Trump's TikTok Dance

Transcript

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Speaker 6 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.

Speaker 7 And I'm Jane Coston.

Speaker 6 Jane, so great to have you.

Speaker 7 Hello.

Speaker 7 It's wonderful to be here. It's good to see you.

Speaker 6 New York Times and CNN contributor Jane Kosten, guest host today. This is fantastic.

Speaker 7 It's good to have you back here. I could not be more excited.

Speaker 6 So on today's show, we are going to talk about the Republican House just passed a potential TikTok ban that Donald Trump no longer supports. RFK Jr.

Speaker 6 has reportedly chosen his running mate, and it could be Aaron Rodgers or Jesse Ventura. And we're going to talk about whether Republican politicians are too terminally online to win.

Speaker 6 But first, you might remember that last month, the special counsel who investigated President Biden's handling of classified information concluded in his report that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges, but then swerved out of the way to call Biden, quote, a well-meaning, elderly man with poor memory.

Speaker 6 Well, House Republicans called Robert Hurd a testify yesterday so they could yell at him for not indicting Biden and generate some content for campaign ads.

Speaker 6 Here's an example from Republican Representative Tom Tiffany.

Speaker 8 So I want to thank you for the work that you did as far as you could. But unfortunately, you are part of the Praetorian Guard that guards the swamp out here in Washington, D.C., protecting the elites.

Speaker 8 And Joe Biden is part of that company of the elites.

Speaker 6 You are part of the guard who defends the swamp.

Speaker 6 Unfortunately. It was very polite the way he said it.

Speaker 6 Just before the hearing, House Democrats released the full transcript of her's interview with Biden, which at one point showed the special counsel contradicting his own characterization of Biden's memory.

Speaker 6 Let's listen.

Speaker 10 I now want to turn you to the transcript and day one, page 47.

Speaker 10 You said

Speaker 10 to President Biden, you have appear to have a photographic understanding and recall of the House. Did you say that to President Biden?

Speaker 9 Those words do appear on page 47 of the transcript.

Speaker 10 Photographic is what you said. Is that right?

Speaker 9 That word does appear on page 47 of the transcript.

Speaker 10 Never appeared in your report, though. Is that correct? The word photographic?

Speaker 9 That does not appear in my report.

Speaker 11 Attorney Hurr, Webster's dictionary defines senile as exhibiting a decline of cognitive ability, such as memory associated with old age. Mr.

Speaker 11 Hurr, based on your report, did you find that the president was senile?

Speaker 6 I did not.

Speaker 9 That conclusion does not appear in my report, Congressman.

Speaker 6 Democrats also use the hearing to remind everyone that Trump is much worse at both handling classified information and remembering important things. Let's listen.

Speaker 3 Unlike President Biden, Trump did not alert the National Archives or DOJ of the documents, nor did he turn over all the classified materials in his possession.

Speaker 3 He did not agree to sit down for a voluntary interview with the special counsel. He never consented to a search of his home.

Speaker 3 On the contrary, Trump suggested that his attorney hide or destroy evidence requested by the FBI and the grand jury.

Speaker 3 Trump carefully instructed his aide to move boxes of classified documents to hide them from the FBI.

Speaker 3 Trump tried to delete incriminating security tape footage from Mar-a-Lago, and he got his attorney to provide a false certification to the FBI saying he had produced all the documents in his possession.

Speaker 12 I'd have to get the exact dates for you. I can do that.
Am I correct that you married your current wife in January 2005? I don't know relative to that date.

Speaker 12 And what years were you the owner of the Paz Hotel? I don't know.

Speaker 12 James Webb. I don't remember the names.
I don't remember the name. So you don't remember saying you have one of the best members? I don't remember that.

Speaker 12 I remember you telling me, but I don't know that I.

Speaker 6 Tough that he doesn't remember his anniversary.

Speaker 7 I mean,

Speaker 6 I guess when you've had a couple wives, it's sort of.

Speaker 7 It's not surprising exactly. I think that, like,

Speaker 7 at the very 30,000-foot view, it is not ideal that we now have dueling depositions of two presidential candidates and two presidents.

Speaker 7 That's not good. I will say, as a side note, if I ever could win anything, I would like to win the chance to depose someone.
Deposing someone just sounds super fun. Just being like, did you say this?

Speaker 7 And the person being like,

Speaker 7 Apparently I did. That sounds great.

Speaker 7 I would go to law school just to depose people. That's all I want to do.

Speaker 6 And of course, like when you're getting deposed, you are advised by your lawyers, any good lawyer, to say that you don't recall if you're not absolutely sure, because otherwise you could have perjury charges.

Speaker 7 Absolutely.

Speaker 7 It's another classic example of how the good thing to do doesn't sound good.

Speaker 7 If you are arrested, you should not say anything to the police.

Speaker 7 However, the police, when they do your Dateline episode, will be like, yeah, she lawyered up right away, didn't say anything, which is the right thing to do.

Speaker 7 But when you're watching Dateline later, you're going to be like,

Speaker 7 she killed all those people.

Speaker 6 And that's what we're watching right now, Dateline. That is what politics has become.

Speaker 6 I'm glad you're here to talk about this because when we spoke yesterday, you said you hadn't been following every detail of the hearing or the her investigation, which you know what?

Speaker 6 Makes you just like most voters.

Speaker 6 So now that you're all read up on everything, what do you think?

Speaker 7 I think that it is March of an election year. And so the relevance of these particular events remain to be seen.

Speaker 7 I know that's not a very satisfying answer, but I've been taking a break from social media for Lent,

Speaker 7 which has been great. It just also means that I am not plugged in.

Speaker 7 Quite literally, but I am not plugged in to literally everything that's taking place.

Speaker 7 And so like after going through the transcript of the hearing and reading a bunch of write-ups from actual news outlets,

Speaker 7 my main takeaway is, wow, everyone hates each other. Because you had Republicans yelling at her about how he's the Praetorian Guard for Biden, which he is not.

Speaker 7 And also, I don't know how the Praetorian Guard got involved here.

