Pardons, Prosecutions, and Perfume: Trump Unveils 100 Day Agenda

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Speaker 5 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm John Lovett.

Speaker 6 I'm Tom Needy Tour.

Speaker 5 On today's show, Donald Trump sits down for his first major interview since winning the election and lays out his plans on deportations, tariffs, healthcare, political retribution, and more.

Speaker 5 The killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson crosses the barrier from cultural fixation to political debate. though it's still a cultural fixation.

Speaker 5 And in some incredible news, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad flees to Moscow, ending two generations of his family's sadistic rule.

Speaker 5 We'll get into what this means for the world and for America's new president.

Speaker 5 But first, President-elect Donald Trump sat down with Kristen Welker at Meet the Press for a pretty newsy and substantive interview that lasted one hour and 16 minutes.

Speaker 4 I wonder how long his staff was trying to call it. 30 minutes?

Speaker 5 20 minutes? I didn't know it was that long, and I just started reading the transcript. And I was like, why does this keep going?

Speaker 6 They must have budgeted an hour.

Speaker 5 It's crazy.

Speaker 4 It's very long.

Speaker 5 There were a few big topics they went in depth on.

Speaker 5 And we're just going to take them one at a time, play some clips so you can get a feel for what it was like without having to suffer through the whole thing like we did.

Speaker 6 Yeah, that's a service we provide.

Speaker 5 You do not rewatch the whole thing so you don't have to.

Speaker 5 Let's start with immigration. They covered a lot here, including big questions on deportations and citizenship.
Here's a sampling.

Speaker 7 If they come here illegally, but their family is here legally, then the family has a choice. The person that came in illegally can go out or they can all go out together.

Speaker 8 You've promised to end birthright citizenship on day one. Is that still your plan?

Speaker 7 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 5 So even though Trump wants to end birthright citizenship, he also said he wants to work with Democrats on a solution for the DREAMers who he spoke favorably about.

Speaker 5 Let's talk about birthright citizenship first, which I think is the big headline here. Ending it, at least for the children of undocumented parents, something of a right-wing passion project.

Speaker 5 It's also birthright citizenship is also guaranteed in the Constitution and the 14th Amendment. Do you guys think he actually can end this?

Speaker 6 I think he wants to fight. I don't think he knows or particularly cares if he can end it.

Speaker 6 You know, it's yet another place where the Constitution is unequivocal, and yet we're having this debate because we don't know if six conservative justices will agree anymore.

Speaker 6 That's the reason we can have this debate.

Speaker 6 But I think he wants the fight.

Speaker 4 So you think he would just do something, test it in court, see if the Supreme Court, not go through the constitutional amendment process?

Speaker 5 So he said both. He doesn't have the.

Speaker 5 He wouldn't ever get the vote.

Speaker 6 He doesn't have the discipline. But

Speaker 6 he said it's he, you know, throughout this interview, it was a lot of moments of Welker trying to pin him down.

Speaker 6 And his whole sort of stance throughout the interview was just refusing to be pinned down. So this is one of the places where he did that too.
And he said, well, we may have to bring it to the people.

Speaker 6 But then he brought it back to the executive order and talked about the executive order he was going to issue when he was president.

Speaker 4 Just so the listeners know, it's very hard to amend the Constitution.

Speaker 4 Just to propose an amendment to the Constitution, you require, you need support from two-thirds of both houses of Congress or two-thirds of state legislature.

Speaker 4 And then the bar is higher to three-fourths to ratify it. So not going to happen.

Speaker 5 Supreme Court said something about this back in 1898. They ruled that birthright citizenship is part of the 14th Amendment.

Speaker 5 They said the ruling there was the 14th Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, including all children here born of resident aliens.

Speaker 5 The only qualification, the reason that the right keeps talking about this and has for a while, is there's a qualification in the 14th Amendment that says children children born in the U.S.

Speaker 5 have to be, quote, subject to the jurisdiction thereof. But of course, undocumented immigrants are subject to U.S.
jurisdiction and that they can be sanctioned for violating the law.

Speaker 6 Right, they're not ambassadors. Right.

Speaker 5 That's what I was saying. The only people who aren't subject to U.S.
jurisdiction are foreign diplomats with diplomatic immunity. That's why that exception is in the Constitution.

Speaker 6 Something I am sure Donald Trump has ranted about when all those

Speaker 6 ambassadors were racking up tickets in Manhattan over all those years. There's no doubt that Donald Trump fucking hated seeing those diplomatic plates

Speaker 6 parked in the fucking fire zones.

Speaker 5 There was also a Trump appointee on the Fifth Circuit that just ruled in 2015 that the clause covers, quote, the vast majority of lawful and unlawful aliens.

Speaker 5 So it is a pretty, I mean, who, again, it's this Supreme Court, so who knows? But you could see Roberts. You could see, I mean, it's, it seems unlikely.

Speaker 5 What do you guys make of the cognitive dissonance between saying he wants to protect the dreamers who are children who were brought here, undocumented children who were brought here by their parents as kids.

Speaker 5 But he also thinks that kids born here shouldn't get citizenship.

Speaker 6 Yeah, so it's interesting. I actually thought the Dreamers, the part where he talked about the Dreamers, was the most interesting part of this section because he actually was

Speaker 6 more compassionate in his language than he's been in a very long time.

Speaker 5 Yeah, not ever, but a long time ago.

Speaker 6 Not in a long time.

Speaker 5 He used to say that answer that he said he was like, you got to do something. Some of them are great people.
You got to do something. We're going to do something for them.

Speaker 5 That's what he used to say when he was president.

Speaker 6 Yes. So he has not, he did not talk that way throughout the entire campaign.
So I think the contradiction is that he doesn't care and he's not thinking about it that way.

Speaker 6 When he talks about birthright citizenship, he's talking about, you know, he's ranted about

Speaker 6 tourists having babies from Asia. He's talking about people that just got here.

Speaker 6 When he's referring to the Dreamers, he's actually acknowledging what has been at the core of the democratic position on this, which is you need to have a system of rules and laws going forward, but you need to recognize that people have been in this country for a very long time.

Speaker 6 It's sort of acknowledging both sides of that.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I just think he's a liar. I don't think, I mean, if he wanted to protect the dreamers, there's a deal on the table with the Democrats that he could pass tomorrow.

Speaker 5 Just do it. Protect them.

Speaker 4 Go for it. I mean, he got that.
There was an offer in 2018, 2019 that was basically protection for the dreamers in exchange for billions of wall funding.

Speaker 4 And Democrats walked away from it because of the wall funding at the time. But again, they could pass a narrow fix for the dreamers.

Speaker 5 Man, I wish we had taken that deal. I do too.

Speaker 6 But I think that tells you, like, liar or not, like, I think he would take that deal. I think that can still happen.

Speaker 5 Yeah, maybe. I just would love it.

Speaker 4 He would love the win.

Speaker 4 I think he's a guy who doesn't want to get blamed for ugly images on TV, but ultimately supports an incredibly radical immigration agenda that includes mass deportations of tens of millions of people.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it feels like a past versus future thing. Yeah.

Speaker 5 You know, that he, you protect the children of undocumented immigrants who are already here, but you don't allow the children of future undocumented immigrants to become citizens because, like you said, he believes that this birth tourism, that people come here illegally and have children is like this is the whole quote-unquote anchor babies.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's just

Speaker 6 he wants to have, after a certain date, be able to deport people without having to consider the fact that the children born here are American citizens.

Speaker 6 He wants to have a date after which he doesn't have to worry about that anymore. But unfortunately, the Constitution says otherwise.

Speaker 5 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Also, there's a bigger challenge here.

Speaker 5 Like, if you, there's bigger consequences here, if you suddenly decide that that citizenship in the United States is not, uh, is not granted because you're born here.

Speaker 5 Like the, the, the amount of people that you could start stripping citizenship from is just, it goes on for, it's crazy. Getting rid of birth sex relationship is crazy.

Speaker 5 But we'll, I mean, they're going to try via executive order. So we'll see.

