John Kelly's Trump Bombshell

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Speaker 4 Welcome to Pot Safe America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

Speaker 3 And I'm Alex Wagner.

Speaker 4 On today's show, Donald Trump's former chief of staff, John Kelly, goes on the record to confirm that Trump praised Hitler and thinks he can use the military against domestic political opponents.

Speaker 4 Kamala Harris sharpens her closing closing argument, and Barack Obama raps with Eminem. Then, Senator Sherrod Brown stops by to talk with John about pulling out an all-important win in Ohio.

Speaker 4 With me to discuss all of it is my friend Alex Wagner, host of Alex Wagner tonight on MSNBC, and a fixture of their special election coverage. Alex, thanks for being here.

Speaker 3 It's a thrill and an honor, Dan.

Speaker 4 You were on the ground in Pennsylvania for a few days this week, and you did a live show from there last night, right? How was it?

Speaker 3 I sure did.

Speaker 3 It was a lot.

Speaker 3 I was with Victor Martinez, who's the number one Latino radio host, Spanish language radio host, and based out of Allentown. I was at a barbershop in West Philadelphia.

Speaker 3 I was meeting with Trump-supporting Republicans in East Philadelphia. I was with John Fetterman in Red Counties for Trump.

Speaker 3 It was fascinating. And I got to say, I got an earful.
I got a lot of perspective.

Speaker 3 But if you ask me which way that state's going to go, I wouldn't be surprised if Harris won it, you know, tidally or Trump won it tidally or it was neck and neck and we didn't get the vote count for like 14 days after election day.

Speaker 3 It just feels incredibly unpredictable and very, I won't say volatile, but just unknowable in a way.

Speaker 4 That really feels like this election. Yeah.
Unknowable.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 All right. Let's get into the news today.

Speaker 4 For as long as Donald Trump has been around the presidency, he's had staff who walk away and tell people how disturbed and scared they are about his stewardship of the country.

Speaker 4 The problem is they hardly ever go on the record with those charges.

Speaker 4 Less than two weeks before the election, however, Trump's longest-serving chief of staff, retired Marine General John Kelly, did an on-the-record recorded interview with New York Towns reporter Mike Schmidt.

Speaker 4 Let's take a listen. What do you think? Do you think he's a fascist?

Speaker 5 Well, I'm looking at the definition of fascism.

Speaker 5 Those are the kinds of things that he thinks will work better in terms of running America. The former president

Speaker 5 is

Speaker 5 in the far right area. He's certainly an authoritarian,

Speaker 5 admires people who are dictators. He has said that.

Speaker 5 So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure. Keywick

Speaker 5 commented more than once that

Speaker 5 Hitler did some good things too. And of course,

Speaker 5 if you know history,

Speaker 5 again, I think he's lacking in that. But if you know what his, you know, Hitler was all about,

Speaker 5 it would be pretty hard to make an argument that he did anything good.

Speaker 4 If you know what Hitler's all about, look, it's hard to be shocked by peel back the onion on Hitler.

Speaker 3 Peel back the onion.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 4 A complex figure.

Speaker 4 It's hard to be shocked by new revelations about Trump these days, but I do think hearing the audio from one of his closest advisors saying that Trump praised Hitler is a fascist is shocking or at least should be.

Speaker 4 What do you make of this report?

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, I think, first of all, like when the conversation begins with, so

Speaker 3 do you think he's a fascist? Like, that just tends to, let's just say, like, we are in a different space with this candidate.

Speaker 3 And the TLDR of that John Kelly answer is like, if it looks like a fascist and it walks like a fascist, it's a fascist. If you have a

Speaker 3 former general who is, by all accounts, not a hair on fire liberal, like someone who is as into the concept of law and order as anyone else, as any person could be, not as anyone else.

Speaker 3 And he's out there saying Trump's a fascist. Yeah, it should alarm everybody.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think the issue is there is, especially among Trump supporting, you know, voters out there, a disbelief that he'd actually carry through on it. Like, yeah, sure, he likes dictators.

Speaker 3 Sure, he's, you know, into light fascism or not light fascism, just full-on fascism. But is that really going to come and affect my life if he's re-elected? And that's the fundamental problem here.

Speaker 3 Having said that, I think there's every reason to focus on this. I think that that it should alarm everybody.
I don't think we should sainwash his comments.

Speaker 3 And like, it's obvious that Donald Trump isn't a student of history or a student period.

Speaker 3 So like when he says Hitler did some good things, that doesn't mean he's reading some like deep-cut history of, you know, Hitler.

Speaker 3 It's just that he has a personal, there's a proclivity towards, you know, Hitler-style fascism.

Speaker 3 And he can't really explain it away except to say that like in his mind, he believes that Hitler wasn't all that bad because in his mind, he agrees with Hitler.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's not like Donald Trump is so deep into the history of World War II-era Germany that he's familiar with, I don't know, the public works projects of Nazi Germany or something like that.

Speaker 4 He knows only what the most basic thing to know about Hitler is, and it's not good.

Speaker 4 Right, he knows Holocaust, and he's right. And he seems to not have a giant problem with that or not be disturbed by the idea of praising someone who did that.

Speaker 3 Well, it's revealing.

Speaker 3 I think it's revealing. I think these two things together together are extraordinarily revealing.
You know, he may be a wannabe fascist.

Speaker 3 He may ultimately be a failed fascist, but fascism is where he's at.

Speaker 4 And the, I mean, you hit on what has been the challenge of this Trump will be a dictator on day one argument, which Democrats have been making since Biden was the candidate.

Speaker 4 And the fundamental challenge of that argument is that for all of the terrible things that Donald Trump did as president, Most people do not believe he was a dictator.

Speaker 4 Now, what we're learning from some of the accounts of the presidency, the Trump presidency that came out afterwards, what we're learning from Kelly in these interviews, what we've learned like 14th hand double secret code from like Jim Mattis and Mark Milley is that Trump tried to do these things and he was

Speaker 4 stopped or distracted or whatever else from a series of people. And what we also know is those people are no longer going to be around him.

Speaker 4 One lesson Trump has learned since 2020, and he's not somebody who learns a lot of lessons, but is that he wants enablers around him.

Speaker 4 And so instead of the people with the big names and the stars on their, in the medals and all of that, he wants someone who's going to do what he wants.

Speaker 4 And so there will not be some, if John Kelly, as he talked about in this interview, did make it harder for Trump to use military force against American citizens,

Speaker 4 the next person may not, will probably not do that. And that's, and that's very, very scary.
Now, so you have John Kelly, a four-star general, uh, saying he's a fascist.

Speaker 4 We have Mark Milley telling Bob Woodward that Trump is a fascist. We have all these alarming accounts.

Speaker 4 We have a report in the Atlantic, which has people talking about Trump, most likely Kelly, talking about

Speaker 4 Trump wanting to use military force against domestic political enemies, the enemy within the thing he is saying on the campaign trail all the time.

Speaker 4 And it's a huge deal, but it doesn't it feel a little bit like we're sort of like people aren't alarmed enough that it happened. Colin Laris gave the statement we'll talk about in a minute.

Speaker 4 It's getting some coverage, but just like we're kind of numb to it. Am I right? Are you getting the same impression?

Speaker 3 I think it's two things.

Speaker 3 One is there hasn't been enough focus maybe on the stooges around trump in part because it's about the trump show but you remember garbage pail kids down do you are you old enough to remember it's like there should be in the way that i think there's a there's much broader understanding of project 2025 it would have been slash it would be great for democrats to say like these are going to be the arc these specific people are going to be are the architects of a second to trump administration instead of just like this policy paper right these are the real human beings who are going to let trump unleashed do whatever he wants to do, right?

Speaker 3 I mean, maybe that would help in the context of showing that what came before is not what will be in a second term, right?

Speaker 3 You won't have those same sort of career professionals, people who care about the Constitution in the White House. You'll have this bunch of clowns.

