Rachel Maddow on Surviving Trump 2.0

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Speaker 2 The first 100 days, bills are passed, executive orders are signed, and presidencies are defined. And for Donald Trump's first 100 days, Rachel Maddow is on MSNBC five nights a week.

Speaker 3 Now is the time, so we're gonna do it.

Speaker 2 Providing her unique insight and analysis during this critical time.

Speaker 3 How do we strategically align ourselves to this moment of information, this moment of transition in our country?

Speaker 2 The Rachel Maddow Show, weeknights at 9 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC.

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau.

Speaker 1 So, this is our first Sunday show of the new year. We are going to be doing one of these every other Sunday for 2025.
Exciting.

Speaker 1 On each of these shows, we're going to talk to someone really smart in politics or media.

Speaker 1 And the idea is to sort of step away from the churn and the breaking news and to have interesting, thoughtful conversations about the big ideas and forces and trends shaping the news, shaping politics that we are all scrambling to digest every day, as I'm sure all of you are as well.

Speaker 1 I am thrilled that our first Sunday guest is Rachel Maddow. host of the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.

Speaker 1 Rachel is back to anchoring the 9 p.m. hour every weeknight for the first hundred days of the second Trump administration.
They somehow got her to come back and do five nights a week.

Speaker 1 Poor Rachel, but lucky us. On day three of the administration, on Wednesday, I sat down with Rachel here at the Sirius XM Studios in New York, across from MSNBC's offices at 30 Rock.

Speaker 1 No doubt, by the time you're hearing this on Sunday, a ton of crazy new shit will have happened. But already, by Wednesday,

Speaker 1 things were feeling not great. Pretty surreal.
Here's a sampling of some of what's happened this week.

Speaker 3 Do you intend to continue selling products that benefit yourself personally while you're president?

Speaker 5 Well, I don't know if it benefited. I don't know where it is.
I don't know much about it other than I launched it. I heard it was very successful.
I haven't checked it. Where is it today?

Speaker 6 You made a lot of money, sir.

Speaker 5 How much?

Speaker 3 Several billion dollars, it seems like, in the last several days.

Speaker 5 Several billion, that's peanuts for these guys.

Speaker 7 By pardoning not some of the rioters, but all of them,

Speaker 7 political violence in this country just became mainstream. It is now a fact of life in America.

Speaker 5 This was a political hoax. And you know what? Those people, and I'm not saying in every single case, but there was a lot of patriotism with those people.

Speaker 8 There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families.

Speaker 8 Some who fear for their lives.

Speaker 3 She should never be allowed to preach the message of Jesus in her life because she's not even talking about Jesus. This is why no one's going to these, yeah, this is why these denominations are dying.

Speaker 1 Well, that's just, you know, Elon's thing. to grab your heart with one hand and then to shoot it out in the sky.
You know, you're just, you're asking for it.

Speaker 3 You're asking for it.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's just not very well coordinated. I don't know.

Speaker 5 FEMA is going to be a whole big discussion very shortly because I'd rather see the states take care of their own problems.

Speaker 9 A lot of my friends on the other side of the aisle are sitting by idly while Donald Trump proposes by executive order to destroy Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which establishes that everybody born in the United States is a citizen of the United States.

Speaker 1 That's the difference in leadership style. So masculinity's back.
How many genders are there, Tommy? How many genders are there, Tommy? The honest answer, Desi, I don't care. I'm the libertarian.

Speaker 1 I don't care. Just what you want to be.

Speaker 1 You can be what you want to be.

Speaker 5 I won youth by 36 points. Now, maybe that's because I won on TikTok.
I don't know.

Speaker 10 These people are disgusting. They say that they're for women.
Turns out MAGA and conservatives are the feminists now. We are the ones like Donald Trump who are protecting women and children.

Speaker 10 They're not doing it.

Speaker 1 I wanted to talk to Rachel for this first Sunday show.

Speaker 1 Not just because, like us, it's her job to cover this day in and day out, but because as listeners of this show know really well, she thinks about things and talks about things and crystallizes things in a way that no one else does.

Speaker 1 Here's my conversation with Rachel Maddow.

Speaker 1 Rachel Maddow, welcome back to Pod Save America.

Speaker 3 Hi, John. Nice to see you.
You too.

Speaker 3 I used to work here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we're in Sirius XM in New York City. In New York City,

Speaker 3 and I was thinking, oh, I remember where this address is ringing a bell. And then I got out of the elevator and I thought, ah, this is where I did my gay love song call-in late-night show.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 1 As a fill-in host, I wasn't the main host. Did you get a lot of callers? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yes. All men.

Speaker 3 That was weird.

Speaker 1 But yeah, it was, that was

Speaker 3 a little known

Speaker 3 sort of grace note on my resume.

Speaker 1 Most requested songs?

Speaker 3 It was a lot of disco. A lot of disco.

Speaker 3 See, I thought it was love songs, and so it was going to, the Collins were going to be like heart-to-heart, like, oh, he left me, and I want to win him back, and everything.

Speaker 3 But it was really like love songs, like, I remember we met at the club and play that, you know.

Speaker 1 You know, Diana Ross, whatever.

Speaker 1 That works too. Yeah.
Thank you so much for taking the time during an especially busy week for you now that they have pulled you back in into doing five nights a week for Trump's first hundred days.

Speaker 3 I'm happy to do it.

Speaker 1 This is our inaugural Sunday show. The idea is to have a weekly conversation with smart people in politics and media.

Speaker 1 It lets us sort of step back from the breaking news coverage, focus on the big picture. Love to start with how you are processing the return of Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 I think we've all learned in the Trump era that it is

Speaker 1 possible to be shocked even when we aren't surprised. There's a difference between fully expecting what will happen and then experiencing it as it happens.

Speaker 1 So what's been going through your mind this week?

Speaker 3 I feel like,

Speaker 3 oh yeah, that's what these muscles are for.

Speaker 3 This is what we train for.

Speaker 3 You know, being back five days a week is its own experience for me. It's been a few years since I've been doing Monday to Friday shows.
And so that's got its whole, its own vibe and its own feeling.

Speaker 3 But there is a cadence to the Trump chaos news cycle or a lack of cadence, rather.

