Trump's Crackdown on Dissent

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Speaker 3 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm John Lovett and Tommy Vitor.

Speaker 3 On today's show, Donald Trump may plunge the country into a recession, but seems oddly okay with it, which seems like a problem for all of us that we'll talk about.

Speaker 3 We'll also get into the throwdown between Elon Musk and Trump's cabinet during a meeting where Elon reportedly fought with Marco Rubio over not firing enough people and Sean Duffy over Musk's attempt to fire air traffic controllers.

Speaker 3 Excited to fly this week.

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Speaker 3 Then we'll cover Democrats' debate over the party's shutdown strategy and basically everything else.

Speaker 3 And speaking of Democrats, Lovett will regale us with tales from his weekend trip to Michigan where he caught up with Bernie Sanders on his fight oligarchy tour. Hell yeah, I did.
Look at you.

Speaker 1 Feeling the burn.

Speaker 3 Quick little trip to Michigan. One day.

Speaker 1 One day.

Speaker 3 But first,

Speaker 3 we try not to alarm you all on this show unless it's necessary.

Speaker 3 But there are a few stories out there about the Trump regime cracking down on dissent and opposition that make you wonder how we'd react if this was happening in another country.

Speaker 3 So over the weekend, ICE agents with the federal government detained a legal permanent resident in New York, took him away from his very pregnant wife, threw him in a detention center in Louisiana, all despite the fact that they have not charged him.

Speaker 3 with a crime. His name is Mahmoud Khalil, and he's a Columbia graduate who's been the leader of the university's pro-Gaza protests.

Speaker 3 Trump is bragging about the arrest and said that it's part of his promise to find and deport any student protesters who he believes have engaged in what he's calling, quote, pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.

Speaker 3 The Trump administration also cited anti-Semitism as the reason they're canceling $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University.

Speaker 3 As a note, more than a quarter of the school's operating budget comes from federal grants. So this is going to have a real impact on faculty, on students, on tuition costs, all the rest.

Speaker 1 I could spend a little bit of bit of that fucking endowment though.

Speaker 3 I don't agree with it. I'm just saying.

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 3 Anyway, continue.

Speaker 3 Hope they don't come after Williams.

Speaker 1 Listen, first they came for Columbia and I did not speak out. For I went to a small liberal arts college in northwestern Massachusetts that few people have heard of.

Speaker 3 Trump also signed an executive order on Friday that orders the government's public service loan forgiveness program. You get help with your student loans if you go into a career in public service.

Speaker 3 It's been around forever. To exclude anyone at any group that provides or supports gender-affirming care for minors, helps undocumented immigrants, or runs DEI programs.

Speaker 3 On Thursday, he signed an executive order canceling all federal contracts, security clearances, and even access to federal buildings from Perkins-Cooey, a law firm that does a lot of work for Democrats.

Speaker 3 The courthouses are federal buildings, and so it's where they would practice law.

Speaker 5 That's a good point.

Speaker 3 Last month, Trump signed a similar order canceling security clearances for anyone at the law firm firm of Covington and Burling because they did some work with Jack Smith.

Speaker 3 Here's Trump talking about this decision with Fox News' Maria Bardiromo on Sunday morning.

Speaker 6 We have a lot of law firms that we're going to be going after because they were very dishonest people. They were very, very dishonest.

Speaker 6 They could go point after point after point, and it was so bad for our country. And we have a lot of law firms that we're going after.

Speaker 3 Cool. Very cool.
Let's start with the Columbia situation.

Speaker 3 And I should note that right before we recorded, a judge has temporarily blocked Khalil's deportation until there's an actual hearing, which I believe is scheduled for Wednesday, at least the first of maybe a couple.

Speaker 3 How big of a deal is this?

Speaker 5 I think individually, all these stories are a huge deal. And collectively, it's like it's an assault on free speech, like we haven't seen in a very long time.
It should worry everybody.

Speaker 5 I mean, just starting with Columbia, I mean, sometimes when Trump does something that's so far over the line, conservatives react honestly for about 24 hours. You notice this?

Speaker 5 That happened in this case. Ann Coulter tweeted, there's almost no one I don't want to deport, but unless they've committed a crime, isn't this a violation of the First Amendment? Yes, Ann.

Speaker 5 Yes, it is.

Speaker 5 And I think with free speech issues, it's just in the abstract, we should be agnostic about the topic, the people involved, whether you agree or disagree with what they said, whether you find it offensive or not.

Speaker 5 If a lawful permanent resident can be rounded up by ICE agents or the Department of Homeland Security, thrown into jail without charges,

Speaker 5 without even being charged with

Speaker 3 or accused of a crime, that should worry everybody.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so it's a small detail, but they didn't have to send this person to Louisiana. There's detention facilities.
There's ways of processing him in New York, New Jersey. So this is like...

Speaker 3 And originally they did have him in New York, New Jersey, and then they transferred him to Louisiana.

Speaker 1 So it's meant to be punitive. He's a lawful permanent resident.

Speaker 1 For very good reason, lawful permanent residents are protected by the First Amendment the same way we're all protected by the First Amendment.

Speaker 1 There are ways in which the government can revoke somebody's immigration status, but it's not as punishment for speech you don't like.

Speaker 1 And by the way, it's not even as punishment for speech you don't like that may be associated with protests in which some people broke the rules or broke the law or what have you.

Speaker 1 You charge somebody with a crime, right? If he broke the law, you charge that person with whatever that crime is.

Speaker 1 That due process then may ultimately result in somebody losing immigration status, something that happens all the time. If you commit fraud when you apply, right?

Speaker 1 There's lots of ways immigration status can be revoked. But no, you can't just say, oh, this person is participating in protests.
And there's very Orwellian language. And

Speaker 1 I never say Orwellian because it's been such a fucking cliche and just overused phrase. But to say it was

Speaker 1 for protest aligned to terrorist organizations.

Speaker 3 One of the ways that you can revoke a green card, and by the way, like you said,

Speaker 3 the State Department cannot just revoke a green card on its own. It has to go through a hearing.
There has to be an immigration judge involved.

Speaker 3 One of the ways you can revoke a green card is if someone is a member of a terrorist organization or an extremist organization or has provided support, right?

Speaker 3 It's a threat to the United States because they're providing support to a terrorist organization.

Speaker 3 So clearly the White House wants to say that anyone who participated in these protests is Hamas or providing support to Hamas.

Speaker 3 But again, no crime has been charged and no evidence has been provided that this person provided any kind of material support to Hamas or was part of Hamas or anything like that.

Speaker 5 And most, I think most terrorism prosecutions are providing material support. So if they had any evidence of that, they would have charged this kid with a crime.
Exactly.

Speaker 3 Exactly. And by the way, the way this happened is he was coming home and outside his apartment, there were four plainclothes agents, and they identified themselves to him and his wife.

Speaker 3 They asked who he was, and then they said, you're coming with us.

Speaker 3 His wife, who's eight months pregnant, ran to get his green card because they said, oh, we're taking away your student visa. And she's like, well, he's not a student visa holder.

Speaker 3 He's a green card holder. And then the ICE agent is on the phone with someone and is like, oh, we're taking him in anyway.

Speaker 5 They're doing this on the fly. Yeah.
I will say, I made the general point about free speech.

Speaker 5 I also think in this specific instance, as someone who's talked publicly about Gaza and Israel and the two-state solution for a very long time, there is a long-term sustained effort to police speech on this specific topic, especially to define criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic or activism that protests Israel, like the BDS movement, as anti-Semitic.

Speaker 5 And so Trump is building off of

Speaker 5 not just those efforts to punish protesters, but now they're going to use this as a pretext to punish universities.

Speaker 5 And just to do a little bit of what aboutism, Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister of Israel, was giving a speech at Harvard Business School.

Speaker 5 The moderator made a point about how, hey, if you disrupt this, you're going to get kicked out.

Speaker 5 And he goes, I think we'll give them a pager, referring to the operation that blew up thousands of Hezbollah operatives. Just imagine if a pro-Palestinian, I don't like that speech.

Speaker 5 I don't like that speech very much, but it's clearly a joke. Imagine if a pro-Palestinian protester said, if you protest, we'll come after you with our hang gliders or we'll put a bomb on your bus.

Speaker 5 Like, now, is that kind of comment going to get you deported? Is that material support for Hamas? How are we thinking about this?

Speaker 3 Well, imagine if an Israeli citizen was here and has a green card, is a legal permanent resident, and said,

Speaker 3 you know, I hope Netanyahu finishes the job. I hope

Speaker 3 they kill everyone in Gaza. And then that person is just deported or detained in the middle of the night, sent to Louisiana, and we just don't hear from them.
We don't know.