Speaker 3 But the second piece of it, which I think speaks to the broader question of why this doesn't resonate more, you know,

Speaker 3 it doesn't pierce the veil, if you will, around Trumpism and Republicans drawn to Trump, is I think for as many reports as you have of, you know, Millie or Mattis or Kelly coming out and saying, this guy's a fascist, you also have events like the one last week where Trump's standing on stage at a town hall and dancing to Ave Maria and hallelujah for 45 minutes, right?

Speaker 3 You have him like slinging fries to a bunch of like vetted Trump supporters who have been cleared by Secret Service at a McDonald's. You have him in these kind of absurd

Speaker 3 situational kind of political comedies that I think make people think, oh, he's not that bad. He's kind of just like,

Speaker 3 you know, he, he,

Speaker 3 I think it reminds them of their crazy grandparents or their crazy uncles, which now apparently is an asset in American politics, where they say outlandish things, right?

Speaker 3 They do things their way, but they're not actually a harm to the rest of the family. And like, so there's always a point counterpoint.

Speaker 3 And I would also say most of the, you know, people who are in the tank for Trump or excited about him aren't reading The Atlantic, right?

Speaker 3 They may hear passing mention of the fascism stuff, but the dancing on stage cuts through the noise better because it's memeable, it's on the internet. It's just, I mean, I just think that the

Speaker 3 sort of political comedy of the Trump candidacy is more widely known than the darker, you know, fascistic tendencies that he has embraced and will embrace in his potential second term.

Speaker 3 So, you know, I think it's a problem. Like his character, a character study of Trump is necessarily, I can't believe I'm saying this, kind of of a complicated thing in that way.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I would say that's

Speaker 4 right. There's a lot of issues there.

Speaker 4 He really could have used a lot of therapy is my take. Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 Yeah, definitely. Maybe some medication.

Speaker 4 It's all the above. A couple of points here.
One,

Speaker 4 the inevitable part of this discussion is is anyone going to care is going to be a difference. And one of the challenges we have, which is why

Speaker 4 it's going to be incumbent upon Democrats and the Harris campaign to make people know about this over the next few weeks, is just the distribution pipes of media are broken.

Speaker 4 Most people are never going to see this, not just because in the Atlantic and the New York Times, but their things were in the Atlantic and New York Times for decades, and they would eventually reach people because they would be on, it would be in their local paper, which they would see every morning when they went to check out the sports scores.

Speaker 4 It would be on their local news, which they would watch every night before dinner because they want to know what the weather was going to be the next day.

Speaker 4 It would show up in their Facebook feed because Mark Zuckerberg thought it was a great way to make money by distributing news for free to the public. None of those things happen anymore.

Speaker 4 So it's just so much of the conversation only happens among political junkies who opt into political media so it's not going to osmotically get to voters the second thing here is and you hit on it really right is that what people usually see about trump is him talking about arnold palmer's manhood or serving fraud that's a general that's a generous term for it anyway sorry manhood we know specifically what you're talking about dan i i'm just trying to keep this show i know a lot of our listeners i don't do a good i don't do a great job of this i use the f word a lot but but you won't say the word teenage definitely don't say that.

Speaker 4 I mean, I don't know if you listened to the last episode, but whatever our yearly allotment of dick jokes is, John, John, and Tommy way surpassed it. So we're reeling to back out

Speaker 3 manhood.

Speaker 4 We'll go with manhood. Or what is putter? Was his putter.
Arnold Palmer's the size of Arnold Palmer's putter.

Speaker 4 That does defang some of the scary stuff. But I just want to say this, which is it does feel.

Speaker 4 Unlike 2020, like we are ambling into the abyss here as a society.

Speaker 3 I agree.

Speaker 4 Everyone knows how dangerous he is. He is telling us.
The things he's saying on the stump are way more dangerous than they were then.

Speaker 4 And now it's not a theoretical exercise because he has instigated a violent insurrection that led to the loss of lives. Like it is real.
We know what's happening.

Speaker 4 I'm glad John Kelly did this interview.

Speaker 4 I'm glad he did an audio interview with the New York Times. He should be commended for that.

Speaker 4 But if you truly believe that Donald Trump is a fascist who wants to use military force on his domestic political opponents, you have to do more than call Mike Schmidt. Right.

Speaker 4 And the same goes for James Mattis and Mark Milley and every, all these other Trump people, Mike Pence, other Republicans like George W.

Speaker 4 Bush, people who were saying, I don't really like Trump, but I'm going to write in, I don't know, Ronald Reagan's spleen or whatever you're going to do in your ballot.

Speaker 4 If this is really as bad as you say it is, you have to do more.

Speaker 4 Like there's that story in the New York Times the other day about how Jamie Dimon and Bill Gates and these other business leaders are for Kamala Harris, but they're afraid to say it.

Speaker 4 Like if you truly believe what we are, if you truly believe that Donald Trump is this dangerous, you have to do everything possible to stop him. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And it doesn't feel like it's a society we're doing that.

Speaker 3 No, it doesn't. I mean, the fact that Dick Cheney came out before George W.
Bush, who so obviously is voting for Kamala Harris, is just shocking. Like the idea of sort of the presidential club,

Speaker 3 it's a wrap on that. I mean,

Speaker 3 he should be out there campaigning for Kamala Harris. I will say also, as not a student of history, but someone with just passing understanding of

Speaker 3 what has happened, fascists and dictators also do loony old grandpa style things too, right? Like

Speaker 3 we should seek no comfort in the idea that he loves YMCA. Like that is not going to prevent him from jailing journalists and going after political opponents.

Speaker 3 I mean, Fidel Castro has all sorts of personality, had all sorts of personality idiosyncrasies. I can, my mom's from Burma where there's a military junta in charge.

Speaker 3 Those guys are pretty wacky too in their off hours. This is all actually the portfolio of behaviors around dictatorial tendencies and fascists.

Speaker 3 So I don't mean to underscore, I don't mean to undermine the notion that he's an incredibly dangerous that I just don't think people think of it that way.

Speaker 3 I think it's like we have this Marvel comic book

Speaker 3 conception of villainhood. And it's like, you're all evil all the time, or you're a good guy.
And Donald Trump has the ability to make people laugh as he shreds the Constitution.

Speaker 3 And I think, and I honestly think part they're like the fact that those Republicans have not come out and that they're not endorsing Kamala Harris and why ever Mitt Romney isn't endorsing Kamala Harris has to do with some, I think, personal reluctance to fully wrap their arms around the danger that is being posed by a potential second Trump term.

Speaker 3 You know, they, they are alarmed because of personal experience, but it's, it's, it's shocking to me that they haven't made the leap towards doing everything they can to stop him.

Speaker 3 And that suggests that something's holding them back.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And that, I mean, it's to the credit to the Cheney family for doing this, who seem to at least understand that their era in Republican politics is over.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and or if it's ever to come again, it has to begin with stopping Donald Trump. And so it is, you know, look, I don't know that George W.
Bush would make a huge difference. He's not that popular.

Speaker 4 He's kind of seen as

Speaker 4 a failed president turned painter. Yeah.
But still, just like, leave it all.

Speaker 3 I'm a huge fan of the painting. I wish he had started with that.

Speaker 4 Started with that.

Speaker 4 If he had just had a really inspiring art teacher in seventh grade, perhaps American history would be, would be changed for the better.

Speaker 3 If you'd just gone it to Jerry Gagozian instead of

Speaker 3 the ranch at Crawford, Texas. Anyway, we'll never be able to undo those eight years.
But yeah, I'm not saying it.

Speaker 3 I guess what I'm saying is it's not that I think George Bush would be some incredible campaign surrogate.

Speaker 3 But I do think there is this, I mean, this moment is about a sort of cultural norms and people feeling like they are inside or outside of like the America that wants to preserve democracy.

Speaker 3 And like, really, it's like you want everybody who's a fan of democracy, you want a groundswell of that sort of support to be obvious to anyone that is voting in this next election.

Speaker 3 And the more people you have inside the tent of like the pro-democracy tent, I think the better that is in convincing anybody who's still on the fence or sitting on their couch and unsure of what they actually want to vote.

Speaker 4 And this is not a crazy argument. Actually, the folks at Blueprint poll tested closing arguments.