Speaker 6 Or they won't, like, we don't, like, again, like, it's just like, this was an interview where.

Speaker 5 I mean, it seems like they're, the Wall Street Journal says they are drafting an order. So it seems like they're going to at least try, but whether, what, what happens to the next question?

Speaker 6 What happens next, we don't know. Yeah.
I, I just like, he is,

Speaker 6 it's, it it was a strange interview in that, like, basically on a few different, few different places, Welker was like challenging, did you really mean this?

Speaker 6 And every single time he said, of course I did. Of course I did.
But then he does this sort of more moderate sounding language on dreamers, on a few other issues.

Speaker 6 So it was like an interview where he was making himself hard to pin down.

Speaker 5 It sounds like the deportation plan is to start with immigrants who've committed crimes here in America, but then go far beyond that to include undocumented immigrants who've been here for years, have jobs, pay taxes, live with American citizen family members.

Speaker 5 We've talked a lot about Democrats not becoming the defenders of the status quo, but obviously immigration was one of the defining issues of the campaign.

Speaker 5 How do you guys think Democrats should fight this or can fight this, really?

Speaker 4 Well, I mean, we know there's a bunch of states where the Attorney Generals are preparing legal challenges. Groups like the ACLU will

Speaker 4 challenge in court any effort to use the military to deport people. And then there will be cities that will refuse to work with ICE and prevent deportation operations.

Speaker 4 So that's kind of the policy side. Then I think part of it as Democrats, I mean, if this starts to happen, you start seeing families ripped apart.

Speaker 4 You start to see, you know,

Speaker 4 he's going to go well beyond criminals, these sort of deportations. It's going to be farm workers, students, people who served in the military, teachers.

Speaker 4 I think you have to lift up those stories and talk about the impact on communities.

Speaker 6 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, there was a moment in the interview. where he said something he hadn't said before where

Speaker 6 Welker's asking about all these, about the kind of impact of all this kind kind of mass deportation.

Speaker 6 He says, well, you know, they're these criminals, they're hiding, they're in our cities, they're on our farms. And it was a strange,

Speaker 6 like, wait,

Speaker 6 you don't, you know, he hasn't, he doesn't talk like that. He doesn't reference the fact that undocumented people do a ton of the labor on farms in this country.
And it was...

Speaker 6 It felt like reflective of some kind of conversation he'd had where it's clear that this rounding up of people is going to impact the nation's food supply.

Speaker 6 And so he's starting to think about how to message around the impact of that. I don't know, but it was strange.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think the hard reality of this is that it's very difficult to fight deportation since Trump is well within the law and past presidents of both parties have deported undocumented immigrants.

Speaker 5 Cities can try not to cooperate with ICE. You know, Tom Holman, the New Borders are said, if they don't cooperate, I'll just have my agents do it.
It's whatever. We don't need their cooperation.

Speaker 5 But I do think you show, like Tommy said, how cruel and unnecessary and harmful it is to the country to expel people who are doing nothing more but trying to live their lives, do their jobs, haven't committed any crimes.

Speaker 4 Or giving back a lot to the country, contributing to the economy, to society in a million different ways.

Speaker 6 I was paying, paying, by the way, also just one other lie, and all of us undocumented people are paying into Medicare and Social Security and not able to ever recoup it.

Speaker 4 He also lied and says we're the only country in the world that does birthright citizenship. That is totally wrong.
Dozens of countries do it. The Canadians do it.
Chile, like lots of countries.

Speaker 5 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I think that another challenge for Democrats is because they are going to to start with criminals or people who've committed crimes here in America.

Speaker 5 Obviously, you break the law if you cross the border unlawfully.

Speaker 5 But for the people who've committed crimes here in America, they're going to make a big deal out of them and then sort of try to bait Democrats into, you know, look, the reason that there are, to the extent that there are people who've committed violent crimes or either other crimes in America who are undocumented, the reason they're still here is not because the Biden administration or other Democrats just didn't want to go after them.

Speaker 5 Part of it is because either they can't find them, or law enforcement's been looking for them, but can't find them, or sometimes people are here because we don't have agreements with the countries that they came from to send them back to those countries.

Speaker 5 And so, this is there's a number of challenges, just logistical challenges, the Trump administration is going to have to grapple with just in order to do some of these deportations.

Speaker 5 I read that they're actually thinking of sending some of these undocumented immigrants back to countries that aren't their home countries because they don't have the agreements with

Speaker 5 all the countries, which is just well and this is where tom homan's full of the the immigrations are sure ice could go to a community and find someone and take them and deport them but they're gonna have a hard time finding them that that's the part that you need the local cops for is the law enforcement piece tracking people down knowing where they are yeah but it's gonna be hard and i also think the democrats just need to be clear in laying out the alternative right which is we of course support going after criminals and people who've committed crimes in this country and also you know people who've just arrived here or like, let's, let's, we, we're fine with removing people, recent arrivals, right?

Speaker 5 But people who have been here for years, who just want the chance to become citizens, we should give them the chance to become citizens.

Speaker 5 We should bring them out of the shadows so that they can contribute, which is what they want to do in this country. I mean, I think you just have to be very clear about the message.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I think you have to, I also think like this interview that Trump gave is an opportunity for Democrats to say, like, okay, we will do your, we have, we have a conservative border bill right now.

Speaker 6 We will tie that with protections protections for finally letting these dreamers who did nothing wrong and who only know this country to become citizens, which you now say is something you want to do.

Speaker 6 So let's do that right now. How about that's the first thing?

Speaker 6 That's one of the first things you can do when you become president. We should be out there taking him at his word.

Speaker 5 All right, let's talk about what to make of Trump's answers on whether he'll actually go after his political enemies. Here he is answering questions about the January 6th committee.

Speaker 7 I think those people committed a major crime, and Cheney was behind it. And so was Benny Thompson.
And everybody on that committee

Speaker 7 for what they did. Yeah.
Honestly, they should go to jail.

Speaker 8 So you think Liz Cheney should go to jail?

Speaker 8 For what they did? Everyone on the committee used to jail.

Speaker 7 I think everybody on the

Speaker 9 voted in favor of the job.

Speaker 8 Do you want Cash Patel to launch investigations into people on that list?

Speaker 7 No, I mean, he's going to do what he thinks is right. If they think that somebody was dishonest or crooked or a corrupt politician, I think he probably has an obligation to do it.

Speaker 8 Are you going to direct him to do it?

Speaker 7 No, not at all. Not at all.
I'm not looking to go back into the past. I'm looking to make our country successful.

Speaker 7 Retribution will be through success.

Speaker 5 All right. Where do you think we are on the spectrum of a rule of law to Trump decides who goes to jail?

Speaker 4 Just some pure uncut fascism there.

Speaker 6 Yeah. You know, it's funny.
Again, like if you could, there are, he,

Speaker 6 before that section, he's saying the right things. He's saying, I'm not, I don't want, I'm not going to tell Cash Patel what to do.
I'm Pam Bondi's. Great.
I'm not going to tell her what to do.

Speaker 6 They're going to do what they want to do. I don't want to go backwards.
I'm not, that's what Biden did. I'm not for that.
And then the second welcome brings up the select committee.

Speaker 6 He's like, jail, jail for every fucking one of them.

Speaker 4 Oh, who voted for it?

Speaker 6 Who voted for it? Jail. Well,

Speaker 6 we don't hear the end of that sentence. I think maybe on the committee, because weren't there?

Speaker 4 On the committee vote. Yeah, but that's

Speaker 4 you vote against me and you're going to jail. I mean, it's just pure unadulterated fascism.

Speaker 6 Yes, also the Constitution has protections specifically designed to protect legislators from the executive for doing their jobs. Not something that comes up in the interview.

Speaker 6 It also reminded me that there was a part in that Atlantic profile of Patel that said he's the kind of guy you don't have to tell him to do it.

Speaker 4 That's why that question was dumb.

Speaker 4 That's why you chose Cash Patel. Right.
He's an enemies list in his book.