Speaker 7 Me neither. Yeah, and but then you had Democrats yelling at her that he had smeared Biden by referring to him as elderly and talking about his memory issues.

Speaker 7 I was very entertained because part of the transcript shows that Biden does remember going to Mongolia and having an awesome time bow hunting, which sounds super fun.

Speaker 6 Apparently, Biden excels at archery and he remembers

Speaker 7 the details of the...

Speaker 7 That's my takeaway. From the trip?

Speaker 6 From a trip to Mongolia 13 years ago, and he's remembering hitting the target. I don't even want to know why that story came up, by the way.

Speaker 7 No, he wanted to talk about cars, and he wanted to talk about how hot his wife is. So I was like, yeah, Joe Biden, elderly wife guy who remembers elderly wife guy things.
That checks out.

Speaker 7 But I think like the main, you know, it was interesting how

Speaker 7 rather than ask questions that could show like, why didn't charges result from this? Why did this not appear in the ultimate report that you gave? Like what, you know, getting actual answers.

Speaker 7 Everyone involved decided this is a televised hearing. We must do televised hearing things and yell at each other and yell at him.

Speaker 7 This former special counsel who did not ask for any of this. He's just there and he was yelled at.
But I think that

Speaker 7 it was interesting because a couple of the write-ups I saw were like, this could have election ramifications. And I'm thinking back to, do you remember four years ago?

Speaker 7 Do you remember what was taking place roughly four years ago? Oh, I think

Speaker 6 we were home for quite a while.

Speaker 7 Yeah, we were home for quite a while.

Speaker 7 Some stuff was happening. I believe we are now just over the anniversary of when Rudy Gobert

Speaker 7 caused the entire NBA to shut down, which I will never move on from the fact that as far as I'm concerned, it's all Rudy Gobert's fault. But

Speaker 7 we have no idea what is going to happen in between now and November. It is not ideal that Biden is in this situation.
This report is not good. This hearing was not good.

Speaker 7 But whether it will be relevant to people voting in November, which is, I don't, it's a while from now. A lot can happen.

Speaker 7 You can have an entire global pandemic between now and then. I would prefer we didn't.
That happened four years ago. I was like, all right, goodbye, everybody.
Taking my social media break for Lent.

Speaker 7 And I came back and we were in the midst of a global pandemic. So I'm really trying not to like instigate that again.

Speaker 7 I'm doing my very best, but I will just say, like, I don't know how relevant this is going to be. I don't know what's going to be at top of mind for voters, especially because

Speaker 7 the opposition candidate also has

Speaker 7 apparently memory issues and a deposition and a host of legal issues. A couple deposits.

Speaker 6 Even legal at this point.

Speaker 7 Yeah, exactly. He's been deposed a bunch of times.
Exactly. And also had a whole classified document scandal.
And his classified documents were kept in various places in Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 7 And now there are interviews with former Mar-a-Lago staffers saying, like, yeah, we just moved stuff around. And it seemed weird.
Like, that's not good.

Speaker 7 But again, I don't know what it will mean for people voting in November. Yeah.
I mean,

Speaker 6 my takeaway is if you are truly concerned about Joe Biden's memory or cognitive abilities, I would urge you to read or at least skim. It is 159 pages, the full transcript of the interview.

Speaker 6 It paints a much different portrait of Biden than her's report, in which the special counsel very clearly cherry-picked, exaggerated, and editorialized in a way that absolutely wasn't necessary in order to explain why he chose not to bring charges.

Speaker 6 Just one example. In the report, Herr says Biden, quote, did not remember even within several years when his son Bo died.

Speaker 6 Of course, what actually happened is that Biden was telling a story to her about why he started thinking about running for president in 2017, 2018, which involved a promise to his dying son.

Speaker 6 Biden said, what month did Bo die? Oh, my God, May 30th. And then a White House lawyer interrupted to say 2015.
And Biden said, was it 2015 he died? The lawyer said, yes. And Biden said, it was 2015.

Speaker 6 So like, it's not like Hurr was completely lying, but when you say he did not remember even within several years when his son Bo died, you wouldn't know from that that he immediately knew what date it was and was just had to be corrected on the year as he was telling a very, very long story about why he ran for president.

Speaker 7 Yeah, exactly. And especially because I think if anyone has experienced tragedy, sometimes you remember every aspect of it like it happened.
It is still taking place.

Speaker 7 And sometimes little things fade away. Like you might remember, like, I remember where I was when I found out that this person had passed away.
I can tell you everything about it.

Speaker 7 I could tell you what the weather looked like, but what year? Not sure. Like might need a moment.

Speaker 7 And so like that was a moment in which I think that, and I think Representative Raskin also made the point that like there seemed to be, I mean, Republicans getting really upset about document handling seemed a little bit of a, I'm giving a side eye.

Speaker 7 I'm aware that side eye is not ideal for a podcast format, but I do think that there is a sense about being, like, this hearing was not about documents. This hearing was about

Speaker 7 Biden should be charged with crimes and removed from the White House. And you know who should take his place in the White House?

Speaker 7 Donald Trump, another person with documents issues who actually has been charged charged with crimes. Yeah.

Speaker 6 And by the way,

Speaker 6 if you don't think that Biden is going to be charged, which none of them really think because Robert Hurd said he's not going to be, and now it doesn't look like they're going to impeach him because they haven't found any evidence that warrants impeachment.

Speaker 6 And it also, and Ken Buck just retired, so now they barely even have a House majority, let alone enough people to impeach him. So in case that's not going to happen, Biden's old.

Speaker 6 Biden's old and he's senile, even though Robert Hurd just said he wasn't senile.

Speaker 6 But anyway, that's what they were trying to push. I don't think they successfully, I don't think they successfully advanced the storyline about Biden's age in this hearing.

Speaker 7 Right, exactly. Because that's, I mean, politics so much is about storylines and about introducing ideas into the media zeitgeist.
I am a part of the media zeitgeist.

Speaker 7 I do zeitgeisty things on occasion. And there is an idea of like, if we talk a lot about how Biden is old, then the media will have to report that he is old.