Speaker 4 And the best testing closing argument, especially with independence, is this idea that most of Trump's cabinet and senior staff are not supporting him.

Speaker 4 So you can only imagine that his former chief of staff, who also happens to be a four-star general, being on the record saying these things would help with that. So more people doing that is good.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 The vice president. This morning went out and gave a brief statement to the press reacting to the Kelly interview.
Let's take a listen.

Speaker 7 It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Speaker 7 All of this is further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is. This is a window into who Donald Trump really is.

Speaker 7 from the people who know him best, from the people who worked with him side by side in the Oval Office and in the situation room.

Speaker 7 And in a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions.

Speaker 7 Those who once tried to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses would no longer be there and no longer be there to rein him in.

Speaker 7 So the bottom line is this.

Speaker 7 We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power.
The question in 13 days will be, what do the American people want?

Speaker 4 What did you think of her message?

Speaker 3 I mean, right on, right?

Speaker 3 Like these comments, these audio tapes, these deserve a real platform. They deserve focus.
They should drive the news.

Speaker 3 They aren't normal, despite the fact that they've been echoed, you know, over the years. Like, we are reaching a crisis point.
And I think it's right for her to highlight it.

Speaker 3 I think, you know, her speaking in very serious terms about what has been unearthed by a phone call with Mike Schmidt and the Atlantic and Jeffrey Goldberg is like, is absolutely right.

Speaker 3 I mean, as a matter of political strategy, I don't know what it does. You know, I don't know if this is the thing that moves people with 13 days left to go.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I don't know if it moves people either. I think doing the statement is the right thing because it kind of like the Atlantic story came out and it got a lot of online attention, right?

Speaker 4 I'm sure I didn't, I wasn't able to watch TVO. So I'm sure you guys talked about it on MSNBC last night.
And then the Mike Schmidt interview happened a little later in the day, I guess, or at night.

Speaker 4 I couldn't really tell when that happened, but

Speaker 4 what she wants, and that is even more damning to Trump is now you have the audio, which matters a lot in this media environment because you can now, that audio can now travel the world on TikTok and Instagram and elsewhere in a way in which just the written words.

Speaker 4 just can't, right? It's not the, it's not the right medium for this media moment. But if you want something to be a story, you got to go make it a story.

Speaker 4 And one way you make it a story and you make it part of the conversation is to go talk about it. Give it more, give it more pictures, give it more audio for it to circulate to people.

Speaker 4 Because the only way the people who are going to sign this lecture are going to see it is they're not picking up the New York Times to see it. It is the New York Times runs it.

Speaker 4 Kamala Harris talks about it. A bunch of people then talk about it on social media and TikTok and whatever else.

Speaker 4 And then it gets and then it randomly shows up in their feed because the algorithm chooses to show it to them. And so you got to just pour gasoline on the fire.

Speaker 4 So I think that's the right thing to do.

Speaker 4 From a message perspective, what I really like about this is that she tries to go right at the concern you raised at the top of this pod, which is if he wasn't a dictator before, why would this time be different?

Speaker 4 If he didn't shoot people last time, why would he shoot people this time? And she makes the point that John Kelly and people like John Kelly will not be around him next time. And so that has changed.

Speaker 4 The context from which Trump is operating is changed. He's now surrounded by people who will let him do these things.
And so just because it didn't happen before doesn't mean it'll happen now.

Speaker 4 Now, there's a lot more work to do to make people to hammer that message home in a very little amount of time, but I thought the way she did it there was right.

Speaker 3 She needs to have like a picture or a fat head of Roger Stone and Stephen Miller on either side. Like, these are the guardians.
This is what we're looking at, America. Just saying.

Speaker 4 Do you think putting up large pictures of Stephen Miller is a good way to win an election or a bad one?

Speaker 3 I mean, listen, that's who is going to be his minder. That guy and the other guy who wears a bowler hat for fun.
I mean, you know, these people can't be trusted.

Speaker 4 We don't want to get into what Roger Stone does for fun.

Speaker 4 It's a fair point.

Speaker 4 It's a fair point. It's a family show.

Speaker 3 It's a family show. Yes.

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Speaker 4 With less than two weeks to go, Kamala Kamala Harris is getting in front of every voter possible.

Speaker 4 She's doing a CNN town hall in Pennsylvania tonight, then has a rally with Bruce Springsteen and Obama tomorrow in Atlanta, and a rally with Michelle Obama in Michigan on Saturday.

Speaker 4 In between all those things, she's going to Texas on Friday for a rally focusing on abortion rights, where she'll record an interview with Brene Brown's podcast.

Speaker 4 And yesterday, she sat down with Hallie Jackson of NBC News, Your Sister Network, for an interview that aired on Nightly News last night. Let's take a listen.

Speaker 15 Last election, the former president came out on election night and declared victory before all the votes were counted. What is your plan if he does that again in two weeks?

Speaker 7 Well, let me say this. We've got two weeks to go.
And I'm very much grounded in the present in terms of the task at hand. And we will deal with election night and the days after as they come.

Speaker 7 And we have the resources and the expertise and

Speaker 7 the focus on that as well.

Speaker 15 So my team's ready to go. Is that what you're saying? Are you thinking about that as a possibility? Of course.

Speaker 7 This is a person, Donald Trump, who tried to undo a free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people, who incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol and 140 law enforcement officers were attacked, some were killed.

Speaker 15 Would you consider, if you win and he's convicted, a pardon for former President Trump?

Speaker 16 I'm not going to get into those

Speaker 16 hypotheticals. I'm focused on the next 14 days.

Speaker 15 But do you believe, is there any part of you that subscribes to the argument that has been made in the past that a pardon could help bring America together, could help unify the country and move on?

Speaker 16 Let me tell you what's going to help us move on. I get elected president of the United States.

Speaker 4 A lot of tough questions are on a whole bunch of topics. What did you think of the interview?

Speaker 3 I thought it was good.

Speaker 3 You know, I think Halley asked her some questions that, yes, we would love a vice presidential candidate and potential president to answer, but I absolutely get why she would not negotiate with her.

Speaker 3 She was asked in part of that interview whether she would, what concessions she was prepared to make to get to restoring Roe v. Wade

Speaker 3 and getting it through Congress.

Speaker 3 The question about a pardon to Trump, I mean, who in their right mind would even float that

Speaker 3 13 days before an election?

Speaker 3 You know, I got to say, I thought her answer on the post-election period was interesting, right?

Speaker 3 Because honestly, as someone in the media, that's the period that I'm the most worried about, given what happened last year and given just how much, I mean, honestly, tighter this race could be, how much longer it could take to get the vote, how much, you know, preamble there's been about election fraud and the election monitors that have been deployed by the RNC, and then the freelancers who are out there.

Speaker 3 And I would say even on the left, a concern that there's going to be chicanery and that we can't necessarily trust the results in certain swing states.

Speaker 3 So I'm deeply worried about that kind of volatile environment. And I get why Harris wants to focus on Election Day.

Speaker 3 I also get, as a public official, that she doesn't want to stir up paranoia and fear and potentially violence by suggesting there's going to be something bad.

Speaker 3 But I would, you know, as a candidate, like to hear more about the army of lawyers that will be deployed and the ways in which

Speaker 3 there is a strategy in place, as I'm sure there is, to combat the misinformation, the disinformation, and the, you know, trying to push the country towards, at worst, violence and maybe at best, just even deeper division around the results of the election.

Speaker 3 So I guess I understand her posture in that interview, but

Speaker 3 I wish there had been more from her on that answer in particular.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, look, there were a whole bunch of questions here that were tough to answer. I thought she navigated it well.

Speaker 4 She pivoted to message at several points, which is what you want to try to get out of this.

Speaker 4 On to your point about the post-election period, I have great confidence that the Harris campaign has a massive, well-funded, well-thought out legal strategy. Like, I'm very confident in that.

Speaker 4 And I'm curious to know what, if anything, they're going to be able to do to fight the post-election misinformation.

Speaker 4 A lot of the guardrails that existed in 2020 and they didn't go great are not there anymore. There's less fact-checking in the media.

