A Tale of Two Campaigns

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Speaker 15 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

Speaker 15 On today's show, Donald Trump goes after RFK Jr., Larry David goes after Donald Trump, no labels goes after anyone left who will join their ticket.

Speaker 15 And MAGA World goes completely nuts with conspiracies about how the Baltimore Bridge collapsed because of open borders and DEI programs.

Speaker 15 Then Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of Texas stops by the studio to talk to Tommy about the secret to driving House Republicans crazy. I feel like they're almost there, but...

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, where are you driving them to?

Speaker 15 But she does do a particularly good job of it. But first, a tale of two campaigns.
Joe Biden just capped off a very busy month of campaigning.

Speaker 15 He hit eight swing states in just 18 days with a New York fundraising event featuring Barack Obama and Bill Clinton that's expected to bring in a record-breaking $25 million.

Speaker 15 That is more money than the Trump campaign raised in December and January combined. And the Biden campaign also has more than three times the amount of cash on hand as the Trump folks do.

Speaker 15 Over the last month, they've also opened 100 new offices and hired more than 350 new staffers in the swing states.

Speaker 15 Meanwhile, the other campaign, Trump has held just one actual campaign event, one event since clinching the nomination on March 12th.

Speaker 15 The campaign hasn't yet made any significant investments or hires in the swing states, even though they've fired.

Speaker 15 dozens of staffers since taking over the RNC and are reportedly quizzing potential new employees on whether they believe the 2020 election was stolen.

Speaker 15 Instead of campaigning, Trump has been splitting time between his golf club and a Manhattan courtroom where he will soon be tried for the first of dozens of criminal charges.

Speaker 15 Trump's legal bills are piling up, which is one reason he's short on cash and reduced to making fundraising pitches like this one on Truth Social.

Speaker 16 But the Soros-PAC prosecutors and politicians, Democrats, all that are after us, we have to go out, we have to fight. They're communists, they're fascists, they're lunatics, and they just don't stop.

Speaker 16 They don't know how to give up, and you got to hand it to them for that. But that's the only thing you got to give them credit for.

Speaker 16 They're bad people, they're against our country, they don't want our country to make it. There's something wrong with them, but we're fighting, we're winning.
You see what's going on.

Speaker 16 So, whatever you can do to help financially would be fantastic because we have to beat it if it's five dollars or ten dollars or a hundred dollars, whatever you can do

Speaker 15 the communists and their fascists,

Speaker 15 Just in case. Now, Dan,

Speaker 15 if you woke up to that news today that I just mentioned about the two campaigns and hadn't seen any polling over the last several months, you might be surprised to learn that the race is basically tied.

Speaker 15 But one would think that the huge gap between the Biden and Trump campaign operations will ultimately make a difference in a close race, right? Tell me it will.

Speaker 15 Do you need me to say yes yes to this?

Speaker 15 Whatever, no, you can say whatever you believe. No, look, I think you don't even read all of that.

Speaker 15 If you had just said to me that he was preparing to start a criminal trial for one of his dozens of criminal charges, like that's it. That's the point at which I am shocked that the race is tied.

Speaker 15 I don't even need to know about his laziness or lack of money or that bizarre pitch. Just one guy is going to walk in a courtroom and may leave in a prison jumpsuit.

Speaker 15 And the fact that that race is tied, that's alarming and quite surprising.

Speaker 15 Look, this is always so hard to talk about this in such a close election because of course it could make a difference. Everything can make a difference.

Speaker 15 It's why it's such an exhausting election to talk about. 50,000 votes over three states, a handful more organizers, a few better ads, a couple more campaign visits.

Speaker 15 Any one of those things could be the difference between democracy and authoritarianism, right? It's just that. It's just that.
It's how narrow the margins are. So it's really, it's important.

Speaker 15 The thing that I think is, that this has reminded us of is that there is an advantage to incumbency.

Speaker 15 There had been this sense, I think, and even I felt it some, that Trump had negated some of Biden's incumbent advantage because he had glided through the primaries.

Speaker 15 He never really had to like get on debate stage and muck it up with a bunch of yahoos.

Speaker 15 He didn't, you know, he avoided some of the more demeaning parts of the primary process and just basically ran as a nominee the whole time. But he was spending money.

Speaker 15 in those states to win those delegates.

Speaker 15 And the Biden campaign was clearly behind the scenes, while things were very quiet, building an operation and putting in place a plan that they were going to launch the moment he walked off the stage during the State of the Union.

Speaker 15 And they are doing that and they're executing it quite impressively, I think.

Speaker 15 Now, it does seem like the Trump people could catch up after all these stories ran about how far behind they are.

Speaker 15 I guess the Trump campaign did a call with reporters today where they said that the RNC will be opening dozens of offices and hiring hundreds of staff in the next month or so.

Speaker 15 I listened to you and Sarah on yesterday's episode and you made the point that, you know, Biden has a lot more cash, but Trump will probably have enough cash to run the campaign.

Speaker 15 And of course, we know that he was outspent by Hillary Clinton in 2016, still won that campaign. So what do you think?

Speaker 15 Is this just sort of a temporary, you know, where the general is just starting out and people need stories to write? Or do you think this is a real advantage that Biden will have through November?

Speaker 15 Look, yeah, he has the advantage now. And yes, Trump can narrow the gap, but time is the only non-renewable resource in a campaign.
And so Biden is going to, this is time that Trump is wasting.

Speaker 15 And I think the Trump campaign may be misunderstanding their own success in 2016.

Speaker 15 Some of the things he was able to do that allowed him to negate the financial disadvantage with Hillary Clinton and to avoid sort of traditional campaigning are not available to him this time.

Speaker 15 His ability to dominate the political conversation does not exist like it used to, right? The entire world was dialed in in 2016.

Speaker 15 Everything Everything he was saying and doing, every single tweet was not just like on CNN and MSNBC and Fox and in the New York Times. It was on local television.
It was on

Speaker 15 late night comedy shows. It was on social media.
That world doesn't exist anymore. You can't reach people that way.
You have to do it in a more systematic, piecemeal approach.

Speaker 15 And they have not yet shown the ability to do that.

Speaker 15 The other advantage he had is he recognized the market inefficiency around Facebook and how he could sort of gig the Facebook algorithm, which benefits his sort of outrageous content, to drive the conversation and reach a shitload of voters at a very low cost.

Speaker 15 That is not available to him in the same way either, right? Democrats have narrowed the gap there. We figured that out, but Facebook is also deprioritizing that sort of political content.

Speaker 15 So, the ways in which he was able to allie the sort of political gravity in 2016 are not available in the same way.

Speaker 15 So, he's going to have to come up with new ways to narrow the gap or get better at traditional politics, one of the two. So, I know that he's not campaigning as much as Biden is because he is lazy.

Speaker 15 He has also had some courtroom appearances that will continue to keep him busy. We've talked about that.
I wonder

Speaker 15 if

Speaker 15 there's anything intentional about it as well. Let's see what you think about this.
It's like Biden's job. Is this a theory? You're giving me a theory? I'm giving you a theory.

Speaker 15 I'm giving you a theory. I'm just

Speaker 15 something I've been wondering about. Biden's job is pretty clear, right? He needs to make the race a choice between four more years of Biden and four more years of Trump.

Speaker 15 And a big part of that is reminding people, reminding voters why they don't like Donald Trump. Trump's job is to keep the focus on Biden and make sure that voters don't remember how awful he is.

Speaker 15 One way of executing that strategy is to simply not be in voters' faces as much and to lay low a little bit. I think there is something to that theory, right?

Speaker 15 I think you are right that the more Donald Trump is in the news, the less well he does.