Speaker 3 And now imagine imagine there's over 13 million legal residents in America of all nationalities, from all backgrounds.

Speaker 3 And so if you play this out, then you imagine ICE just going up to legal residents because now they all know who they are, where they are, right?

Speaker 3 You go up to a legal resident and you say, oh, it depends on what their background is. Oh, you're Ukrainian.
Oh,

Speaker 3 you must be with some Nazi group

Speaker 3 in Ukraine that Elon Musk is always talking about. Or, oh, you're a Latino.
You must be with Trende Diagua or whatever, one of the cartels.

Speaker 3 Trendi Argua that they've now labeled terrorist organizations. And now we have legal permanent residents in this country who've done everything right, who are applying for citizenship, just like

Speaker 3 you're supposed to do. And now we're just going to detain them

Speaker 3 and send them away.

Speaker 1 And allow me to put on my Jew hat for a moment. I'm literally, it is an exit.
I'm actually wearing a deli hat, so it is actually a huge amount of time.

Speaker 3 Oh my gosh, you are

Speaker 3 literally welcome. I'm literally wearing a Jew hat today.

Speaker 1 The anti-democracy. league.

Speaker 5 I condemn that speech.

Speaker 3 Yeah, condemn it all you want. But, and, you know, look, you know, Tommy's point.

Speaker 1 Let's say that this person had a bunch of anti-Semitic comments. Protected.
Anti-Semitism is protected speech. I don't like it.

Speaker 1 I don't like a lot of what I heard at some of these protests that I do think go from anti-Zionism into pure anti-Semitism on the regular.

Speaker 1 But like to see the anti-defamation league put out a comment with this sort of to be sure at the end about everyone deserving due process, but ultimately coming down on the the side of what the Trump administration is doing is so fucking stupid.

Speaker 1 The idea that like, oh yeah, like, you know, be a kind of a patron to what Trump's doing. Be like a good Jew who supports the regime.
That'll protect us in the end.

Speaker 1 The thing that like protects Jewish people from anti-Semitism is the culture of freedom, a legal order that protects freedom, including the freedom of green card holders, not just citizens, but non-citizens in this country.

Speaker 1 That protection is ultimately what makes Jews safe in America.

Speaker 1 The idea that going down a road in which people think it is defensible for the Trump administration to come knocking on somebody's door who has not been accused of a crime to revoke their immigration status for speech and protest you don't like is so it's obviously morally reprehensible, but it is so fucking stupid in the long term.

Speaker 1 That makes every Jewish person in America less safe. Think about the road we're going on.
It's like there are posters in the schools. They say, first they came for the socialists.

Speaker 1 What do they think comes after that?

Speaker 3 And then they were cool? Like, it's so stupid.

Speaker 1 It's so, like, it's so obvious. And like, we, we like, I just, there's all these people that have pretended to care about history and to learn from history and think about history.

Speaker 1 And it's happening right in front of our faces. And they're too either cynical or naive to realize that they're the people not doing the right thing in the moment when they're supposed to.

Speaker 3 I would also say that this is why.

Speaker 3 right i i would guess this is why uh the trump administration singled this man out and started with this conflict because donald trump doesn't actually give a fuck about gaza or the conflict it's just another thing he's dealing with.

Speaker 3 But they know that tensions are so high around this that they can get a ridiculous fucking reaction like that from the ADL. And then

Speaker 3 they will limit the protest, the breadth of the protest in this country about what they're doing. And then they can go to the next step, right?

Speaker 3 That's why they're like, well, this is sort of a lightning ride.

Speaker 3 And the way we know that is the White House...

Speaker 3 Not only did Donald Trump brag about it on Truth Social, the White House, the official White House account tweeted Shalom Mahmoud and is bragging about it, which is also, you know, to chill other speech from anyone who opposes the administration on any issue.

Speaker 5 I enjoy the irony of this all happening, right as we're learning that the White House has been holding direct talks with Hamas about getting hostages out of Gaza, which I support, by the way.

Speaker 5 I think it's the right thing to do. I think it's ridiculous.
We have to go through Qatar or some other carve-out of conversations with the group holding American citizens.

Speaker 3 I don't know. Maybe the people engaging in the direct talk should be departed.

Speaker 5 I mean, if Joe Biden did this, Lindsey Graham would have have filed articles of impeachment on the spot.

Speaker 3 That's right. So what do you think

Speaker 3 the whole crusade against the law firms is about, huh?

Speaker 5 I mean, it's just to have a chilling effect on these law firms.

Speaker 5 They want these lawyers to not want to take cases where they sue the Trump administration or oppose them in any way.

Speaker 5 And then in some instances, it's just an act of vengeance, like going after Jack Smith.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I think

Speaker 3 they're...

Speaker 1 The worst case scenario for the Trump administration is this gets shot down pretty quickly while costing Perkins Cooey a bunch of money, having to hire another law firm to represent them.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, this is expensive. All then, this makes life more difficult.
He's just punishing his enemies. And he doesn't need it to go further than this for it to have been effective.

Speaker 1 And the further it goes, the more fun he's having.

Speaker 3 But I think that the point that Tommy just raised is like, it's going beyond.

Speaker 3 The intent is to go beyond punishing his enemies, because if other firms that are not his enemies end up taking a case that is suing the government, then Trump can go after them.

Speaker 3 Or the other thing that can happen is, so there's a big law firm, right?

Speaker 3 And they take a case suing the government. And the big law firm also has other clients that are big corporate clients that have business before the government.

Speaker 3 And now they're like, do I really want to take that case that's suing the government because the Trump administration might come after us?

Speaker 3 Or I might lose this corporate client because now our firm is lightning rod as well.

Speaker 3 That's what's that's what a lot of these lawyers are, at least that's what they were telling the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 3 But they were saying it quietly because now they're all afraid to speak.

Speaker 1 And they got to see how it plays out, right? Because Perkins Cooey hired Williams E. Connelly, which is a bipartisan firm that has some Trump people in it.

Speaker 1 And some of this is like, does our law firm have a guy that can call a guy to say, leave us alone? You know what I mean? There's like sort of like,

Speaker 1 there's a relationship thing here. So some of this, I think, is like, it is, yeah, I think we just have to see how it plays out.

Speaker 5 There were reports early on that the Trump people were telling big firms, do not hire people out of the Biden DOJ, especially the Jack Smith team.

Speaker 5 So this is sort of part of a longer process of just trying to like keep really good lawyers from opposing them in any way.

Speaker 3 And again, we just talked about people being detained. So you get, you know, the Trump administration comes after you for whatever, a defamation case of this or that.

Speaker 3 They're trying to take whatever they do. And you try to find a good lawyer.
And now some of these big firms are like, do I want to take this case on? I don't know. I mean, that's the effect of this.

Speaker 3 And good for Williams and Connolly for jumping in to defend Perkins Cooley because a lot of these law firms should like band together and make a public statement.

Speaker 3 And there had been some, the journal reported that there had been some attempt to do that. And they haven't wanted to do that yet because they were a little nervous.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I can't believe these lawyers are looking after their own interests against these other law firms that they compete with on a daily basis on behalf of the sleaziest corporations on planet Earth.

Speaker 5 I do worry about this politically. I mean, on its face, it seems like such a brazen First Amendment violation, but I don't know.

Speaker 5 Historically speaking, this country has not always been sympathetic to protesters.

Speaker 5 I always think about how after Kent State, 58% of the country blamed the students, 11% of the country blamed the National Guard troops who shot them. The sentiment was they got what they deserve.

Speaker 5 So I do worry that, I don't know, maybe the Trump people think that,

Speaker 5 you know, going after a bunch of Gaza protesters will be good politics for them and that they might know something we don't. It makes me very nervous.

Speaker 3 Me too. And I do think, whether it's the law firms, whether it's what they're doing to some of these Gaza protesters, like

Speaker 3 everyone just has to be aware that this is going on and that the more people who speak up and the more people who stand in solidarity with the people who are targeted, whether you disagree with them or not, whether you're like them or not, whether you think that you, like the harder it's going to be for the Trump administration to pull this off, they win if they start doing this and picking out people up tonight and then everyone else is like, well, I'm not going to say anything.

Speaker 3 There was this whole New York Times story over the weekend, too, about like how all these people who spoke out in the first term against Trump are quiet now. And a lot of them went on background.

Speaker 3 A lot of people wouldn't say anything. And it's,

Speaker 1 I like, it's the wrong way to handle this. Yes.
Well, it's also just take a step back. Why do they think it's such good politics to chill free speech and go against protests?

Speaker 1 Like, why do they think it's such good politics to go against foreign aid? Why do they think it's such a good politics to pull these completely like these moves?

Speaker 1 They're just like completely anathema to what America is supposed to represent.