Speaker 3 The 24 hours a day, turning on a dime, internal incoherence,

Speaker 3 shocking for shock value, shocking for incompetence.

Speaker 3 All of that stuff is just kind of flooding back in terms of how to do it. And you can despair over that because the first Trump term was, broadly speaking, bad times for America.

Speaker 3 But I also think, well, you know what? We know a little bit about how to cover this. We know a little bit about what to expect.
We know a little bit about what he's like.

Speaker 3 And so it is our responsibility and our privilege to cover it as best as we possibly can. And I know how to do that.
And I'm here. I'm ready to go.
Put me in, coach. I'm ready to play.

Speaker 1 I feel the same way from the perspective of like me covering politics and talking about it on Pod Save America.

Speaker 1 Has there been a moment where it's like hit you personally where you're just watching it and you're like, oh yeah, this is going to, we're going to be doing this for four more years now?

Speaker 3 You know what it was? It was the,

Speaker 3 in the flurry of first couple days of actions, there was

Speaker 3 the stuff about water in California

Speaker 3 that, and Trump started sort of elaborating on it. There was an executive action about it, but then he also started talking about it, about how we need, there's, we need to turn the valve.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there is a valve in Northern California that if you just turn it, we will get water in Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 He thinks, I think, that north is also up

Speaker 3 and that up there's a water tower. like it's a New York building and if you just turn the valve then down gets the water

Speaker 3 and in the campaign you might remember him riffing a lot on um the difficulty of washing his hair and how many times he has to flush the toilet to make what's in the toilet go down the toilet and like he I was realizing like oh

Speaker 3 we're gonna get the plumbing stuff again.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we're playing the hits.

Speaker 3 It's one thing to think about the truly radical designs he has for the country and for the democracy.

Speaker 3 But it's another thing just to remember like the personal pathology that's going to be played out out loud, ad nauseum, and just repeated until other Republicans start articulating it as a value too.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 3 And that, the reminder of the nonsense of it, the human nonsense of it

Speaker 3 is a visceral thing for me. Also, I also think like, wow, how could history have been different had he been able to realize his dream of being a plumber?

Speaker 1 Maybe

Speaker 1 we as a country wouldn't be going through all this stuff. He was a plumber, a hug from dad, something like that.

Speaker 1 We're recording this on Wednesday, so who knows what else will happen over the next few days.

Speaker 1 I haven't been able to get past him pardoning supporters of his who were convicted of violent crime on January 6th

Speaker 1 because of the message it sends to other Trump supporters who also want to commit political violence because only around 20% of Americans support the pardons.

Speaker 1 And because somehow it's not the only thing or even the main thing that everyone's talking about. Why do you think that is? And

Speaker 1 what have your thoughts been on the pardons?

Speaker 3 Well, the flood the zone idea is real. And

Speaker 3 we not only lived through that before, but they articulate that strategically. People like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and others.
They don't want us to be able to focus on any one

Speaker 3 bad nominee because there are so many bad nominees. They don't want us to be able to focus on any one outrageous action or policy because there are so many outrageous actions and policies.

Speaker 3 And that's a strategy. And so that's part of the reason why we find it hard to focus.
I do think that the pardons thing is going to be something that they regret.

Speaker 3 And I think it's going to be something for which they have to pay a political cost because we've already seen it just in the immediate aftermath of the pardons that

Speaker 3 Just about every Republican elected official who is asked about it has to say, I haven't seen the details.

Speaker 3 I haven't, Tommy Tupperville. I haven't watched the videos of the police being assaulted.
So therefore, I can't comment on it.

Speaker 3 But of course, anybody who assaults police officers shouldn't be pardoned.

Speaker 3 Seeing Republican elected officials, including the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, including all of these Republican senators who now have to, for example, vote on Trump nominees, seeing them unable

Speaker 3 to articulate a justification for it, seeing them uncomfortable wanting not to be asked about it, knowing that it is indefensible, and nevertheless being asked to defend it, that is constructive.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Because Trump may have his own, I don't know what's going on inside his head and I don't know exactly what he wants in the world and I don't like to think about his brain. So I don't.

Speaker 3 But I do know a little bit about how politics works and I do know that while he may want to be a one-man sort of tyrannical monarch style ruler, he for now exists in a democracy that has other elements of authority and governance.

Speaker 3 And to the extent that Republicans are personally repulsed by what he's doing and asked about it constantly and can't defend it and

Speaker 3 essentially are being forced into a corner where they either have to hide from questions or say they disagree with him, that's probably good in terms of slowing down the worst things he wants to do.

Speaker 3 And I think it's a good sign that so many Republicans had a terrible, terrible first full day of Trump's second term.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, it's wild because I thought

Speaker 1 your monologue about this and about sort of the use of shame as a tool for elected Republicans who have to defend this was wonderful.

Speaker 3 From time to time, we enter into a period where people in public office very frequently do lots of terrible things.

Speaker 1 What turns them around?

Speaker 3 What stops them from doing terrible things? What makes them correct course and start doing the right thing instead?

Speaker 3 One thing that sometimes works is shame and embarrassment.

Speaker 3 Being confronted with the wrongness of what they are doing, feeling shame or embarrassment, or at least the possibility of public rebuke and the awkwardness of being unable to explain their actions in a way that satisfies anyone.

Speaker 3 Sometimes you can't turn public officials around, but sometimes you can.

Speaker 3 Sometimes that sort of thing can cause public officials who are otherwise behaving in ways that are weak and wrong to find their spine and to change their minds.

Speaker 1 I noticed right before we started recording today, Mike Johnson got up and was asked about the pardons. And he said, well, look, it's Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 He has the authority. And

Speaker 1 all along, the case has been that people who protest peacefully shouldn't be punished. And then announced that they're going to investigate Joe Biden's pardons.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Without even commenting on the people who are convicted of violence.

Speaker 3 And then it's incumbent upon anybody who next encounters him to ask him the follow-up questions. Right.

Speaker 3 So like the peaceful protest is not something that has been criminalized in this country, in this environment around January 6th. January 6th was not a peaceful protest.

Speaker 3 Among the people who Donald Trump deliberately pardoned, even though they had the option not to, were people who explicitly pled guilty not to peacefully protesting, but rather to attacking police officers and trying to kill them with baseball bats and two-by-fours.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, it just... It just means that this should follow Mike Johnson around like a smell.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Apparently, according to reporting from Axios and Notice, J.D.