Speaker 7 And then they'll have to do like roundtable discussions about how old is Joe Biden? He's so old that he might remember Truman. I don't know.

Speaker 7 And like, that's the point.

Speaker 7 But I do think that the challenge is that like

Speaker 7 Trump is also old. I'm aware that that is not a discussion that we have all the time.

Speaker 7 I think that a couple of people, I think McKay Coppins, who's a great writer for The Atlantic, has made the point that like so much of Trump's weirdness is baked in.

Speaker 7 with American voters and with, you know, kind of the media that like, if you just keep saying like weird weird things Trump says, there's a certain moment.

Speaker 7 Um, there's a sports writer, uh, he owns the ringer, uh, Bill Simmons.

Speaker 7 He came up with this thing years ago called the Mike Tyson zone, which is that, like, Mike Tyson, if you, if you hear that Mike Tyson did anything, like, um, Mike Tyson jumped off the Eiffel Tower, you'd be like, yeah,

Speaker 7 probably.

Speaker 7 Like, there is a certain zone, and like, Donald Trump is within the Mike Tyson zone of like,

Speaker 7 if I heard, if you told me that Donald Trump went on a long rant about the Netflix revival of Gilmore girls and how terrible it was, I'd be like, yeah,

Speaker 7 100% checked. Not a surprise at all.
Nope, nope, nope. I'm like, now I'm going to incept myself into believing that this happened.
But like,

Speaker 7 this hearing was an effort to put this conversation about Biden's age back into media spaces and make the media talk about it.

Speaker 7 And I think that the media will continue to talk about Biden's age because I do think it is relevant for obvious reasons. Namely, he is elderly.
Actuarial tables are actuarial tables for a reason.

Speaker 7 But I also think that on this particular issue, the documents issue, I don't think that they got what they wanted out of it. It's the same way that the Biden impeachment didn't go anywhere.
Like,

Speaker 7 you can bring a horse to water, but you cannot make it into a document scandal, as the saying says.

Speaker 6 I think part of their problem is that the hearing came, you know, several days after a State of the Union where Biden appeared feisty, was a joyful warrior.

Speaker 6 And, you know, my take on the State of the Union is it's not going to be a game changer since State of the Unions often aren't game changers.

Speaker 6 They usually don't lead to any change in approval ratings or bumps in the polls. But I do think it was a...
blueprint for Biden for the campaign.

Speaker 6 Like if he is like that out on the campaign trail or when we see him in public from now until November, he's going to be a lot better off. But what did you think?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think that

Speaker 7 how the State of the Union is perceived is always, it's always challenging because you are asking people who already have a perception of the person giving the State of the Union.

Speaker 7 Like, you cannot bring in people who have literally never heard of Joe Biden and be like, watch this speech. How do you think this guy did? Like, that's not how this works.
And I do think, like.

Speaker 7 How his, I don't think it's going to have any impact on polling, but I do think that Republicans keep setting the expectations for Joe Biden on the floor.

Speaker 7 We saw this in 2020, and we have seen this over and over again. That Joe Biden is supposed to be barely alive.
He is supposed to be unable to do literally anything. And that he will do anything.

Speaker 7 He will appear to be a member of the human race in good standing. And then Republicans are like, well,

Speaker 7 he was loud.

Speaker 7 He was very loud. And he seemed to

Speaker 7 jacked up Joe. He seemed annoyed.
And like,

Speaker 7 at a certain point, like, maybe

Speaker 7 set your expectations for Joe Biden, like, slightly above comatose. Like, I think that that is the challenge here.
Like,

Speaker 7 if you have baked in this idea that Joe Biden is senile, and then Joe Biden does things that make it obvious that he is not senile,

Speaker 7 I think that you are ignoring, if you're a Republican, things that are actually things you could go after Joe Biden on. You could go after Joe Biden on any number of subjects.

Speaker 7 You could go after the withdrawal from Afghanistan or any number of actual policy issues. This is me trying to make this election about policy while it will not be about policy.
I know that.

Speaker 7 I know that. But like.

Speaker 7 I think that it just, it's so easy. It's so easy to just be like, oh, he's old and can't do anything.

Speaker 7 Whereas Donald Trump, not old, not weird, is, you know, this vital person, like a Ben Garrison comic. And it keeps not working, and they keep doing it over and over and over again.

Speaker 6 I remember

Speaker 6 during the, in the early months of the 2012 re-elect, the Romney people sort of tried out a line on Obama that was,

Speaker 6 you know, he's a decent man who was a a historic president and we're so glad that he made history, but he just hasn't been able to turn the economy around and we need someone new. And

Speaker 6 we were much more afraid of that line of attack than we were what they ended up with by the end, which is like, you know, he did Benghazi.

Speaker 6 And because once again, the Republicans let like the fringe take over the messaging.

Speaker 6 And it's just not as, it's not the people had doubts about Obama, but they didn't believe that he was some evil whatever that they painted him out to be.

Speaker 6 And that is the same thing that the Republicans are doing with Biden right now right.

Speaker 7 And I think that that's something,

Speaker 7 you know, 2012, like Mitt Romney wanted to talk about like the economy or like very specific issues that I think were tethered to actual policies upon which you could actually criticize Barack Obama, whose actual polling numbers were not like that great in 2011, 2012, due to any number of things.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 the

Speaker 7 GOP media base was like, no,

Speaker 7 Benghazi slash Orly Tates slash something extremely strange. Like, oh, I've never, I will never forget about Orly Tates.
You can't take that away from me. But like,

Speaker 7 it is interesting how, I mean, this is, I mean, it's a, it's a cultural discussion.

Speaker 7 Biden's age is an easier conversation to have that everyone makes sense of when

Speaker 7 talking about withdrawing from Afghanistan gets complicated because a lot of people wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan and everyone was always going to be mad at the person who actually did.

Speaker 7 People could be mad about the economy or about biodomics or about inflation, but like all of that is a little challenging to talk about, but like he's old. That's easy.
Yeah. And he's senile.

Speaker 7 Yep. That's something that people kind of understand.
It just happens that it keeps not necessarily being true.