Speaker 1 It's because they don't believe that there's enough people that are going to make the argument successfully to the country and that people will go with their kind of base gut

Speaker 1 animal instincts on issue after issue. They're counting on that.

Speaker 5 I think they also think that they can make it about the specifics of the case or what someone said or did versus the principle. And we have to focus on the principle.

Speaker 3 Yes, exactly.

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Speaker 3 During that Maria Bartaromo interview, Trump also got lots of questions on the economy, especially about his on-again, off-again trade war. Let's listen.

Speaker 8 Are you expecting a recession this year?

Speaker 6 I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition because what we're doing is very big.
We're bringing wealth back to America. That's a big thing.
And there are always periods of

Speaker 6 it.

Speaker 6 It takes a little time.

Speaker 8 You said, look, we're going to have a disruption, but we're okay with that. Is that what you meant? The stock market going down was the disruption.

Speaker 3 What other disruption were you alluding to?

Speaker 6 Look, what I have to do is build a strong country. You can't really watch the stock market.
If you look at China, they have a 100-year perspective. We have a quarter.
We go by quarters. That's true.

Speaker 6 And you can't go by that. You have to do what's right.

Speaker 3 I guess someone's out of the prediction business.

Speaker 3 So on Friday's show, we talked about how Trump backed down for now on most of the tariffs against Canada and Mexico, though he's apparently sticking with tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum that are set to go into effect on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 China's retaliatory tariffs on American agricultural products have now gone into effect. The Canadians are also hitting us with some retaliatory tariffs.

Speaker 3 And their new prime minister, Mark Carney, said in a speech Sunday that America wants to, quote, destroy our way of life.

Speaker 3 And reaching for a hockey metaphor, said, quote, we didn't ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves. He found it.
He found it. He wasn't reaching.

Speaker 5 You got that one. What's icing?

Speaker 5 When you shoot it from your zone all the way into the other zone without someone touching it after two lines or something like that.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 5 It's a very boring penalty.

Speaker 3 The market seemed less enthused by this trade war and continued a three-week sell-off on Monday amid fears of the recession that Trump has refused to rule out.

Speaker 3 What do you think, guys? So Trump and his team have now called this a transition, an adjustment, a disturbance. And Scott Besson called it a detox.
A detox was the one I really liked.

Speaker 3 It's also funny, by the way.

Speaker 1 I just love, you know, just we need like a few months of just sort of clean economic recession to kind of just get a lot of these growth toxins out of our body.

Speaker 3 Dry, dry 2025. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's just.

Speaker 3 It doesn't seem great.

Speaker 5 Correction. Icing is when you shoot it from your side of the center line all the way past the opposing team's goal line.

Speaker 1 Icing and offsides have never made sense to me.

Speaker 3 Yes, I can.

Speaker 1 I know it's a different situation.

Speaker 5 You got to get them in the puck before they cross. Anyway, my buddy Dan Nathan is a very smart finance guy.
He made this point to me. In 2017, Trump did his tax cut first.
So that juices the market.

Speaker 5 It juices the economy. Then he started going with the tariffs.
Now they've got it all back assward. He started the trade war.
He's tanking the market. He's weakening the economy.

Speaker 5 He's weakening his political standing.

Speaker 3 And then he's going to try to ramp through this massive tax cut that no one actually thinks will be paid for it feels like a mistake i thought trump was supposed to be especially sensitive to stock market fluctuations oh he is like what what do we think happened here i'm a little honestly like my my like

Speaker 1 late-night worry is that like he's so now heavy on fucking cryptocurrency that like the more unstable the american economy gets the more he's sort of hedged against that's not what's happening like bitcoin is like basically correlated with the nasdaq and the market like it's tanking right now yes i'm just trying to explain why he seems to be a little less worried about the markets these days.

Speaker 1 I think he's foolish a couple years ago.

Speaker 3 I think he's still just worried about it.

Speaker 5 And he's just like very mad that his in-house interviewer is not asking him the right questions.

Speaker 3 I think it's very funny that on the same day that he does the Bar Romo interview, Howard Luttnick's on the Sunday shows and said, this country will absolutely not have a recession. Absolutely not.

Speaker 1 Well, that's what, right? It's the only thing you can say.

Speaker 3 If you say that's a confidence game.

Speaker 3 One person close to the administration talked to Politico for quite a while about all this. And they said he has to acknowledge there's going to be some pain.
He can't say everything's perfect.

Speaker 3 If he said everything's perfect, people would think he lost his mind.

Speaker 1 The other part of this, too, is I talked about this with Bernie just a little bit, but like the, you know, when the Bush people did their tax cuts, they were smart enough to understand that politically you do it with, you finance it with deficits, and then you use those deficits to later claim you need to cut spending.

Speaker 1 It was called starving the beast.

Speaker 1 They understood that like going out there and saying we're going to cut taxes for the richest people in America, but in a deficit-neutral way, which means cutting a bunch of services, also just makes your job that much harder.

Speaker 1 So, like, they're not even, yeah, they're not like, like, they're not, they're not politically or like economically doing the things that you think they would do if their goal was ultimately to like get the economy hot so that they can kind of have better politics to pull all the other shenanigans they're trying to pull.

Speaker 3 Hot ass economy. Hot ass economy.

Speaker 3 It's also possible that they don't know what the fuck they're doing because it's not just the tariffs themselves that is causing the markets and businesses to start freaking out a little bit.

Speaker 3 It's the uncertainty around the tariffs. Like he threatens tariffs,

Speaker 3 imposes tariffs. Yeah, right.
And then he takes them back.

Speaker 3 Clearly, like he backed away from them on Friday, Thursday, whenever it was, because he saw the reaction and was like, all right, I'm going to back off.

Speaker 3 But it didn't really calm things because everyone's like, well, who the fuck knows what's going to happen?

Speaker 5 Right. Like, can't Sam and Diane the economy? Yeah.
Ross and Rachel.

Speaker 3 Will they or will they? Sam and Diane. Oh, man.
Like, is it,

Speaker 1 are semiconductor's America's lobster.

Speaker 3 Here's the thing: Lovett and I would have gone with Ross and Rachel because we're millennials. I went with both, but he's Gen X.
He's Gen X. It's fun.
He's Gen X.

Speaker 3 He and Dan will be talking about Sam and Diane.

Speaker 1 He still thinks of Fraser as a spin-off.

Speaker 5 Catching strays from poor Dan's.

Speaker 3 He's getting a shot out here. Yeah, look, Dan's like a real Gen X.
Look, here's the thing. Like,

Speaker 1 this show is about a cross-generational conversation between Tommy and Dan as kind of our elders. Who we grew up, like, by the way, what's crazy is like we grew up learning from them.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And now we sit at this table.

Speaker 3 So this really six-foot guy talks with his 5'4 buddy and his 5'10 friend. Wow.
Wow. Wow.
Also, I just want to point out that Trump has single-handedly resuscitated the Liberal Party in Canada.

Speaker 5 I'm trying to move us on.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 5 And we're reigniting nationalism all through North America. Claudia Schanebaum down in Mexico has an 85% approval rating.

Speaker 3 I mean, can you tell us about what's with this new guy? I know this is the leave of the world, but former Bank of Canada head.

Speaker 5 He kind of came out of nowhere. He wasn't in politics.
Like Trudeau, basically.

Speaker 3 Is he the hero? Is he the hero we've been looking for?

Speaker 3 I don't know. He could just be another neoliber.

Speaker 5 But like Trudeau is head of the party for 11 years. He was prime minister for nine years.
He stepped down. When was that, January? So they do an intra-party process.

Speaker 5 150,000 people decide the next head of the party. So then you become the de facto prime minister.

Speaker 5 And so the election is supposed to be in October, but everyone figured they would call a snap election because the conservatives, this guy Pierre Polyev, who's sort of like the Trump of Canada, was up 20 points.

Speaker 5 And then fucking Trump. put in place all these tariffs and they're booing the national anthem in hockey games.

Speaker 5 And now the Liberal Party is back and it's like not really clear how it's all going to shake out.

Speaker 3 Imagine if Biden could have called a snap election during Brat Summer.

Speaker 3 We had a couple of votes. Yeah, still might have lost.

Speaker 3 It just depends on the poll.

Speaker 3 There was like one week where they were ahead maybe that was that very long.

Speaker 1 Or was it just the vibes or was it just the vibes?

Speaker 3 Yeah, the election at our convention.

Speaker 1 The other part of this too is it's like...

Speaker 1 even like take Trump like on his own terms. Like, okay, somebody out there was like thinking about where they're going to put a factory to make some kind of a widget.

Speaker 1 And it's like, you know, originally I was going to embark on a 10-year project to build a factory abroad. But now that there were tariffs on Canada for 36 hours, I think I'm going to put it in Ohio.