Speaker 1 Vance saying on the Sunday shows before Donald Trump was inaugurated that obviously we shouldn't pardon people who committed violence.

Speaker 1 It was the response to that that finally led Trump to say, apparently, according to a source, according to Axios, fuck it, let's let them all out.

Speaker 1 Because the Trump-based people were mad that J.D. Vance thought that they were going to go one by one.
So that was basically a trial balloon. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And think about what that means for the dynamic between Trump and J.D. Vance.
In the same way with the Matt Gates nomination, right? I mean, they nominated somebody for Attorney General

Speaker 3 reportedly at the behest of Boris, who they later said

Speaker 3 were shaking people down for bribes in order for him to

Speaker 3 suggest them to the president as potential appointees. I don't know, maybe somebody should follow up on that.

Speaker 3 But reportedly, at the behest of Boris Epstein, they named a guy who was actively under investigation for statutory rape, drug use, and prostitution to be Attorney General of the United States.

Speaker 3 And you can question Donald Trump's judgment in doing that. Sure, that's a discussion.
What's in Trump's head? What are his aims? Fine.

Speaker 3 I'm politically more interested in the fact that they then had the vice president-elect J.D.

Speaker 3 Vance personally grab Matt Gaetz by the arm and walk him into the offices of all of these Republican senators who they then leveraged into endorsing Matt Gaetz for attorney general and saying, yes, they would vote for him.

Speaker 3 Give Matt a chance to have humiliated J.D. Vance that way and cost those Republican senators forever.

Speaker 3 Those Republican senators will have it on their record that they thought Matt Gates was a great choice for Attorney General before they then pulled him and wasted all that political capital.

Speaker 3 That's just political malpractice within the Republican Party and between the president and vice president.

Speaker 3 And if that's how they're going to act, they should pay for it politically and they should be asked about that stuff constantly. J.D.

Speaker 3 Vance has been now twice publicly humiliated on core issues that he purports to be principled on.

Speaker 3 Law and order with Matt Gates and the pardons thing, where he said anybody who attacked a police officer or was violent shouldn't be pardoned. And then they were.

Speaker 3 He should be asked about that every time he pops his head above ground.

Speaker 1 Sean Hannity did this event last night where he's interviewing Mike Johnson, but he's got all the other Republican House members sitting there.

Speaker 1 And he basically talks to them like they're kindergartners. And he was like, now you all know you're not going to get everything you want out of these bills in the first year.

Speaker 1 Could you imagine you doing a show where you're like interviewing Hakeem Jeffries and then like all the other House Democrats are there and you're just like wagging your finger at them and telling them like, this is what you can expect?

Speaker 3 This is what you can expect. And if you have a problem, take it up with daddy.

Speaker 1 I just think they've all decided to like. become supplicants to Donald.
Like they don't, I don't know that, I hope that shame works, but I don't know if there's any of them left that have

Speaker 1 shame.

Speaker 3 I think being a

Speaker 3 supplicant and doing this sort of dear leader, yes, sir, whatever you say, sir. Yes, I'm going to turn in my mother.
Yes, two plus two equals five. Yes, Matt Gates is a good attorney general choice.

Speaker 3 Yes, people who who hit police officers with baseball bats

Speaker 3 should be

Speaker 3 sprung from prison. Yes, the January 6th defense attorney should be the U.S.
attorney, the acting U.S. attorney in the District of D.C.

Speaker 3 All of these things are humiliations to every Republican who lines up with them.

Speaker 3 And there's no such thing as humiliation for Donald Trump. He doesn't, I think, experience shame or embarrassment.
And again, I don't care to investigate why, but other Republicans do. And

Speaker 3 Donald Trump isn't going to live forever. And the MAGA movement is maybe at its apex right now, but it won't be forever.
All of these guys are going to have to run for something.

Speaker 3 And they're all going to have to look at themselves in the mirror. And they all have, you know, mothers, many of them children, and they have to live with themselves.

Speaker 3 And I do think that I'm not counting on human decency, but I am counting on human embarrassment

Speaker 3 and shame

Speaker 3 and awkwardness, the difficulty of answering questions about these things to be a moderating force in terms of what he can get from his own party.

Speaker 3 And I think what he can get from his own party for the foreseeable future is going to be the only de facto limiting constraint in terms of what he can get away with.

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Speaker 1 You're a student of history, especially as it relates to authoritarian movements in other countries and in our own.

Speaker 1 If you're listening, you haven't already, you should go listen to Rachel's podcast, Ultra, or read Prequel, both of which tell the story of a fascist movement in 1930s America.

Speaker 3 Excellent. Both excellent.

Speaker 1 Thank you. What are you seeing right now that feels like history is repeating itself? What feels new?

Speaker 1 And any lessons from all your research that could be useful to us right now?

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, the thing that feels new

Speaker 3 in modern America, like in the past century, I'd say, in the United States,

Speaker 3 that is something that we do see in other countries. And this is something where

Speaker 3 even contemporary other countries, I think, offer a good lesson in terms of what this means, is the attempt to integrate

Speaker 3 loyal, lawless, paramilitary force with the state.

Speaker 3 So we have these executive orders that direct

Speaker 3 people within the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies and even like the SEC and the FTC to investigate past actions by those agencies basically to see if there's anything that they can use as a pretext to bring prosecutions against government officials and former Biden administration officials.

Speaker 3 Like that's the use of the government to essentially terrorize the opposition and to terrorize the previous administration.

Speaker 3 At the same time, you've also got, you know, flinging open the doors of the federal penitentiary and letting out over 200 people who were actively incarcerated for federal crimes, most of which involved violence on January 6th.

Speaker 3 And you've got pro-MAGA members of Congress like Lauren Boebert offering to give them guided tours of the Capitol now that they're out.

Speaker 3 I highlighted on the show on Tuesday night one of those guys who she was offering a tour of the Capitol flashing the white power sign behind her while she was saying it.

Speaker 3 Those sort of twin threats that we're going to use the government to destroy opposition, but we're also going to use lawless, loyal, paramilitary, immunized force to physically menace people and to create an environment in the civic space that makes regular people afraid.