Speaker 15 And he has been in the news a lot recently as the campaign has kicked off, as he's become the nominee, as his court cases have been more intent, the more intense focus in the Supreme Court case or an immunity.

Speaker 15 Like that's all been not great for him is my take. I do, the one thing that I think that they may also be missing is that

Speaker 15 His goal was to keep the focus on Biden and keep the focus on Biden in the way in which Trump wants Biden to be viewed.

Speaker 15 And that was a much easier task when Biden was being much quieter and he wasn't campaigning and he wasn't on air, right?

Speaker 15 He was really shadow boxing against a caricature of Biden being promoted by the right-wing media, by clips on social media, by sort of the Biden discourse about his age. And Biden is now pushing back.

Speaker 15 There's a countervailing pro-Biden message happening, both from his campaigning and from a serious amount of television advertising.

Speaker 15 So just simply sitting back and letting sort of the world beat up on Biden and sending some truths and making some jokes jokes about it, that I think will not work in an engaged campaign.

Speaker 15 So, yeah, it may be that he's trying to keep the focus on Biden, but he's going to have to do more than just, I think, step back if Biden's going to be actually actively making the case for himself, which he's now doing effectively and with money behind it.

Speaker 15 I will say also that

Speaker 15 the idea that Trump can somehow muster the discipline to lay low, not make himself

Speaker 15 the center of attention.

Speaker 15 Your new Trump theory that John has put on here.

Speaker 15 But I was wondering wondering if, like, you know, the people in the campaign,

Speaker 15 it could have been a strategy that they are at least aspiring to.

Speaker 15 I don't necessarily believe they'll be able to execute on it. That is the advantage of Truth Social, right?

Speaker 15 Because before, if he wasn't campaigning, he was tweeting, and tweeting was getting him a ton of attention. He is just truthing like a maniac out there, and no one knows or cares, right?

Speaker 15 It really is like

Speaker 15 the Creed's blog from the office where Ryan just opened a Word document and told me he was posting on the air. That's kind of what Truth Social is.

Speaker 15 Well, the Biden campaigns, though, are doing a good job.

Speaker 15 Their rapid response operation and their Twitter feed has been like copy-pasting his truths a lot more, which I think is good because it's like getting them in the mix a little bit more.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's good. The stuff the Biden campaign has been doing over the last several weeks since the campaign has fully kicked off has been quite impressive, I think.

Speaker 15 Let's talk about the money. The New York Times ran the numbers.

Speaker 15 Trump has spent more than $100 million on legal bills since leaving office, which, according to the Times, nets out to more than $90,000 a day.

Speaker 15 And somehow the guy who just loves telling us how rich he is isn't paying for any of this with his own money. How is that possible?

Speaker 15 Well, John, do you know how people like Donald Trump get really rich? They spend more time. They scam other people.

Speaker 15 Well, they're better at taking money from other people than spending their own, right? That's how I got so rich.

Speaker 15 It is one of the reasons why Trump is in a money deficit is the big money donors probably don't want to give money to have that money spent on legal bills. They would love to defeat Joe Biden.

Speaker 15 They would would love lower tax rates. They'd love to be able to pollute with impunity.
But the idea that they're going to pay for his criminal defense, it gives them pause.

Speaker 15 It is certainly, I think, affecting donations to his super PACs, which are being massively outraised by the pro-Biden super PACs. Yeah.

Speaker 15 So instead, he's just, you know, asking people for five, $10, $15, $20

Speaker 15 so that they can fund

Speaker 15 his legal defense. And many of them will do that, right?

Speaker 15 The guy's, his entire life is just a series of scams designed to benefit one person, Donald Trump. That's it.
That's the whole campaign.

Speaker 15 That is, I think, where this, like, one of the reasons to talk about the legal bill stuff is to make sure that every rich person knows that their money is being misused that way, that this guy who just made $3 billion on paper for his scam website wants to take your money and use it to pay his legal bills.

Speaker 15 Like that, that can depress donations among the rich, the rich folks.

Speaker 15 But the other reason is you tie it, he's asking you to pay his legal bills, he's selling Bibles, he's selling sneakers, he's selling NFTs, he's doing all these things.

Speaker 15 It's all part of the narrative you just laid out, which is he's in it for himself. He's not in it for anybody else.
By the way,

Speaker 15 if he becomes president again, what a great way, what a great easy way for foreign government to curry favor with Donald Trump. All they have to do is buy some shares of Truth Social or

Speaker 15 some of the Lee Greenwood Bibles by the crate.

Speaker 15 It's just, it's the grift never ends.

Speaker 15 We just see MBS wearing those Trump, Air Trump ones or whatever those sneakers are. Yeah.
Huge minority stakeholder in Truth Social, MBS, with his, with his holding up his fucking Lee Greenwood Bible.

Speaker 15 One last thing here on this new RNC big lie litmus test for new hires. Obviously, it is Trump's Republican Party, has been for a while.

Speaker 15 He is free to staff it with as many election deniers as he'd like.

Speaker 15 It does seem like it may limit the talent pool that he can choose from to run this race and also maybe the appeal that he can make to voters who don't believe the election was stolen. I don't know.

Speaker 15 What do you think?

Speaker 15 I think I said to you the other day, off mic, I hope the DNC is asking their hires if they think Biden was the legitimate winner. Because if the answer is no, we don't want those people on our team.

Speaker 15 It is an important litmus test.

Speaker 15 I do hope it's being.

Speaker 15 It is funny that people are so worked up about some

Speaker 15 junior MAGA kid having to being forced to pass his litmus test when it is the actual litmus test for membership in the party writ large.

Speaker 15 If you are a member of Congress and you are unwilling to say that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, you basically get run out of the party.

Speaker 15 So this is not the RNC field organizer interview process is low on the list of problems this relates to Donald Trump's MAGA extremism, big lie election denier bullshit stuff.

Speaker 15 Like it is, it's what you have to be to be a Republican now. That is the price of admission to the party.

Speaker 15 I do think it's just yet another proof point that this is what the second Trump administration will look like. It's like kooks, morons, grifters, right-wing extremists out for revenge.

Speaker 15 You got your Mike Flynns, your Stephen Millers, Steve Bannons, Laura Loomer, Marjorie Taylor Greene. This is it.
This is who's going to be in charge of the government.

Speaker 15 And as a campaign message, again, it's like what you were saying. You know, if you, you got Joe Biden, who wants to be a president for everyone, even the people who don't vote for him.

Speaker 15 And then you got Donald Trump, who is a president only for people with undying loyalty to him and all of his craziest conspiracy theories.

Speaker 15 You got to sign up for all of it in order that otherwise Trump doesn't want your vote, doesn't want you to be part of anything, and is not only going to not help you, probably going to come after you.

Speaker 15 That's the difference.

Speaker 15 I would like to say I picked up a paper, but I haven't done that in years.

Speaker 15 But I was on the internet today and I saw a story that said, potential Secretary of State Rick Grinnell meeting with foreign leaders.

Speaker 15 And I was like, not just foreign leaders, like right-wing autocrats all over the world, just finding all the authoritarians and fascists he can in every country. And he's just, you know,

Speaker 15 just wait, wait until Trump's back. It just hadn't even occurred.
I mean, this is my own ignorance, but it hadn't even occurred to me that Rick Grinnell was going to be the Secretary of State.

Speaker 15 Like, obviously, that's the case, but it's just like,

Speaker 15 that is the level that we are dealing with here. Yeah.
And again. You don't need Senate appointments.

Speaker 15 First of all, you're probably going to get Senate appointments because you're going to have like a pretty MAGA Senate at this point if Trump wins again.