Speaker 1 Makes no fucking sense.

Speaker 3 No one can plan anything.

Speaker 3 The funding cuts, right? Like there's a lot of businesses that have federal contracts. They get funding from the government, right? And so you have that, you have the tariffs.

Speaker 3 No one can plan anything. Of course, there's uncertainty.

Speaker 5 One of his recent demands was he was telling leaders in Mexico and Canada that they have to send factories to the U.S.

Speaker 3 Like, what political leader can make that choice?

Speaker 5 Just shut down a bunch of jobs in your own country?

Speaker 3 Yeah. Trump also re-truthed a piece by Charlie Kirk over the weekend titled, Shut Up About Egg Prices.

Speaker 3 So that's where we are now. Huh.
Shut up about egg prices. I just say that.

Speaker 1 That was the kind of, in the liberal commentary at, that was a bit of an argument made on the left for quite some months

Speaker 3 before the election.

Speaker 3 Shut the fuck up about the egg prices and we'll be all right.

Speaker 3 Look how well that, look where that got us.

Speaker 1 And now here we are, like debating the finer parts of immigration status.

Speaker 3 And then people are like, if Joe Biden did that, you're like, yeah, no, the problem is we're

Speaker 3 shut up about X.

Speaker 3 Now the yoke's on us.

Speaker 3 You know what? I'm just going to leave it there. That's it.
That's a perfect segue.

Speaker 5 Beautiful button on that one.

Speaker 3 Trump's other big economic policy, destroying the federal government, also hitting some speed bumps.

Speaker 3 We talked about Trump reigning in Elon on Friday's show, but that was before we got all the juicy details about the cabinet meeting where it all went down.

Speaker 3 Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report that Elon accused Marco Rubio of not firing enough people at the State Department and insinuated he's good on TV, but not much else.

Speaker 3 Marco got mad, said Elon was lying, and then went back and forth until Trump had to jump in and defend Marco.

Speaker 3 Elon also fought with real-world Road Rule star turned Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

Speaker 1 Who, by the way, is the hero in this piece. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yes, the hero, who accused Doge of trying to fire air traffic controllers. And then Elon's like, that's a lie.
We did not try to. Give me the names.

Speaker 3 And he's like, I can't give you the names because I prevented you from firing them.

Speaker 3 Idiot. He didn't say it, but he should have.
Should have. This all ended with Trump announcing that cabinet secretaries, not Elon, decide who gets hired and fired at their agencies.

Speaker 3 And then they all tried to make up and pretend they're best pals on social media.

Speaker 3 Now, I initially thought Elon would be asked about all this when he sat down for a Fox business interview with Larry Kudlow on Monday.

Speaker 3 My original segue into this was, and here's what he said when asked about it today. But there is no question.
It was just a 15-minute tongue bath from Larry Kudlow.

Speaker 3 Kind of like a charming tongue bath.

Speaker 1 It was a tongue bath, but it's an uncomfortable tongue.

Speaker 3 That's why I say we should feel uncomfortable. I don't like it.
Try to watch it later. The cat gives a kitten.
Right. Anyway, here's how it sounded.

Speaker 3 I mean, frankly, I can't believe I'm here doing this.

Speaker 1 It's kind of bizarre.

Speaker 2 You know how to read an income statement, and you know how to read a balance sheet. You've had some business experience.
I'm kidding, but you know about this stuff. I mean,

Speaker 2 how are you running your other businesses?

Speaker 3 With great difficulty.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, producers are yelling at me to get out. I don't want to end this interview because it's too much fun.

Speaker 5 That question, how are you running your businesses on a day when the Tesla stock is down 15% and Twitter had like a multi-hour outage is actually very funny.

Speaker 3 Eli did seem a little down during the interview.

Speaker 1 He did not seem like he's on the wrong curve of whatever's going on inside of that fucking body.

Speaker 3 I know it's a long way from the chainsaw and the legalized comedy and all that kind of stuff. He was very subdued.

Speaker 1 What happened to the guy that had become meme?

Speaker 1 You're not looking very become meme, Elon.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 he did try a little bit of memeification at the beginning because

Speaker 3 little intranet jokes because he was like, and you know, your businesses

Speaker 3 have been targeted.

Speaker 3 There were shots fired at Tesla dealerships. And all of a sudden, Elon just interrupted and he goes, shots fired, but not that.
Like, get it? Like, on the internet, shots fired.

Speaker 1 I missed that because Pundit took an Eat Austin sandwich off of his desk.

Speaker 1 That's it. That's why I missed the first few seconds.

Speaker 3 How How fun was that New York Times story?

Speaker 3 We deserve every word of that.

Speaker 1 First of all, I love that story. Everybody should take a moment and go for it.

Speaker 3 Good for Maggie, good for Johnny.

Speaker 1 Good for Maggie, good for John. So there's just one point I wanted to make about the story, which was excellent.

Speaker 1 It was written in a really strange way because there's lots of what seem like direct quotes from the piece, but they're not in quotes. It's like, it's not written like a New York Times story.

Speaker 1 It's written like a book. And it made me think two things.
One,

Speaker 3 could there be?

Speaker 1 Could there be? And two, are these people already recording each other? I hope so.

Speaker 1 And like, if I, if I was somebody in that room reading that story i would be very paranoid about how that story was written basically as if somebody was in the room transcribing it without any reference to a recording or who the if there's no like some sources say duffy said this and some sources monkey must said that it is a narrative as if they were in the room and i just love that for them and for us And so it was a cabinet meeting, but then there's a whole bunch of people who sit in the sort of outer ring around the cabinet table.

Speaker 5 So I don't know if that's staff from the agency. Like, does the Secretary of Defense get one staffer or is it all White House staff?

Speaker 3 No, it's White House staff.

Speaker 5 It's all White House staff. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's the leak. It's usually like senior staff and then

Speaker 3 the staff are on the table.

Speaker 5 I think I just wanted to briefly remark upon how Marco Rubio continuing to be like the saddest, smallest man in government because he desperately wanted to be president. It's not sure.

Speaker 3 I'm not clear why.

Speaker 5 He doesn't have like big ideas he's trying to put forward, but he wanted to be president. Now he has like the big time cabinet job, right? It's like top three

Speaker 5 treasury defense. And he's yet he's still getting kicked around by Elon Musk and then even his own team.

Speaker 5 Remember a couple months ago, we learned that his spokeswoman had talked shit about him on Twitter and he had to hire her anyway.

Speaker 5 Then there was a story over the weekend.

Speaker 5 CNN reported that the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy deleted a bunch of tweets where he called Marco Rubio a low IQ individual and accused him of going to gay phone parties.

Speaker 3 You guys see this? I sure did.

Speaker 5 This guy still works at the State Department.

Speaker 1 There was a moment, people just need to understand, there was this brief frenzy on the internet that Marco Rubio had attended gay sex parties.

Speaker 5 Which is just not true.

Speaker 3 Phone parties. Phone parties.

Speaker 3 There's a picture of him

Speaker 3 with foam around him and some men. Now, apparently, there was just a regular phone party, and they just tried to insinuate that.
Foam parties are disgusting. Yeah, they are.
Disgusting.

Speaker 5 That foam is so dirty.

Speaker 3 No one needs to be at a phone party.

Speaker 1 Look, this is an episode about freedom. and not judging, not yucking other people's yum.
Whether it be a phone party or an anti-Israel protest.

Speaker 5 Regardless, whether or not he was at a phone party, then he gets attacked in this meeting in front of the entire cabinet by Elon, accused of not doing anything, and then Monday morning he has to send out the tweets like, I'm a good boy, and I did what I'm told, and I canceled 83% of the programs at USIAD.

Speaker 5 But the remaining 18% get transferred to state, which that math does not add up.

Speaker 3 I think that our Secretary of State is the result of an elaborate prank that the whole Trump MAGA world has been playing on him. Like, we're going to make him Secretary of State.

Speaker 3 We're going to make him think he's got a big job now.

Speaker 3 And then we're going to put all the people who hate him as his staff and then we're gonna sick elon musk on him we're gonna make him prom king and he's gonna walk out on that stage pig's blood

Speaker 1 i feel like we are not even at the beginning of the humiliation of marco rubio you know that some people have made this point i don't somebody on social media was making this point and i'm sorry to whoever it was that both jd vance and marco rubio have like fundamentally changed their worldview to fit with donald trump but jd vance does it in such a convincing way and marco Rubiu just can't.

Speaker 1 And he can't because you can just see it in his eyes.

Speaker 1 The person in there that doesn't agree, he can't kill that part of himself. And I don't know if that speaks well of him or poorly of him, but I'm loving every second of it.

Speaker 3 My view on this is that, and I've changed my view over time, I think J.D. Vance believes it.
I think J.D. Vance has like, is entirely bought in.