Speaker 4 Like why you chose Pamboni to, well, I guess Matt Gates washed out, but that's why she was your second choice because you don't need to tell these people what to do.

Speaker 4 They know they're there to punish your enemies.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 You could read it two ways, I think, which is one,

Speaker 5 exactly how we just talked about it, how you guys just talked about it. The other is

Speaker 5 he genuinely doesn't want to go back and doesn't want this, doesn't want to have all these investigations. But you bring up things that he's pissed about and that he's talked about before.

Speaker 5 He's going to set him off because the man has no control of his emotions. And also, he's never been someone who's like, oh, you know, I changed my mind.
I actually like Liz Cheney. Let's

Speaker 5 let bygones be going. Like, he's always going to be like, yeah, yeah, she should go to jail, but

Speaker 5 I'm not going to make anything happen. Right.
Now,

Speaker 5 again, the huge problem here is whether or not you believe Trump, whether or not he means he really is going to make them go to jail or he doesn't want to go back to the past.

Speaker 5 Cash Patel and Pam Bondi are the problem because they'll either take his comments as a green light to go investigate and prosecute or they may just decide to do whatever the fuck they want knowing that Trump either won't care or he will approve and they will curry favorably.

Speaker 6 Glad they're doing it despite his lack of intervention, which is sort of an ideal outcome for him. Yeah,

Speaker 6 just stepping back, this was the most unleashed Trump in this entire interview. It's an hour and 16-minute interview.

Speaker 6 It was much more like Trump on Rogan, where the clips are taken out of context to make it seem like the most dangerous and kind of unhinged version of Trump.

Speaker 6 But for the majority of this interview, he is trying to seem as reasonable and mainstream as humanly possible. And he, I think, does succeed in a lot of places.

Speaker 6 This was one place where it was like, whoa, he's definitely going beyond his,

Speaker 6 whatever goals he had for this interview, he has left those behind to start rallying against Liz Cheney. The one thought I had while watching,

Speaker 6 it was a little galaxy brain, which is like, man, this is not somebody, like, this is baiting Joe Biden. into pardons.

Speaker 6 That's what I, I was like, why, why would you go so hard at these people right now? You're, you're so careful throughout the rest of it to try to seem more, more, more, more disciplined.

Speaker 5 I think he just has no impulse control. Yeah, I agree.
I understand this. I think Liz Cheney is bait.
I think it's like that. It's just, he's just triggered by hearing Liz Cheney in January 6th.

Speaker 5 And same thing when she mentioned 2020. Like it's, it's wild to me that one of the questions was like, do you, did you win the 2020 election? I'm like, oh, we're going back there now.

Speaker 5 But like, there are certain things, not certain things. There's a lot of things you can say to Trump to set him off.

Speaker 6 To set him off.

Speaker 4 He is also very mad that the January 6th committee destroyed all their records and evidence and thinks that's prosecutable now.

Speaker 5 The whole thing,

Speaker 4 he's very mad. I think he's seeking retribution.
He was trying to be serious, but the minute you push him, it's like he's electrocuted.

Speaker 5 But I do think, I guess where I come down on this is I would not be surprised if they do launch investigations and try to do everything he had said during the campaign he wanted to do.

Speaker 5 I would also not be surprised if nothing happens.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it's all, look,

Speaker 5 Joe Biden, it's it's but if I was Biden, I think I, that's, I mean, if I was Biden, I think I would, would I would I would do I think really hard about preemptive pardons and blanket pardons for the J-SIGS committee and Jack Smith and his team.

Speaker 5 And I would do the team and I would do the staff.

Speaker 5 I would do like for anyone who was caught up in federal employees who were investigating Donald Trump in some way, I would think seriously about pardons.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I just, it's like an umbrella. You know, you're, it's okay.

Speaker 6 If you have it and you don't need it, better than to need it it and not have it and we don't we will not we do not get to go back and man joe but look i think it's why he pardoned hunter he doesn't want to look back and realize he had this chance to save his son didn't take it well it's time to use that in the same way for the rest of us he also uh talked about uh pardoning the uh january 6th protesters rioters who have been convicted who pled guilty who are currently serving time in prison

Speaker 5 he said that's a day one thing that he's going to do do you think people are going to care about that?

Speaker 6 I do. I mean, I don't think the voters want to look back.

Speaker 4 And this is looking back. And I think, you know,

Speaker 4 here's what I think we have to do. The Republicans are very good at picking out a couple of specific stories and examples and lifting them up, right? Like Lake and Riley, any sort of

Speaker 4 incident of horrible. crime against an individual by an undocumented migrant, Trump will tell that story ad nauseum.

Speaker 4 We need to not just like look at the statistics around January 6th or talk about it in the big picture.

Speaker 4 We need find individuals that he pardons who are hitting cops or beating people up or being violent and get the footage of that and the stories of those individuals out on day one.

Speaker 4 I do not think that people, I mean, I think the polling on this was like 30% support for pardoning January 6th insurrectionists.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I saw Terry Anton had this on CNN. It was like 33% said they were patriots.
64% were opposed to pardons. 1% want it to be a priority, which he's clearly making a priority if it's on day one.

Speaker 5 And 53% think that what the rioters did was an insurrection. So the public opinion is clear.
I totally agree with you, Tommy, that like you've got to.

Speaker 5 And he kind of danced. She goes back and forth.
This is what I was going to get. Yeah, she goes back and forth on the police officers.

Speaker 5 Like, what about the people who violently assaulted police officers? Some of the way that it was written up had Trump responding by saying they had no choice.

Speaker 5 He wasn't saying, I don't think he was saying they had no choice to assault the police officers. He was referring to a different part of her question, which was they pled guilty.

Speaker 5 And he's saying they have no choice to plead guilty because it was like a forced confession kind of thing.

Speaker 6 Well, it's it's amazing how realistic Donald Trump can be about the criminal justice system when it's his own fucking people. Like, oh, the jail is

Speaker 6 not fit for people. And oh, well, you understand that people take plea deals just to get out of something and confess the things that they didn't actually do.
Incredibly generous to his own people.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I think it matters. The other thing he did throughout this section was bounce around who was going to get pardoned.
Is it who's going to be affected?

Speaker 6 He really didn't give any straight answer. He avoided it completely.
So I think it matters who ends up getting these pardons, right?

Speaker 6 If it's a blanket pardon for a bunch of people that assaulted cops, like we should be fucking talking about it for years. But

Speaker 5 huge issue. We should make it.
I think this is a one number

Speaker 5 a really big deal out of Trump is letting violent criminals out of jail to roam the streets in your neighborhood.

Speaker 5 This is when you go from, yeah, Democrats shouldn't be talking about like democracy because it doesn't really resonate with people, but criminals in your neighborhood who were committing political violence and assaulting cops.

Speaker 5 Yeah, people are going to care about that.

Speaker 1 What's poppin' listeners? I'm Lacey Mosley, host of the podcast Scam Goddess, the show that's an ode to fraud and all those who practice it.

Speaker 1 Each week, I talk with very special guests about the scammiest scammers of all time. Want to know about the fake heirs? We got them.
What about a career con man? We've got them too.

Speaker 1 Guys that will wine and dine you and then steal all your coins. Oh, you know they are represented because representation matters.

Speaker 1 I'm joined by guests like Nicole Beyer, Ira Madison III, Conan O'Brien, and more. Join the congregation and listen to Scam Goddess wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 5 All right, Trump also talked about his economic plans, including a lengthy back and forth on tariffs, with Trump saying he, quote, can't guarantee Americans won't end up paying more.

Speaker 5 He also said, I can't guarantee that. I can't guarantee tomorrow.
Yeah, it was very, very metaphysical. It was very funny.

Speaker 6 It was very funny. Very funny.

Speaker 5 He also talked about how his other big priority is extending the Trump tax cuts, which mostly benefit the richest Americans.

Speaker 5 He was also asked about raising the minimum wage, but didn't sound as favorable on that, even though he said he would consider it.