Speaker 15 And even if not, all you have to do is just install someone as the number two deputy, leave the top job open, and they'll get to do whatever they want to do with no with no confirmation from the Senate.

Speaker 15 So that's what we're going to get.

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Speaker 15 Trump's latest messaging has also been as sharp and disciplined as ever.

Speaker 15 He spent most of the week week on Truth Social attacking the judge who's about to preside over his first criminal trial, the judge's daughter, Rana McDaniel, MSDNC, sleepy eyes, Chuck Todd, etc., etc.

Speaker 15 The whole, he just, you know, of course he had to weigh in on the whole Rana drama.

Speaker 15 But he also attacked someone he doesn't mention often, independent candidate and self-proclaimed spoiler Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,

Speaker 15 calling him, quote, the most radical left candidate in the race by far, and saying, quote, I guess this would mean he's going to be taking votes from crooked Joe Biden, which would be a great service to America.

Speaker 15 I love that he is running. Trump fanboy and future cabinet secretary Vivek Ramaswamy certainly agrees.
Here he is on Fox Wednesday night.

Speaker 20 What we need this November is a decisive moral mandate, a landslide of Reagan 1980, 1984 proportions. And I think we have an opportunity to do it.

Speaker 20 And if RFK being in this race helps that, you know what? I think that could be a good thing for this country.

Speaker 20 And I'm against any Democratic effort to try to remove him or keep him off the ballot as they will try to do.

Speaker 15 What do you think's going on here? Is Trump actually afraid of losing votes to RFK Jr.? Is he trying to define him as a lefty so that RFK takes votes from Biden? Is it both?

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's always so hard to divine the plan here. But I think to the extent there is one, it is to

Speaker 15 try to basically do to RFK Jr. what Adam Schiff did to Steve Garvey, where

Speaker 15 the super PAC that supported Adam Schiff in the California primary ran all these ads attacking Garvey as being a MAGA Republican to raise his name ID and make in get MAGA Republicans to vote for him.

Speaker 15 I think what he's essentially doing here is saying, look at this radical lefty to try to get liberals and more progressive Democrats who are or more progressive voters, I'd say, who are not super happy with Biden to go to RFK Jr.

Speaker 15 Now, is he executing this plan with subtlety? No. Is it fully thought through? No.
But I do like that is part part, like RFK Jr. right now.

Speaker 15 And if you, everyone here obviously has already listened to the Wednesday pod where I talked to Liz Smith, who's working with the DNC on it, on dealing, on responding to third-party candidates.

Speaker 15 He takes from both maybe a little bit more from Biden is what we're saying. You know, that could tip one way or the other as more of these double haters

Speaker 15 come home, which often happens with third-party candidates.

Speaker 15 So he's trying to, I mean, what I see what he's doing, he's, which is what he always does, which is like try to do the card trick with the card sticking out of his sleeves.

Speaker 15 but i i kind of get what the trick is yeah i mean you and liz talked about rfk's vp pick uh nicole shanahan on the wednesday pod um any more thoughts on this choice now that we've had a few days to learn more about her um i noticed a politico headline from this morning that caught my eye rfk jr's vice presidential pick calls ivf one of the biggest lies being told about women's health uh she also wanted to fund a study to see if two hours of morning sunlight will help with fertility troubles i i noticed So

Speaker 15 you're a busy man. You're running a media company.
You're basically podcasting 18 hours a day. You probably did not watch the announcement, did you? I did not watch the announcement.
No, it was wild.

Speaker 15 It was scheduled for like,

Speaker 15 I don't know, it's maybe sort of like 10 in the morning. And Liz was supposed to come on the podcast at 1:30.
Obviously, three and a half hours would be enough time to get a VP announced.

Speaker 15 No such luck. There was a

Speaker 15 pre-program. RFK Jr.
spoke for so long that I left to go

Speaker 15 pick up my kid from school, came back, and I thought YouTube had frozen, but he was still talking. And so the main point here is the whole thing was chaos, just not well thought out, right?

Speaker 15 I just think that there is no, maybe

Speaker 15 all of the ideas were, with the possible exception of Jesse Ventura, which is just like, that's crazy, but it's like RFK crazy. The other ones, you know, Aaron Rodgers, Mike Rowe, all nuts.

Speaker 15 This just seems like the last, the only person willing to say yes, I think, think, who also happens to have the ability to self-fund a ballot access effort. Yeah, that seems like the real.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 And she's got a little sort of like woo-woo. Oh, lots of very woo-woo.
Very Northern California vibes. Yeah.

Speaker 15 No offense.

Speaker 15 Oh, yes. Just the salt of the earth down there in Southern California.

Speaker 15 We're real America down here.

Speaker 15 So it's interesting. Some of Kennedy's supporters, or at least people claiming to be his supporters, don't seem too happy about the pick.
A few appear to be planning an event called the Save RFK Jr.

Speaker 15 Rally, intended to recall Shanahan and his campaign manager, who's Kennedy's own daughter-in-law and also a former CIA officer.

Speaker 15 The organizers, they have this event on his website because on RFK Jr.'s website, supporters can go on and organize their own campaign events.

Speaker 15 So the organizers of this event say that she's using her divorce settlement money from Sergey Brin to, quote, manipulate the Kennedy campaign.

Speaker 15 And they're asking, quote, what will come of the Kennedy family after Roberts' presidential campaign is derailed by a poor vice president running mate, or he is assassinated by the CIA to install Nicole Shanahan as president?

Speaker 15 Let's not wait around to find out. I guess this is what happens when you let anyone who visits your campaign website organize their own events.
Or, more likely,

Speaker 15 your entire rise to political fame is based on spreading dangerous conspiracy theories. Yeah, eventually they're going to come bite you in the ass.

Speaker 15 I mean, just these are the kind of people you're bringing to your campaign, right?

Speaker 15 Another one on the docket, if you're, if you can't go to that event, you can also go to the dramatic reading of RFK's sex diary.

Speaker 15 That event is listed as taking place at 69 Scumbag Drive Intercourse, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 15 I don't think that's real. You don't think that's a real one? No.
Who knows? We're just asking questions. Maybe.
You never know. That's right.
I don't know.

Speaker 15 We're going to do our own research. Maybe they want you to think it's fake.

Speaker 15 You think about that? That's what pharma wants. So most of the RFK news isn't that funny.

Speaker 15 The folks at Split Ticket just ran a poll with only 18 to 29-year-old voters that finds Biden at 35%, Trump at 25%, and RFK Jr. at 23%.

Speaker 15 There's also a new Quinnipiac poll that also has RFK Jr. taking about a quarter of the youth vote.
Thoughts on those numbers and in general, what the Biden campaign should be doing about Kennedy?

Speaker 15 Well, those numbers aren't good, John. I'll tell you that.
No, they're not. No, they're not.
Joe Biden won the youth vote by 20 points, I believe.

Speaker 15 23 points for under 29 voters was the in the Pew Validated voter study, just to pick a random one.

Speaker 15 You know, I talked to Liz about this for a while, but there is, you're going to have to eventually have

Speaker 15 trusted, I think it's going to be less about what Biden does or even like necessarily advertising with the campaign, but you're going to need some sort of trusted messengers making the case for who RFK Jr.

Speaker 15 really is. So

Speaker 15 he is not, while he has these environmental credentials and all this woo-woo stuff, as you, as you described it,

Speaker 15 as you look down your nose on us from real america in la she met her last husband at a wonder lust yoga festival i mean come on i'm i yeah i'm not

Speaker 15 i'm not defending nicole shanahan here i'm making fun of you it's too new very different than

Speaker 15 but you know he he has very right-wing positions immigration right-wing positions on abortion the ivf stuff i think very powerful okay

Speaker 15 Right now, he's just a name with some Democratic patina that is not Joe Biden or Donald Trump. And we have to fill in the blanks of that.

