it's not healthy, both physically and psychologically.

Alex Jones raised it.

You raised it.

And I don't want in any way for people to say, oh, this is what they're fomenting these.

But

you look at the guy, he just doesn't look well.

And he's, you know, people think he's somehow immune to the same laws of nature that govern Joe Biden.

He's an almost 80-year-old guy, and this is the hardest job on the planet.

And, you know, at the way he does it, you know, work-by-day post on Truth Social all night.

You can,

the pressures of it are,

and no one who has never worked there can't fully appreciate

what it is.

So, Ram, you know,

yeah, I mean, I think it's a non-trivial question.

I used to refer to, we've all seen presidents from the first photo to the last photo and they walk out.

It ages you.

Every year in the White House is a dog year.

It's like seven years.

He's an old man to start with who doesn't take care of himself.

And you're seeing

the physical manifestations of that age and wear and tear.

I think we've now seen the psychological

manifestation of that physical state of being.

I genuinely hate it when we hear, I know we all hear this, occasionally over the last 10 years, you've heard liberals say, God, I hope Trump dies.

And I hate, I hate it when I hear people say that.

I hate it.

I hate it.

But it is the case that if you live a life where you don't exercise, you don't eat green vegetables and you eat Burger King and Big Macs for 70 years, it's going to take a toll at some point.

And I think it might be.

I think he's passed the Mediterranean diet.

Yes.

Okay.

I must say, I do envy the ability to eat Big Macs every day.

I gave them up decades ago.

You're a better man for it.

Well, I'm a lesser man for it.

Yes, I'm a lesser man for it.

Before you go, Ram, we want to give you a question from the mailbag.

It's listener mailbag.

So if you have questions for the hacks, you could send them to hacksontap at gmail.com, or you can, and we prefer this, call them in yourselves so we can hear your voices at this number 773-389-4471 i'll repeat it because who can remember that 773-389-4471 hey david i think it looks like rom has to run so he's gonna have to skip the mailbag you offended him he's running i can't believe it what a mess but see you rom okay guys see you see you later

man so david we got two voicemails you know i like the voicemails i mean yeah man we take we take the incoming, however it comes.

And if you don't want to call, that's fine.

But you're going to have a better chance of getting into the show if you call so we can hear your voice.

And we have perfectly, given that there's two of us, Rom, having decamped, we have two voicemails this week.

Let's play the first one for you from our friend, Ryan.

Hi, guys.

My name is Ryan from St.

Louis.

I've had a theory for a while that Democrats put too much thought into

the electorate having common sense and not fighting back back on the crazy stuff early enough.

I was wondering about your thoughts on that.

Thank you.

Yeah, Ryan, this is akin to the discussion we were just having.

First of all, thanks for calling in and thanks for listening.

And hey to everybody in St.

Louis.

I think that

I think what Democrats need to do is stay close to people.

And

as Ram was saying,

yes, I think there's all kinds of what you call crazy, I call dangerous stuff going on.

And you have to fight those fights.

But ultimately, you know, people also are living their lives and they're struggling with higher costs and they're struggling with

a slowing economy and job situation.

And fundamentally,

they need to know someone's fighting on their side in the midst of all of this.

And so I would not, you know,

I still think that needs to be a major focus of what Democrats are doing, even as they push back on these sort of

autocratic incursions of Trump, because

we've got to, you know,

You want to save American democracy, but you also

want to

save the American family that is suffering in this economy and give them a sense of confidence that you have a vision to make this country work better for them.

So I think you have to do two things at once.

I couldn't agree more, David.

And the only challenge is, you know, crazy, you know, Trump says that I think one of the things that our friend could be, that Ryan could be thinking about here is, you know, things like Trump, you know, talking about the crazy stuff includes things like, you know, changing the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

And, you know, Trump does throw a lot of chum in the water.

I don't, I think, you know, you don't want to chase every bit of of chum.

But the key element is Democrats having to make some better distinctions between what is crazy stuff that no one really cares about and stuff that's crazy that actually, in a weird way, kind of somehow gets in under the skin and ends up mattering more than you think.

I'll tell you, the stuff that

should be chased is the stuff that actually raises people's costs

and makes it harder and not easier for people and creates more turmoil and more

peril for people, be it, you know,

waging a war on vaccines that we know work,

to

the tariffs.

And

so,

you know, I think you're right, John, you got to center

the stuff.

Someone said the main thing should be the main thing.

That's your friend Haley Barber.

The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.

Now, Aaron has a voicemail question.

That's Aaron with an A, too, with a double A.

Aaron, A A.

Thank you Aaron.

Hey, Hacks.

This is Aaron from Bellingham, Washington.

And my question today is if the Republicans could be overplaying their hand and with redistricting cut their margins and in the wave election, couldn't they end up losing a lot of seats that they'd have otherwise kept safe?

Aaron raises a good point.

It's so good that we actually started to touch on it.

David, you did earlier in the show today.

And I think, you know,

it is, you know, I go back to Dave Wasserman who says, you know, it's not that often.

The wizard of

the guy whose Twitter handle is

at redistrict.

He knows something about this.

And he said, you know, it's not that often that these, that parties get the maps wrong, you know, and that, and that suddenly they miscalculate or whatever.

But it is the case that they can misread some of the macro political trends.

And one of the

key one that you just mentioned earlier in the show, I think is super important.

And there are text Republicans who are really worried about this, is that they've redrawn these maps in Texas very much in accord with Trump's performance in the 2024 election.