Speaker 6 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 6 And the truth is, he's a well-meaning elderly man who can remember just with mind-numbing detail all kinds of stories from his 81 years on this earth and will tell those stories to you like ad nauseum.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Like, and I have been, it is the Joe Biden in that transcript is like the Joe Biden.

Speaker 6 Anyone who knows Joe Biden, who has been in meetings with Joe Biden, who has talked to Joe Biden, like we have all heard those kind of stories where he has a, the mental acuity, he is sharp, right?

Speaker 6 and he remembers a lot he goes on at length right

Speaker 6 and he tells these stories and some of the stories are a little kooky might make you roll your eyes time to time but the guy is sharp he is really sharp

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Speaker 6 So, the House is on a real tear this week

Speaker 6 on the heels of that very successful special counsel hearing. They just passed a bill 352 to 65 that would ban TikTok from all U.S.

Speaker 6 app stores unless ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the social media platform, agrees to sell TikTok to an American-based owner within 165 days.

Speaker 6 The legislation passed overwhelmingly bipartisan support. It also has support from President Biden.

Speaker 6 This is all based on assessments from the intelligence community and the FBI that TikTok poses a threat to national security.

Speaker 6 They believe the Chinese government will use or is using the app to spy on American users, spread propaganda, and interfere in our elections. The bill may or may not pass the Senate.

Speaker 6 We don't know yet, but it does have one brand new opponent, Donald Trump, who tried to ban TikTok when he was president, but just changed his mind recently after a fierce lobbying campaign by people with financial ties to TikTok, including a billionaire donor and Kellyanne Conway.

Speaker 6 Imagine that. All right, before we get to the Trump of it all, like, what do you think of the ban or the potential ban?

Speaker 7 So I think that there's

Speaker 7 in a normal, objective conversation about this, I think that the ban, that is not really a ban, to be clear.

Speaker 7 If we go back to 2020, there's another app that's very popular and occasionally lightly controversial that has this exact same issue.

Speaker 7 Grinder, which some of you might be extremely familiar with, and some of you are like, what's Grindr?

Speaker 7 But you're also lying. You know what it is.

Speaker 7 So Grinder in 2020, owned by a Chinese company, Kunlun.

Speaker 7 The U.S. forces the sale of Grinder to San Vicente acquisition because of security concerns.
And people are still grinding? Is that what? I'm not going to ask.

Speaker 7 Someone will email me to tell me what the verb is when you say that. Still grinding.

Speaker 6 Still grinding.

Speaker 7 Got the episode title.

Speaker 7 I'm leaving that there. So

Speaker 7 there are examples for this. This is not no more TikTok ever.
This is sell it to an American subsidiary, sell it to an American company.

Speaker 7 Which is, I think, it seems to me

Speaker 7 a reasonable ask if you would like to continue having TikTok in the United States. Like, it's a thing that you can do, but then,

Speaker 7 but it's not about objectively what TikTok actually is. It is about what TikTok means.
If you're former Vice President Mike Pence, you believe it is digital fentanyl, which

Speaker 7 I don't entirely understand what that means or what Mike Pence thinks fentanyl is, but

Speaker 7 that's neither here nor there.

Speaker 7 If you are Rand Paul, you believe that this is all deeply unfair.

Speaker 7 There are obviously a lot of libertarians with, like, I think, on many issues, I agree with them with regard to attempting to ban TikTok or limit TikTok for, like, some of the arguments against TikTok that I've seen from Republicans seem to literally be like, it's poisoning our children.

Speaker 7 Liberal nonsense. Like, the idea that in China, TikTok is like, ah, they watch orchestra performances, but in America, they watch pornography on TikTok.
Like, that's, no, that sounds stupid.

Speaker 7 If you have actual security concerns with regard to the ownership of TikTok, that is different from

Speaker 7 TikTok is bad. Ban TikTok.
No more TikTok for anyone.

Speaker 7 Those are two different things. So I think that how people are thinking about this app is actually how people are thinking about.
tech and this type of tech.

Speaker 7 On the one hand, you have people who I think are a smidgen too enthusiastic about it.

Speaker 7 Some of them are being paid to be enthusiastic. Our good friend of the Bowling Green Massacre, Kellyanne Conway.

Speaker 7 Some people, you know, there have been a host of TikTok influencers who have been on Capitol Hill to talk to people. I don't know if you may have seen, others may have seen.

Speaker 7 TikTok has had a big ad campaign to the United States to being like, you know, I'm able to support my family. I'm educating toddlers.
I'm making soap. Like, I'm the nicest person in the entire world.

Speaker 7 And I'm on TikTok. Nothing bad could happen here, which I'm like, fine.

Speaker 7 But I think that the conversation is less about what TikTok is and more about what TikTok means,

Speaker 7 which is about a social media platform that is confusing and loud and sometimes filled with really bad stuff and sometimes filled with really good stuff. And it is currently seemingly out of control.

Speaker 7 And a lot of people don't like that. And a lot of people don't like that.
Other people don't like that. Yeah.
I mean, look,

Speaker 6 my view on this is that it's that most social media platforms, as currently designed, do more harm than good.

Speaker 6 That's my own bias here.

Speaker 6 I think that functional democracies require a shared reality and social media is not in the shared reality business, traps us in different realities where we only see and hear now what we want to, even if it's not true, makes rational debate impossible, makes it very easy to ignore what's going on in the world altogether.

Speaker 6 I think TikTok is maybe one of the worst of all the platforms because the algorithm is more determinative, right? There's very little choice involved.

Speaker 6 You're just being fed video after video based on your own interests.

Speaker 7 But what if I really want to watch a llama hopping to party up by DMX? That's my right.

Speaker 7 I have the right to watch a llama hop to party up by DMX. Don't take that away from me.
That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 6 It's like, so all that aside, like I'm not, like I said, I'm not a fan of Twitter, even though I use it and I'm addicted to it. I also have spent an hour on TikTok.

Speaker 6 And then, where did the hour go, right? So, like, but you're right. If you want to, if you want to do that, great.
But operating in a country where the government is actively hostile to U.S.