Speaker 3 to enter, regular people afraid to participate. That is something that we've seen in lots of other authoritarian countries.

Speaker 3 We've seen that, for example, in Turkey in modern times. We've seen that a little bit in Hungary.
We've seen that in some other,

Speaker 3 we've seen it in the Philippines. Seeing that in the United States, those things happening at once, feels new.

Speaker 3 And it's worth remembering that paramilitary violence and militias are illegal in every state in the country.

Speaker 3 And even if they are going to be immunized federally, this may be a place for state law enforcement.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I'm interested in how you're thinking about covering Trump 2.0.

Speaker 1 I saw saw you say that you're trying to follow a, you know, watch what he does, not what he says mantra, which we're trying to do on this show as well. It's hard.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's hard to know when he's being serious, when he's trolling. It's hard to know what matters, what matters less.
It's hard to know like where to focus people's attention.

Speaker 1 How are you thinking about navigating all that? How are you thinking about it?

Speaker 1 I'm still working it out right now.

Speaker 1 I'm trying to focus on like

Speaker 1 what the effects of his policies on people because I'm thinking just from a political perspective that we need to persuade people that maybe people who voted for Trump for the first time or people who didn't vote at all, that

Speaker 1 he's not, what he promised is not going to happen, right? He's not going to make their lives better. And I don't think that just means sort of kitchen table issues, though it does.

Speaker 1 I think it also means like making sure people know that now there are these violent criminals who are convicted of assaulting police officers out on the streets.

Speaker 1 And that's what he's doing too. So I think that I'm trying to do less of what was the salute that Elon Musk gave, right? Because it's like, okay,

Speaker 1 who wins that fight? Right.

Speaker 1 Like, we can have that debate. And then maybe everyone in the country can say, oh, yeah, no, it was a, it was a bad salute.
And then what happens? Well, we didn't, we didn't vanquish Elon Musk.

Speaker 1 He's still around. Right.
He's still, he still bought his

Speaker 1 speech now. Right.
Uh, and his positioning.

Speaker 3 He's got a new label on it, but he's still doing all the things he does.

Speaker 1 He gets to do all the things he does. So I'm trying to focus on like what actually affects people that Donald Trump is doing and making sure that we're clear about it.

Speaker 1 And also making sure that, you know, I'm trying not to make,

Speaker 1 I feel like if you turn the dial, the outrage dial to 11 all the time, then it sort of numbs people.

Speaker 1 And then when something's really serious, they'll be like, ah, you said that before and it's, you know, it didn't come true.

Speaker 3 How does that apply to like the Greenland and Panama stuff?

Speaker 1 Like, how are you thinking about that? I'm thinking that.

Speaker 1 He seems pretty serious about Panama. I mean, you put something in an inaugural dress and he seems pretty serious about Greenland, too.
So I think you got to watch it.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't subscribe to that's just a distraction and we can't talk about Greenland in Panama, especially because it involves, potentially involves military force, right?

Speaker 1 Anything that involves like, again, this is affecting people's lives, right?

Speaker 1 People in the, in the military here, people at home, our safety, our security, the alliances that we have, like that, that does affect people.

Speaker 1 I would love to talk about it and cover it in a way that people can say, all right, this is how it matters to me. Yeah.
But I don't think you can just wave it away as a distraction.

Speaker 3 The thing that is interesting about it to me is that it is invented out of whole cloth for the purpose of this Trump term. Yes.

Speaker 3 Like there was no pressure on the issue of Panama that anybody was agitating about. There was no, I mean, yeah, like competition for the Arctic.
Sure.

Speaker 3 Like that's, you know, Russia has a lot of icebreakers. Okay.
Like, yeah, I've been covering that for 15 years. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But this is something, this is a place they've decided to plant a flag and to put a lot of rhetorical energy, to put it in the inaugural, as you say.

Speaker 3 And I feel like it's like a good test case for us to figure out the doing versus saying line.

Speaker 3 One of the things that's interesting now that he's president is that, you know, Panama's response was to go to the UN and to lodge a complaint with the United Nations saying, hey, one of the rules here of us all in the United Nations is we're not supposed to threaten and menace other countries.

Speaker 3 He's doing that. He said in his inaugural, we're taking it.

Speaker 3 And when asked ahead of his inaugural, will you rule out military force? He said, no, I won't. Well, that actually,

Speaker 3 we actually aren't supposed to do that within the United Nations. He probably knows that.
That's probably part of this.

Speaker 3 Similarly, with Greenland, there's a lot of, I think, very like elementary level understanding about what it means to be a NATO, which is that if any NATO country gets menaced or attacked, all the other NATO countries are treaty bound to defend them and respond to that.

Speaker 3 Very little discussion, though, about what happens when one NATO NATO country threatens another. Like that's not a thing that we usually have, but we really can't do that within NATO.

Speaker 3 And threatening to take Greenland is threatening, and to do so potentially via military force is threatening to make war on our NATO ally, Denmark. So

Speaker 3 it seems to me that maybe the important thing here is, you know, why did Trump have one of his executive orders be taking us out of the World Health Organization?

Speaker 1 Yeah, that just sort of slipped by yesterday.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's because he doesn't want us to be in any organizations of any kind that represent the post-World War II international legal order.

Speaker 3 So take us out of the World Health Organization, thereby effectively probably collapsing the World Health Organization.

Speaker 3 Really screw up NATO by threatening war on a NATO ally, potentially forcing the question of whether or not the United States is rightfully within NATO

Speaker 3 within the United Nations. Start menacing another.
I mean, Panama, Panama does not have a military.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 us

Speaker 3 proposing military force against Panama isn't actually even threatening a war. It's just threatening an invasion.

Speaker 3 But it does so in a way that is already calling question as to whether or not we are a member in good standing of the United Nations.

Speaker 3 So if all of this is about blowing up not just our international standing, but blowing up the post-war international order and all of the international institutions that we bolster that make up

Speaker 3 the post-World War II international landscape, well, then,

Speaker 3 you know, maybe these things have some logic. And

Speaker 3 it also means that Trump's second term in office will be the greatest pinnacle of achievement of Vladimir Putin, who more than anything wants to destroy the post-war temporal order and have a supposedly multipolar world where big countries just take what they want.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And that's, again, back to that's something that people should care about.