Speaker 3 He's got all the authoritarian tendencies. He like loves Orban and Hungary and all the rest of it.
Like he is, he's part of the project. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 I do think that there, yeah, with Vance, like there's this sort of great salesman quality that he has. Like he, he always has this tone in interviews.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't understand how anyone could be so stupid as not to understand why we are right. And he was doing it about why the mineral deal in Ukraine weighed more.
He got in trouble for it.

Speaker 1 He got in trouble. Of course, it's crazy.
He went in trouble for saying, for insulting French and British troops. But the point he was making, he was making with such a kind of strident arrogance.

Speaker 3 You can tell he used to be an establishment cook because he's very scoldy.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Yeah, no,

Speaker 5 the need for rare earth minerals has prevented conflicts in the Congo for decades now. There's never been a war in the Congo because of rare earths that we mine there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but I always just, I think he's a salesman at heart, selling, and I think he, like any great salesman, he sells himself first. And so I do think he like starts to really adapt these views.

Speaker 5 There's this clip of Rubio from 2016 going around. We should just insert it right here.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 10 He's running for president, so no matter what, he won't be a dictator unless our republic completely crumbles, which I don't anticipate it will.

Speaker 10 And if you listen to the way he describes himself and what he's going to do, he's going to single-handedly do this and do that without regard for whether it's legal or not.

Speaker 10 No matter what happens in this election, for years to come, there are many people on the right, in the media, and voters at large that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump, because this is not going to end well one way or the other.

Speaker 5 How great was that, everyone? Also, I just want to, I don't know that people realize Tesla's stock is down 50%, 5-0% in the last three months.

Speaker 1 By the dip.

Speaker 5 And it's because Elon's like, he's a master at manipulating the stock market. It is all smoke and mirrors.
It is not revenue.

Speaker 5 It's him trying to convince investors that he's going to sell the next fleet of robo-taxis and autonomous robots and stuff.

Speaker 1 And I'll just say this, that I don't let cybertrucks in. I just don't let them in.
Into work?

Speaker 1 Into my lane.

Speaker 1 I'm not kind to the cybertrucks on the road. I'm not, I don't break any rules.

Speaker 3 You used to own one. Well, I had a

Speaker 3 Tesla. You don't own that.
You had a cyber truck.

Speaker 1 Yes, of course I did.

Speaker 3 Of course, we also have a Cybertrunt. So Tommy and I, you know, put graffiti on it.

Speaker 1 Right. Well, it couldn't fit in our compact spaces.

Speaker 3 So I had to get rid of my Cybertruck.

Speaker 1 You guys ought to say that John, Tommy, and I, we park in these three tiny fucking spaces. And every morning, someone comes in and is like, hey, hey, too close.
Too fucking close.

Speaker 1 And you're like, I thought I parked.

Speaker 3 No, you got to park a little bit further because I couldn't get out of the car.

Speaker 3 Tommy leveled an accusation on, and I actually, when I went out to get coffee, I had to take, I took a picture just to prove that I had actually parked far, far away from the line.

Speaker 5 Are you digging in and doing well, actually?

Speaker 1 I just want to say that we've been together longer than the Beatles.

Speaker 3 Maybe one serious discussion in this section before we start. Just one question.
So Jeff Stein and Dan Diamond had a good piece in the Washington Post.

Speaker 3 Not as gossipy as Maggie and Jonathan's, but a good piece. Good reporter.

Speaker 3 It was good. They made the case that Trump actually does appear to be susceptible to political pressure on things like tariffs and Doge cuts.
Walked back the tariffs now a couple times.

Speaker 3 He has now reined in Elon a little bit. What do you guys think? Do you think that this is him feeling some political pressure? Do you think it's something else?

Speaker 1 No, I think he does. I think he actually does.
I think he's hearing it. I don't think he faces political pressure in that he cares about blowback in the mainstream press.

Speaker 1 I think he hears it from the congressional Republicans.

Speaker 1 And I think behind closed doors, there are more honest conversations with Mike Johnson, with Jon Thune about what they're hearing and where it's like, hey, man, they're like kind of the kind of thing that's like, hey, man, they're with you, but you got to give them this, or you got to, you got to slow down on this, or I'm getting a lot of shit about this, whatever it may be.

Speaker 1 Because I think actually where the political pressure is right now, like really does boil down to whatever happens, yes, with the CR that's coming, but ultimately with reconciliation and whether or not they can get an all-Republican bill through the House.

Speaker 1 And if the economy is going down, if there's a bunch of blowback around Medicaid cuts, all of a sudden

Speaker 1 planes are planes are continued to touch,

Speaker 3 which they're never supposed to do.

Speaker 1 They're bumping. Then all of a sudden they're not able to count to a majority in the House and his whole agenda is in jeopardy.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, we're tariffing Canada, one of our closest allies, over a completely made-up fentanyl trafficking problem. Someone at the White House has to just be like, what are we doing here?

Speaker 5 Because as you pointed out, I mean, he does need the political capital to get these things, this tax cut through Congress.

Speaker 5 And it just, it doesn't look good right now.

Speaker 3 He also, he likes being liked. That's like his biggest important.
And he is, I think, more self-aware than he lets on.

Speaker 3 And he knows, right, the stock market's been terrible, right? Like, he's not, he watches the TV.

Speaker 3 And so he knows what's going on. And I think he does not want to be hated.

Speaker 5 Yeah. The deal was like, we'll give you money.
You give us a tax cut for all his donors. They can't be happy right now.

Speaker 3 Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but two announcements before we do that. We got a new podcast from Crooked that we think you'll love.
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Speaker 3 Check out the trailer for Shadow Kingdom God's Banker right now, wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe for episodes starting March 17th.

Speaker 3 Better yet, join our Friends of the Pod community to binge all the episodes that same same day at crooked.com/slash friends or on the Shadow Kingdom Apple podcast feed. Also, merch store news.

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Speaker 1 Isn't it crazy that Shadow Kingdom is about in 1982 and you and I were babies and Tommy was in high school?

Speaker 3 Are you going to get kicked out of another rally?

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Speaker 3 All right, let's talk talk about what Americans really care about: whether the looming government shutdown can be averted.

Speaker 3 On Saturday, Speaker Mike Johnson put out the text of the continuing resolution he's going to bring to a vote Tuesday night. It turns out it's not exactly a clean continuing resolution as promised.

Speaker 3 It increases spending on things like defense and border enforcement while cutting spending by greater amounts in other areas, including zeroing out a lot of health care programs in states.

Speaker 3 Trump is whipping support for this one. He wrote on Truth Social: All Republicans should vote vote in parentheses, please exclamation point, yes, next week.

Speaker 3 So far, we've only got one Republican hard no from Thomas Massey. If that holds, this thing will pass the House, big if.

Speaker 3 Then it will go to the Senate, where the funding bill can't pass without support from at least seven Democratic senators and probably eight since Rand Paul seems like a no.

Speaker 3 Democratic leaders say this is a power grab by the White House and a, quote, slush fund for Trump and Musk. What do you think they mean by that?

Speaker 1 Well, there's no control.

Speaker 1 Donald Trump is treating every dollar Congress has ever appropriated as money he can decide whether to spend or not.

Speaker 1 Republicans have acted as though putting into the law controls on what Trump does to protect Congress's authority under the Constitution is like

Speaker 1 so unacceptable. So, yeah, I mean, if Donald Trump believes he can just cut or spend however he sees fit, then we're no longer appropriating money for the administrative branch.

Speaker 1 We're appropriating money for Donald Trump to spend.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, So our pal Alyssa Slockin, the fairly moderate new Democratic senator from Michigan, said on Sunday that she's withholding her vote to fund the government until Congress gets, quote, assurances that the administration will actually follow the law and spending the money.

Speaker 3 So it's not a slush fund.

Speaker 3 That seems to me like Senate Democrats might actually be willing to vote down this funding bill.

Speaker 3 Though then they asked Mark Kelly, and he was sort of saying what Slockin said, but then he was like, But shutdowns are bad. We don't like shutdowns and the CR isn't great, but shutdowns are bad too.

Speaker 3 Tommy, what do you think?

Speaker 3 Can you see a possible compromise here? Is this a good idea to go forward and withhold votes? Bad idea?

Speaker 5 I mean, I think Love's point is an important one. Like, Congress's position sort of has to be, if you want to cut spending, we will write a bill.
Otherwise, we shouldn't exist anymore. Right.

Speaker 3 So I don't, like, I also think

Speaker 5 Democrats should approach this with some confidence because Trump does not want a shutdown right now.

Speaker 1 The economy is very shaky.

Speaker 5 People are wondering what he's doing. Like, people, like, voters know Republicans control everything.
I don't, like, shutdown politics are complicated.