Speaker 5 We've talked about how Democrats need to focus on working-class voters' issues very early, of course, but how do you think Democrats should respond to the Trump economic agenda?

Speaker 6 What I took from this is you'd say, Donald Trump has just told us what his priorities are as president, to free people that assault cops and cut taxes for the rich.

Speaker 6 Those are his two big priorities, right? It's not raising the minimum wage. It's not protecting access to health care.
It's not even lowering costs.

Speaker 6 It's tax cuts for the rich and freeing the people that assaulted the cops on his behalf. And that should tell you something about what you can expect from Donald Trump over the next four years.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I would hammer the tax cut issue.

Speaker 4 I was reading a report on the 2017 Trump tax cut. It found that large U.S.
pharma companies saved about $6 billion in taxes over the course of four years.

Speaker 4 And during that time, they expanded their workforce by less than 1% globally. So they saved a ton of money on taxes and they created no jobs.

Speaker 4 In 2023, Pfizer made over $27 billion and paid zero federal income taxes, thanks in part to the Trump tax cut because they make the bulk of their money in the U.S.

Speaker 4 And then they use loopholes and tax avoidance schemes to recognize that revenue in Ireland or whatever. So this is the opposite of populism.

Speaker 4 This is the opposite of the bullshit that Steve Bannon and his types try to tell us that the Trump MAGA message is about. And I think we need to really push it hard.

Speaker 4 I mean, again, like the richest 0.1% of taxpayers got a $250,000 tax cut. The poorest quintile in this country got a $70 tax cut.
That's the story of the 2017 Trump tax cut that he's trying to extend.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And I do think much like your point, Tommy, on the J6

Speaker 5 rioters,

Speaker 5 Democrats are going to have to work hard to publicize and lift up the stories of who's going to benefit from the tax cuts.

Speaker 5 Because my guess is that the Trump folks will sell the tax cut extension as middle-class tax cuts. In fact, I wouldn't even be surprised if they gave, if they tried to propose, especially with J.D.

Speaker 5 Vance and that crew in there, like larger tax cuts for the middle class. So they actually are bigger than the $70 they got last time.
And I think that we need to lift up the stories of the

Speaker 5 big CEOs and billionaires who are getting the tax cut. I also think, by the way, look, there's already companies that have said they're going to raise prices thanks to the tariffs.

Speaker 5 I think every time a company announces that they're going to raise prices because of the tariffs or every time they do raise prices, we need to make a huge fucking deal of it.

Speaker 5 We need to make a huge deal of who's getting the rich people who are getting tax cuts. And I think we should also talk about people who are making minimum wage and can barely afford to get by.

Speaker 5 And I think the frame of this is we took Trump at his word. You know,

Speaker 5 he ran on making life more affordable for people and cutting costs. And he's breaking his promise.
He's betraying the people who voted for him.

Speaker 5 And, you know, what I wouldn't do is say things like, oh, well, too bad. This is what you voted for, people, or they're idiots or they deserve it.
Because you already see this.

Speaker 5 You know, people are already posting this. It's like the same people who are like, well,

Speaker 5 the Latinos and immigrants who voted for him, they deserve it if they get deported. Right.
Like this is not

Speaker 5 when he does this, it is, it is, he is breaking a promise to people that he made.

Speaker 6 Yeah, Chipotle just announced that they're raising prices next year. And then you look, and they had an incredible increase in profits over the previous year.

Speaker 6 They're raising costs because they think they can get away with it. Corporations and Donald Trump and the billionaires around him are conspiring to raise prices.
They are not focused on what you need.

Speaker 6 They are focused on each other, and

Speaker 6 you will pay the price.

Speaker 5 Another big topic in the interview is healthcare. Welker Preston on the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and on RFK Jr.'s plans for childhood vaccines.
Let's listen.

Speaker 8 Sir, you said during the campaign you had concepts of a plan. Do you have an actual plan at this point for health care?

Speaker 7 Yes, we have concepts of a plan that would be better. I'm not against vaccines.
The polio vaccine is the greatest thing.

Speaker 7 If somebody told me to get rid of the polio vaccine, they're going to have to work real hard to convince me.

Speaker 7 I think vaccines are,

Speaker 7 certain vaccines are incredible.

Speaker 7 But maybe some aren't. And if they aren't, we have to find out.

Speaker 5 Before we get to vaccines, what do you think his answers there signal about how serious he is about taking on healthcare reform and going after the aca again

Speaker 4 i i don't know that he cares about health policy as much as he hates obama and acts accordingly i don't know it seems like he wants credit for all the good parts of the aca but maybe doesn't want to touch that hot stove again but i don't know what do you guys think i agree i i took it he spent a while talking about how much he did to make Obamacare work, which is his new lie.

Speaker 6 It's obviously, it's not true. He sued to get rid of Obamacare.
And, you know, and he even responds to Welker points out and he says, well, that's what I was doing to try to get rid of it.

Speaker 6 But actually administering it, he was trying to sabotage it internally, sabotaging the enrollment periods, making it more difficult to sign up. So he was trying to undermine Obamacare at every turn.

Speaker 6 But it does seem like he doesn't want that fight. He also...

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, I think he understands that the appetite for ACA repeal isn't there.

Speaker 4 It's popular. It's like 60% approval.

Speaker 5 It's the most popular it's ever been. Only 38% of people disapproved.
The appetite isn't there in Congress either.

Speaker 5 I do worry worry about Medicaid a lot because I think Republicans will want to gut Medicaid as part of the budget bill they're going to use to extend the Trump tax cuts.

Speaker 5 So I think we should watch that. Obviously, Biden did the Inflation Reduction Act as part of a budget reconciliation bill.
We talked about that more than enough when it was happening.

Speaker 5 But I think Republicans are going to now do something similar with the budget bill. And they're going to try to do tax cuts and then all of their other cuts to the budget.

Speaker 5 And I worry about health care programs that can be just

Speaker 5 cut or radically reduced just in the budget.

Speaker 5 I don't think they're going to have the votes to actually repeal the insurance protections or the law, the Affordable Care Act, but I think a lot of the money that goes to making health care affordable for people, I really do worry about that.

Speaker 6 Right. The places where they'll look to make cuts that they think they can get away with will be Medicaid and will be food stamps.

Speaker 6 They will go after the programs that target the poor, especially because in this interview and previously, Trump has said that he wants to carve out Social Security and Medicare.

Speaker 6 He knows politically, it's toxic. And so where are you going to find the money to pay for a $200,000 tax cut for a person making $5 million? You're going to cut food stamp increases by $20 a month.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And the Doge Bozos, like Elon and Vivek, are like learning in real time on Twitter that most of U.S.
spending, federal spending, is entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.

Speaker 5 And they're like, amazing. Look at this quote tweet.
Drives me fucking nuts. It's just like day one.
Did you guys all hear about this?

Speaker 6 The Elon posting, posting, Elon posting, somebody like, we're paying so much for healthcare, but we're not really getting a good value for it. Like, you fucking suck.
We've been dealing with this.

Speaker 6 This is talking about this for fucking 20 years.

Speaker 5 Good thing a brilliant man like me has looked into this.

Speaker 5 You guys know that we've seen it. No one has done that before.

Speaker 6 You don't know the administrative cost on private insurance versus Medicare. It's out of control.

Speaker 4 Dilettance.

Speaker 5 Brief exchange about abortion. Welcome to asked if he would be restricting access to abortion pills, and he made it seem like he would not.

Speaker 5 I think the question is, like, does he come under more pressure from Republicans in Congress now that they have a majority in both houses to do more in abortion than he might be inclined to do?

Speaker 5 Or, you know, she asked the question about the abortion pill. That would be an administrative action.
Does some of the loons he has put in charge of his government decide to move on that?

Speaker 4 That's the big question. I think clearly Republicans want a national abortion ban.
This is part of their project.

Speaker 4 There are a bunch of right-wing zealots in the House, in particular, who will stop at nothing to get a federal abortion ban.