Speaker 6 interests and looking for ways to spy on us, not good. I don't think we would have accepted during the height of the Cold War the Soviet Union owning NBC.
Right.

Speaker 6 That's something that would have been a problem for people.

Speaker 7 Right, exactly. And, like, I think that

Speaker 7 it's difficult for people to separate all of these pieces.

Speaker 7 It's like any hearing you have on these issues with regards to the Chinese Communist Party or the Chinese government obviously turns into rabid xenophobia, which no one needs.

Speaker 7 But like, there is an actual security concern here. There is a security concern that has been raised by many people of both parties.

Speaker 7 People who I do not think are completely insane. I think that that is worth hearing, especially because if TikTok is owned by an American company, then you can continue to watch

Speaker 6 whatever.

Speaker 7 Yeah, you can keep on TikToking or inventing TikTok dances. And please just don't film your TikTok in public because you look insane.

Speaker 7 What is also of interest to me is that Donald Trump on this particular issue, who, as you mentioned, wanted to ban TikTok in 2020. Donald Trump, occasionally, is accused or given

Speaker 7 accused is too negative a term. He is

Speaker 7 admired for his ability to

Speaker 7 do three, four, five-dimensional chess on any number of issues. But Donald Trump is actually the most easily influenced person in the history of time.
Ever.

Speaker 7 Ever.

Speaker 7 At any

Speaker 7 time.

Speaker 7 And on this particular issue, he has been effectively influenced because there is a person that he hates. That person's name is Mark Zuckerberg.
That person runs Facebook and a host of other entities.

Speaker 7 For years, Donald Trump has hated Mark Zuckerberg. Hated him a lot.
And so

Speaker 7 the brilliant people who are paid millions of dollars to do this very thing go to Donald Trump and are like, hey,

Speaker 7 you know what Facebook hates?

Speaker 7 TikTok.

Speaker 7 You know what your supporters love? TikTok.

Speaker 7 And, you know, your supporters are free on TikTok.

Speaker 7 David Urban, who's a lobbyist, longtime advisor to Trump. I believe he ran the Pennsylvania campaign in 2016 for Trump, said that the app could be a campaign tool.

Speaker 7 You've got Kellyanne Conway, who's being paid by Club for Growth to defend TikTok, which is a circle that I really want to put a pin in to have a conversation about later, because Club for Growth doing this is weird to me as someone who's been following conservative politics for a long time.

Speaker 7 Yeah. But so, and then, you know, I think most importantly, you have Jeff Yas, who owns about 15%

Speaker 7 of Byte Dance. He's the biggest donor to Club for Growth and thus Kaylian Conway.
And so all of a sudden, Donald Trump, again, most easily influenced person in the history of time.

Speaker 7 Like, there are, there are eight-year-old boys who are less easily influenced than Donald Trump. Actually, eight-year-old boys are really hard to convince of a lot of different things.

Speaker 7 Not Donald Trump. So Donald Trump now is like

Speaker 7 TikTok, eh, whatever. But in comparison to the evil Mark Zuckerberg, we got to keep TikTok.

Speaker 6 I mean, it also goes to show people like Donald Trump will abandon his position on literally any issue.

Speaker 6 He will screw over literally anyone, his own family, if it will help him politically or if he thinks it will help him politically. That is the only thing he cares about is Donald Trump.

Speaker 6 So I'm tough on China. Doesn't matter if it's gonna, if

Speaker 6 coming out against a TikTok ban is gonna help him politically. Whether it's whatever the issue is, he will abandon it in a second if it's gonna help him politically.

Speaker 6 And I do think, having said what I just did about TikTok, that there is a good case to be made that a TikTok ban that it, well, if this legislation is signed into law and Byte Dance doesn't sell and TikTok is then banned in the United States and President Biden has signed that into law and Donald Trump is out there opposing the ban, I think there's a very good case to be made that this will politically benefit Donald Trump, especially with a group of voters, young voters, who Joe Biden has been struggling with compared to how he did in 2020.

Speaker 6 And so like, all that said, I'm like a little, just the political strategist in me. I'm like, yeah, I might wait until after the election to do anything about this legislation.

Speaker 7 Right, which I think that

Speaker 7 that seemed to have been the path that was attempted four years ago. But I will also say a couple of things.
One, the TikTok audience is older than anyone thinks it is.

Speaker 7 The TikTok audience is actually generally people around my age because

Speaker 7 the deeply elderly, people in our

Speaker 7 30s. We are ancient.

Speaker 7 We are struggling.

Speaker 6 Well-meaning millennials.

Speaker 7 And I will also say that in other countries where this has been attempted, people basically, TikTok basically just did what it has already done in the United States, which is that it became Instagram Reels.

Speaker 7 Like, Instagram Reels are essentially repurposed TikToks. There are thousands.
I don't actually have TikTok, but because of Instagram, I feel like I do.

Speaker 7 And so it's not as if, like, TikTok has broken contain. TikTok, like, the people who are on TikTok do not stay there.
They are also posting their content on YouTube. But, like, the content is there.

Speaker 7 The users are there.

Speaker 7 Like, you can't really attempting to limit, we are now in a point of like kind of social media amalgamation in which people who are on one platform don't just stay there.

Speaker 7 Their content doesn't just stay there. It crosses over.
But I do think, I mean, if I

Speaker 7 if I'm ByteDance, I just sell. I just sell.
I do it like Grinder. I just sell to an American company for

Speaker 7 billions of dollars.

Speaker 6 But I guess the Chinese government has a say here, right?

Speaker 6 If ByteDance is allowed to sell.

Speaker 6 And they have previously said that they will not allow a sale, which if you weren't worried about Chinese government influence on TikTok before, the fact that they have been very opposed to a sale should raise some red flags, people.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it just, I mean, that does seem

Speaker 6 lightly. We're not letting go of this company.
And also, by the way, the Chinese government that does not allow any American social media platforms to operate in their country.