Speaker 15 And if we do that, I think a lot of those voters can come home. I think the good news is there's time to do it.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I found it somewhat hopeful when Liz said that a third of the people who say they're going to support RFK Jr.

Speaker 15 have no idea what he stands for. Any of his positions are just literally just based on his name.
Yeah. It's just another

Speaker 15 one person who's not Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Right.
A few other interesting things I found in that split ticket poll.

Speaker 15 Biden and Trump are both quite unpopular with younger voters, but a lot more of them hold a strongly unfavorable view of Trump than they do Biden.

Speaker 15 And among those who are certain to vote, young people who are certain to say they're certain to vote, it's Biden 41, Trump 28, Kennedy 18.

Speaker 15 And then the double haters, Trump is not getting the double haters. He's only getting 6% of people who don't like Biden or Trump.
And Biden's getting 29 and actually RFK Jr.

Speaker 15 is winning that group, which is not totally surprising. And his strongest demo is independent young voters, which is a group that he is actually winning.

Speaker 15 It's the one demo he's winning in that youth voter.

Speaker 15 I think it's an interesting poll just because a lot of these, when we were talking about the youth vote, it's usually like a subsample of a larger poll.

Speaker 15 And in some of these polls, it shows like Trump winning the youth vote. And this does not show this.

Speaker 15 This basically, this poll says Biden has problems with young voters, but it's not that they like Trump. It's just that they don't like Biden.

Speaker 15 And right right now they're parking themselves with RFK Jr. or saying that they're not going to vote.
Yeah. And the good news of that is they're not going to go to Trump.

Speaker 15 The more challenging news is you have to win almost all of them back because you can't afford not to.

Speaker 15 Because every, even if they go to, if they vote for RFK or they don't vote, that is a minus one from the Biden column, presuming most of them voted for Biden in 2020. Yep.

Speaker 15 And then you've got to make that vote up somewhere else. And I don't know where that's coming from.
So. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 15 Meanwhile, our friends at No Labels are having some real trouble finding anyone to be their spoiler candidate.

Speaker 15 Friend of the pod, Chris Christie, officially declined to be on the No Labels ticket on Wednesday, saying he'd concluded that doing so would only help Donald Trump. Good for Chris Christie.

Speaker 15 We always knew he was he'd be a hero in the end.

Speaker 15 As Playbook put it this morning, quote, Christie joined senators Joe Manchin, Bill Cassidy, Mitt Romney, Representative Dean Phillips, former governors Nikki Haley, Larry Hogan, and John Huntsman, and former Lieutenant Governor Jeff Duncan, among others, in passing on a chance to be No Labels candidate.

Speaker 15 On top of that, the group's chairman, former senator and former Democrat Joe Lieberman, died on Wednesday at age 82. Complications from a fall, apparently.
Very sad.

Speaker 15 Lieberman himself pointed out in one of his final interviews that no labels might ultimately fail to find and field a bipartisan unity ticket and said, quote, if it's Trump and Biden, for me, it's an easy choice.

Speaker 15 What do you think? Is this thing falling apart? Is there anyone else left to run on the no labels ticket?

Speaker 15 It seems like it's falling apart. Like, could they find a random person to a random Republican state legislator and a random independent or Democrat somewhere to be the vice president? Sure.

Speaker 15 But the idea that they're going to recruit someone of name value, a former senator, a governor, a former presidential candidate, that seems to have fallen apart before their eyes.

Speaker 15 And that is positive news for the Biden campaign. Yeah.
And again, they keep saying like, oh, we're not going to field a ticket if it's not a ticket that can win.

Speaker 15 And I do think that, I mean, that argument, you know, we thought it was bullshit the whole time, but it just makes it harder to argue that if it is like two no-name candidates that no one's ever heard of before and not someone, not two candidates with like, you know, a real background.

Speaker 15 And I think that they're definitely running out of those. They, it's, I don't care if they ran two former presidents, right? Or I don't know, it doesn't matter.
No, I know.

Speaker 15 There's a constitutional barrier to them winning.

Speaker 15 There is no, like, the whole thing is based on a lie. And the lie is that there is a world in which they could possibly win.
All they can do is spoil one way or the other.

Speaker 15 All the polling shows they would spoil things to help Trump. So don't do it.
Right. It's that, which is why a lot of these people have decided not to do it.

Speaker 15 They don't want to run a presidential campaign. They're certainly going to lose and hand the election to Trump and forever be

Speaker 15 like a persona non grata in polite society for ending democracy out of some fanciful ego trip.

Speaker 15 And I do think that's why Liz mentioned that the strongest argument against Kennedy is like a vote for Kennedy is a vote for Trump.

Speaker 15 You can like Kennedy, you cannot like Trump and Biden, but he's not going to win the presidency. And if he doesn't get on the ballot everywhere, then it's an even more powerful argument, right?

Speaker 15 Like, sure, he's on in some swing states, but you're throwing away your vote because there's, it's mathematically impossible for him to win.

Speaker 15 So, all right, before we get to the interview, we haven't yet talked about the deadly collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, mainly because when a tragedy like that occurs, You wait for an investigation to figure out what happened, and then you hope that the government fixes the bridge as soon as possible.

Speaker 15 Alas, that is not the world we live in anymore, Dan. Wired magazine ran a non-exhaustive list of things that have been blamed for the bridge collapse on social media.

Speaker 15 The list includes President Biden, Hamas, ISIS, P.

Speaker 15 Diddy, Nickelodeon, India, Barack Obama, Islam, Aliens, Sri Lanka, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, Wokeness, Ukraine, Foreign Aid, the CIA, Jewish people, Israel, Russia, China, Iran, COVID vaccines, DEI, immigrants, black people, and lockdowns.

Speaker 15 Unless you think that these are just random social media accounts generating these conspiracy theories, think again.

Speaker 15 On Twitter, Marjorie Taylor Greene asked ominously, is this an intentional attack or an accident? Utah State Representative Phil Lyman, a candidate for governor, tweeted, DEI equals DIE.

Speaker 15 And various Republicans beclowned themselves on right-wing television as they are prone to do. Let's listen.
This is a horrifying event.

Speaker 21 Is this terrorism?

Speaker 15 How the hell did this happen?

Speaker 21 Is this incompetence?

Speaker 15 Who's allowing this?

Speaker 21 How did this happen?

Speaker 22 The White House has issued a statement on this saying that there's no indication of the nefarious intent in the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

Speaker 22 But of course, you've been talking a lot about the potential for wrongdoing or potential for foul play given the wide open border.

Speaker 23 You look at our critical infrastructure and I'm one of these people that believes we've never fully come out of all the lockdowns and the COVID issues.

Speaker 23 If you talk to employers in America they'll tell you that filling slots with employees who aren't drug-adled is a very huge problem.

Speaker 24 The question here is maybe for the Department of Transportation whether it is with the airlines and what's going on with Boeing and all the problems they're having or in this case, you know what?

Speaker 15 Don't worry about tree equity, Buddha jej don't worry about all the other issues that go along with using the proper pronouns let's worry about people keeping people safe what the fuck is tree equity can we i have to admit i did not read the entire wired magazine article can we double click on the nickelodeon as the cause

Speaker 15 There's a scandal with a documentary about Nickelodeon and a couple of the

Speaker 15 producers in Nickelodeon, like just like with some awful sexual stuff with some of this. Okay, that's you don't want to go down that rabbit hole, Dan.
Yeah, that's that's what you're doing.