Speaker 4 The question is whether Speaker Johnson will will keep those people under wraps if he and Trump have cut some sort of deal.

Speaker 5 Trevor Burrus,

Speaker 5 yeah. I think

Speaker 5 the votes aren't there in the House. The Republicans don't have a big enough majority.
And the frontline members are not in districts where they're going to,

Speaker 5 especially since the frontline members are a lot of them blue state Republicans. They're not going to want to do that.

Speaker 5 I think it's not, the appetite's not there among enough Republican senators to do that. They're not going to vote in the Senate either.
I worry about

Speaker 5 the Comstock Act and what happens within the administration.

Speaker 6 Yeah. The question is always on abortion with Trump has been not what does he want to do, but what is he willing to stop?

Speaker 6 That's why the most important question during the election was would you veto a bill?

Speaker 6 That's why the questions around what he would do administratively are so important, and he has evaded those answers.

Speaker 6 I think he clearly understands how damaging politically this has been for him and does not want the fight, but a lot of people around him do.

Speaker 5 All right, let's talk about the vaccines.

Speaker 5 All over the place there. He says that Kennedy won't be upending the system.

Speaker 6 That's that was, yeah.

Speaker 5 But if you watch or read through, it's also pretty clear he's bought into the idea that there, there's been a huge spike in autism in America and that it has to be attributable to something external, maybe vaccines.

Speaker 5 Who knows? Let's investigate. He also mentions at one point that it could be chlorine in the water, presumably meaning fluoride, which we know RFK wants to get rid of.

Speaker 4 Oh, that's what he meant. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 6 That's that's what he meant. Got it.
Cool.

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 unless he's worried about public pools.

Speaker 6 I don't know. I took it to mean fluoride.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 The danger to me seems, again, that like Trump is at risk of just getting convinced by RFK Jr. to make these major public health changes.

Speaker 5 And by the way, if RFK goes off on his own and does some investigation, it's just an investigation. Like, oh, I wonder what's going to turn up, you know?

Speaker 4 This is the problem.

Speaker 4 RFK, this is what he cares about. This is the only thing he cares about.
In 2021, he did a podcast interview where he said he goes hiking.

Speaker 4 If he sees a parent carrying a little baby, he'll say to them, better not get him vaccinated. Like literally, like he says it to strangers

Speaker 4 on the hiking trail.

Speaker 5 He said this.

Speaker 4 So that is not a nuanced perspective that includes a carve-out for polio. This is an ideologue who is dishonest, who is sloppy.

Speaker 4 And if he gets access to a big bunch of data, he's going to find what he wants to find. And in the process, I don't know where Trump will land on all this, but in the process, the U.S.
government

Speaker 4 sowing chaos and making people hesitant or scared to get vaccines, like that is going to do damage. Yeah.

Speaker 5 To me, that's like the best case scenario is a huge fight over vaccines and whether, you know, RFK's bullshit study is right or wrong.

Speaker 5 You could get a whole bunch of people in HHS who whistleblowers saying, no, this is bullshit, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 5 If there's conflict about it, that is going to increase hesitancy. That's going to do damage enough.

Speaker 6 Yeah,

Speaker 6 I think RFK Jr. coming out and trying to withdraw vaccine approvals causing a kind of giant national debate over this.
Do I think that's necessarily going to happen? No.

Speaker 6 I worry about the kind of quiet power this guy's going to have behind the scenes to decide what gets funded, what doesn't get funded, who's in charge of overseeing like these investigations.

Speaker 6 And like it's going, the ways in which, like for a long time on abortion, the question was, would the court overturn Roe v. Wade?

Speaker 6 And what they did was then the headlines would end up being, court upholds Roe v. Wade while undermining abortion all along the way.
And I worry about what happens when you have somebody like RFK Jr.

Speaker 6 in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services. And it comes out, RFK Jr.
will not be banning vaccines.

Speaker 6 But the policies that are now coming down from the top throughout HHS are undermining vaccination campaigns, undermining public health research, undermining the institutions that are not just making sure people are getting vaccinated now, but investigating and doing the research into the next generation of vaccines.

Speaker 6 Like I'm worried about what happens when the headlines fade because he's not doing the big, terrible thing, and we just live with the slow degradation of what is the incredible public health apparatus, like the incredible achievements of America's public health system.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think he's going to do both. I mean, he's already said, I mean, there's a quote out there where he said, I'm going to tell the

Speaker 4 researchers that we're going to hit pause for eight years on basically R and D on some of these vaccines and things.

Speaker 4 But what always happens with these anti-vax advocates is they get a mound of data and they find in what they want.

Speaker 4 And then the scientists on the other side are left having conversations about correlation, not causation, and other variables and the uncertainty of the scientific process and yada, yada, yada.

Speaker 4 And we just lose that public debate. And in the process, a bunch of parents are like, I don't know, man, this measles thing is scary.
And

Speaker 5 what you're doing is this story. I read something online.

Speaker 4 There was this awful example of a child who, you know, got the shots and then all of a sudden wasn't responsive. And that stuff is really powerful.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Next thing you know, they take away your Diet Coke.

Speaker 6 Never. He's not stupid enough to go after my and Donald Trump's Diet Coke.

Speaker 5 I know. That's where he draws the line.

Speaker 5 Foreign policy was not a major focus of the Meet the Press interview, which Trump recorded on Friday morning, two days before Assad's regime fell in Syria, though the issue did come up when Welker asked about Tulsi Gabbard's nomination to be director of national intelligence.

Speaker 5 Gabbard had a couple of infamous secret meetings with Assad that reportedly have a bunch of senators worried about her nomination, with good reason.

Speaker 5 Let's listen to Trump's response.

Speaker 8 Let me ask you about former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. You picked her to be the Director of National Intelligence.
In 2017, she had two secret meetings with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Speaker 8 Do you have questions or concerns about those meetings? No.

Speaker 7 And he's got bigger problems right now. Well, do you think it makes it hard for her?

Speaker 8 I mean, do you think it compromises her ability?

Speaker 7 I met with Putin. I met with President Inqi of China.
I met with Kim Jong-un twice. Does that mean

Speaker 8 they weren't secretly president? Well, when you were president, they weren't secret meetings. Do you have confidence in Tulsi Gabbard?

Speaker 7 I do.

Speaker 7 I mean, she's a very respected person.

Speaker 5 Before we get into the politics of it, Tommy, can you just walk everyone through what actually happened this weekend since this is now the biggest story in the world?

Speaker 5 I know you and Ben did a bonus episode about this for Pod Save the World that everyone should check out.

Speaker 4 We recorded something Sunday. We'll do another one on Tuesday for Wednesday, but check them out if you want the longer story.
I mean, the short answer is that in Syria,

Speaker 4 these opposition forces toppled 50 years of Assad rule and 13 years of the civil war, and they just drove them out of town. It was lightning speed.

Speaker 4 The rebels basically started coming south from northwestern Syria and over the course of eight days took city after city after city until they just rolled into Damascus and Assad had to fly to Russia where he will now live out the rest of his life,

Speaker 4 hopefully in some squalid conditions.

Speaker 4 So it's just a truly historic moment where one of the most brutal regimes in modern history fell and Assad, Bashar al-Assad came after his father, who was just as brutal and took power in a coup. And

Speaker 4 Bashar killed 500,000 of his own people through the course of the Civil War. He's just a truly horrific human being.

Speaker 5 Sounds like when push came to shove, Iran and Russia really weren't there for their pals in Syria. They were not there.

Speaker 4 They were either tied up in Ukraine or tied up in Lebanon, or Hezbollah had been decapitated by the Israelis. So his benefactors were not around to bail him out this time.

Speaker 5 Well, then let's talk about his other friend, Tulsi Gabbard.

Speaker 5 What do you think this means for Gabbard's nomination?

Speaker 6 Anything? I mean, that's a good question.

Speaker 4 So the kind of hit list on her,

Speaker 4 they mentioned it there. She met with Assad twice.
She flew to Syria to meet with him in 2017.