Speaker 7 Yes, and also has tight limits on their social media platforms, as has been found out 90 bazillion times over the last five years. But I think, like,

Speaker 7 I am,

Speaker 7 I am not sure what the political ramifications would be. I will say that the polling indicates, and again, polling is just a photograph in time.

Speaker 7 It does not tell you what any, how anyone will actually react to anything. The polling indicates that most Americans are in support of a ban on TikTok.

Speaker 7 Now, why that is, we need to ask most Americans, and neither of us have that kind of time. But like, how people think about this particular issue might be a little more complicated.

Speaker 7 I mean, yes, I am fully convinced that House members have been deluded with calls from young people, which I will say,

Speaker 7 it's kind of funny to me that people are like, why aren't young people more politically active?

Speaker 7 And then young people get politically active and then call their representative about an issue that matters to them. And people are like, whoa, stop it.

Speaker 7 Stop it. Go away.
And like,

Speaker 7 they're doing the thing they're supposed to do.

Speaker 6 All right, before we go to break, and in case you missed it, the Cricket Store just launched a no-trespassing collection inspired by states where abortion is under attack.

Speaker 6 A portion of the proceeds will go to Vote Save America's Fuck Bands Fund, which currently supports abortion rights organizations across Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.

Speaker 6 Head to cricket.com/slash store to shop now.

Speaker 6 Also, in case you missed it, our Pod Save America and Love It or Leave It 2024 tour dates were just announced, and the Friends of the Pod pre-sale is happening now.

Speaker 6 So, if you want access to the best seats in the house before everyone else, subscribe at cricket.com/slash friends to get the exclusive code.

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Speaker 6 All right, so here's a New York Times headline that made me throw my phone. Aaron Rodgers and Jesse Ventura top RFK Jr.'s list for running mate.
What a world.

Speaker 6 Apparently, Kennedy has approached the New York Jets quarterback and the former professional wrestler about joining his independent ticket as vice president.

Speaker 6 And quote, both men have welcomed the overtures. Two people familiar with the discussion said.

Speaker 6 The Washington Post then followed up with the report that Kennedy has, in fact, selected his running mate and will announce his choice within two weeks.

Speaker 6 Kennedy's currently only on the ballot in four states, though his super PAC says he has enough signatures to qualify in Georgia and Arizona as well.

Speaker 6 Like Kennedy, Rogers and Ventura, both conspiracy theory guys. Rogers spreads misinformation about COVID.
Ventura thinks the government did 9-11. Gonna be tough to choose between them, huh?

Speaker 6 Apparently, Discovery Channel host Mike Rowe and Tony Robbins. Yes, that Tony Robbins are also in the mix.
What do you think, Jane?

Speaker 7 I'm about to say words that I have never said before, but all credit to former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who has apparently stopped having discussions about becoming vice president.

Speaker 6 Too crazy for Tulsi.

Speaker 7 Too crazy. As had Senator Rand Paul, which makes sense because the idea of Rand Paul being anyone's vice president just seems

Speaker 7 unlikely, unworkable, on a lot of things.

Speaker 7 With respect that is due, Jesse Ventura did serve as governor of the great state of Minnesota. That is a real thing that happened.
Many of us were there.

Speaker 7 Aaron Rodgers.

Speaker 7 Hang on.

Speaker 7 I need to gather myself. So in January.
Now, this is,

Speaker 7 I started out writing about the NFL and college football. That is my first love, my true passion.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 a quote went around a bunch yesterday.

Speaker 7 The absolutely fantastic ESPN commentator and reporter Mina Kimes shared it as do a host of other people.

Speaker 7 So in January, Aaron Rodgers, Jets quarterback, who played two plays for the Jets before tearing his Achilles,

Speaker 7 he told Pat McAfee. on ESPN because Aaron Rodgers had time to call into Pat McAfee

Speaker 7 anytime he wants.

Speaker 7 He loves it. He said the Jets need to eliminate distractions, which

Speaker 7 it's a real guy in hot dog costume asking, We're all trying to find who did this.

Speaker 7 Aaron Rodgers, I want to talk at the very micro about the football of it all because this is a rare opportunity in which I can do this.

Speaker 7 I figured, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 he has a job.

Speaker 7 He has a job that for what 30,

Speaker 7 31 other starting quarterbacks and like a ton of other people is an all-encompassing job. Being an NFL quarterback is extraordinarily high pressure, very difficult.
People are mad at you all the time.

Speaker 7 You are working all the time.

Speaker 7 Aaron Rodgers came over from the Packers.

Speaker 7 If you watched Hard Knocks this year, which was excellent,

Speaker 7 Aaron Rodgers came across as like a nice, interesting person with a lot of strange views, but he didn't really talk about those and he seemed kind of like, oh, you know, he was going to make the team better and he was doing a lot with like team camaraderie and people got along.

Speaker 7 And then he gets hurt.

Speaker 7 And in normal Peopleville, it would have been like, you know, you would have just seen a lot of like hashtag grind set posts on Instagram as he like works his way back from an Achilles chair, which is like...

Speaker 7 The fact that you can do that now, like an Achilles chair in football or in sports in general used to just be like, well, that's, you're, you're, that's done.

Speaker 7 He was even hinting in December that like, oh, I could make a return. That was never going to happen, but he just likes to hear himself talk.

Speaker 7 Being an NFL quarterback is a full-time profession. Like if you're an NFL quarterback, that's all you do.

Speaker 7 Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow has been recovering from a hand issue. That's all he does.
He goes to physical therapy and recovers from his hand issue. He's not like, well, we're here.

Speaker 7 I'm going to enter the seminary and become a priest in my spare time.

Speaker 6 Not a lot of opportunities for part-time work when you're an NFL quarterback.

Speaker 7 And do you know what's also a full-time job? I don't know if you've heard this.

Speaker 7 Being a vice presidential candidate. Being a vice presidential candidate, which,

Speaker 7 just to really circle things up here,

Speaker 7 the election

Speaker 7 that is going to take place is in November. You know what else is taking place in November? That's actually way cooler and better and I like more than elections.