Speaker 5 It's especially complicated when you have Elon Musk controlling the most powerful piece of social media with X and the ability to blame Democrats.

Speaker 3 It'll get rocky, but I don't know.

Speaker 5 I would demand something at the very least. And I think saying, yeah, you have to follow the law and actually appropriate money where we say is pretty important.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, I feel like I've talked about this on too many episodes, but, you know, Dan has made the point, like, know what you're asking for.

Speaker 3 Ask for something if you're going to go through this and like make it specific. Make it clear.
Make it under, you know, and look, will they, if you get it, are they going to abide by it?

Speaker 3 Who the fuck knows? But

Speaker 3 if we're going by what they're going to abide or not abide by, then we might as well just give up. You're right.
Then there's no Congress. We might as well give up.
Right.

Speaker 1 If we're afraid of the politics of what happens when Donald Trump doesn't follow the law, we've lost already.

Speaker 1 If we're afraid of the politics, if Donald Trump does follow the law, well, that's ordinary politics. We've done a million times.

Speaker 1 And then if they need our votes to pass something, then you should get something for your votes. Yeah.
Right?

Speaker 1 Like if they're just going to do what they would have done if they had a 60-seat majority, well, that doesn't make sense.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Don't be scared about the midterms now.

Speaker 3 For God's sake. No, that I would not.
Do something. So, of course, government funding isn't the only thing Democrats are arguing about.
Excellent Wall Street Journal headline here.

Speaker 3 Democrats are busy fighting over what to fight over on their list.

Speaker 3 Whether it was good or bad to interrupt Trump in his joint address and whether we should be blowing up members' phones in town halls to get them to fight the Doge cuts.

Speaker 3 Tim Walls was also out there this weekend saying that that the Harris campaign played it too safe during the campaign and should have done more town halls where they got tough questions.

Speaker 3 For good measure, we also had a bunch of stories over the weekend about Democrats starting to swear more, talk more about sports, and podcast more, which, of course, we love. How about football?

Speaker 3 You like?

Speaker 3 How are you guys feeling about the party's very public therapy session/slash nervous breakdown?

Speaker 5 Par for the course, huh?

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 it's sort of like, um,

Speaker 1 hey, everybody, just stop.

Speaker 3 Just go do. Remember that from Forgetting Sarah Marshall? Do less.
Don't burden yourself.

Speaker 1 I guess I'd like a little bit more, a little less discussion of the strategy types that are available to us and a little bit more of, if you think this is what we should do, why don't you do that?

Speaker 1 And if you think there's something else we should do, you do that. And then we'll just take a look at it.

Speaker 1 You know, let's just throw, let's just throw some spaghetti against the wall, you know?

Speaker 3 And if that spaghetti looks like a years-old trend on TikTok, the choose-your-fighter thing. I didn't love that.
I didn't love that.

Speaker 1 But it's like, I don't think Democrats have paid too great a price for Al Green going, meh.

Speaker 1 And like, I don't, you know, but I, but, and like, I don't think the color coordination was particularly effective.

Speaker 5 Yeah, look, most protests aren't popular in the moment, so you can disagree with Al Green's tactic, but at least he had a focus message that was about Medicaid cuts.

Speaker 5 I like that better than like holding a silly, like, kind of QT sign. I think that was always destined to look silly.
I think if you look at the Senate,

Speaker 5 Corey Booker, Brian Schatz,

Speaker 5 Chris Murphy, there's a lot of people just like putting shots on gold, making a lot of content, putting stuff on TikTok, putting up videos. I think that's the right way to go.

Speaker 3 Tim Wallace is right. They did play Too Safe.

Speaker 5 I mean, I remember when he was named as vice president, everyone was really excited to hear him do a bunch of interviews. And then he was bottled up for half the campaign.

Speaker 5 And that was obviously a mistake.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 The being afraid of taking on some of the more controversial...

Speaker 1 like policy issues that the Trump campaign was making big under the assumption that under the hope that you ignore that you push that down you campaign in your most effective on your most effective messages that was like a smarter safer thing to do like it turns out that didn't work was that the wrong decision at the time i don't know but like right now like there's a i feel like in that piece like there's a lot of like abstraction and like i don't sometimes i don't know what is fighting voting against the CR is fighting voting for it, but being angry.

Speaker 1 Like sometimes like very confusing, but only but focusing on reconciliation.

Speaker 1 Like what, like I don't often know how to apply the abstraction, but like the core point, one of the core points made in the piece is there are some more moderates that are basically saying, our constituents, that we need our moderate constituency to think of us as even-keeled fighters who will work with Trump sometimes and oppose him where he's wrong.

Speaker 1 While there's the left, I'm just like trying to make the most generous version of it. And then, but the left says Trump is threatening the Republic.
We need to fight these people at every turn.

Speaker 1 And by the way, that will bring out the people we need when they see us becoming champions for them and the working class.

Speaker 1 And that means, that means giving no quarter and trying to stop every one of these doge cuts, et cetera, et et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 And I think probably that may make sense in Tom Suazi's district, but not make sense for others. It not make sense for the party as a whole.
I don't know.

Speaker 3 I think there's been, it's odd to say this as three founders of a media company here. There's been a bit too much focus on like

Speaker 3 what mediums and formats to communicate and get the message out. And like, I get it.
You know, it's a, it's a...

Speaker 3 crazy media environment right now and you can't do just television anymore and put out a press release right we've talked about that a a million times, but like there should be a little more focus on just be yourself, you know, do what's comfortable to you in your own skin.

Speaker 3 And then the fact that you have to do it on a new medium, right? Like you have to be on TikTok or you have to do a podcast, like that shouldn't change your style, your message, who you are.

Speaker 3 Like, I feel like there's a lot of trying to fit themselves in like boxes that they don't really belong in

Speaker 3 just because either their younger staff or consultants or anyone else is telling them, like, this is what's cool, this is what you got to do. Like, you just be yourself.

Speaker 5 Boxes of vertical video. Yeah, you don't have to do like a trending meme.
That's silly. Just talk.
But I do think it's good to get out there.

Speaker 5 I mean, apparently, House members were mad that they were told not to applaud at the State of the Union. And if that's the case, that was bad advice because

Speaker 5 every president ever who delivers a State of the Union creates a trap for you if you do that by introducing some really emotional story where clearly everyone should be applauding.

Speaker 5 And if you're sitting on your hands, you look bad. But I don't, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 But that's, I think this is where like, we're like, do we applaud or not applaud?

Speaker 3 Like, why is that even? It's just a silly thing the media focuses on.

Speaker 1 No, I know, but what I'm getting, there's like, it's like, all of this feels like it's trying to make up for some deeper problem, which is about like, what do we stand for?

Speaker 1 Why don't people believe us? How do we, like, there's a kind of bigger problem inside of like democratic politics that we all on some level know and we're sort of grappling with.

Speaker 1 And like in the short term, like no one's going to solve it.

Speaker 3 It's going to take a lot of time.

Speaker 3 Well, and again, elections will come and you need to strategize around an election and figure out what the best message is for like the next, for at least this year, just do your politics.

Speaker 3 Like you're not going to look at the reaction or you're not going to read advice. You're just doing it based on what you think and believe and how you feel about things.

Speaker 3 Just like try that for, just try it for a little bit. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, sure.

Speaker 3 It'll work for some people and some people it won't work for. And then, you know, you get a later job.

Speaker 3 Well, the like politics like no one is watching, yeah, yes, yeah, it's like no one's watching, politics like no one is watching, yeah. Post like you've never been here, no one is, yeah, and no one is.

Speaker 1 Here's the thing: for most people, nobody is.

Speaker 3 Like,

Speaker 3 you know, you go to that, like if the podcast, the podcast dropped on a feed and no one heard it, did it really? Did it really make it?

Speaker 1 Did those three guys say anything?

Speaker 1 Did those three white guys say anything?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 1 My answer is yes.

Speaker 5 That was a draft version of the title. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But like, you know, I saw the difference between, like, there was like this whole,

Speaker 1 I, like, I posted a picture of the Bernie rally and said, like, I thought this was inspiring because it genuinely was.

Speaker 3 I saw you quote tweet it, and I was like, oh, he must be shadow boxing his mentions on this one. You bet I was.
You bet.

Speaker 1 Not shadow boxing boxing.

Speaker 3 But.

Speaker 1 There is every reply under the book in the sun to explain why it wasn't actually inspiring and actually quite bad. What? Yeah, just sort of like, like, why is Bernie alone?

Speaker 1 Why aren't other Democrats doing this? Bernie's too old. Why isn't he with somebody else? This isn't.

Speaker 3 Sometimes I feel like we're running a political campaign with 5,000 people who like all have an equal say in the campaign all the time and they're all strategists.