Speaker 4 Then she got this kind of PR tour around Aleppo after it had been bombed to dust by Assad and the Russians. She said Assad is not the enemy of the United States.

Speaker 4 She refused to say Assad is a war criminal. She also refuses to believe that Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, which he very much did.
And so there's all these other weird examples.

Speaker 4 Like in 2018, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a closed-door meeting with a Syrian defector who had smuggled all this evidence of Assad's brutality and war crimes out of Syria.

Speaker 4 And bipartisan groups of staffers were so worried about Tulsi being there that the guy wore a mask in like closed-door hearings.

Speaker 4 And then there's this, that same NBC report that talked about that, mentioned a trip Tulsi took to the Turkey-Syria border in 2015.

Speaker 4 There, she met with two little girls who had been horrifically burned from airstrikes while they were living at this IDP camp.

Speaker 4 And she asked them, how do you know it was a Russians and Assad who bombed you and not ISIS? And the answer is, ISIS doesn't have an Air Force, you fucking moron. So it's like,

Speaker 4 are you an Assad fan? Are you just that stupid? You know what I mean? Like, how do you get it?

Speaker 5 Neither speaks very well for qualifications for DNI. No.

Speaker 6 Yeah, there's also the, she embraced the conspiracy theory around biolabs in Ukraine. And like, you know, this has become like ideological.

Speaker 6 And because like, and John Bolton has been one of the like the most like fervent opponents. Yeah.
But the point he made, which is just like, this isn't, she just seems like she has terrible judgments.

Speaker 6 Exactly. Like, it's not ideological.
She's a fucking kook. And like, whether or not the fact that she was so

Speaker 6 solicitous towards Assad and like the specific situation in Syria aside, like the fact that all this is unfolding as she's about to go into these hearings is a reminder that this is a serious and important job.

Speaker 6 Like the

Speaker 6 like Trump, one part in the Welker interview, Welker says, you know, you said you would end the war in one day if you were president. So how's that going?

Speaker 6 And it is like, to me, like, it is a the Hegseth stuff, the Gabbard stuff,

Speaker 6 it's a reminder to me, like, Trump has won twice as a challenger. He has lost as an incumbent.

Speaker 6 It is easy to say how, how, how you will solve every problem and understand how to turn every key when you are a candidate.

Speaker 6 But when you were president, these are serious, real, and complicated issues that demand serious, capable people. And Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, these are not those people.
Yeah, you need a team.

Speaker 4 And like, I get where Tulsi is coming from on not saying Assad is not the enemy of the United States.

Speaker 4 She's just trying to make an argument that we shouldn't go to war in Syria or on behalf of the Syrian opposition. I understand that.

Speaker 4 But in service of that goal, she became an apologist for this evil war criminal who was using

Speaker 4 chemical weapons on his own people, who was throwing people in these gulags and torturing them for years and years and years.

Speaker 4 And so, you know, there's going to be the Gabbard hearing, but then there's going to be a set of policy questions for Trump. There's 900 U.S.

Speaker 4 troops sitting in Syria right now working with these Kurdish forces to keep ISIS at bay. There's Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles that are kind of littered throughout the country still.

Speaker 4 These Israelis were bombing those over the weekend. CENTCOM was hitting all these ISIS targets.

Speaker 4 There's going to be this need to make sure that this isn't just chapter one of the Syrian Civil War, but that something good comes out of it, some sort of viable state.

Speaker 4 Because the Syrian Civil War led to 5 million people, I think, fleeing beyond Syria who are living as refugees. Most of them are in the sort of neighboring countries, like Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, etc.

Speaker 4 But I think Germany took like 800,000 refugees in. A lot of those people want to go home.

Speaker 4 A lot of that migration destabilized the politics in these European countries and led to the rise of these far-right parties.

Speaker 4 So there's a huge opportunity right now for the international community to step up, help Syria, help people come home and make it a viable state and not let it devolve into just another fucking nightmare for these people who have lived through hell for the last decade.

Speaker 4 And the question is, what is Trump going to do? Because his tweet is like, not our problem. That's his take.
And then his DNI is like an Assad fan.

Speaker 6 And then you have Rubio, who's been a hawk. Right.
It's just like the contradictions get resolved when you're governing. They can exist while you're campaigning.

Speaker 6 They don't get to continue to exist when you're governing.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Did you see in Playbook Today, they were reporting that, you know, Gabbard's defenders now are going to say, well, she once called him a brutal dictator and

Speaker 5 also she has top secret clearance. So if there was any problems, this would have come up then.

Speaker 4 That process is always perfect, right?

Speaker 5 And then she was just promoted also to like, to be a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve. So that's, you know, all of this stuff is like qualifications for that.
But I'm like,

Speaker 6 I don't think the Army Reserve process probably isn't geared to look into international fucking trips to meet with Assad.

Speaker 6 Like, I'm sure she did what she needed to do to earn that promotion, but like, it's a ridiculous defense.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the Air Force reservist named Jack Teixeira was the kid who leaked all those top secret documents onto Discord to his gamer buddies.

Speaker 4 So I don't know that that's the bar we're going to hold the DNI to.

Speaker 5 Seems wise.

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Speaker 5 We've been following the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, like everyone else, a story that now clearly has a political angle.

Speaker 6 Well, because he's running for the 2028 primary.

Speaker 5 Correct, yes. We don't know which party.
As of this recording, Monday afternoon L.A.

Speaker 5 time, police have a, quote, strong person of interest in custody, 26-year-old Luigi Mangioni, who was apprehended at a McDonald's in Pennsylvania with a backpack containing a gun, a silencer, fake IDs matching the ones used in New York, and a handwritten manifesto that didn't give the health insurance industry the best reviews.

Speaker 5 This was after the bullet casings found at the scene had the words delay, deny, and depose written on them.

Speaker 5 The reactions on social media, which is why this is one of the reasons why this is a big story, have ranged from people joking about the murder to celebrating it.

Speaker 5 United Health Group had to shut off the Facebook reactions to the announcement of Thompson's death after nearly 75,000 users responded with a laughing emoji.

Speaker 5 The reaction inevitably reached the point where politicians got asked about it. Here's California Congressman Rokana on ABC's this week on Sunday.

Speaker 16 Let me just say it was horrific. I mean, this is a father we're talking about of two children and my sympathies to the entire family.
There is no justification for violence.

Speaker 16 But the outpouring afterwards has not surprised me. Look, I, as a congressperson, had United Healthcare deny a prescription for a nasal $100 pump spray.
And I couldn't get them to reverse this.

Speaker 16 So imagine what ordinary people are dealing with. The biggest denial comes when it's cancer treatment.
I mean, people are getting denied on cancer treatment. And my view is very simple.

Speaker 16 Why can't we have a rule that if a doctor prescribes something and if Medicare, traditional Medicare, is going to cover it, then private insurance companies should be forced to cover it.

Speaker 16 I mean, it's absurd in this country what's going on.

Speaker 5 I think that's a good idea. What do you guys think of Rose's answer? And what's your general take on this story?

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 6 when I saw that the shooting had happened, I was just, I was like, okay, so here's what's going to happen next. I just was waiting for it.
Like there's going to be a round of people celebrating it.

Speaker 6 There's going to be a round of people criticizing the people for celebrating it.

Speaker 6 Then a round of people criticizing those people for not understanding the pain that people are experiencing in their lives. Everybody.

Speaker 5 Next thing you know, universal healthcare. Right.

Speaker 6 Like, right. It's sort of like this.

Speaker 5 Medicare for all or else. Right.

Speaker 6 That was the worst ideas I've heard. But the, but the kind of like performative,

Speaker 6 the way you demonstrate you really understand what's broken in our healthcare system is by performing this lack of empathy. That's how you demonstrate you really get it.

Speaker 6 And if you don't have that lack of empathy, that means you don't really get it. All of that I was just sort of like, just sort of waiting for.

Speaker 6 And of course, like unfolded actually worse than I expected.