Speaker 15 I'm guessing that's why Nickelodeon popped up. Okay, all right.
All right, host of offline. Way to take it away to go down the rabbit hole.

Speaker 15 Hey, look, I just have to do my own research. What the hell is wrong with these people, Dan?

Speaker 15 I mean, they're just the worst people imaginable. I mean, it's great.
This is all a grift. It's a grift for money, it's a grift for attention.

Speaker 15 And the opportunities to do this come when there are these events

Speaker 15 that spark intense online conversation. Those happen so far less than they used to, right? We're now in so many different, you know, we're prisons through the individual algorithms.

Speaker 15 We are on all these different platforms. In the old days, something like this happened.

Speaker 15 There would be like a piece of video footage, a tragedy, a crash, someone would die, and then the entire world would gather and talk about it.

Speaker 15 And now when these things do break through, the people who

Speaker 15 are searching for clout, searching for for money searching for attention try to get there as fast as humanly possible to drive some sort of conversation down some sort of insane rabbit hole and there's there's two kinds of things right a lot of these conspiracy theories are about getting attention and followers for some real grifters the political stuff is all about very relentlessly and cynically and deviously using any opportunity you possibly can to push your worldview right to say that this is like the idea this is something to do with pronouns or dei or all these things is dangerously absurd.

Speaker 15 But then what you're doing is you get the outrage backlash to virality, right? You say this horrible thing, right?

Speaker 15 Like the person who called the mayor of Baltimore, the DEI mayor, and then everyone responds to it. The algorithm sees all that engagement as positive and shows it to more people.

Speaker 15 And that person gets more attention and builds more followers and can then monetize those followers either financially or politically. And this is the world we live in.

Speaker 15 This is the social media world that it continues to exist and it gets worse as some of the guardrails come down with people like Elon in charge of Twitter/slash X.

Speaker 15 And it is a social media story. And when it happened and we saw some of these conspiracies, Max and I decided we're going to be talking about it on offline this week.

Speaker 15 But it also is, it has bled into politics and is going to have like potentially real-world effects here.

Speaker 15 Republicans in Congress are already hinting that they may not pass the emergency funding necessary to fix the bridge, or at least not without extracting some concessions from Joe Biden.

Speaker 15 And it's just like, to me, it's just another example of how, like, you have, you have two parties, right?

Speaker 15 So you have this bridge that you drive across every day to get to work. An accident destroys the bridge.

Speaker 15 One party says, hey, we're going to move heaven and earth to fix this bridge as fast as we can, which is basically what Joe Biden said, what Pete Buttigieg said, what the mayors, the governor, everyone else said.

Speaker 15 We're going to get this done.

Speaker 15 The other party says, we're not giving you any money to fix the bridge that we think collapsed because of corporate diversity initiatives, drug addicts, COVID lockdowns, and a cyber attack that's the beginning of World War III.

Speaker 15 That's what Alex Jones said. Who do you want in charge?

Speaker 15 You want in charge? You want the party that's going to fix the bridge so you can get your ass to work or the party that says all that kind of shit?

Speaker 15 It's just, it's a very clear choice. And it's like the same, it fits in the same bucket as, you know, Taylor Swift is a deep state psyop and she and Travis Kelsey rigged the Super Bowl.

Speaker 15 And, you know, the ghost of Hugo Chavez and Mark Zuckerberg rigged the last election and stole it from Donald Trump. I mean, these people are fucking weirdos.
They are weirdos.

Speaker 15 If you ran into one of them at a coffee shop, you would not let them watch your laptop if you went to the bathroom. Why are you going to elect them to run the fucking country?

Speaker 15 Put that in.

Speaker 15 It's just if you do let them, if you do let them watch your laptop, clear your internet history immediately when you get back.

Speaker 15 Yeah, you're probably going to jail because they probably just, yeah, they probably committed some kind of cyber attack.

Speaker 15 Anyway, all right, before we go to break, we're less than 100 days away from the release of our book, Democracy or Else, How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps.

Speaker 15 And Cricket is giving back by donating the profits from the book to support Vote Save America and 2024 campaigns.

Speaker 15 If that's not incentive enough for you, we're also going to be giving away some limited limited edition democracy or else water bottles to keep you hydrated while following our guide to saving democracy.

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Speaker 15 I love, I always read the housekeeping, so I can just watch the look on your face as you discover the things the company you started is doing. It's so good.
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Speaker 15 All you have to do. I forgot the end of the pitch because it's the next page.
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Speaker 15 You guys, just a chance chance to win the water bottle?

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Speaker 15 head to crooked.com slash books for the details. I'm sorry, everyone.
When we come back, Tommy talks to Congresswoman Jasmine Craggin.

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Speaker 18 I am thrilled to welcome to the show today a representative from the great state of Texas, Congressman Jasmine Crockett. Welcome to LA.

Speaker 17 Thank you so much. It's interesting when you use great in Texas in the same sentence nowadays.
But yes.

Speaker 18 How did you guys like incept all of us to say great state of Texas? You know what I mean? It's just like a family.

Speaker 17 I don't know.

Speaker 17 I mean, Texas is a cult in and of itself, just so you know, right? Like everything's bigger in Texas and we're still in like everybody that's been here in California and we're bringing them to Texas.

Speaker 17 It's a cult mentality.

Speaker 18 Also, your mom is here with you, I think.

Speaker 15 She is. Wanted to welcome her in the studio.
It's like every once in a while you have

Speaker 18 elected officials come in with like 15 staffers. It's fun to have someone rolling with their mom.
That's a much better way to go.

Speaker 17 Yes. She's referred to as the mama staffer.

Speaker 15 I love that. I love that as well.

Speaker 18 She probably keeps you honest.

Speaker 15 She does.

Speaker 18 Well, listen, thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 18 You have this. fascinating role as a freshman lawmaker.

Speaker 18 You serve on the House Oversight Committee, which has put you in the middle of this like wild effort to impeach President Biden, to go after his children.

Speaker 18 So just wondering, what has that experience been like for you?

Speaker 18 Because like, I know calling it a circus is kind of an insult to like Cirque de Soleil or people that are organized, you know what I mean? But you just kind of got thrown in there.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it's so interesting. And to add to the drama, last week I was added to the weaponization.

Speaker 15 committee as well.

Speaker 17 So yeah, so we'll see what happens with that.

Speaker 17 But you know what? what? There are days that I wake up and I'm like, why did you decide to do this? What are you doing? Is this really like the best uses of your time?

Speaker 17 And then when you think about the fact that I could have never really contemplated being in Congress, let alone being a freshman, having to defend the President of the United States in a sham impeachment, I think about.

Speaker 17 the history that may or may not be allowed to be taught in the future and how I'm literally living history and the work that I'm doing is truly of service to this country.

Speaker 17 And it's not so much about President Biden himself, but it's about our institution. And it's about whether or not our institution can survive kind of the radical maniacal

Speaker 17 idiocracy that we're dealing with. And being able to push back on that and hopefully preserve some semblance of respect for the institution

Speaker 17 makes me say, all right, lace up your shoes. You got to get ready to go.

Speaker 15 Get ready to go. Yeah.

Speaker 18 I mean, you're a serious person. You're a public defender.
You were in the Texas State House.

Speaker 18 How do you prepare for a hearing where you have a Republican colleague that's holding up explicit photos and like all these stunts? Like, what do you do to get ready for that?

Speaker 15 Watch wrestling? Yeah.

Speaker 17 You don't ever get ready for that. I remember the first time Marjorie decided that she was going to show nudes, it threw us all off.