Speaker 4 Even some of the fact-checking, we sort of now know how that the limits of fact-checking in general.

Speaker 4 The social media platforms were spending a lot of time and energy to try to keep disinformation and misinformation from spread going viral on their platform.

Speaker 4 They're not doing that anymore to any extent at all. The owner of one of the larger social media platforms is the number one purveyor of some of the worst conspiracy theories out there.

Speaker 4 So that's going to be a real messy period.

Speaker 4 I'm sure that they have very, very smart people who I know have been thinking about it, but I am also, and I understand why they're not giving us the playbook in advance, but I am curious about what they will do with the limited tools available to them to push back on Big Lie 2.0.

Speaker 3 I think it's going to be incumbent on members of the media to do a lot of that work too, which is, you know, we do a good job sometimes and we do a very bad job other times.

Speaker 3 So we got our work cut out for us.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I do think I will say to the credit of the media, and that's not something I do a ton, a lot of lessons were learned after 2020 about,

Speaker 4 you know, it took, especially after January 6th, about how to cover Trump when he's lying about the election. Some of those have been unlearned pretty dangerously since then, but I

Speaker 4 have faith that a better effort will be made from at least the best-intentioned players in the space.

Speaker 3 Which is definitely not me. I mean, I know that already, the way you're saying.

Speaker 4 You are among the best-intentioned in the space. I was specifically referring to you.

Speaker 4 In addition to the interview with NBC, Harris also did an interview with Telemundo. But those were the only two events on her campaign schedule.
Say she had no trips to the Battleground State.

Speaker 4 I just laid out her robust schedule to come, but the fact that she was not actually campaigning at Battleground State less than two weeks before the election became a topic of conversation.

Speaker 4 Some folks feel her schedule is not robust enough or as robust as, say, Obama's was in 2008, 2012. What do you think about how she's been campaigning?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, first of all, I applaud the fact that she's doing more media. That's great.
You know, she had been basically locked in a cupboard for a couple

Speaker 3 for the first six or seven weeks of her campaign. And to some degree, I understand that.
But at the same time, it's time and it's good. And I think she's been comporting herself really, really well.

Speaker 3 I am loath to suggest that Kamala Harris isn't working her ass off

Speaker 3 to win this election. I would like to believe there is a reason she is not in a battleground state and is instead doing interviews in Washington.

Speaker 3 The reality is the more the public sees of Kamala Harris, the more they like her. So they should be putting her out as often as possible.

Speaker 3 I think she'll probably have a punishing schedule for the last 10 days of the race. So maybe they're just trying to give her a reprieve and do a day of media.

Speaker 3 I guess I'm just, as a member of the media,

Speaker 3 I guess I don't question the decision because the fight is so clearly at everybody's doorstep.

Speaker 3 I don't think they're making kind of thoughtless decisions at this point. That seems to be a piece of campaign strategy.

Speaker 3 But maybe, Dan, you can tell me otherwise, that this is like, you know, the campaign strategist whiffed this one and she should have been out in Georgia.

Speaker 4 I don't know what the reason was, but there's a reason because I know the people who run our campaign, Jeno Mally Dylan, David Pluff, Stephanie Cotter, all those folks.

Speaker 4 They believe to their core, and I've done many campaigns with them, that the best thing is for the candidate to be in front of voters. Now, people keep comparing it to Obama's 2008 schedule.

Speaker 4 And it's like, he did all this stuff every single day. The better comparison is to his 2012 schedule when he was president at the same time that he was running.

Speaker 4 And sometimes you have to do things as vice president. I don't know what those things were yesterday.
Maybe that's what she was doing, but she is out there a lot. She's out there more than Trump.

Speaker 4 And so there is a reason here. I just don't know what it is.
And I do, there's not a chance.

Speaker 4 Now, there's not a fiber in my body who believes that she was in Washington doing interviews, which is a way to communicate with voters, but that she was in Washington because the campaign thinks they have this in the bag or she's not working hard enough.

Speaker 4 That's just not the reason. There is a reason.
They just haven't shared it with us.

Speaker 4 And maybe we'll find out before, but she was was doing something and probably and certainly something that contributed to either her job as vice president, which is important, or to win the campaign in some other way, right?

Speaker 4 Maybe there's some other interviews we don't know about. Maybe it was taping ads.
It could be, it could be absolutely anything.

Speaker 3 It could have been between two ferns with Zach Californakis. And then we'll really say thank you.

Speaker 4 Then she'll have one. It'll be over because that's what will happen.
Okay.

Speaker 4 It's pretty rare for a candidate. We just talked about the importance of being in battleground states.
Texas, not a battleground state. The Harris campaign has been cleared.

Speaker 4 They're not going there because they think they can win it. They're going there to highlight abortion.
Do you think this is a smart decision?

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the abortion thing is so interesting because in my conversations with male voters, particularly in Battleground States, it hasn't really resonated.

Speaker 3 In part because, you know, Michigan has protections, Pennsylvania has a few more protections.

Speaker 3 I mean, there's not the sense of doom and threat in the same way that there is in abortion deserts like Texas.

Speaker 3 And I think if it's not going to give her a win in Texas, it could give, it could kick Ted Cruz out of office, right?

Speaker 3 Like juice the turnout among people who understand the stakes, who are feeling the excruciating choices they have to make just either to start a family or not have a family or whatever their personal choice is and help maybe control the Senate in the process.

Speaker 3 It's a super important issue. I think it's an, you know, Texans

Speaker 3 should be reminded and probably need to be reminded about what sending Colin Allred to the Senate means versus sending Ted Cruz when, you know, there's the prospect of a national abortion ban on the table.

Speaker 3 And so, yeah,

Speaker 3 I think it's the right thing to do. And you know this, Dan.
Like, just because she's in Texas doesn't mean the words she says stay in Texas.

Speaker 3 They will be clipped and they will be put on the internet, and she will be renewing the focus on reproductive choice in the closing days of the election. And I think that's absolutely right.

Speaker 3 She should be doing that. By the way, we'll be having our own reproductive rights-focused special on MSNBC that I'll be co-anchoring with Joy Reed next week in case people want to talk about it.

Speaker 4 I think that's an organic promo. It's great.

Speaker 3 Well, I just

Speaker 3 promote that. But, like, I mean, and I say that in part because I feel like

Speaker 3 we are talking, and I think necessarily so, about fascism and democracy and the economy and immigration.

Speaker 3 Abortion is a huge driver for Democrats, a real tangible result of what it means to have a Republican in office.

Speaker 3 And it is good to, you know, focus back on that before people go to the polls, because I do think to some degree that has not been as sharp. We have not had

Speaker 3 as sharp a focus on that from the Harris campaign

Speaker 3 in her closing argument.

Speaker 4 I fully endorse this decision to go to Texas. Obviously, if she can provide a boost to Colin Already and he can kick Ted Cruz out of the Senate and back to Cancun, that is a super plus.

Speaker 4 But even more importantly, what she is desperately trying to do here is get attention.

Speaker 4 And the audience is yes, people in Texas, but it's primarily the exact voters you were talking about in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, places that have Democratic governors or constitutional rights to abortion access.

Speaker 4 To say to those voters, if Donald Trump wins,

Speaker 4 what you see in Texas when it comes to abortion policy could very well be the national policy. Trump could pass and sign a federal abortion ban.

Speaker 4 He could, as Project 2025 has suggested, use executive authority to make it hard to get abortion medication, impossible to get abortion medication.

Speaker 4 In Project 2025, they want to have a database of pregnancies. Like there is scary stuff here.
What is happening in Texas could be the nation.

Speaker 4 And it is so hard to grab people's attention in this media environment and going to Texas, giving a speech in Texas is off the beaten path. It's different enough.
We're talking about it now.

Speaker 4 It'll get more coverage than if she just gave an abortion speech in Michigan on the same day.

Speaker 3 It's

Speaker 3 trying to get attention. It's the geographical equivalent of going to Fox News, right?

Speaker 4 Yes. Yes.
It's why Trump's going to Madison Square Garden. Same.
Yeah. It's just, it is a way to get people's attention.