Speaker 6 It was all pretty ugly. The thing that I,

Speaker 6 there is a lot of like earned vitriol. Like insurance companies.
Some are better than others. Plenty play games, even break the law to try to avoid paying.
We have a cruel and broken system.

Speaker 6 Like, that's what we have. Like, this guy, well compensated, is a tool of a broken system.
This insurance company exists and benefits from a broken system.

Speaker 6 And like that, to me, like, I want to have a debate about the broken healthcare system and why we have this ridiculous system where half the people get insurance through work, which creates these incredibly convoluted and broken incentives, where we have publicly traded companies that exist to create a difference between how much they pay out in health benefits versus how much they recoup in premiums.

Speaker 6 Like their job is to maximize that differential. We built a whole system around it.
That's fucking stupid. That is terrible.

Speaker 5 That causes all kinds of harms.

Speaker 6 But like the idea that we're going to associate the murder of a health executive with Medicare for all, to me, does not bring us anywhere closer to Medicare for all.

Speaker 6 We're not going to shoot our way to universal health care. And it ends up becoming a kind of vicious and negative and divisive debate.

Speaker 6 A debate we can win without kind of needing to resort to this sort of like ridiculous kind of performative, I don't know what you'd call it, theatrics, heroics. I don't know.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 4 People can make jokes. The reason I don't make them is because I just think that people all have families and, you know, let's think about it on a human level.

Speaker 4 And then also, you know, deciding that or tacitly supporting targeted assassination is the slipperiest of slopes in my view. And I saw people saying, well, you know, United

Speaker 4 Healthcare is responsible for more deaths because they deny claims. Well, what if someone decides that rationale applies to like, you know,

Speaker 5 abortion rights groups and goes after their CEOs, right?

Speaker 4 And I just, I think copycat violence is a real problem. So let's just not celebrate this stuff.
That said, everyone has had a terrible interaction with an insurance company. Every single person.

Speaker 4 The insurers reject one in seven claims for treatment. ProPublica had a really long investigation in February of 2023 that's worth reading about United Healthcare.

Speaker 4 It's one story about their treatment of a patient who finally found an effective treatment for a debilitating disease that was wildly expensive. He was denied.

Speaker 4 His family then sued and they got access to all these recorded calls and documents and things that just outlined the way United Healthcare put profits ahead of his healthcare or anything else and lied and did all these horrible things.

Speaker 4 But I think the net effect of this incident is probably going to be that a bunch of corporate CEOs getting armed security and their customers pay for it. And that's the frustrating part.

Speaker 5 Yeah. I I mean, according to the New York Times, some people on social media said that people who have information about the killing shouldn't share it with authorities.

Speaker 5 The hostel that he was staying in was cooperating with the authorities, and they got threats because they were cooperating.

Speaker 5 Some people posted names and pictures of other health insurance executives. I'm going to take the

Speaker 5 neolib squishy centrist position that murder. That's it.
Let's hear it. Murder is bad.

Speaker 5 Also denying people life-saving health care because they can't afford it, bad. How about that? Wow.
That's incredible. How about that? Isn't that crazy? Incredible.

Speaker 5 Hope all the murderers are caught and punished.

Speaker 5 Also, hope we pass more laws to make sure that everyone can get the health care they need without the insurance company putting them through hell, which insurance companies frequently do. Yeah.

Speaker 6 I feel like the other question, like, why do we have a system where all these people have horror stories? like terrible stories about what it's like to engage with these companies.

Speaker 6 These companies exist to deny claims and make life harder.

Speaker 6 And, you know, Barack Obama used to tell stories about what it was like when his mother had cancer and how you're dealing with the worst moment of your life and you're on the phone with insurance companies.

Speaker 6 Like, why does this system exist? And the debate online, fine, it's not real life.

Speaker 6 But I do think it captures something that is real about the healthcare debate, which is there are all these people that are screaming like this system is fucking stupid. It is stupid, right?

Speaker 6 And yet when you try to change it, you run into this buzzsaw. Now, part of that is because the insurance lobby donates a lot to campaigns.
They run a lot of ads.

Speaker 6 There's a lot of anti-government, anti-Medicare propaganda, a lot of right-wing propaganda about this. But the reality is when you ask people, do you like your insurance?

Speaker 6 The vast majority say they do. Even when a majority of those people say they've had problems with their health insurance, that one in six say that they've had claims that they could never resolve.

Speaker 6 Yeah. That they could never resolve.

Speaker 5 Just to put some statistics there, like Kaiser Family Foundation did a very large poll June of last year, June of 23. 81% of people give their health insurance a rating of excellent or good.

Speaker 5 Now, if you're in poorer health, that number falls, but it falls to 68%, still pretty high.

Speaker 5 58% say they've had a problem with their health insurance in the last year, though half of those people say it was resolved to their satisfaction.

Speaker 5 And then 27%, so one in three people, say in the last year they've had a specific issue with a claim denial or the insurance company paying less than they had hoped the insurance company would pay.

Speaker 5 Clearly a problem. To your point, though, let's talk about what the barriers are, right? What happened when we tried to pass the Affordable Care Act, right?

Speaker 5 Which was a Herculean effort that cost a lot of Democrats their jobs, a lot of House members. Everyone talks about what happened in 2010 and like, why didn't Down Ballot win?

Speaker 5 And was it OFA or this or that? No, no, no.

Speaker 5 A bunch of people took the vote, knew that they would probably lose because they took the vote for Affordable Care Act, but they thought it was important enough to do anyway, and they did it.

Speaker 5 The Affordable Care Act, which didn't even pass with a public option because we didn't have the votes for a public option, which still isn't single payer, we passed a bunch of insurance company reforms that put a bunch of new regulations on insurance companies, but we couldn't get more than that.

Speaker 5 Fast forward to the 2020 Democratic primary, where the central debate in the primary was over Medicare for all. And what happened there?

Speaker 5 Medicare for all ended up less popular than it started at the beginning of the primary because when you ask people, should the government guarantee health insurance? People say yes. Like 60% say yes.

Speaker 5 When you ask people, do you think it should be a government-run system or a private insurance system? More people want private insurance than they do government.

Speaker 5 That number has narrowed now, but that's still. So

Speaker 5 it is a problem with the insurance industry. It is a problem with their lobbying.
It is a problem with the money in politics. It is certainly a problem with the Republican Party.

Speaker 5 But it's also, we have work to do convincing people to change this system.

Speaker 4 Well, it's also, I think, look, I think the fact that profit is in the healthcare system is the original sin here. It's the thing that we would all want to get rid of.

Speaker 5 If we were doing it over again, we would have to shout profit in the system.

Speaker 4 Single-payer Medicare for all type system.

Speaker 4 The challenge that you outlined, though, is getting people to trust that the government is going to competently administer that system is also a great challenge.

Speaker 4 I imagine that challenge was not aided by the rollout of healthcare.gov during the ACA

Speaker 4 fight and rollout in the second Obama term. So

Speaker 5 let's talk about why that was such a challenge, right?

Speaker 5 In 2013, as part of the Affordable Care Act, we said, look, if insurance companies try to give people these shitty plans that don't cover anything, where they're paying a lot of money, but they still can't get good coverage, what the government's going to do is say, we're going to cancel those plans.

Speaker 5 And the government canceled those plans, and suddenly there was a fucking uproar like you wouldn't believe because people said, I thought I could keep my health insurance if I liked my health.

Speaker 6 Because of a line that you had to include when you were campaigning to reform the healthcare system, which is, if you like your plan, you can keep your plan, which was going to be true for 98% of people.

Speaker 5 Well, also the website didn't work too. Right.

Speaker 5 But I was saying the bigger one was the real political problem: why did we get all these cancellations? And now people are like, well, everyone hates their health insurance plan.

Speaker 5 Well, actually, no, we tried to cancel a bunch of really shitty plans that didn't do a lot to cover people, and there was a fucking uproar.

Speaker 5 So that's not to say that we, of course, we should try again, but it is much more complicated with actual people.

Speaker 6 The other part of this is like, oh, people also say they're comfortable with expanding insurance by the government.