Speaker 7 Football. Football is taking place then.
The fact that I saw that headline in the New York Times and for just a second, I was like,

Speaker 7 this isn't like some of that, one of those like weird, you remember like early 2000s, like internet scam stuff that was like political scams where it's like, oh, you know, we fake the cover of a magazine and it's supposed to talk about how this is actually all about climate change or something like that.

Speaker 7 Like for a second, I was like, wow, this is a really involved fake. But no,

Speaker 6 I did a double take as well.

Speaker 7 I did a double take. It's a real thing.
It's a real thing.

Speaker 6 And unfortunately,

Speaker 6 I keep going back and forth on how seriously to take RFK Jr.'s candidacy because he is not quite a serious person, has proved himself to be, nor is Aaron Rodgers in his

Speaker 6 spreading COVID misinformation and random conspiracies about Jimmy Kimmel Kimmel and

Speaker 6 and and Jeffrey Epstein that turned out of course not to be true. So like Aaron Rodgers not a serious person at this point

Speaker 6 Nor is Jesse Ventura at this point nor

Speaker 6 arguably ever a lot of the other people on this list as well and

Speaker 7 but I actually I want to I want to jump in here for a second Aaron Rodgers

Speaker 7 is not a serious person. This is something like the conspiracy stuff.

Speaker 7 He does conspiracy stuff in the way that like it's it's interesting because it's the one way in which I think Aaron Rodgers is a very identifiable American because he does conspiracy stuff for fun.

Speaker 7 Like, this is, this is interesting and entertaining for him. Like, it's like the guy you work with where you have had approximately one beer with him and were like, that will never happen again.

Speaker 7 Because he just randomly started being like, so how do you think they fake the moon landing? And you're like, oh, no, it's this person.

Speaker 7 He is like every time, I mean, and he always has that plausible deniability about being like, I'm just, you know, i'm just thinking out loud trying to think outside the system but like he does have and should stay within his actual job his actual job at which he is let's remember very good at multiple mvps he's won a super bowl he has been very successful and he just happens to have this sideline of saying things that are fucking insane

Speaker 7 RFK Jr. is actually a very serious person, which is why he is of concern, because he very seriously says and does the things that he says and does.
Like, this is not a sideline.

Speaker 7 He is a former environmental attorney who

Speaker 7 has been spreading vaccine misinformation for years, not because it is fun for him. It actually seems like it's not fun for him at all.
He is very serious about this. He really,

Speaker 7 really believes it. This is not like a being contrarian thing or trying to think outside the matrix.
He is absolutely 100% convinced of it. That is not good.

Speaker 7 And I think

Speaker 7 to,

Speaker 7 I'm guessing what you're thinking of like how, you know, what RF, what role RFK will play in the election.

Speaker 7 I think that the challenge is going to be that each party believes that he is going to be a problem

Speaker 7 at best for their opposition at worst for them. And so, for instance, there's been talk about RFK RFK joining the Libertarian Party ticket.

Speaker 7 I don't think that is going to happen because I will say this for the Libertarian Party. RFK is a very non-libertarian person.
Very non-like

Speaker 7 the adjacent, it's not, it's he,

Speaker 7 the ways in which he wants to wield the government. on a host of issues ranging from environmental issues, which let's keep in mind, that is where he started out.
Like,

Speaker 7 not very libertarian.

Speaker 7 Now,

Speaker 7 he could still attempt to run on the ticket, but I don't think that the LP will permit that. I do think that RFK can thread this very particular needle of being someone that appeals to people who are

Speaker 7 conservative

Speaker 7 on social issues. but fairly liberal on economic issues with regard to the welfare state, with regard to social security.

Speaker 7 You know, when you have conservative influencers and pundits saying, like, why should anyone retire? Retirement will kill you. Just work forever, as Ben Shapiro implied, I believe, yesterday.

Speaker 7 A candidate who is talking a lot about the need to build up the welfare state while espousing the same kind of anti-corporate, anti-quote-unquote big pharma attitudes that used to be something that like lefties talked about in the early 2000s.

Speaker 7 Like when you have a candidate who can appeal to people who think of themselves as being conservatives while also sounding like somebody who would be at the WTA protests in 1999, like that's an interesting through line.

Speaker 7 However,

Speaker 7 I will also say like

Speaker 7 for, I think that I think that that's the concern also for Biden. Like you have someone who can

Speaker 7 who sounds this particular way, who can

Speaker 7 thread that particular needle that I think

Speaker 7 that is a populace that neither party is reaching out to or understands.

Speaker 7 That is not to say that like everyone should should be aiming themselves at the vaccine skeptical conservative voter.

Speaker 7 Like that's, you know, that's not that big a population and also vaccines are cool and good. But like I understand why both parties are concerned about this.
And I think like

Speaker 7 it is

Speaker 7 this list of potential candidates really speaks to the

Speaker 7 I'm not socially conservative. I'm like, the kind of the like the

Speaker 7 political middle, that political muddly middle of people who are also vaccine skeptical and really like state power, but also don't want to be told what to do, which is a large swath of people.

Speaker 7 Like, I think that I understand this list of people as being representative of that when you get like Tulsi and Rand and Aaron Rodgers. Like, well, it's a little bit more.

Speaker 7 I get why people are worried. I get that.

Speaker 6 It's anti-establishment, countercultural, and low trust at a time when people do not have a lot of faith in institutions and are pretty cranky. So, yeah, that's like a toxic mix.

Speaker 6 Kennedy's campaign also has like an extremely online feel to it, heavy on conspiracy, grievance, fringe, weird. DeSantis' campaign was also very online.
Didn't work out so well for him.

Speaker 6 You wrote a piece that you and I talked about before on the 2020 Trump campaign being too online. And it does seem like the

Speaker 6 terminally online reactionary manosphere is the real driving energy in at least some segment of Republican politics right now. I know you've been thinking and writing about this.

Speaker 6 What's your sense of what that's all about and sort of why it's bubbling up right now?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think that

Speaker 7 first, I think it's helpful to explain what I mean by extremely or terminally online, which is something, John, you understand very well.

Speaker 7 Being extremely online is not just being on the internet. It is believing firmly and acting as if events that take place online matter to everyone offline.