Speaker 17 We were were like, wait a minute, wait a minute, what just happened? Like, it was just like, we had no warning whatsoever.

Speaker 17 And it's like, just when you think it can't get any lower or more ridiculous, she finds a way.

Speaker 17 And so you don't prepare for that, but you mentioned that I've been a public defender and ultimately I've been a trial lawyer.

Speaker 17 And unlike civil attorneys that have defositions and they know what people are going to say, or if they don't say it, they can correct them and really get them together.

Speaker 17 In a criminal case, you never know what's going to happen.

Speaker 17 And so I think that really it's my criminal defense experience in the courtroom that's prepared me best for Congress, right?

Speaker 17 Like, who knew you needed to deal with like the criminal world to figure out.

Speaker 15 They might be sitting next to you.

Speaker 17 Exactly. Yeah, no, seriously.
In fact, in our last hearing, listening to Harness talk about, I mean, he called out Congressman Sessions. He called him out.
He's like, oh, yeah, he was a part of that.

Speaker 17 He knew this was all fake. And like Sessions is sitting there on this impeachment committee where Parnas is like, oh, no, no, it was me.
It was Trump. It was Sessions.
It was Giuliani.

Speaker 17 And they all knew that this was a lie and that this was propaganda being pushed by Russia. And here it is.
He's still pushing that propaganda. I mean, it was a wild moment for me.

Speaker 18 Lev Parnas, who was, you know, Giuliani's guy in the impeachment Ukraine inquiry.

Speaker 15 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Wild.

Speaker 18 So the chairman of the committee, James Comer, he seems to be suggesting that rather than holding a vote to impeach President Biden and get a trial going in the Senate, that he might instead make a criminal referral to the Department of Justice in case Joe Biden wants to prosecute himself, I guess, or

Speaker 18 Donald Trump maybe prosecutes him if he's re-elected. Do you think that's a suggestion that they're giving up on impeachment?

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 I mean, it was never really,

Speaker 17 it was never going anywhere, right?

Speaker 17 And when you have members of the freedom caucus that are resigning Congress because they think the impeachment is so ridiculous, I mean, it is a bad day to be a Republican, right?

Speaker 17 Like when you're losing the freedom caucus.

Speaker 17 And so, you know, I think that Comer really doesn't know how to get out of this tangled web that he's in.

Speaker 17 Most people don't even realize that we have three committees of jurisdiction as it relates to the impeachment. It's oversight, it's ways and means, as well as judiciary.

Speaker 17 But the hearings that everyone remembers that are seared into everyone's minds are the failed hearings and oversight.

Speaker 17 And, you know, there's been a lot of internal turmoil as it relates to the Republican Party overall about the prosecution of this impeachment inquiry.

Speaker 17 And when you start to lose Newsmax and Fox News, you know that like, all right, I'm just not going to have the votes. And,

Speaker 17 you know, Moskowitz, Congressman Moskowitz out of Florida, another freshman, he is an interesting guy,

Speaker 17 to say the least. But I remember at our last hearing, you know, usually we'll talk kind of in the interim and we go around the same time.

Speaker 17 And he's like, so what are you going to do? I was like, I don't know, you know, this and maybe that and, you know, whatever. And then I was like, what about you? He's like,

Speaker 17 I've got an idea, but I need to go last. And so I was like, all right, you know, and now he's not last technically in order right now.

Speaker 17 And then when I saw that he basically called for the impeachment vote, I was like, what are you doing?

Speaker 17 But only Mosquits would do that. And, you know, he called Comer's bluff.
He, he wouldn't, he was like, I'll vote for impeachment right now. Let's go.

Speaker 15 Yeah, they were like, what do we do? Yeah. He's like, froze.

Speaker 17 Yeah, exactly. So I think it, it showed America exactly where we are on this, which is nowhere.

Speaker 17 So we'll see what happens next.

Speaker 18 One issue you focus on a lot is reproductive rights.

Speaker 18 You've been calling out right-wing judges, talking about how they're trying to restrict abortion access, and more recently, IVF. We have this great legal show here called Strict Scrutiny.

Speaker 18 They cover the Supreme Court. They believe that the arguments you're hearing out of courts in Alabama, for example, that essentially they briefly forced the state's IVF clinics to close.

Speaker 18 The argument is basically that fertilized embryos should be recognized as people and thus have the same legal rights as people.

Speaker 18 They think that's where the Supreme Court is heading, right?

Speaker 18 So I was wondering if you could help listeners understand what the impact of that kind of fetal personhood argument would be on abortion access, IVF, and all the things that folks care deeply about.

Speaker 17 It is so psychotic.

Speaker 17 These people are psycho, and I'm saying that as a preacher's child, so don't say I'm sacrilegious. I will not.
They are psycho.

Speaker 17 You know, and it's so frustrating to me as someone who practiced civil rights and felt like I always had to prove a black person's personhood after they were killed.

Speaker 17 It seems like there was every excuse in the book to kill a black walking, living, and breathing human being.

Speaker 17 And then you want to talk about embryos and say that they are people, something that cannot breathe. It is absolutely insane.

Speaker 17 And honestly, if you care about people, I just need you to care about them all the way through. Right.
Like from the cradle to the grave, as we would say,

Speaker 17 you know, because you're forcing people to have children, yet I'm fighting with Republicans in the House when it comes to things like snap benefits, where people only get $6 a day.

Speaker 17 You don't want to feed them once they're here.

Speaker 17 So do you really care? Like, it's very frustrating. So I'll get off of that and get on the legal stuff.

Speaker 17 You know, it is beyond dangerous, but I think that while Democrats have been accused of not being the best messengers, I can tell you that the best thing that we got going for us ever is the Republicans opening their mouths

Speaker 17 and attempting to legislate and attempting to

Speaker 17 craft some sort of legal precedence. It is, it is amazing.
It is so helpful. Like, I just want to sit here and be silent and say, watch them work.
Yeah, like in Alabama.

Speaker 17 Because in Alabama, we just saw that they flipped a seat in a special election over a 20-point swing in that seat.

Speaker 17 I promise you, before the IVF decision, there was probably no chance, no money, no support whatsoever for that now newly elected lawmaker.

Speaker 17 These radical folk are on the wrong side of history. And

Speaker 17 what is frustrating, an additional point of frustration for me, is when we talk about abortion access,

Speaker 17 it really is only talking about a certain demographic of folk, to be perfectly honest. We're talking about the lower socioeconomic people not being able to access the healthcare that they need.

Speaker 17 And it's one of the reasons that I applaud a Dr. Jennard or a Kate Cox out of the state of Texas because

Speaker 17 these are women that say, I recognize my privilege. I know I can leave the state.
I know that I have the money to be able to afford to go somewhere else to get the healthcare access that I need.

Speaker 17 But I care about those other women that won't have that access. And they decided to put their entire very personal fight front and center because they were fighting for other women.

Speaker 17 Because ultimately those women fled our state and they went somewhere else. The interesting part about this repro fight now is bringing in IVF that brings in a different category of folk.

Speaker 18 It's a very expensive procedure.

Speaker 17 Very expensive. And so now when we were talking about abortion, it was more a lower socioeconomic that was really losing their access unless and until we ended up with a nationwide ban.

Speaker 17 But now this fight is a bigger coalition because now we're talking about the more affluent folk not having access to being able to make decisions about how and when they create a family.

Speaker 17 And so, you know, while in my opinion, it shouldn't have taken a trigger out of Alabama to build this coalition.

Speaker 17 People should have seen that this was an attack on freedom as a whole because that's what we're experiencing in this country.