Speaker 1 But the thing about it, well, online, but the thing about it is that there was none of that feeling. in the actual

Speaker 1 because it's real life and in real life what was there at that event there were it was it was very diverse uh age all demographics and there were people there that have been Bernie fans forever.

Speaker 1 There were people there that had never been to a political rally before. They were all very excited to be there.

Speaker 1 They weren't checking to find out how long they'd been a Bernie backer or if any Pete Buddha Jej supporters. And now it's just sneak in, right?

Speaker 3 Like none of that exists in the real world, right? There's nobody like, oh, you like Bernie. Do I hear high hopes in the background? You like Bernie now, but

Speaker 1 you were part of the DNC coup in Iowa in 2016.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's like

Speaker 5 people who are early into a band who scold you if you come to it later. It's like, that's not fun.

Speaker 1 Right, but like the two, like the two things can't be, the two positions can't be, why isn't the Democratic Party embracing Bernie's message? And, oh, sure, you like Bernie now. Where were you before?

Speaker 1 It's like, well, those two things are in opposition.

Speaker 5 Some of my, sometimes our leftist friends don't build the biggest tents, and we all should just welcome people into the Bernie Club.

Speaker 5 I think there's like sort of two competing things that are in my mind. Like, first of all, in Congress, obstruction works.
Mitch McConnell built a whole career off it.

Speaker 5 So let's just obstruct everything Trump does and try to prevent harm. And then there's the other piece of this, which is like people are looking for something to be for and some sort of inspiration.

Speaker 5 And when I talked to Aleister Campbell for the Sunday pod, he was Tony Blair's guy.

Speaker 5 And one thing they did before Tony Blair became prime minister was they like, they literally had a big contentious debate about the constitution of the Labor Party, like the DNA of it.

Speaker 5 They had a huge contentious fight, like ripped it down to the studs and tried to reimagine it. And I think the Democrats were missing that process.

Speaker 5 And it probably won't come until we have a nominee ahead of the 2028 primaries because, you know, whoever's the top of the ticket kind of reshapes the party around him or herself.

Speaker 5 But I think we're missing some of that. We're missing a process to kind of like reimagine who we are and our brand and our values and then project it outwards.

Speaker 3 I also, I agree with that.

Speaker 1 I also think there's like,

Speaker 1 I'm watching The Real Housewives from the beginning, a lot of them. And honestly,

Speaker 1 everybody was right. I can't believe I waited this long.
It's a dream. It's better than any drama.
Severn's going to eat shit compared to the real housewives in New York.

Speaker 3 Got some nodding heads over there.

Speaker 1 But there was a moment during a reunion where Andy.

Speaker 3 The reunion

Speaker 3 is incredible.

Speaker 1 Well, Andy turns to all the gals and says, Would you come back for another season?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Alex said, I would love to. And Jill said, I'm not so sure.

Speaker 3 I bet Jill got more money after that.

Speaker 1 And I just like, there's a there's a downside to Democrats constantly hand-wringing in public about how terrified they are of looking like they're obstinate or

Speaker 1 like worrying about how they need to show that they that they're some of their constituents want them to kind of coordinate with Trump and not be so opposed to him while opposing the bad parts is it sends a message that they're that they're fucking that they'll that they'll that they'll bend that they'll give up and if like Democrats were a little bit more like we will support bills that do the right thing and we won't we won't go we won't be ransomed into supporting whole resolutions

Speaker 1 yes absolutely like like just there's a just like Trump is a negotiator he's not a very good one but he thinks about it he cares about it it's like maybe like let's think about that a little bit but also good for Bernie for filling a space and like giving people a place to go to get excited and fired up yeah I think that's good in house districts that that Republicans won by only a few votes.

Speaker 3 More Democrats should be doing that. Absolutely.

Speaker 3 Whether you like Bernie's politics or not,

Speaker 3 here's a guy who has not changed anything about himself and doesn't want to, doesn't care how you feel about it, is completely comfortable in his own skin.

Speaker 3 And he's going around drawing these big crowds, just...

Speaker 3 old traditional style. Just go do a rally and you talk to people and everyone's like, this is great.
He didn't figure out like the TikTok trend.

Speaker 3 He didn't figure out exactly how to like do do an explainer video. That's a vertical video.

Speaker 1 He's not like, we got to stop the oligarchy. No cap.

Speaker 1 That's not Bernie's move. That's not Bernie's move.

Speaker 5 Shit ended there, I think.

Speaker 3 How was it?

Speaker 3 It looked really fun.

Speaker 1 The rally was great.

Speaker 3 We stopped the oligarchy.

Speaker 3 Sorry.

Speaker 1 We sat down with Bernie after, but it was, we said, he was supposed, we were supposed to talk to him before the rally. We only talked to him.

Speaker 1 after, which was after his third rally, and he was pretty well cooked.

Speaker 1 So we got, we had like a quick, we had a good conversation, but I will say it was also awesome just getting to talk to a lot of people.

Speaker 1 And if you go to crooked socials on Instagram, on X, on TikTok, you can see all the conversations.

Speaker 1 And we walked to the end of what was one of the longest lines I've ever seen in politics of people trying to get in, and it was really fun. So, check it out.

Speaker 5 Subscribe on TikTok, yeah, Instagram, absolutely, X, maybe take it or leave it.

Speaker 3 All the platforms:

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Speaker 3 All right, enough of us yapping about it. Let's hear your conversation with the man himself, Bernie Sanders.

Speaker 1 Senator, welcome back to Pod Save America. Good to be with you.
We were just talking about this. We're in Warren, Michigan.
It is not an election year. There are 10,000 people here.

Speaker 2 I'll tell you, I have, needless to say, I've done a lot of rallies. And we've done rallies during the presidential campaign that were larger than this, for sure.

Speaker 2 But the idea

Speaker 2 that in a non-campaign, coming here to Warren, Michigan, that you have 10,000 people is totally insane.

Speaker 2 And what it tells me, and we had tremendous turnouts in Kenosha, we had wonderful turnouts in a small community in Altoona, Wisconsin. And what it tells me is the American people are up in arms now.

Speaker 2 They are not going to let Trump and his friends turn this country into an oligarchy. They're not going to let him turn us into an authoritarian society.

Speaker 2 And they're not going to allow him to give tax breaks to billionaires and cut the programs that working class people need.

Speaker 1 You said something yesterday in Wisconsin. You said we're no longer moving toward an oligarchy.
We are living in one. Yeah.
Which I hadn't heard you say before.

Speaker 2 Well, look, I think the evidence is pretty clear. When you have a president get inaugurated and standing behind him, sitting behind them were the three wealthiest people in the country, Mr.
Musk, Mr.

Speaker 2 Bezos, and Mr. Zuckerberg, and then sitting scattered throughout the stage, 13 other billionaires who Trump nominated to head major agencies, Secretary of Treasury, et cetera.

Speaker 2 You tell me what you would call it. This is,

Speaker 2 I find it hard not to describe it as a government of the billionaires. And that is what a law cocky is about.

Speaker 1 There's this,

Speaker 1 you know, you made this video after,

Speaker 1 I think, two weeks into Trump's term. And it was really meaningful for me just personally because I found it very helpful to think about how to fight back.

Speaker 1 You talked about needing to define what's happening, needing to fight back in the short term, and then needing to build a progressive movement and agenda in the long term.

Speaker 1 But there was also like a group of gravity in your voice and a sense that, in a way that I maybe hadn't heard before.

Speaker 1 I don't know if you agree with that.

Speaker 2 Look, these are

Speaker 2 the scariest times in my lifetime. That's all.
I mean, I think that's objectively the truth.

Speaker 2 You know, it is not just they want to give tax breaks to billionaires and cut programs for working people. Frankly, that's happened before.

Speaker 2 But you combine that

Speaker 2 with

Speaker 2 the power of the oligarchy in general. You combine that with Mr.
Musk owning Twitter and able to send out his messages to hundreds of millions of people.

Speaker 2 You combine that with the fact that people like Bezos, the second wealthiest person in the country, fired or got rid of most of his editorial staff and is going to convert him into a right-wing thing.

Speaker 2 Combine that with the fact that Trump is suing major media outlets and is threatening to investigate PBS and NPR.

Speaker 2 So it's not only the power of money, it's also combined with that, the movement toward authoritarianism.

Speaker 2 You know, when Trump unilaterally cuts federal funding that was passed by Congress, that is illegal, that is unconstitutional.

Speaker 2 When you have the vice president saying, well, in his judgment, the courts don't have the right to stop unconstitutional acts of the president, man, that is authoritarianism.

Speaker 2 That's what the courts are.