Speaker 1 Or because if the, you know, at a time when we have Putin and China and Iran and North Korea cooperating more, it is a dangerous world.

Speaker 3 And for us to stand alone, or are we going to stand with them?

Speaker 1 Yeah. And it's a, and it's a question that Americans should get the answer to from Donald Trump, right? Like, this is a dangerous time.
What are you planning to do to keep us safe?

Speaker 1 Is it just to take Greenland and Panama? Is that going to keep us safe?

Speaker 3 Are we going to be an Axis power now?

Speaker 1 Are we the bad guys this time?

Speaker 3 Because if it's China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, which is the Axis that's like, for example, waging war in Ukraine right now, and that's the model that Trump likes in terms of how countries should not be constrained and how they behave.

Speaker 3 Is he proposing that... you know, he talks about his love letters from Kim Jong-un.
He says,

Speaker 3 I know I said that I would end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours, within one day of me being elected, let alone sworn in.

Speaker 3 But he actually said, but I need to talk to Putin in order to see how that's going to go.

Speaker 3 I mean, the way that he's easing up all of his big talk on China, everything that he had threatened against China, all of a sudden, China's good. China doesn't have to worry about anything.

Speaker 3 I mean, we'll see how it goes with Iran.

Speaker 3 Apparently, the last warning that the Biden administration gave to Trump's incoming national security team before they walked out of the White House was, watch out, Iran wants to kill U.S.

Speaker 3 government officials and former U.S. government officials.

Speaker 3 Whereupon Trump immediately withdrew the Secret Service Protection Detail from John Bolton, which had been put in place because of the Iranian hitman who tried to kill him.

Speaker 3 The Axis powers, to the extent that there is one,

Speaker 1 are

Speaker 3 the people and the entities that Trump is acting most inexplicably positive toward. And if we're going to join that kind of an axis, I don't think that's the way Americans think of ourselves.

Speaker 1 Pod Save America is brought to you by Stamps.com. You know, we've used stamps.com here since we started this thing, which was about seven years ago, right around this time.

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Speaker 1 When you look back at how you covered the first four years of Trump, anything you would have done differently?

Speaker 3 I would have hydrated more systematically.

Speaker 1 I would have

Speaker 3 rather been relying on individual little paper cups of water that I filled up and then drank while coming back from the water cooler.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I would have taken, honestly, I would have taken better care of myself. I do think that that chaotic cadence

Speaker 3 of there being no

Speaker 3 normal day of, you know, the president's, what is is it?

Speaker 3 He sleeps in until 10 or 11 in the morning and then watches some TV and rolls in around noon and then just pounds Diet Cokes until four in the morning and makes up policy based on whoever he last spoke to and posts it on his social media.

Speaker 3 I mean, that environment for people who are trying to, you know, cover the most important country in the world and its workings

Speaker 3 is trying. It's physically trying.
And so we, I think we need to,

Speaker 3 we need to do more tag team relay stuff. We need to take better care of ourselves.
We need to, as you say, sort of calibrate to understand what the biggest threats are and what's just gross.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 That is hard.

Speaker 1 I mean, I struggle with, and I heard this from people during the course of the campaign, people I know, who are like, look, I don't love Trump, but we survived the first Trump term.

Speaker 1 And everyone, you know, everyone was hair on fire and saying it was going to be the end of democracy. And here we are.
We survived. There were bad things that happened.

Speaker 1 You know, there were some bad things that happened. January, these are people who are like, January 6th, awful.
He's a bad person. But like, how bad can it be? We survived the first time.
Wow. I know.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's hard because

Speaker 1 I'm trying to figure out how to calibrate like, because I do think that this time,

Speaker 1 this time it's actually much more serious. And I'm like,

Speaker 1 I think the threat is much more dangerous

Speaker 1 than it was in the first term. And I'm trying, it doesn't seem like.
most, well, clearly because they voted for him, but it doesn't seem like most people in the country believe that.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 I think there is a bias toward thinking that the institutions that we have are durable and that they'll always exist and that no work had to happen to get them and

Speaker 3 they'll defend themselves. But just look at elections.

Speaker 3 One of the things that Pam Bondi talked about after the Matt Gates Attorney General nomination fell apart and Pam Bondi got in there, one of the things that is expected from the Justice Department under Bondi is that they're going to do some sort of examination of the 2020 election

Speaker 3 because of this predicate lie that the election was somehow stolen from him. Now,

Speaker 3 I don't think that's just for Trump's ego. And I don't think that's because he's embarrassed that he hasn't ever provided any evidence that demonstrated that the 2020 election was stolen.

Speaker 3 And he wants to show that evidence because he wants to. he wants everybody to know he's not a liar.
I don't think that's what's motivating that.

Speaker 3 I think what's motivating that is an effort to try to make elections

Speaker 3 seem

Speaker 3 suspect,

Speaker 3 dangerous, wrong, and something that we shouldn't depend on in the future. And it's really, really, really important that we have a 2026 midterm.

Speaker 3 It's also very important that we have a 2028 presidential election. But I don't think in 2025

Speaker 3 you assign your Justice Department to proclaim the falsity of a previous election because you're interested in holding normal elections going forward.

Speaker 3 You do that in order to discredit elections as a system in this country so that we don't have them anymore. And maybe that sounds like hair on fire.

Speaker 3 You know, maybe that sounds like I'm being alarmist because we did, in fact, just have an election. But I don't think we should assume that that threat is resolved.
I really don't think it is.

Speaker 3 And I think if you watch what he's doing,

Speaker 3 you can see

Speaker 3 the real danger there.

Speaker 1 I mean, you can just tell yourself a story, put out a hypothetical about how this could work, right? Which is we have the 2026 midterms and Democrats maybe take back the House. We get to 2028.

Speaker 1 Let's say Democrat wins in 2028 and Donald Trump's still in the White House and he's leaving or he's supposed to leave and he says, no, J.D. Vance actually won.
This was fraud.

Speaker 1 And now he controls the whole government. And he has lessons that he's learned from failing to,

Speaker 1 you know, stay in power forcefully in 2020.

Speaker 1 And, you know, when you say, oh, this could lead to the end of democracy, we'll be like, oh, you're exaggerating. But like, what I just laid out, couldn't we see that happening?