Speaker 17 I tell people all the time, I don't really care if you agree with abortion or not. Not really my job to make you agree.

Speaker 17 But if you believe that this country is based upon freedom, if you believe in freedom, then you should take issue with what's going on as it relates to repro because it's not stopping at repro.

Speaker 17 When you look at this radical Supreme Court and what we've had since the three Trump Trump appointees to the Supreme Court, it's been diversity, equity, and inclusion. It's been the LGBTQIA community.

Speaker 17 And after the Dobbs decision, now it's, well, let's go after Mifa Pristone. Then it's going to be that they're going to go after contraception in general.

Speaker 17 You know, the only thing that we can assure you is that the loving case is going to be safe and sound because Clarence Thomas is married to a white woman.

Speaker 17 I mean, that is the only thing that seemingly is safe right now. Everything else that we have considered to be safe.
And I think that this is the lesson that we all need to have as a takeaway.

Speaker 17 You can never get comfortable. You can never get comfortable.
Democracy and freedom have to be fought for in every single generation.

Speaker 17 And it's one reason that I do have so much faith and hope in Gen Z, because I do believe that they understand how serious this is, whether we're talking about guns or whether we're talking about repro, whether we're talking about the environment

Speaker 17 or whether we're talking about how wars are prosecuted in the future. These are going to be, in my opinion,

Speaker 17 I know that some people hate to use the term, but the real woke folk,

Speaker 17 the people that are paying attention to everything and really can get our country back on track if there's a country for them to get back on track.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 18 In Texas, I think Governor Abbott says he supports IVF. I imagine that he's put forward a bunch of laws to protect it and make sure it's safe and there's access going forward.

Speaker 15 Yeah, nothing. Nothing.

Speaker 17 We only meet once every two years.

Speaker 17 You're right. So they're not currently in session.
That's for sure. They just had elections.
They'll go back into session in January.

Speaker 17 But he loves to call special sessions for everything else that's so important to him, such as

Speaker 17 school vouchers. He wants to call special sessions for that.

Speaker 17 But, you know, this IVF thing, it just sounds good.

Speaker 15 It's infuriating.

Speaker 18 I'm sorry to say her name twice in this interview, but Marjorie Taylor Greene, she threatened to oust Speaker Johnson recently.

Speaker 18 There's been some debate over whether Democrats should vote for Speaker Johnson to save his job in return for some concessions. What do you think of that idea?

Speaker 18 And is there like a wish list that Democrats should fight for?

Speaker 17 I think that you can count on me to be a no for MAGA Mike no matter what.

Speaker 17 So just watch the board.

Speaker 17 You won't find Congresswoman Crockett saving MAGA Mike.

Speaker 17 Now,

Speaker 17 what leadership decides to do, maybe with some of our frontline members and things like that, people in districts other than mine,

Speaker 17 you know, I think that we leave those negotiations up to leadership. I think that you don't get something for nothing.
Right. For sure.

Speaker 17 And I mean, we've been getting, we've been getting kind of scraps. I mean, you know, it's like, oh, you can pass a budget finally six months later.
Like, really?

Speaker 15 Like, seriously?

Speaker 17 You know, it's like, oh, okay, well, we'll, we'll vote to keep the government open. Really? Like, we should be doing, like, these are, you know, it's bare minimum that we're getting

Speaker 17 for sure.

Speaker 17 But, you know, we used to live in a time where you could expect in a very bipartisan way that when it came to matters of national security and foreign affairs, for the most part, we'd pretty much be on a similar page.

Speaker 17 I mean, the difference was, you know, Democrats have never really cared for how bloated our defense budget has been because we bloat defense and then non-defense, which is everything that takes care of everyday people, is always like getting the scraps, right?

Speaker 17 Like and trying to bring some parody to that, especially since, you know, defense can't seem to ever pass an audit. But I will tell you, as it relates to Ukraine, I am very concerned.

Speaker 17 And it's not just for the Ukrainians.

Speaker 17 It is legitimately for the world.

Speaker 17 We're talking about Russia potentially having access to a nuclear plant that's in Ukraine,

Speaker 17 either being able to take that over or potentially destroying it and causing harm environmentally in that way.

Speaker 17 Not to mention the idea of allowing Putin to be emboldened further is problematic, not just for us, but for the world.

Speaker 17 And so, you know, the idea that we can't unite around

Speaker 17 going after or pushing back on Putin is a problem. Not to mention, I don't know how many people really understand that if Putin decides, okay, I've got Ukraine.
Now, where do I move?

Speaker 17 And he moves into a NATO country. And for people that don't understand what a NATO country is, and I know that Trump is talking about pulling us out of NATO, but that is also a very dumb idea.

Speaker 17 That means that your mothers, your brothers, your sisters, your uncles, your aunts, your children, they then have to suit up and go into war.

Speaker 17 So when people are talking about the cost, we have a monetary cost of helping Ukraine, but we may end up having monetary as well as American lives that are lost if we don't nip this in the bud right now.

Speaker 17 And so it's very crucial. And this is going to hit home really hard.
And, you know, people see the big numbers and they're like, oh, that's a lot of money. They can do something else with the money.

Speaker 17 It's not really how the budget works. You're either on this side of the ledger or that side of the ledger.

Speaker 17 If they don't spend it it on this war, they're going to spend it on something else, this defense. It's not going to somehow come over to the other side of the ledger.
And

Speaker 17 I really am just concerned about our national security, and I really want them to take it seriously. So this is not a win for Democrats.

Speaker 17 This is a win for Americans, Ukrainians, and honestly, the rest of the world.

Speaker 17 So absolutely, we should take up the supplemental. I don't know that we would ever have too much of a fight as it's not been talked about over funding for Taiwan.

Speaker 17 There seems to be bipartisan support for Taiwan because there seems to be bipartisan issues with China. That's why they decided TikTok had to be the one thing we could do.

Speaker 17 Yeah, because they care so much about China. So, I mean, you know, I think that we can always get the funding for Taiwan if necessary.

Speaker 17 But also,

Speaker 17 the Republicans do not want to support the people of Gaza. at all.
They have passed two packages out of the House.

Speaker 17 The first one was a package to give money to Israel while giving, while defunding IRS. The second one was just to give money to Israel.
They have no intentions.

Speaker 17 They equate the Palestinian people with being Hamas, which is not true.

Speaker 17 And so, you know, I think that we need to make sure that we push really hard for aid for the Palestinian people.

Speaker 17 I think we also need to make sure that we're pushing for aid for the Haitians. The Haitians have really

Speaker 17 taken just a back seat. And, you know, I don't know if we'll get the world to really wrap their arms around the Haitians like they've wrapped their arms around other folk.

Speaker 17 But, you know, I try to remind people that

Speaker 17 the Haitians showed up at our door knocking. And when they showed up at the border in Texas, we saw law enforcement on horses whipping Haitians.

Speaker 15 Yeah, that's awful.

Speaker 17 And then they sent them back.

Speaker 17 And no one ever asked the question, why are Haitians coming to the united states there's this idea in america that everybody just wants to you know walk and risk their lives and risk being raped and robbed and all this other kind of stuff just to get to america i got news for you that ain't the case and at that time their president had been assassinated but no one was really talking about it and the national news wasn't really covering it and

Speaker 17 gangs have been emboldened ever since they execute i'm saying they they never said who officially killed the president. But it's a very dangerous set of circumstances.

Speaker 17 And right now, the Dominican Republic doesn't want to allow them in either.

Speaker 17 And so, you know, it is important for America to do what America does best, which is to be big brother.

Speaker 17 And I try to stress to people that foreign aid and having good trade policies and making sure that other countries are stable, that is a benefit to the entire world.