Speaker 4 And the other thing we just have to, it is a sad thing for democracy, but the importance of local media in politics, it's still quite important, but it's way less important, particularly for the undecided voters who consume less media.

Speaker 4 Politics is national. News is national.
Going to Texas is almost as good a way to reach a lot of voters in Michigan as doing a speech in Michigan.

Speaker 4 It's not great that we're not, that it's not all local TV and local news anymore. That was an important part of the process, but the world has changed.
The media economics have changed.

Speaker 4 And so the efficacy of going to a place like Texas in 2024 is very different than it would have been back in my day in 2008 or 2012.

Speaker 3 That's where we're at.

Speaker 4 Obviously, abortion is going to be a huge part of her closing message.

Speaker 4 How do you think she should balance that with the economy and border security messaging that we also know that undecided voters are very concerned about?

Speaker 3 It's so hard. Can I just say, like,

Speaker 3 this poor woman, my lord, like, who wants this? Nobody wants to be in this position.

Speaker 4 Everything. Everyone has to be.

Speaker 3 I mean, everything, everywhere, all at once. She's got to do it all.
I mean, that's just the reality of it, right? She's talking to different voters.

Speaker 3 She's talking to suburban women when she talks about abortion. I wish she was talking to everybody.
She's talking to men, you know, working class men, especially when she's talking about the economy.

Speaker 3 She's talking to the Latino vote. She's talking to more working class Americans when she's talking about immigration.
I mean, she's just talking to each segment that she needs to turn on.

Speaker 3 So she's going to have to do it all. And, you know, I think that that's just the reality of what a closing message is when you're literally building the biggest possible tent you can.

Speaker 3 What's amazing is that it's held, that the party of AOC and Dick Cheney is still, you know, the bandwagon drives onward, hopefully ending at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Speaker 3 It's a testament to the Democratic Party that like this is this coalition has held for as long as it has with nary a peep from from, I mean, accepting a few certain issues, mostly

Speaker 3 with everybody in accord. I think it's amazing.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, I mean, she's going to have to talk to all the different, you know, sort of buckets of voters who may be sitting on their butts, unsure of whether they want to vote or skeptical of the fact that she'll be four different years of a Democratic administration and won't be a continuation of what they believe has not been a good moment for them financially or economically, though that is not true.

Speaker 3 And she's got to remind people of fundamental, you know, bodily autonomy and how it's on the ballot.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, I mean, it's not as it's not the oh, it's not the sort of polished stone that was the Obama candidacy in 2008, where you knew exactly what you were getting and it was this beautiful glowing thing that you could hold in your hands.

Speaker 3 It's more like, you know, emotional confetti. That's the description I always use.
It's just like, it's in the air, it's everywhere, it's all around you.

Speaker 3 And, you know, all the little bits together kind of make, I don't know, a celebration of her candidacy. This is an overwrought metaphor.

Speaker 3 The point is, it's, yeah, it's everything, everywhere, all at once. And that's what she's got to do.

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 4 I really tort about this because the ways in which we communicate are so different, right? It was

Speaker 6 in

Speaker 4 back in 2008, 2012, even 2016, it was largely, you needed one core message for everyone because you were communicating to everyone in the same way. Yes, you could do like some,

Speaker 4 you know, black radio or you could do some Spanish language TV or something that would be a little micro-targeted, but in general, it was all macro communication all the time.

Speaker 4 Your TV ads ads were large, could reach anyone at all times. Now there's the ability to target even more, right?

Speaker 4 You can have, you can identify the voters who feel a certain way about a certain thing, and you can push messaging towards them via digital advertising or influencers or whatever else.

Speaker 4 Like you can, we just have so much richer data about how to, and so many more tools to reach people, but ultimately you still have to put it through one frame, right?

Speaker 4 And I've, and I have struggled with this the whole campaign.

Speaker 4 The closest thing I can come up with for one way to latch all these things together is that Kamala Harris is for you and Donald Trump is for himself. And that's how you get to abortion, freedom.

Speaker 4 It's how you get to her economic plan versus his economic plan.

Speaker 4 And it's the way you get to border security because it allows you to tell the story as she does at every opportunity that the reason the border is not as secure as it should be is because Donald Trump torpedoed a bipartisan deal to help himself.

Speaker 4 So if you want someone who's going to fight for you, Kamala Harris will do it.

Speaker 4 Because the one core essential truth about Donald Trump that even in their private moments, his supporters would admit is that he's a narcissist. Yeah.
He cares about himself.

Speaker 3 Can I just say one thing?

Speaker 3 I was at a barbershop in West Philadelphia this on Monday, and one of the guys said, I've made more money with assholes than with nice people.

Speaker 3 And I think one of the problems, and I think you're right, that is a very elegant sort of distillation of how Kamala Harris can sell herself to people who are still on the fence or to even people who support her.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump, Kamala Harris is for you. Donald Trump is for himself.
We underestimate the lure of a man who's only out there for himself.

Speaker 3 And I see, I saw and heard that reflected in especially the men that I spoke to, that that was actually aspirational and that the greed, you know, it felt like the 1980s, right?

Speaker 3 Like greed is good and that the narcissism wasn't off-putting, but like, you know, that's someone who wanted to be like, and that's someone who was maybe going to help you get rich just because it provided a template from the highest echelons of government for everybody else in the country.

Speaker 3 I'm obviously not endorsing that, but I just mean

Speaker 3 I think that's part of the reality here is that, and that's a testament to like where we've gotten as a society, but that there is a kind of

Speaker 3 the subject of that, that, what do we call it, thesis, Donald Trump, is maybe not, he doesn't do so badly in that, in that dichotomy.

Speaker 4 I think that's exactly right.

Speaker 4 I mean, that is ultimately the entire thesis of Trumpism, which is I will protect you from whatever threats you're worried about, domestic or abroad, and I will put more money in your pocket.

Speaker 4 And because I will do those two things, you are willing to put up with me as a largely embarrassing asshole, right? You may not like my personality. You may not like my tweets.

Speaker 4 You may not like the way I act. You may be somewhat concerned about the fact that I keep getting convicted of federal crimes and state crimes.

Speaker 4 But because I will do those things that matter the most to you, right? In your in the hierarchy of needs, those are the top, right? Safety and financial security.

Speaker 4 And if I can protect those, you'll put up with everything else.

Speaker 4 Now, what is essential then is for the Democrats and the Harris campaign to, you have to make it, you have to make how this matters for people, right?

Speaker 4 So it's not just like he, we don't like Trump because he's a narcissist. He only cares about himself and therefore he's a bad person.

Speaker 4 It's because he only cares about himself, he's going to help people like him and not people like you.

Speaker 4 And that's a hard argument because people think they did well under him before, but the tax cuts for the rich, you know, finding a way to talk about the increase in prices because of tariffs, talking about the restrictions of your freedom on abortion and everything that can come next.

Speaker 4 Like, that's the hard turn. Like, this is not easy.
If it was easy, we would have beat Trump in 16. 2020 wouldn't have been so close, and he would not even be running again, but it's not easy.

Speaker 4 Okay, even with Harris off the trail for a day, Democrats are in get out the vote mode, and Kamala Harris has been absolutely blissing the battleground states, and so are her top surrogates.

Speaker 4 On Tuesday, that meant Barack Obama holding a rally with Tim Walls in Madison, Wisconsin, and Obama in Detroit with Senate candidate Alyssa Slotkin. And who else? Eminem.

Speaker 4 I I would just say my old boss was feeling himself at this event. Let's take a listen.

Speaker 3 Can the real Slim Shady please stand up

Speaker 17 that people shouldn't be afraid to express their opinions. And I don't think anyone wants an America where people are worried about retribution or what people will do if you make your opinion known.

Speaker 17 I think Vice President Harris supports a future for this country where these freedoms and many others will be protected and upheld.

Speaker 17 And here to tell you much more about that,

Speaker 17 President Barack Obama.

Speaker 18 I got to say, you know, I have done a lot of rallies,

Speaker 20 so I don't usually get nervous.

Speaker 18 But I was feeling some kind of way following Eminem.