Speaker 2 He is now trying to end what the founding fathers were pretty smart about, creating a form of government where there were checks and balances, you know, a legislative body, an executive body, and a judiciary.

Speaker 2 So he is moving aggressively in all of these areas. Yeah, there was gravity in my voice.
This is a scary moment.

Speaker 1 There's this strange

Speaker 1 contradiction in fighting back. Because on the one hand, you have the kind of brazenness of what Trump is doing, as if he won't ever ever have to worry about Democratic legitimacy at all.

Speaker 1 That they're not worried about being held accountable, or they're not worried about people paying attention, or they're not worried about what could happen.

Speaker 1 But then we're here in a district that a Republican won by a few points, right? These people still care about their jobs, right?

Speaker 1 This is a place where normal politics just seems still be possible to practice.

Speaker 1 And I'm just curious how you think about that, that on the one hand, we're facing this unprecedented brazen power grab by the richest human beings in the history of planet Earth.

Speaker 1 And on the other, we got to knock on doors and turn people out to win by a few hundred, maybe a thousand votes in a district like this.

Speaker 2 Well, I think, and this is what I believe, maybe I'm wrong, but it is what I have always believed. And I am a politician, you know.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 when people stand up and talk, when your phone line bangs off the hook,

Speaker 2 when you see rallies, if I'm the congressman from this district and I see 9,000 people coming out who really do not want tax breaks for billionaires and cuts in Medicaid. You know what?

Speaker 2 I'm going to think twice about it. So I think what

Speaker 2 Trump and Musk hope is they can create a sense of powerlessness in people. Hey, what do you think? I got all the money.
I got all the power. I own the media.
I can buy elections.

Speaker 2 What do you think you can do? You can't stop me. And if people believe that, we're going to lose.

Speaker 2 But if people understand that when they stand up and fight back, and that's why at the end of these remarks, I talked about the history of this country. This is not the first time.

Speaker 2 You know, I think back, well, slightly different thing, you know, in

Speaker 2 December of 41, 1941, the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor. You know what? We have to fight a war on two fronts completely.
The military was not prepared to do that.

Speaker 2 Yet in two years, country came together, we were able to, you know,

Speaker 2 lay the groundwork for victory. We can do it.
We can do it. When people are mobilized and are prepared to stand up and fight back.

Speaker 1 So talk about what does success to you look like in the short term?

Speaker 2 In the short term, it means a solid defeat of this outrageous reconciliation bill, which would provide $1.1 trillion in tax breaks to the 1%

Speaker 2 and massive cuts to Medicaid, nutrition, and education programs. That's the immediate.
We win that. We got them on the defensive.

Speaker 2 And that's why I'm here in this district and why I was in Kenosha and Altoona earlier.

Speaker 1 What does that argue for doing even before we get to that reconciliation vote?

Speaker 1 Because right now they're trying to jam through this continuing resolution just to keep the government open to give them time to negotiate with each other to figure out their tax cuts and Medicaid cuts.

Speaker 2 Aaron Ross Powell, well, I'll be back in Washington on Monday and we'll be delving into that, but there's a lot of stuff that's flying on, so I can't give you a good answer on that one.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, you know, I remember when the Bush tax cuts

Speaker 1 were on the table and

Speaker 1 they talked about starving the beast. I'm sure you remember.

Speaker 1 But the reason they said that is they were kind of attenuating the connection between massive tax cuts for the richest people and inevitably what they would try to do next, which was privatizing Social Security, cutting health care.

Speaker 1 They understood that there was like a political risk in doing that.

Speaker 1 Can you remember a time when you have had at the exact same moment an active proposal to cut $1 trillion worth of taxes for the richest people, to give people making over a million dollars, an average of $70,000 just in cash money while also firing 80,000 people from the Veterans Affairs?

Speaker 2 No, this is unprecedented, and it's why this is a scary moment. Look, Musk is many things, but he is extraordinarily arrogant and extraordinarily aggressive.
And they're going for it.

Speaker 2 They're going for it. I mean, it's just hard to keep up with what they are doing.

Speaker 2 And that's not an accident as well. But I tell you, I think

Speaker 2 that when you propose to cut, was it, 83,000 positions at the Veterans Administration,

Speaker 2 the American people are going to say, you're not going to do that. Because no matter what your politics may be, there is respect for people who put their lives on the line to defend our country.

Speaker 2 And I've been talking to veterans all over this country. And you know what? I don't think they're going to get away with that.
I think the veterans community is going to stand up.

Speaker 2 I think you have seniors all over this country saying, no, I can't get a phone call now because the Social Security Administration is understaffed.

Speaker 2 Some 30,000 people a year die who have disabilities because they don't get their benefits on time. This will only make it much worse.

Speaker 1 So there was a report out of the Times about basically a fight in the cabinet room or in a cabinet meeting between Musk and Rubio and Duffy and Trump and all these characters because they're feeling the political consequences of the attention on long hold times for people just trying to find out what happened to their Social Security checks or veterans being laid off.

Speaker 1 Most of the 25% of the people that work at VA are veterans. So they are firing veterans who take care of veterans.
I can't think of a less popular

Speaker 1 decision.

Speaker 1 Is there any hope in the pressure

Speaker 1 that's taking place inside of the Trump administration? I know we want to beat these people, but in the meantime, we got to figure out anything we can do to stop these.

Speaker 3 I think not.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think the answer is going to be exactly what we're doing here today, and that is rally thousands of people all over this country.

Speaker 2 Our next trip we expect will probably be heading west, maybe to Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, whatever, and just

Speaker 2 put pressure on these members of Congress.

Speaker 2 Now, in fairness to them, because of the corrupt campaign finance system, if some Republican today stands up and says, you know what, I am not going to cut Medicaid in my district to give tax breaks to billionaires, you know what happens?

Speaker 2 The next day, Musk says, guess what, fella? We're going to primary you. I got endless amounts of money.
You're in trouble. These guys are scared to death.
They're scared to death of Musk.

Speaker 2 But we're going to have to force them to make a choice. They can be scared to death of Musk or they can be scared to death of their own constituents.
That's the choice we're going to give them.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 1 look, I don't know if you have any interest in talking about what Democrats are doing wrong, if you cared about their outfits at the State of the Union, but we can skip it if you want.

Speaker 2 Yeah, look, Democrats will do, and you want to talk about Democrats. I'll give you Chuck Schumer's Lema.
Hakeem Jeffries, you can talk to them.

Speaker 2 I'm here doing, you know, as you know, I'm an independent, the longest, I'm proudly longest-standing independent in American congressional history. I'm doing what I do.
Democrats will do what they do.

Speaker 2 And that's that.

Speaker 1 So we talked to a bunch of people in the line that were excited to be here. And one thing we heard was just people saying how much they believe in you.

Speaker 1 They're here because they want to do what you think is best and they view you as like a moral leader of the movement.

Speaker 1 But they also are feeling

Speaker 1 worried and nervous that you're a little bit out here alone.

Speaker 1 And you know, you said that you may not seek re-election.

Speaker 2 I didn't make that definitive. I am,

Speaker 1 I didn't make it definitely.

Speaker 2 I am 38 years of age now. I am getting old.

Speaker 1 I'm not, I'm not. Listen, I think there's 40, man.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of ways to be 89. There's a lot of different versions of 89.

Speaker 1 You're sprite with Rolling Stones. They're still touring.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 1 do you think about a successor?

Speaker 2 No, I don't want to. Look, all I will tell you is that one of the untold stories

Speaker 2 is that when I was in the House, I helped form the Progressive Caucus. You may know that.
And we had about five people at the time. Grew a little bit.
Today there are somewhere around 100.

Speaker 2 And there are fantastic people, many of them, dozens of them. Young people, many of them are women, people of color, great people.

Speaker 2 So, you know, that is one of the success stories that the progressive movement has had. We've elected.

Speaker 2 people the likes of which when i was in the house you know 18 years ago they didn't exist So we're making some real progress. We've got to do a lot more.

Speaker 1 Here's my last question for you. You want to talk about the future? Would you ever take an edible with me and sit down and just have a conversation about the future?

Speaker 1 Just get really stoned on marijuana, really brainstorm? No.

Speaker 2 But I'm happy to talk to you. I don't need to do marijuana to talk.

Speaker 3 What happened?

Speaker 1 What happened to the radical? What happened to the Bernie of the 60s? Let's get stoned.

Speaker 2 Are you serious?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 No, that's not who I am, as a matter of fact. I've done marijuana twice in my life.
Twice?

Speaker 3 Yeah, didn't quite agree with me.

Speaker 1 Do you want to end daylight saving time?

Speaker 2 Doesn't matter. Okay, thank you very much.

Speaker 3 That's our show for today. Dan and I will be back with the new show on Friday.
Talk to everybody then.

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