Speaker 1 Do we see Donald Trump, now that he already did that once, do we see him just saying, oh, no, J.D. Vance lost, he's a loser.
That's fine. I'll let the next Democrat in.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 And what?

Speaker 1 Or maybe I'll stay. Or

Speaker 1 maybe I'll stay until we settle this. Yeah.

Speaker 1 There was some fraud.

Speaker 3 Prop me up in the corner. I'll be fine.

Speaker 1 There was some fraud. And I know the Constitution says, but you know what? It's instability right now.
I'll leave eventually, but I'm just going to stay for a little bit.

Speaker 3 It could happen like that. And And

Speaker 3 there's other factors at work here.

Speaker 3 I mean, what are the other constituent parts of democracy that we need to be worried about? One of them is

Speaker 3 the fourth estate.

Speaker 3 We need to worry about having an actually free press and not having state TV.

Speaker 3 And the press is under incredible pressure from without,

Speaker 3 but also demonstrating all of the wrong instincts, I think, broadly speaking, in terms of supplicating themselves to the new power in Washington. And that is something that is not a fait accompli.

Speaker 3 It's not done. It's an iterative process.
I think the public should react to that. I think that people should vote with their feet and people should support.

Speaker 3 independent and free-spirited press that isn't cowed and that isn't afraid and that isn't intimidated. But that is something that we need to fight for too.

Speaker 3 And the public and public opinion and public behavior there really matters. It's not a done deal.
All of this stuff is, nothing's inevitable. All of this stuff is live.

Speaker 3 I mean, one of the wildcards here is, and this is something that's been surprising to me, you know, I think one of the sort of caustic and maybe slightly mean-spirited observations that was also true about the first Trump term is that while every president after a term looks about 25 years older than he did at the start of his term, that didn't really happen to Trump.

Speaker 3 Like at the end of his four years, he kind of looked the same. Still looks the same.
And maybe that happens when you only roll in in the middle of the afternoon.

Speaker 3 You know, maybe that says something about his work ethic as president. But as he is now sworn in for his second term, he looks old and unfit and frail.

Speaker 3 And he is the oldest person ever to take the oath of office as president.

Speaker 3 And we've obviously just been through a version of this with President Biden and his age issue being so determinative and important in terms of what happened in the last electoral cycle.

Speaker 3 But Trump doesn't look good.

Speaker 3 And, you know, J.D. Vance is like 15 and ready to go.

Speaker 3 But that is going to

Speaker 3 that those dynamics, I think, are going to be a real wild card in terms of what happens between these two men, between what happens in terms of how together Trump is.

Speaker 3 You don't get to age infinitely and poorly without it ultimately affecting the way that you behave and speak.

Speaker 3 His second inaugural address, for whatever you can say about its content, was also delivered in a low, slurring mumble.

Speaker 1 Real workman-like.

Speaker 1 But also kind of...

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 he hates giving speeches

Speaker 1 that are written for him because he just wants to be a host and just do his thing.

Speaker 1 His real speech was the speech he gave after. That was like a 33-minute speech to the Republicans where he just got to do all of his stuff.

Speaker 3 He got to do all of his stuff, but it was also very poorly done.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well,

Speaker 1 let's just. He doesn't care.

Speaker 1 He's not an orator. He's just trying to like, you know, he's just doing his show.
He's a host.

Speaker 3 He's never been like a, he's, you know, he's, he's not Churchill, right? There's nothing, there's not not, that's never happened. But he's, he's also not himself.

Speaker 3 He's also just not as good as he was even a couple of years ago, even at the start of the campaign.

Speaker 3 And to see him physically decline, if he's going to fall apart mentally and or physically in this term, that's really going to be a wild moment within this crazy and humiliated, magified Trump Republican supplicant party.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm sure they'll handle it well. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You were talking about the press, and obviously, you know, Trump's suing everyone now. Yeah.
Poor Ann Seltzer and the Des Moines Register and

Speaker 1 ABC settled. Are you afraid? Do you worry?

Speaker 3 Oh, I'm not afraid. But I do expect that there'll be, you know, that.

Speaker 3 Elon Musk and all of the other, you know, who paid Rudy's settlement with the

Speaker 3 Ruby Freeman and Seamus. I'm assuming that all of the money people who are doing Trump's bidding in order to get their own

Speaker 3 interests catered to by the U.S.

Speaker 3 government, I'm assuming that they will all fund a gazillion defamation lawsuits that are designed to ruin not only individual critics in the press and individual reporters, but also whole news organizations.

Speaker 3 I am hopeful that news organizations writ large will understand this as a threat to them all and they will band together and make sure that there aren't, for example, meaningful attacks on the Sullivan decision decision that defends the freedom of the press in terms of libel and defamation protections.

Speaker 3 So I'm not afraid. I am eyes wide open and expecting that the courts will be used to try to destroy the press.

Speaker 3 But again, I think the public should have something to say about that when it happens.

Speaker 3 And I think that, again, there should be some unity within the news business to recognize that we are all in this together. It's not that they're going to protect their favorites.

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Speaker 1 There's a larger challenge with media that I think about a lot, which is that most Americans aren't paying attention to anything we say

Speaker 1 and aren't following much news at all, right? Right. And, you know, Kamala Harris does really well among people who don't just tune into MSNBC and Pod Save America, but just follow the news, right?

Speaker 3 In any venue.

Speaker 1 Right, in any venue. Trump did well with people who don't follow the news or who follow some news like on social media, right?

Speaker 1 And those people care a lot more about cost of living, safety of their communities than they do, you know, the threat Trump poses to democracy, right? They feel like that's sort of esoteric.

Speaker 1 And it makes me wonder if we're all just like sitting here talking to ourselves and to an audience that's already been convinced.

Speaker 1 And I wonder how we break out of that so that, you know, more Americans know what's going on.

Speaker 3 What do you think? I mean,

Speaker 3 it sounds like you're worried that we are just talking to ourselves.

Speaker 1 I am. Yeah.
I am. And I just, I think that, I mean, a lot of this is the way technology has changed the way that we talk and communicate and interact.