Speaker 18 Now notice my palms are sweaty, knees weak,

Speaker 20 arms are heavy,

Speaker 19 vomit on my sweater already, mom's spaghetti.

Speaker 19 I'm nervous, but on the surface, I look calm and ready to drop bombs, but I keep bomb forgetting.

Speaker 4 I mean, look, I'm biased here, but was that great or was it kind of cringe-worthy? I don't really know. Both.

Speaker 3 I mean, it was great. It's also like Barack Obama loves his own performances.

Speaker 3 As someone who knows knows him, Dan, you know this to be true.

Speaker 3 Also, I mean, that, like, that song that he was dropping lines from is his like hype myself up song. Am I, am I incorrect?

Speaker 4 Like, that is

Speaker 3 an Obama like musical chestnut. So I'm sure it was awesome.
And also, I had missed the Slotkin Eminem tour when it rolled through New York.

Speaker 3 So I was glad to be able to catch a little bit of it in Michigan. It's great.

Speaker 4 First of all, I'm all for joy.

Speaker 3 Like, I loved the beginning of the Harris candidacy because she was just happy. Like, it was such a good moment.

Speaker 3 It was a reprieve from the just apocalyptic doomsday scenario we now find ourselves in again. And when he's having fun, when he's smiling, you can't help but smile.

Speaker 3 Having said that, there was a slight daddish edge, a little bit of a daddish edge to it. In part,

Speaker 3 you knew he practiced that before he went out there. That was not impromptu.
And also, honestly, I don't know.

Speaker 4 I don't know. No, Dan.
There's a real chance he did. Dan,

Speaker 4 Dan. I have to believe this.
Dan, I think it was impromptu.

Speaker 3 Dan, it was impromptu.

Speaker 3 The lyrics were impromptu.

Speaker 4 I am, I am, anyway, but props. I can just say, I know how, if I had been with him at the time, I can know how this would go.
We'd be in the car, driving there. He'd be like, you know what?

Speaker 4 Like, Pfeiffer, you want to think I'm going to do? And I'd be like, what, sir? He's like, I think I'll just do maybe the first verse or two of Lose Yourself. And I would be like,

Speaker 4 that's an idea. I hear you.
I hear what you're thinking.

Speaker 4 I don't know. And he'd be like, I'm doing it.
And then he would do it.

Speaker 4 And I would worry about it. And he'd do it and it would go well.
Can I just say,

Speaker 4 I felt this to my core.

Speaker 3 Contrast that with like the people who have to keep Trump in line. It's like,

Speaker 4 look,

Speaker 4 that is a privilege.

Speaker 3 I'm thinking there's shooting protesters in Lafayette Square, sir.

Speaker 4 Versus like, I think I'm going to rap.

Speaker 3 I just want to like. Tan suit, the worst thing he ever did, which was actually afraid outfit.

Speaker 4 You're on the record as that.

Speaker 3 I loved that tan suit and I told him I liked the tan suit to his face. He appreciated it.

Speaker 4 You know what? Because he walked around telling everyone how good he looked in that suit for, frankly, years afterwards. I think he did it just pretty recently.
So you're preaching to the choir there.

Speaker 3 It's cool that he rapped. It's cool.
It's great.

Speaker 4 It is cool.

Speaker 3 It's fine.

Speaker 4 Good. Politics should be fun, right? You want a rally to be fun.
You want your movement to feel like something you want to join. You want people to stop what they're doing to be involved.

Speaker 4 You want them to stop what they're doing and listen. And like, that has always been Obama's great ability.

Speaker 4 Harris has done it herself incredibly well here. Tim Walls did it in a very funny way by calling Elon Musk a dipshit yesterday.

Speaker 4 In a weird, bizarro way, Trump does the same thing for his supporters. And it's not, it shouldn't be spinach.
It should be fun. It should be entertaining.
It should be.

Speaker 4 There should be risk involved, right? And so I think it is great he did it. It's obviously dominating social media.
More people will see more of the rally because of it. Eminem's message is cool.

Speaker 4 Eminem speaks to a certain group of voters. And so all of it was great, in my opinion.
Now, how his daughters felt? Who knows?

Speaker 3 We know how they felt, Dan.

Speaker 4 Yes. We know how they felt.
In general, what do you think of the role Obama's playing down the stretch here? It's great.

Speaker 3 I mean, look at, I think sometimes he kind of steps, he gets a little over his skis.

Speaker 3 I think the scolding of black men in Pittsburgh, just from the men that I talked to, did not come across the way that I think he perhaps had hoped it would, but

Speaker 3 it changed the conversation.

Speaker 3 And I think that was very, very useful in terms of like gender and how much of the resistance to Harris's candidacy and electing her was because there's still some latent or explicit misogyny holding people back.

Speaker 3 That I think is good, but you know, he's magic.

Speaker 3 He's the most magical person in the Democratic Party and has an ability to crystallize the issues and the stakes and do it with passion and eloquence and joy.

Speaker 3 And like, bring in the fucking reinforcements, right? Like, bring him in. And then the closer, Michelle Obama, is going to be hitting the trail too.
Like, of course, this is what needs to happen.

Speaker 3 Like, yes, everybody come out of the woodwork.

Speaker 3 And he's, you know, it's nice to be reminded of the, you know, the once in a generation talent that he is and feel good about the fact that he was elected twice and that we were that country.

Speaker 3 And maybe we can be a country that does that kind of thing once more.

Speaker 4 Like, obviously, I think he's a huge net positive out there. He's a great communicator.
He does a lot for like signaling to the, to the entire party how to talk about things.

Speaker 4 And he did that in 2020 with Trump a lot.

Speaker 4 He sort of, and then in 2022, he did a similar thing about how he's just, he's the best messenger in terms of distilling the argument and then delivering it in a very compelling way.

Speaker 4 I did have this like lingering fear that it's been a long time since he was president. It's been a long time since, oh, wait, I see that in my own gray hairs and aging self.

Speaker 4 And one of the huge target audience here is younger men. And so I was like, does Obama really have a connection to them? But then the folks at Blueprint came out with this poll where they polled men.

Speaker 4 And so here's Obama's approval rating among men aged 18 to 29. He is a plus 38 net favorability.

Speaker 3 That's not nothing.

Speaker 4 That is, I mean, and he's by far exponentially more popular than any other political figure out there with this exact group of people that Kamala Harris absolutely needs to do better, do better with if she's going to win this race.

Speaker 4 And so the fact that we have polling here shows that Obama is the best messenger with them.

Speaker 4 And that's why he's doing so much, you know, he's doing these rallies, but he's also doing a ton of events or like interactions with TikTok influencers. He did

Speaker 4 a podcast today with

Speaker 4 where he was interviewed by Tyrese Halliburton of the Indiana Pacers. So he's doing a lot of stuff to reach that group.
So that's, that's very good to know that it has the impact.

Speaker 4 He still has that appeal with the young voters she needs, even all these years later.

Speaker 3 I think it's really important also for it to be a man alongside her doing this, not because she needs a man, but because the question of masculinity is so, it's,

Speaker 3 there's so much tension around it. And Obama is so confident in his manhood and so clearly masculine.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 Not that Tim Waltz isn't, but he's such a known sort of male patriarchal figure in American life that I think is really important to have him out there talking, you know, vociferously at great volume about what an extraordinarily accomplished leader Kamala Harris will be.

Speaker 4 That's exactly right. Okay.
When we come back from break, we're going to hear John's interview with Senator Sherrod Brown about his must-win race in Ohio.

Speaker 4 But before we do that, less than two weeks to go, we wanted to remind you that Vote Save America has a bunch of really vital tools.

Speaker 4 As soon as you're done listening to this, head to votesaveamerica.com slash vote to do three things.

Speaker 4 First, use the build your own ballot tool to get up to speed about everything and everyone you'll be voting for in your state. Second, check the ways you can vote in your state.

Speaker 4 Make sure to vote early if you can. Voting early takes pressure off election workers and ensures faster results.

Speaker 4 And finally, use our last call tool to get a short and simple script that you can paste directly into texts and DMs to get three people you know in the battleground states to vote.