Speaker 7 And the 2020 campaign was a great example of this because Donald Trump would routinely go on the stump and talk about things that online conservatives were talking about all the time to audiences in like Iowa or Nebraska who were like, what in the fuck are you talking about?

Speaker 7 He went on the stump or would tweet at the time and would talk about how we need to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1997. Now,

Speaker 7 I love Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1997.

Speaker 7 That has to do with, you know, how basically it says that, like, if you post something on Facebook, Facebook is not liable for the thing you post.

Speaker 7 If you post a comment on a website, the people who, the person who runs that website, whether it's InfoWars or a recipe website with two long descriptions at the top that you have to scroll all the way through, they are not liable for that.

Speaker 7 That's awesome. I love it.
Donald Trump does not. A lot of people do not.

Speaker 7 Most people don't know what it is or care. And I think that the onlineification of the right, which I think that has been ramped up by the fact that X is now a, what I would argue to be a

Speaker 7 conservative, not conservative like William F. Buckley conservative, but like a right-leaning

Speaker 7 social media outlet

Speaker 7 and is, you know,

Speaker 7 still incredibly popular with online conservatives and the people who care what they think.

Speaker 7 It means that you spend spend a lot of time fixated by issues and talking about issues and hyping yourself up about issues that only matter to other members of the online right or the online left that hates the online right.

Speaker 7 And I think you saw this over and over again in 2022, where you had a midterm election.

Speaker 7 where Biden did that speech about how this is about democracy, this is about fighting against the forces that would end democracy.

Speaker 7 And the online right and like the super online left make fun of him and talk about how he looked like Hitler and how it was scary.

Speaker 7 And this is actually going to be a red wave because you're transing our kids and moms for liberty and libs of TikTok and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 7 And then you might recall, there was no red wave.

Speaker 6 That's the problem with this, which is like this online right-wing activism has now like infected infected and taken over a lot of the party. I mean, it's a problem for them.

Speaker 6 I think for, I think, if for Democratic strategists, it's to like lift up these examples, right? And it's not, and by the way, these aren't just like online influencers.

Speaker 6 The Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, he monitors his grown son's porn consumption. He thinks there were dinosaurs on the ark, on Noah's Ark.

Speaker 6 The guy that they're running for governor in North Carolina thinks Black Panther was a Jewish plot to scam black people.

Speaker 6 You know, like, they're all mad.

Speaker 6 A bunch of them are mad about recreational sex, but they also like ban, they want to to ban all abortion, no exceptions, ban IVF, ban gay marriage, ban books, ban no-fault divorce.

Speaker 7 They want to replace it with

Speaker 7 covenant marriage. But they're also very mad that women aren't sexy anymore.
Like, there are all these, like, AI things where it's just, like, showing, like, here's what the ideal woman looks like.

Speaker 7 And also, all of these ideal women happen to have 11 children and amazing breasts.

Speaker 7 Well,

Speaker 6 they think that Sidney Sweeney's breasts are a victory against wokeism.

Speaker 7 I am so sorry, Sidney Sweeney. I am so sorry.
sorry. This is all so weird.

Speaker 6 It is so weird, but that is the energy of the party. And a lot of Republican politicians are just like, they have bought this now.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 7 And like you see, I mean, the hosted defections coming from like people in Congress, because like this is the onlineification of the right is happening in Congress, too, where you have people who are like

Speaker 7 the online nature. And I will say also.
that this is a problem and this was a problem for Democrats as well because everybody has their weirdos you keep locked in the political closet.

Speaker 7 That's a thing you have. You got to keep them locked in.
You got like in 2020, you had a host of people who were talking about how rioting was great and how this is awesome.

Speaker 7 And then you had a lot of people looking at actual voting numbers from, including like from working class African Americans who were like, no, it's not not cool at all.

Speaker 7 And Joe Biden, notably, won the Democratic primary out of what, 85 people? How many people ran for president among Democrats in 2020? I believe it was 85 people.

Speaker 7 And he is, and to his credit, he is very not online. Like, absolutely 100% not online.
I know he now has a TikTok now, but like, that is run by nice people who are like 25 years old. That's fine.

Speaker 7 This is a person who, like, in the State of the Union was like, I was born during the Second World War.

Speaker 7 I don't remember it, but I think about it a lot and I'm like, yeah, you do. Of course you do.
But like,

Speaker 7 that is something that is adjacent to reality. And I think for the online right,

Speaker 7 the challenge is that they are not adjacent to reality and that reality will take place and they are so put off by reality that they retreat even more into the loving embrace of the online right.

Speaker 6 But this is why I think that Republicans have been very good, especially over the last couple of years, of like picking out, like you said, sort of the craziest anecdotes on the far left and highlighting them.

Speaker 7 Right.

Speaker 6 And I do think that

Speaker 6 if for us to do that to them, we don't have to pick some random conservative activist online or somewhere here and there.

Speaker 6 Like, there's plenty of politicians that they're running for national office that are doing all these things.

Speaker 7 CPAC is it. CPAC where they're like partying with literal Nazis.
It's like actual Nazis. And then they're like, no, we weren't.
And then it's like, no, it actually, there's Jared Taylor. Like, yeah,

Speaker 7 actual yeah real nazis of potomac or whatever so i think it's a i do think that's going to be a um a big issue a big issue to harp on uh in the fall for democratic like again because it's not just going to be about trump it's going to be like look at all these freaks they nominated all these weirdos yeah well so jane uh thank you so much for uh for joining pod save america this was a lot of fun thank you so much for having me anytime you know if aaron rogers does get this vp spot you got to bring me back.

Speaker 6 We'll bring you back. Oh, no, we're going to have a whole

Speaker 6 episode on that. We're going to have content for weeks if that happens.

Speaker 6 All right, everyone, we will be back with another episode Friday morning. Take care.
Bye, Jane.

Speaker 21 Bye.

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Our show is produced by Olivia Martinez and David Toledo.

Speaker 6 Our associate producers are Saul Rubin and Farah Safari. Kira Wakeem is our senior producer.
Reed Sherlin is our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.