Speaker 1 And if this is all going to be done on social media, I don't know. I mean, it's one of the reasons I'm still hanging around on X

Speaker 1 because, like, you know, I don't love it. Not a great platform.
It was never a great platform. Now it's a really bad platform.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But, you know, there's part of me that I'm like, oh, we're all going to go to Blue Sky and then we're all just going to talk to each other on Blue Sky and then we're going to talk to each other on Pod Save America.

Speaker 1 We're going to talk to each other on MSNBC. And it's like, we all got it.
I mean, maybe we're like, are we coming up with a plan all together? Like, how are we going to get outside that bubble? And

Speaker 1 I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 1 But I think that like that is maybe the central challenge that the Democratic Party faces from a political perspective, but also the media faces, traditional media faces from a perspective of getting people to trust the information that they're getting and making sure that the information gets out there.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 3 I also think that it's one thing to think about it from a sort of 30,000-foot like academic structural perspective.

Speaker 3 It's another thing to think about it in terms of like, what are you, John, going to do it to do every day? Yeah. What are your, what are your skills? What are you going to expend calories on today?

Speaker 3 Right. And you, you do what you can.
I mean, I'm very happy that MSNBC is actually very highly performing on TikTok and on YouTube.

Speaker 3 We're among the most

Speaker 3 sort of

Speaker 3 volume-wise, we're among the most widely viewed news organizations on both of those platforms. That's good.
During the transition, I did a series of segments

Speaker 3 that were for YouTube only, that weren't for TV, that were looking at the backgrounds of a number of the Trump nominees. Those got huge traffic on YouTube.
I was really happy for that.

Speaker 3 I am at Blue Sky and

Speaker 3 at matto.msnbc.com at Blue Sky and encourage you to be there because maybe right now it feels like Blue Sky is people who already listened to Pod Save America talking to each other about what they saw in MSNBC.

Speaker 3 But if it gets bigger, it won't all be that.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, community is important too.
Building community is also important.

Speaker 3 And when you're in, when you're on an iterative social media platform, meaning it's a place where you don't just receive stuff,

Speaker 3 you interact with people and that's an important part of what you're doing there. I think it's important to to not be in a place where the interaction is rigged to favor MAGA outcomes.

Speaker 3 And that's explicitly happening

Speaker 3 at Twitter. And

Speaker 3 I think there's a reason that everybody has jumped ship from threads,

Speaker 3 which was a... Twitter knockoff that

Speaker 3 seemed like it might be better, but now it's essentially going through the same process that Twitter went through because Mark Zuckerberg's politics have also followed Elon Musk's down that particular hole.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 if you're in an iterative environment where your interactions

Speaker 3 are going to be gamed in order to favor Donald Trump and Elon Musk's desired outcomes, don't do that.

Speaker 3 Don't provide, don't spend your one precious life providing free content to those gentlemen.

Speaker 3 Do you ever think about

Speaker 1 going into the lion's den, going on some of these other right-leaning shows, some of these other right-leaning podcasts?

Speaker 1 Not necessarily like go on Hannity and have a debate kind of thing, but like the Joe Rogans of the world.

Speaker 1 That's shorthand for all of those because I don't want to get into another debate about Joe Rogan. But do you ever think about that? Like that's that that's one way to start.

Speaker 1 How do you think about persuading people?

Speaker 3 I mean, what I do is talk about the news. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 3 So I read all day and do reporting and fact checking research and then try to observe what's happening in the world, try to make some sense of it, try to present it truthfully and explain what's important about it and why it matters and what might happen next.

Speaker 3 And I'm doing that instead of one day a week on MSNBC. I'm now doing that five days a week on MSNBC.
And I'll do that for the whole first hundred days.

Speaker 3 I'm trying to do as much of that as I can on social media as well.

Speaker 3 I'm trying to keep the pots that I've got boiling, boiling in terms of my next podcast and my next book and the other, there's a scripted TV show and three different movies and a documentary that I'm doing interviews for right now and trying to do all that stuff.

Speaker 3 And And I just feel like, you know what? I'm going to wake up every day and do my thing.

Speaker 1 I'm going to do my thing.

Speaker 3 And I'm going to do it in a way that I'm proud of and that I hope is persuasive.

Speaker 3 And I can't make people who don't want to hear it from me want to hear it from me.

Speaker 3 But if you are persuaded to hear from me,

Speaker 3 I hope that I'm always speaking in a way that is

Speaker 3 fair and persuasive and you can take it to the bank in terms of its factual spine.

Speaker 1 You're a, I know you're not a Democratic strategist, you're a commentator, but you are a close observer of democratic politics.

Speaker 1 Excellent caveat. That was very well done.
Also, someone who is

Speaker 1 very studied in how pro-democracy movements and parties have succeeded in the past.

Speaker 1 When you look at the Democratic Party right now, what do you think it has to change going forward in order to defeat or at least marginalize the anti-democratic faction in this country?

Speaker 1 And so it really isn't a question beyond just the Democratic Party, though that is, we have two parties, and that's the party right now that is the pro-democracy party. But what do you think

Speaker 1 needs to be different?

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, I think that

Speaker 3 there isn't much magic to it. You have to be excellent opposition.

Speaker 3 The Republican Party under Trump has consolidated power in Washington in all three branches of government, undoubtedly. It's a very narrow margin in the House.

Speaker 3 It's not that huge a margin in the Senate, but they've got everything.

Speaker 3 Therefore, when you're in opposition from that position, I think the obvious thing to do is to stick a wedge in every awkward division among the party that has consolidated power. I mean,

Speaker 3 there's hugely

Speaker 3 incompatible forces at work within the MAGA universe. literally even between the president and vice president.

Speaker 3 And so let's start there.

Speaker 1 The tech billionaires and the base of the party. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, and yes, on H-1B visas, right? Should we have immigration controlled by corporations for that purpose in the way that we have or not? Yeah, on that stuff, but on everything.

Speaker 3 I mean, they can't even decide what they're going to do about salt, about the state and local taxes deduction.

Speaker 3 They're at a trillion-dollar impasse within their party on that issue alone. Okay, let's just, let's start there.

Speaker 3 You do have the palpable self-loathing humiliation and

Speaker 3 escape hunting fear of every Republican senator who is asked about the pardons of those violent felons.

Speaker 3 You do have,

Speaker 3 I think, legit law and order-minded Republicans in elected office, including

Speaker 3 some of whom had to run for their lives on January 6th.