Speaker 4 Head to votesaveamerica.com slash vote now to get started. This message has been paid for by Votesave America.
This ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee.

Speaker 4 When we come back, Senator Sherrod Brown.

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Speaker 22 Joining us today, he's currently running against a rich car salesman to keep control of the Senate in Democratic hands.

Speaker 22 Please welcome back to the pod, one of America's very best senators and human beings, Ohio's own Sherrod Brown. Welcome back to Pod Save America.

Speaker 6 Thanks, John. I really appreciate the chance to do this again.
Thanks.

Speaker 22 Of course.

Speaker 22 All right, you've been running and winning statewide races in Ohio for many years now. What, if anything, is different about your state and what you're hearing from voters this time around?

Speaker 6 Well, Ohio's perhaps gotten a little more conservative. People think that.
But last November, we passed the statewide Constitutional Amendment of Abortion Rights, passed it

Speaker 6 with 57% of the vote, which my opponent in this race wants a national abortion ban. So one of the clear contrasts we make, he says I'm 100% pro-life, no exceptions.

Speaker 6 I have supported the Constitutional Amendment or abortion rights.

Speaker 6 So we make that contrast, and I think that that's going to be an absolute voting issue this year, as it is other places, both obviously in the presidential and especially in the Senate race.

Speaker 6 So what's different about Ohio is

Speaker 6 I think I win large part because I take on interest groups and stand up to the drug companies and stand up to big oil and stand up to the railroads, which had that terrible derailment in eastern Ohio.

Speaker 6 And that's the reason, one of the reasons that big money's going after me in this race.

Speaker 22 Has political polarization made it harder than it was back in 2018 when

Speaker 22 you won in 2018, you ended up picking up a lot of Trump voters. You have to in your state.
Is that a little bit harder this time around?

Speaker 6 It's harder only in the sense that

Speaker 6 so many people, I mean,

Speaker 6 there are only, I believe, six Senate seats now, six states, which have a split delegation of one R and one D or an independent. And

Speaker 6 I mean, the assumption I think too many people make is that if they're voting for Trump, they're not voting for me. But I don't look at politics left or right.

Speaker 6 I look at it more as whose side are you on. And I was in Zanesville today with a UAW plant.
And Zanesville is a small industrial town, very conservative. It's kind of the northern edge of Appalachia.

Speaker 6 I will get a lot of votes there because people know I fight for workers. And regardless how they vote in the presidential race, and that's,

Speaker 6 I mean,

Speaker 6 my mission has always been to put workers, the workers should be at the table and talk about the dignity of work, a term from Dr. King initially that he used.

Speaker 6 And I think if you stand up to interest groups like I have, it means tens of millions of dollars are spent against you, but it means that voters, regardless of how they're looking in the presidential race, are likely to vote for somebody that they see as on their side.

Speaker 22 What do you make of a lot of unions in this cycle? You see a lot of the union, the leadership is for Kamala Harris and for Democrats. Some of the rank and file sort of drifting towards Trump.

Speaker 22 I've seen that in places in Michigan. I've heard union members be interviewed, say that some of their fellow workers are a little more pro-Trump.
I've heard that in some other states.

Speaker 22 What do you think is going on there?

Speaker 6 Yeah, I wear when I have a suit or I wear a pen. It's a canary in a birdcage.

Speaker 6 You know the story, Jonathan. Mine workers used to take a canary down in the mines when they didn't have a union strong enough or a government that cared enough to help him.
He was really on his own.

Speaker 6 And where that pen signifies to me

Speaker 6 that workers are the center of what we should fight for in government. I don't know that Democrats around the country have focused on that the way that we should.

Speaker 6 And workers, that symbol also means to me that when

Speaker 6 we didn't, 100 years ago, Wall Street didn't come

Speaker 6 to us and say, hey, I think we should start Social Security, take care of seniors. We fought for it, we demanded it, we got it.

Speaker 6 The polluters didn't come to us and say, it's time to clean up Lake Erie, I want to help. We had to force them, demand it, and make it happen.

Speaker 6 We didn't create Medicare because the health insurance interests wanted to help us. Civil rights didn't happen because a bunch of southern segregationist senators said it's time to give them the vote.

Speaker 6 I mean,

Speaker 6 it really symbolizes, I think the Democrats need to fight more on these issues that matter to everyday people. And I I don't know that National Democrats have figured that out well enough.

Speaker 6 And I can see in Ohio, it's why as a party, we've slipped a little bit.

Speaker 22 Talk to me about Bernie Moreno. What have you found is the most persuasive argument to people who are thinking about voting for him? You mentioned, of course,

Speaker 22 his stance on abortion.

Speaker 22 What else are people finding troubling?

Speaker 6 Well, first of all, he's, as you said, he's a car dealer, luxury car dealer. He has cheated his own workers.

Speaker 6 Raphael Warnock was in town the other day for me, and he said Marino had to pay $400,000 in back pay to workers who he had stiffed out of their overtime and then destroyed the evidence that a judge ordered him to produce.

Speaker 6 And Rafael said, you can't trust a guy who, how would you trust a guy who treats his own workers that way? Why would you think he'd treat workers around the state in any better way? So Marino,

Speaker 6 he's 100% wrong in abortion. He's done that with his own workers.
He's against, not only just against the minimum wage, but he's against, he thinks the minimum wage should be eliminated.

Speaker 6 And recently, as some of you have seen, I assume you've seen it, John, he was in a town hall and

Speaker 6 he said,

Speaker 6 why are these single-issue voters in abortion? What's with them? Why should a woman over the age of 50 care about abortion? And that sort of tells you who he is.

Speaker 6 And it tells you, I mean, he mocked Ohioans, and he particularly mocked women over 50. And I don't think they, as my wife, whom you know, wrote in her Substack column,

Speaker 6 see at the polls, pal, because it's pretty clear. So, but Marino's also a self-funder.
I ask people

Speaker 6 because he's spending so much, because McConnell's spending so much in my race, this is probably the most expensive race now, most money spent against a candidate ever for the U.S.

Speaker 6 Senate, $200 million, something like that. So I ask people to come to sharedbrown.com and help me with $15 or $20 or whatever you can afford.

Speaker 22 So aside from your Senate race, Ohio has become part of the national political debate this year, thanks to your fellow senator and current Trump running mate, J.D. Vance.

Speaker 22 Both Vance and Trump are still spreading lies about the good people of Springfield, Ohio,

Speaker 22 including hardworking, tax-paying immigrants who are there legally. How has that whole controversy landed with folks in Ohio?

Speaker 22 Is that something that's come up in your race too?

Speaker 6 First of all,

Speaker 6 these Senate partners, if you will, it's kind of an arranged marriage.

Speaker 6 Vance didn't choose me, and I sure as hell didn't choose him. I bet.
But that's what we got. Springfield is a town of,

Speaker 6 it's a town a lot like where I grew up, Mansfield. It's a little larger, about 60,000 people.
It's a city that's been hit really hard by globalization.

Speaker 6 All kinds of manufacturing jobs have been lost in that city.

Speaker 6 And they were coming back. And

Speaker 6 the business community brought in and politicians of both parties brought in a number of immigrants to work in these plants

Speaker 6 and then you know lo and behold political figures politicized it and I've worked with them on this issue for months working with state government working with federal government getting help as as more housing is needed more

Speaker 6 more public works generally better more schools to to create to address this influx of people. I think they're getting back on their feet.
I think they will.

Speaker 6 I think it's a prosperous town and beginning to be a prosperous town. And I'm just hopeful that politicians

Speaker 6 stop injecting themselves in to

Speaker 6 create division just so they can win politically. I mean, you saw that on the immigration bill that was about to pass earlier this summer, and

Speaker 6 it was agreed to. It was a pretty conservative bill.
The border agents supported it, yet for political reasons, it got blown up.

Speaker 6 And I'm hopeful after the election, after we have a pretty good year, we keep the Senate and the Kambala wins, we win the House. I'm hopeful we can actually do things and put

Speaker 6 this divisive for the sake of political victories and divisive politics behind us.