And he overperformed so dramatically with Latinos in Texas that the combination of the fact that in midterms, the party tends to underperform their presidential candidate in the previous, the two years earlier, and the fact that the bottom is not quite cratering, but there is significant erosion happening in the Hispanic community with Trump because of the harshness and the capriciousness of the deportation agenda.

Trump totally had their support on the border, doesn't so much have their support on the Home Depot issue that you could see

this thing coming back.

And if not

hurting Republicans in Texas on net, they don't get all five of the seats they think they're going to get.

They may end up getting, you know, picking up those five seats, but then losing a couple, having turned a couple of other seats into competitive seats and end up only netting one or two so it could there could be some kind of backbite there aaron's point uh that that that is what we were discussing i believe that aaron's point goes further which is um

when you redistrict when you gerrymander you're taking you're moving voters around and in this case you're taking uh democratic voters out of republican districts and putting them somewhere else.

And so you're making some districts less Republican and other districts more Republican.

And you hope that the margins all work out for you.

But if it is a wave election, there are some of those districts where you're moving Democratic voters that could become more problematical for you.

So we shall see.

I'm sure we're going to be talking a lot about this over the course of the next year.

I got to say, man, of all the things, this is such a small thing, but, you know.

The idea that this now, this kind of tactical

nonsensus-driven redistricting could become like a regular feature in our politics.

I find it just, I mean, it seems like it's such a dorky thing to talk about compared to some of the things we're facing, David, but I do find it really depressing.

The idea that this is just going to be a partisan tool that both sides are going to use all the time.

Well, listen, you know, here's what I believe.

I agree with you that,

you know, it is,

it seems small in light of large things, but

This is really about

accountability.

This is really about oversight.

This is really about whether or not there'll be guardrails.

You know, I've been plenty critical of my own party, and

I'm not a particularly partisan figure, despite what anybody thinks.

But anybody who's followed me knows that.

And so, you know, I don't wake up every morning thinking, man, I would just, you know, God, I wish Democrats controlled everything.

But I do know that if the Congress continues down this road, that Trump after a midterm election feeling

fortified and

I think that

what we're going to look back at these two years is the good old days when it comes to outreach by

a president and we're going to be more down the road that we're on right now.

So to me, it's more than a partisan issue.

It's really an issue about whether there'll be an accountable Congress, a Congress that will hold everyone accountable, including the president or not.

We started out this podcast with you talking about some of my favorite things.

You know, people in Chicago, the city of Big Shoulders and the Windy City and all that,

drinking beer at nine o'clock in the morning, as I remember them from my college days.

That was such a cheerful image.

And now you're like,

we might look back on these two years as the good old days.

I'm like, Jesus Christ.

No, no, that'll bring me down, dude.

I know.

Well, you're just so gleeful all the time.

I just wanted to

jump a small dose of reality into the situation.

Okay, fine.

So there's one more question that we got.

They're all really excellent, and maybe some of them can be salvaged for future shows.

Jen, who said, what's the best piece of political advice you've ever gotten?

I would say, you know, given that Ram is not here, you know, what's the best piece of political advice you've ever given, David?

Well, I'd like to talk about the best advice I've ever gotten.

And And there were two pieces of advice.

One was from

Gary Hart, Senator Gary Hart, in 1987.

We met in Chicago.

He was planning to run for president.

And

we were talking about the American political landscape.

And he paused at one point and he said, just remember one thing.

Washington's always the last to get the news.

And that is a piece of advice that has served me so well over the years.

and it served me well when I worked in Washington because I realized that I was looking at the country through a periscope and that I was stuck in this echo chamber and that often the conversation in Washington was not the conversation people were having around their kitchen tables.

And oftentimes when people make mistakes politically at the national level, it's because

they're paying more attention to the echo chamber than they are to the voices of people.

And that is still true today.

The other is a

more, a closer-to-home piece of advice that I got from

a Chicago alderman, an old Chicago alderman, Dick Mell,

years ago.

And he was talking to me about a colleague who was thinking of running, in the city council, who was thinking of running for higher office.

And

I said, well, what do you think?

And he said, he'll never make it.

And I said, why not?

He says, because the higher a monkey climbs on a pole, the more you can see his ass.

Meaning that the higher the office you seek, the more scrutiny you get.

That is also true.

You know what it turns out?

It turns out if you look, if you get, if you see more of the monkey's ass,

what becomes clear is that

it's an MRI of the soul.

Like that's the thing.

The monkey's ass is kind of like the way that you see into the soul.

Yes, it is.

That is a piece of music.

It's a related piece of

piece of advice.

It is.

It is.

It helped inform my view that presidential races are MRIs for the soul.

And whoever you are, ultimately, people get to know that, especially the better you do.

So

the best piece of political advice I've ever gotten was an advice given to me by my late great mother, who when I went off to college, gave me a piece of advice that has served me well throughout afterwards, which is just like, I really don't care what you do, but don't get arrested and don't get dead.

That was like, that's kept me afloat ever since.

That's a good advice for up Canada, too.

Don't get arrested and don't get dead.

Well, this don't get arrested thing may cause you to want to revise some of your comments on this podcast before we send it out.

I don't know.

The way things are going, you could end up in Bolton Land.

I said the advice was good.

I didn't say I followed it.

I got arrested three times in college alone.

What are you talking about?

I'm sure that that's in a file somewhere.

And

we may learn about it someday.

So I'm going to try to keep following that advice we had to Labor Day weekend, David.

I hope you have, you're, you're like in the, you're like Michigan, Chicago for Labor Day.

Have fun.

All right, brother, you too.

And to everybody out there, and we'll see you on the other side.

See ya.