Speaker 3 One of their number, an elected Republican in the House of Representatives, is offering guided tours of the scene of the crime of January 6th to some of the people who were there with baseball bats and two by fours, beating police officers and threatening to kill members of Congress not that long ago.

Speaker 3 So that's a divide there.

Speaker 3 You think about that.

Speaker 1 You either think that's cool or you don't.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And that party,

Speaker 3 the ruling power in Washington, which is, that's it. I mean, they are in complete control.
They own everything that happens. They've got those divides among themselves.

Speaker 3 And just go with those hammer and tongs and make them figure out who they are. And I think that the American people

Speaker 3 are not going to like it.

Speaker 3 But just,

Speaker 3 I don't think there's more magic to it than that right now.

Speaker 1 Yeah. We've talked a lot about what we're doing.
What's one habit? or tip that you'd give to anyone for maintaining their sanity through these next four years?

Speaker 1 And we started off you saying maybe, you know, hydrate better, take better care of yourself. Is there anything you do? I mean, you're working all the time, so I can't imagine.

Speaker 3 What do you do?

Speaker 1 I got to figure that out. I mean, I'm playing with my kids now.
You know,

Speaker 1 I have a four-year-old and a one-year-old.

Speaker 3 So that's a full-time job.

Speaker 1 It is a full-time job. I'm better now about when I'm with them to like, I put the phone in another room.
Yeah. And I'm like, I don't need to, I can't do the news.
all weekend long. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, so I'm trying to do that, but I don't know.

Speaker 3 I think that's, I mean, again, not magic, but that's real. And you can tell day to day that has an effect on you.
Yeah. Yeah.
I

Speaker 3 believe in compartmentalization.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. That's cool.

Speaker 1 That nice. Just do it.

Speaker 3 I mean, you, and everybody has to calibrate it differently, right?

Speaker 3 If you're caring for an elderly parent and also caring for your kids and working full-time and trying to do something at school, like that, you're already compartmentalizing in order to get to a meal once a day.

Speaker 3 I mean, so everybody has different levels and sort of different imperatives imperatives about how they need to do that. But I think as a principle, that's good.

Speaker 3 There are, there should be certain times of day when you are not doing things that you are otherwise doing in other parts of the day.

Speaker 3 And so for me, that means, you know, starting looking at the news at a specific time and trying to stop looking at the news at a specific time. It means spending time outdoors.

Speaker 3 I'm a person who likes being outdoors when it's cold. I ice fish is

Speaker 3 my winter recreation of choice. And so far, it's been an excellent ice season.
And so I try to just make myself do that. Conveniently, there is no cell surface anywhere.

Speaker 1 There is also available ice fishing, at least where I live.

Speaker 3 That's smart. Which is really good.
I mean, all that stuff matters to me.

Speaker 3 For me personally, it's important to read fiction.

Speaker 3 It's important to exercise. It's important to spend time outdoors and with animals and family and loved ones.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it's just. That's great.
That's good advice.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Take vitamins, drink a lot of water, drink less.
It's okay. You'll be all right.

Speaker 1 Rachel Maddow, thank you so much for joining Pod Save America, and we are so glad you're back. Me too.

Speaker 1 Me too.

Speaker 1 I know you tried. You tried to escape.
You just couldn't do it.

Speaker 3 I will escape again on April 30th, which makes it very due.

Speaker 1 I will believe you. I believe you.
Thanks, Todd. Take care.

Speaker 5 Appreciate it.

Speaker 1 That's our show for today. But two things before we go.
So the next four years are obviously going to be a challenging, disorienting time, to say the least.

Speaker 1 We just want you to know that Crooked will be here to help you distill what truly matters, to understand what's at stake, figure out what we can do to make a difference.

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Just subscribe into some sweet, sweet content.

Speaker 1 Also, please make sure you're supporting Vote Save America.

Speaker 1 Over the next couple months, Vote Save America will be creating opportunities for you to recharge, find community, and also take steps to protect the people who are most at risk from a second Trump term.

Speaker 1 And then as the elections come, both in 2025 and the midterms and beyond, there will be a ton of opportunities for you to be active and help out and see what we can all do together to stop Trump and his agenda.

Speaker 1 So go to votesaveamerica.com and sign up for their email list to learn more. This message has been paid for by Vote Save America.
You can learn more at votesaveamerica.com.

Speaker 1 And this ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. Thank you to Rachel Maddow for coming on and Tommy Lovett and I will be back in the feed on Tuesday.
Talk to you then.

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Speaker 1 And before you hit that next button, you can help boost this episode by leaving us a review and by sharing it with friends and family. Pod Save America is a crooked media production.

Speaker 1 Our producers are David Toledo and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safari.
Reed Cherlin is our executive editor and Adrian Hill is our executive producer.

Speaker 1 The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis.
Madeleine Herringer is our head of news and programming.

Speaker 1 Matt DeGroote is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant.

Speaker 1 Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Phoebe Bradford, Joseph Dutra, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, Molly Lobel, Kirill Pelavive, and David Toles.

Speaker 1 Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

Speaker 6 Hey, everybody, it's John Lovett of Pod Save America, Love It or Leave It, and for a brief moment in time, survivor on CBS.

Speaker 6 Understanding reality TV is the key to understanding the current state of our politics. Trump gets it.
To your favorite Democrats, I doubt it.

Speaker 6 That's why I'm introducing a limited series on this feed called Love It or Leave It Presents Bravo America.

Speaker 6 Every week, I'm going to sit down with my favorite personalities in reality TV, people like Dorinda Medley from The Real Housewives of New York, Orange County House Husband and Botched Surgeon, Dr.

Speaker 6 Terry Dubrow, Survivors, Black Widow, Poverty Shallow. Welcome to Plathville's Olivia Plath and more.
Over eight episodes of Conversations will answer three big questions.

Speaker 6 What did my guests learn about reality TV? What did my guests learn about themselves? And what did they learn about politics and this great and perfect nation of ours ours.

Speaker 6 Through it all, I'm pushing to get people to talk more openly about all of this, including stories they haven't told and moments that didn't make it on screen.

Speaker 6 Love it or Leave It presents Bravo America on this feed every Tuesday for the next eight weeks. So check it out and be cool about it.