Speaker 22 Yeah, it seems like one challenge is that, especially in the Trump era, you know, Republicans want to tell people that their very legitimate concerns about cost of living, cost of housing, health care, you know, are the fault of immigrants, of people who don't look like them.

Speaker 22 And, you know, and you and a lot of other Democrats are trying to say, look, there's, you know, corporations making record profits and CEOs making record profits and, you know, rich as ever. And

Speaker 22 we should look to them when we're trying to figure out how to help you with the cost of living.

Speaker 22 Like, how have you handled sort of the immigration issue when you've heard about it from voters in Ohio who might be frustrated?

Speaker 6 Yeah, immigration. And they're running some really nasty ads on immigration on transgender against me to the tune of $50, $60 million of ads.

Speaker 6 And fact checkers have shown they're simply not true.

Speaker 6 Independent fact checkers, not Democratic-Republican fact-checkers. And

Speaker 6 they keep running the ads as you would expect them to because they only win when they divide people.

Speaker 6 But I think when you talk about immigration and you talk about a couple of things and you talk about inflation and relate them together, pull them together.

Speaker 6 I talk about going to the grocery store after church, my wife and I, and we see that, and we hear in the checkout counter, we hear at the meat counter, checkout lane in the meat counter, people are complaining about prices,

Speaker 6 but they also understand that it's corporate, it's been corporate greed, the kind of stock buybacks that executives are taking, the kind of

Speaker 6 huge, huge profits, as you point out. point out.

Speaker 6 I also though think that when it comes to immigration, that

Speaker 6 I went to the the border with the Republican sheriff who has since endorsed me. And

Speaker 6 he's a reasonable guy about these issues.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 when one of the things that we've worked on, especially Ohio, in Ohio, about 350 people a month die from

Speaker 6 fentanyl.

Speaker 6 I've been aggressively

Speaker 6 going after the cartels. I've written a bill that's now law going after the cart sanctioning the cartels, sanctioning the precursor chemicals and makers in China.

Speaker 6 And much of what we have to do in my state, especially about immigration, is dealing with the drug issue that,

Speaker 6 and it's all the above. It's scaling up treatment programs.
It's giving Border Patrol

Speaker 6 the screening devices to look for this stuff that's smuggled in. And most of it's smuggled across

Speaker 6 mostly by Americans, apparently, they told us. I mean, factually, that's true.
And

Speaker 6 it comes across at the border and legitimate traffic in the ports, in the points of entry. So we scale that up much better.

Speaker 6 We will in large part deal with this fentanyl poisoning problem. But it also, as I said, it's local treatment programs too, for sure.

Speaker 22 Jeff Goldberg over at the Atlantic just reported that Trump once said in an Oval Office meeting, I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.

Speaker 22 That's according to two sources in the meeting. His former chief of staff, John Kelly, confirmed to Goldberg that he also heard Trump praise Hitler's generals.

Speaker 22 So I saw someone tweet, you know, is it too much for the Republican Party and the American people to care about this type of thing? What do you think?

Speaker 6 Of course we should care about this kind of thing.

Speaker 6 I guess I step back for a second, John. And one of the things that's troubled me, I mean,

Speaker 6 that I'm still incredulous about, and it's hard to be incredulous about anything now, perhaps in American politics.

Speaker 6 But how I have a lot of Ukrainians in Ohio, and Ukrainians have historically been Republican because I have heard from many Ukrainians a generation or two later that they think FDR sold them out at Yalta and Truman sold them out at Potsdam.

Speaker 6 I mean, they think the Democrats have not been the anti-communist party enough and the Ukrainians are here as opponents to the Soviet Union, legitimately. And

Speaker 6 they have changed because they've seen what makes me incredulous is one of the political parties in this country is a pro-Russia party. That's the case for my opponent.

Speaker 6 It's the case for the people my opponent associates with and that the Ukrainians feel adrift and now are much more

Speaker 6 supportive of our foreign policy because they know

Speaker 6 Democrats don't go to bed with dictators.

Speaker 6 And our allies are people.

Speaker 6 Our allies are Ukraine and Poland and Britain and Israel and France and democratic countries around the world, Japan. And

Speaker 6 people are pretty increasingly troubled by this, these, these, that the countries like Iran and Russia and China,

Speaker 6 that we are, we are,

Speaker 6 we are too close to, some of our leaders are too close to them.

Speaker 22 You were just endorsed by former Republican governor Bob Taft,

Speaker 22 the only person to ever beat you back in the 1990 Ohio Secretary of State election.

Speaker 6 Almost nobody knows that, but thank you for pointing that out.

Speaker 22 Otherwise, you got a perfect winning streak there.

Speaker 22 What does that endorsement mean to you? And what do you want it it to mean to voters?

Speaker 6 Yeah, Bob Taft was a good public servant. He beat me in 1990 for Secretary of State.

Speaker 6 And I've gotten along with him except during that

Speaker 6 16 months or whatever, that race. I wasn't like friendly.
We weren't friendly then.

Speaker 6 Since he beat me, within a few years, we began to see each other every once in a while. I've spoken to his class.

Speaker 6 He's a longtime public servant. His family goes back actually before William Howard Taft, the president, is his great-grandfather.

Speaker 6 But there was a Taft before him whose name I forgot and it was like a judge or something but so it's a storied family in Ohio his his support means a lot to a lot of people

Speaker 6 he's a he would be considered by some as kind of a rhino Republican but but he's solid people like him they trust him his support means a lot I have I have heard many many Republicans tell me that they support me including Republican office holders Most don't want to be public about it because they feel a bit threatened by their party if they do.

Speaker 6 But I think Taft's support will go a long way to just tell Republicans, you know, Brown's been effective and I've worked with people to get things done. I've worked with Republicans

Speaker 6 when I need to to get stuff done. I come up with ideas.
from my meetings in your wife's hometown of Cincinnati or Cleveland or wherever.

Speaker 6 Roy Blunt was a former senator, if you remember, from

Speaker 6 Missouri. And I'd known him for 30 years or so.
And he was talking to somebody once and he said, What do you think of Sherrod Brown?

Speaker 6 He said, Well, I've known him for 30 years, and we've agreed exactly five times. And he laughs, and then he said, But all five of those were fed, became federal law.

Speaker 6 So the whole point is you find people that you don't agree with or don't even necessarily like much. I liked Roy, but

Speaker 6 you then find a way to work with them because if you can build that coalition, it works. And so a TAF knows I do that, and that's what gets things done in my state.

Speaker 6 And I will always continue to do that.

Speaker 22 Two weeks to go, extremely close race. Some folks still making up their minds whether to vote for you or whether to vote at all.

Speaker 22 What do you want them to know? What's the closing message

Speaker 22 in the last two weeks here?

Speaker 6 That

Speaker 6 I'll be on their side, that politics is not left or right in my mind. It's whose side are you on? And that my opponent is 100% wrong in abortion rights.
My opponent is 100% wrong in minimum wage.

Speaker 6 My opponent

Speaker 6 fleece took money from

Speaker 6 his employees, $400,000 in back wages.

Speaker 6 And I'd ask people to come on board to go to sherrodbrown.com and contribute $15,000 or $20 or volunteer or come to Ohio or make phone calls into Ohio in a close race in a race where 12 million people live in my state and it's going down to the wire.

Speaker 6 So I appreciate their joining us.

Speaker 22 Sherrod Brown, thank you as always, and good luck in the final stretch. We'll do everything we can too.
And Emily also says hello. She wanted me to tell you hi.

Speaker 6 Tell Emily hi and tell the judge hello too. And John, thank you so much for doing this.

Speaker 4 That's our show for today. Thanks to Sherrod Brown and thanks so much to Alex Wagner for being here with me.
Everyone, make sure you're watching Alex Wagner tonight, Tuesday through Friday at 9 p.m.

Speaker 4 Eastern on MSNBC. And of course, we're looking forward to watching you on election night, election week, whatever it's going to be.
In the meantime, please check out votesaveamerica.com slash vote.

Speaker 4 And John and I will be back with a new show on Friday.

Speaker 3 Bye, everyone. Thanks.

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