Speaker 6 They just, like, I do think, like, okay, so half the country roughly has health insurance through their employer. That is the system we built.

Speaker 6 That is a convoluted, broken system that creates a bunch of perverse incentives. It means that insurers don't cover, don't have much of an incentive to cover preventative care.

Speaker 6 Because if you change jobs, you change insurers, creates a whole host of problems. Small percentage of people buy their own insurance, about 10%.

Speaker 6 The rest are either uninsured or in the public systems. We already have a huge chunk of the country in public health care.

Speaker 6 And that poll that John talked about, it said that 81% of people like their private insurance. It's even higher for Medicare.
Medicare is extremely popular.

Speaker 6 And I do think, like, the point that RoConna makes in that interview is smart, right? Like, that private insurance should cover anything Medicare should cover.

Speaker 6 He's thinking about the ways in which to make private insurance more like Medicare, basically, which costs far less to administer, right?

Speaker 6 A huge percentage of private insurance costs goes towards administration. What's administration? It's paying the staff that reviews claims, tries to make their costs low, right?

Speaker 6 It's like it's money that goes to getting worse health care than actually paying providers.

Speaker 6 But like part of what happens when you end up only debating, when the debate becomes about are you for single payer or against single payers, you don't have other debates, a debate like, should we lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60?

Speaker 5 How about that?

Speaker 5 Or I was going to say, to your point about people liking Medicare so much, I think that the plan offered in 2020 that was both the best plan, but also the most politically palatable plan and that most people liked it was, remember Pete Budigej proposed Medicare for all who want it.

Speaker 5 Yes. And so basically it would allow anyone, if you really want Medicare and you want to be covered by Medicare, you can choose that.

Speaker 5 And if you really don't want that and you really want your private health insurance plan, you can choose that.

Speaker 5 And the idea would be that Medicare would be so popular that more and more people would buy in and we would eventually transition to a system where Medicare covers everyone.

Speaker 6 There's a lot of, yes, that was sort of a form of a public option. But like you lower the Medicare, like, you know, the public option was killed from Obamacare and it was killed by a bunch of centers.

Speaker 6 They all hid behind Joe Lieberman. It was killed by a bunch of people.
But one thing that Joe Lieberman personally killed was the Medicare buy-in for people. And that was just a policy to help.

Speaker 6 Like, if you are between the ages of 60 and 65, that is where your health, you're not yet in Medicare, but you still are in the age where you're starting to have more and more health problems.

Speaker 6 It's an extremely expensive group to ensure. If you get laid off when you're 58, it's incredibly expensive.
Like there's a huge bunch of problems that happen there.

Speaker 6 And Joe Lieberman personally killed a Medicare buy-in. But if we could get the Medicare age down to 60, it costs about $25 billion a year, a tiny, tiny fraction of the budget.

Speaker 6 And that alone would bring health care costs down for fucking everybody just by dint of getting this pool of expensive people to insure off.

Speaker 6 But like, these are the kinds of things I think we should be talking about, like simple fixes that get us on the road to Medicare for all.

Speaker 6 Because

Speaker 6 if you're, if you, if, like, if like, like

Speaker 6 Rokana said, like, not surprised by the reaction, there's an incredible amount of anger and antipathy towards health insurance companies. We should target it.

Speaker 6 We should direct it towards a political aim that could actually help people as soon as possible.

Speaker 6 Well,

Speaker 5 guess what? If

Speaker 5 there were Democratic majorities in Congress and Democratic president,

Speaker 5 we'd get a public option. We didn't last time around, even though Joe Biden proposed it because we had Kirsten Sinem and Joe Manchin.

Speaker 5 If we had won the Senate this time around and won the House and won the presidency, then we'd be talking about a public option for a second term.

Speaker 6 And these should be part of the, like, when we talk about like, what are Democrats for? We spent a lot, you know, what is our big agenda for the future.

Speaker 6 Like these kinds of big changes have to be part of it.

Speaker 5 All right. Before we go, if anyone's looking for a last-minute stocking stuffer, we do have a gift for you.

Speaker 9 My new Trump fragrances are here. They make a great Christmas present.
I've named them Fight, Fight, Fight because they represent winning. We all want to be winning.
We have to win as a nation.

Speaker 9 We want to win as a family. This fragrance is all about strength and success and confidence for men and for women.
Get yourself a bottle and don't forget to grab one for your loved ones too.

Speaker 9 They'll thank you and they'll even smell good.

Speaker 5 Why is that real? I hadn't listened to the end.

Speaker 5 You even smell good.

Speaker 6 Hey,

Speaker 6 did a raccoon with axe body spray wander into McDonald's? No, no, that's my new cologne.

Speaker 6 That's my new cologne. It's fight, fight, fight.
Fight, fight, fight. I'm wearing, it's my Donald Trump-scented cologne.
It's fight, fight, fight.

Speaker 5 Donald Trump was in Paris this weekend at the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Speaker 5 The first lady was there, Jill Biden. Apparently they were sitting near each other.
They spoke. It was a pleasant exchange.
There's a picture of Trump talking to Jill Biden where she's smiling.

Speaker 5 Trump posted that picture with

Speaker 5 a caption that said, A fragrance your enemies can't resist, used as an ad for fight, fight, fight.

Speaker 6 Look, I think

Speaker 6 you don't want to, the fucking liberal media has want to face it. Jill Biden wants to fuck Donald Trump.
That's

Speaker 6 in Notre Dame Cathedral in a holy fucking place.

Speaker 6 That's what the news won't.

Speaker 5 The news won't fucking cover it.

Speaker 6 The news won't talk about it. The news won't talk about it.

Speaker 5 They will say there's a lot of laughter from the coach. Farah's draw dropped.

Speaker 4 It's like he kept rolling out these products during the campaign and I was like, maybe he thinks he's going to lose and he's just getting like one last grift in, but now he's president and he's rolling out a fragrance.

Speaker 4 Come on, man. You have so many avenues for corruption.
You're going to be just fine.

Speaker 5 You don't need a fragrance. Yeah, they always want more.
I always want more. Get the crypto.
Get the. It's called fight, fight, fight because it represents winning.

Speaker 5 That just doesn't make doesn't make a lot of sense.

Speaker 6 You got to smell it. Listen,

Speaker 5 smell like a winner.

Speaker 6 You got to. that head.

Speaker 5 There it is. That would have been a better tagline.
You

Speaker 5 got it. Trump fragrance.
Smell like a winner.

Speaker 6 You got to go in the store and smell the fragrances. Well, you got to trust it based on a brand.
It could smell like anything.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 4 There needs to be someplace to buy this stuff where the money doesn't go to him, like a secondary sale, you know, kind of used fragrance store.

Speaker 5 I don't want to give him money, but you do

Speaker 4 bottles around the office and squirt it on you guys.

Speaker 6 Fight, fight, fight.

Speaker 5 That's our show for today. If you have smelled fight, Fight, Fight Cologne, please let us know what it smells like.

Speaker 4 If you bought it, sell it to me.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and if anyone's looking for a present for me, you know what to get me. That's our show for today.
We'll be back with a new show on Wednesday.

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Speaker 5 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 5 Our producers are David Toledo and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Faris Safari.
Reed Cherlin is our executive editor and Adrian Hill is our executive producer.

Speaker 5 The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis.
Writing support by Hallie Kiefer.

Speaker 5 Madeleine Herringer is our head of news and programming. Matt DeGroote is our head of production.
Andy Taft is our executive assistant.

Speaker 5 Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Phoebe Bradford, Joseph Dutra, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, Molly Lobel, Kirill Pelavieve, and David Toles.

Speaker 14 Hey weirdos, I'm Elena and I'm Ash and we are the host of Morbid Podcast.

Speaker 15 Each week, we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 14 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

Speaker 15 It's smart, it's spooky, and it's just the right amount of weird.

Speaker 14 Two new episodes drop every week, and there's even a bonus once a month.

Speaker 15 Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 13 Yay! Woo!