Speaker 17 And it it takes the burden off of our immigration, our failed immigration system as well.

Speaker 17 And so, you know, I would like to see a push for

Speaker 17 some help for Haiti, some help for the people of Gaza, as well as Ukrainians.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I mean, that last bill also cut off support for UNRWA, which is the only UN agency on the ground doing all this assistance and government.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 that's been drama for sure.

Speaker 17 That decision. And I know some people are like, oh my God, we can't believe you voted to fund the government.

Speaker 17 And i'm like i had to fund the government i do understand you know being in the minority we don't get everything that we want one of the things that hasn't really been pushed out there is that it's our understanding that unra has enough funding for now again this was fy 24 that we're six months behind on

Speaker 17 so what we're talking about is a funding bill that only goes for six months in the first place. Got it.

Speaker 17 It's our understanding that UNRWA is going to be good with funding until, I want to say, January. And so we're supposed to be working on FY25 theoretically.
If FY25 comes about in a timely fashion,

Speaker 17 then UNRWA is good to go and or if we add it back. But pulling it out in my understanding was not going to essentially defund UNRWA at this exact moment and put them in a destitute situation.

Speaker 15 That's good to know. Yeah, no, I'm glad you brought up Haiti.

Speaker 18 I mean, the history of foreign countries meddling in Haiti go back to the French, the U.S.

Speaker 18 sending troops in a bunch of times, the failed earthquake response, but the assassination in 2021 of the president has led to the security situation devolving.

Speaker 18 And hopefully this Kenyan security force goes in. But you're right, the U.S.
has pledged a bunch of money for that peacekeeping mission. And if we don't step up, it's not at all clear who will.

Speaker 15 Absolutely.

Speaker 15 Okay, now the hard questions.

Speaker 18 You ready? So who's the best Beyoncé? Destiny's Child Beyonce, Lemonade Beyonce, Cowboy Carter Beyonce?

Speaker 17 It's going to have to be Destiny's Child. Okay.
Just because, I mean, they're my exact age.

Speaker 17 So that's the original for me.

Speaker 15 You grew up with that.

Speaker 15 I grew up with it.

Speaker 15 Okay.

Speaker 18 Dallas Cowboys or Houston, Texans?

Speaker 17 I represent Dallas. Dallas Cowboys.

Speaker 15 You went to school in Houston College.

Speaker 17 I know, know, but Dallas Cowboys.

Speaker 18 You like Dak?

Speaker 17 I'm a Dak fan. Okay.

Speaker 18 I'm the Dak train. Yeah.

Speaker 15 I'm a Dak fan.

Speaker 17 Don't really care for the other guy that owns Jerry. Cowboys, but I love Dak.

Speaker 18 You love Dak.

Speaker 15 I'm not a Jerry fan either.

Speaker 15 That's a hallway podcast talking about Jerry.

Speaker 18 I know you were born and raised in St. Louis.
Yep. You live in Texas now.
St. Louis-style barbecue or Texas barbecue?

Speaker 15 Ooh,

Speaker 17 that is a hard one.

Speaker 17 I think I've been in Texas too long, so I'm gonna have to go with Texas.

Speaker 15 Texas Barbecue.

Speaker 18 Last question.

Speaker 18 Trump is now selling a Bible Constitution combo for only 60 bucks. I just want to know if you're in the market and thinking of picking a couple up.

Speaker 17 Absolutely not.

Speaker 15 No.

Speaker 17 No, he doesn't know a Bible verse, so I don't know what's in that Bible.

Speaker 18 What did he say when he was asked? He was like Corinthians 4 or something like that.

Speaker 15 He didn't.

Speaker 17 He's been asked a million times, and he couldn't even get Jesus web. He couldn't do nothing.

Speaker 15 No, he's not.

Speaker 17 I don't trust that Bible.

Speaker 15 Who, I mean,

Speaker 18 I feel like you can get a Bible for free somewhere. You probably don't have to buy a Trump one.

Speaker 17 Maybe on your phone.

Speaker 15 Maybe the internet.

Speaker 17 There's a whole app for that.

Speaker 15 The Constitution.

Speaker 18 I feel like you can find that.

Speaker 17 There's a whole app for that. And I trust my Bible app a lot better.

Speaker 18 Congresswoman Crockett, thank you so much for coming to the studio. Great talking to you.
Thanks for fighting the good fight in that wacky committee.

Speaker 18 God bless you for keeping your patience in that place.

Speaker 17 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 15 One last thing to leave you with.

Speaker 15 Larry David went on Chris Wallace's show on CNN on Wednesday night, and Wallace, in what I would say was a shining example of knowing your subject, let Larry tee off on Donald Trump. Let's listen.

Speaker 28 Oh, I mean, you can't go a day without

Speaker 28 thinking about what he's done to this country because he's such a little baby

Speaker 29 that he's thrown 250 years of democracy out the window by not accepting the results of it. I mean, it's so crazy.
He's such a sociopath. He's so insane.
He just couldn't admit to losing.

Speaker 29 And we know he lost. He knows he lost.
And look how he's fooled everybody.

Speaker 15 He's convinced all these people that he didn't lose.

Speaker 29 He's such a sick man.

Speaker 29 He's so sick.

Speaker 15 Anyway, no, it hasn't impacted me at all.

Speaker 15 I love that. It's great.
It is great.

Speaker 15 I love that especially. And I was talking with, I was texting a friend about it last night.
And

Speaker 15 he was like, here's the thing. There's a lot of discussions about like polling and the right message.
He's like, you know, that's a pretty good one.

Speaker 15 Just like, come on, you all know the guy's fucking nuts.

Speaker 15 You know, obviously the Trump base doesn't know that, but a lot of other people, people that are still like, they don't like Joe Biden, they don't like Donald Trump, but like, this man is crazy.

Speaker 15 His party has gone nuts. They think the DEI caused bridge collapses.
Taylor Swissberg in the Super Bowl. They got Donald Trump thinking the election's stolen.
They're fucking nuts. What are we doing?

Speaker 15 It's great. Plus, they want to cut Social Security and ban abortion.
Just throw this in. There is that too.
There is that too. Yeah.
But they're also just like, you know,

Speaker 15 crises come and they happen like COVID did and the pandemic. And look how Donald Trump handled it, right? There are serious things that happen in the world.

Speaker 15 And the question is, who do you want in charge when the serious crises happen? Because you know they will. And you don't want that guy in charge.
Anyway, Larry David should come on.

Speaker 15 Come on, Pod Save America, Larry. It's great.
Are you watching the season of Curb? I am not. I'm going to.
I will. It's fantastic.
It's great. It's just, I'm going to miss the show when it's gone.

Speaker 15 All right. That's it for us.
Thanks to Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett for coming by. And we will be back with a new pod on Tuesday.
Bye, everyone.

Speaker 15 If you want to get ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and more, consider joining our Friends of the Pod subscription community at crooked.com slash friends.

Speaker 15 And if you're already doom scrolling, don't forget to follow us at Pod Save America on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and more.

Speaker 15 Plus, if you're as opinionated as we are, consider dropping us a review. Pod Save America is a crooked media production.
Our show is produced by Olivia Martinez and David Toledo.

Speaker 15 Our associate producers are Saul Rubin and Farah Safari. Kira Wakim is our senior producer.
Reed Sherlin is our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Speaker 15 Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer, with audio support from Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis. Writing support by Hallie Kiefer.
Madeleine Herringer is our head of news and programming.

Speaker 15 Matt DeGroat is our head of production. Andy Taff is our executive assistant.
Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Mia Kelman, David Toles, Kirill Pelaviv, and Molly Lobel.

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