Trump's 2nd Term: Military in the Streets, Mike Johnson in the Sheets

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Speaker 4 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

Speaker 4 On today's show, Nikki Haley burns the votes and says she plans to stay in the race no matter what happens in Saturday's South Carolina primary.

Speaker 4 Joe Biden provides student debt relief to another 150,000 Americans.

Speaker 4 And later, Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wickler talks to Dan about the new legislative maps that have finally ended one of the worst gerrymanders in the country.

Speaker 4 But first, the MAGA establishment continues to make it very clear that a second Trump term would be much more extreme than the first.

Speaker 4 The man who's heading to trial for paying hush money to a porn star he had an affair with spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention on Thursday, just a few days after Politico reported that a Trump-aligned think tank is planning to, quote, infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration should the former president return to power.

Speaker 4 What are those ideas?

Speaker 4 Not a lot of details just yet, but based on what we've heard from Russell Vogt, the former senior Trump official and potential White House chief of staff who's spearheading the project, and former Trump official William Wolfe, a Christian nationalist who works with Vogt, they want to ban the following: abortion, abortion pills, surrogacy, no-fault divorce, and sex education in schools.

Speaker 4 They also want to repeal policies that support gay people, trans people, and single mothers.

Speaker 4 And if people take to the streets to speak out against any of this, they want Trump to use the military against protesters.

Speaker 4 Here's a clip of Trump supporter Jack Pasobic speaking at CPAC, where Trump is also scheduled to speak this weekend.

Speaker 5 I just wanted to say, welcome to the end of democracy.

Speaker 5 We're here to overthrow it completely. We didn't get all the way there on January 6th, but

Speaker 5 we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here. We'll replace it with this right here.
Amen.

Speaker 5 That's right, because

Speaker 5 all glory is not to government, all glory to God.

Speaker 4 He was pointing to a crucifix.

Speaker 4 So all in all, great stuff from the limited government freedom lovers.

Speaker 4 The Center for the Renewal of America, which is the think tank that put out the document that says Christian nationalism is a top priority in a second Trump term, they, of course, told Politico that their reporting is false.

Speaker 4 The Trump campaign, Vote, Wolf, all refused to respond. Wolf even deleted tweets about his policy ideas.
But what do you think, Dan?

Speaker 4 What are the chances that this agenda becomes reality if Trump becomes president again? I feel like Wolf deleting his tweets is sort of the smoking gun here. You think so? Yes.

Speaker 4 Look, I think we should take this threat deadly seriously. The right wing learned the lesson of the first Trump term, right?

Speaker 4 They view him as in, particularly the evangelical Christian nationalist part of the Republican Party views Trump as this obviously imperfect vessel for their policy agenda. And last time.

Speaker 4 But a useful one. A useful one.
A very useful one. Useful, but imperfect, yeah.

Speaker 4 But they got much less done than they possibly could have during Trump's first term because he just hired a bunch of Yahoos, right?

Speaker 4 He was just hiring people out of Fox News green rooms left and right. There was no plan.

Speaker 4 And that's what all of this is connected to the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which is to ensure that the people at all levels of the Trump administration are people who are going to be smart enough.

Speaker 4 to implement this right-wing agenda, that no stone will go on turn. They recognize the missed opportunity of the first term, and they're not going to let that happen again.

Speaker 4 And as we know, Donald Trump, not a details guy. He's not interviewing the person who is the number three in command at the Health and Human Services Agency.

Speaker 4 He's not interviewing the people who are on on the domestic policy council in the White House or working on issues related to reproductive health or freedom.

Speaker 4 This is what this is essentially what Trump did with the Federal Society and his judicial nominations.

Speaker 4 He's going to do with his White House, with his White House and agency staff, with the Heritage Foundation, which means that Russell Vogt and Mr.

Speaker 4 Deleted Tweets over here are going to get a chance to put their agenda in place. And we know how the regulatory process works.

Speaker 4 You can do a lot of really damaging stuff under the radar. And by the time people figure out, it's way too late.

Speaker 4 Also, if you have a Republican Senate and Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House, a guy who, you know, he and his son monitor each other's porn intake on their phones, you can do even more than you can just as president.

Speaker 4 And look, maybe you think that

Speaker 4 a thrice divorced guy who cheats on his wife with porn stars isn't all that into Christian nationalism. Fair.
But

Speaker 4 he knows he needs Christian nationalist support. He delivered for them with three Supreme Court justices justices and Dobbs, like no other Republican president has.
They will say that themselves.

Speaker 4 And all these people are going to get positions with real power, like you say, if he becomes president again.

Speaker 4 He's not a details guy, but also all it takes to get Trump to do something that you want is to kiss his ass, which they know. All they like, they can go into the oval.

Speaker 4 They can tell him he's wonderful. Oh, sign this bill.
It's going to do this. He's going to do it.
He's going to do it. So there were three bullets on the document that Politico obtained.

Speaker 4 Christian nationalism. That was one of the bullets.
Insurrection Act,

Speaker 4 and refusing to spend money authorized by Congress. This is a new thing that all these groups, the Heritage Project, the Christian nationalists, they all want.

Speaker 4 So, this is how the president, this is how a President Trump in a second term gets around Congress. The Congress passes something,

Speaker 4 and then he just ignores what they pass. So, I mean, I think this is like a recipe for a situation that could actually deteriorate quite quickly.

Speaker 4 You have a lunatic president surrounded by right-wing Christian nationalists who ignores Congress, ignores the courts, and sends the military out to deal with anyone who opposes him.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's not, this is, it sounds like dystopian, far-fetched shit, but I really don't think it is when you start reading what these people are saying and you know that these are the people who are going to be in the White House and running the government in a second term.

Speaker 4 And I think what's really, you are exactly right about the dystopian vision of what this this could become, right? Checks and balances out the door, right?

Speaker 4 Everything that is supposed to curtail the power of a rogue executive is gone under this plan. Absolutely.

Speaker 4 What I think we also have to do is be able to take it, make it a little more piecemeal and easier for people to understand, right? Which is how are these things going to affect your life? Right.

Speaker 4 And I think this is where even if Democrats hold the Senate or we take the House back and Trump does not have the majorities he needs to pass a national abortion ban, every part of that federal government that can do anything possible to make it harder to access an abortion in this country will do that.

Speaker 4 Right. That is what's going to happen.
He's going to try to, he can take an executive action to ban abortion pills, Mithopristone, where 50% of women get their abortions through abortion pills.

Speaker 4 He's already, they've already got that plan and that he doesn't need Congress for that.

Speaker 4 There's a whole raft of draft executive orders, presidential memorandum written by Christian nationalists, think tanks, and Donald Trump will sign them and he will not read a single one of them, right?

Speaker 4 This is, I mean, this is very, very real. And I think it's very important that Democrats talk about this because Donald Trump does have, as you point, is this thrice divorced New Yorker that he

Speaker 4 people. New Yorker.
Well, I mean, like Donald Trump does not code to people who see him as a far-right evangelical Christian nationalist. He just doesn't.
That's not how people see him.

Speaker 4 And so they think of him as you see this in focus groups when you bring up abortion.

Speaker 4 Focus group participants among swing voters will tell you that they believe Trump is not only personally pro-choice,

Speaker 4 they are sure he has paid for abortions.

Speaker 4 And so he is able to get away with things that other Republicans can't on these issues that have driven Democratic turnout in elections where Trump was not on the ballot.

Speaker 4 And so every opportunity we have to make the case about how his administration, regardless of what he personally believes or doesn't believe, that doesn't matter.

Speaker 4 What matters is what he does and what he has done. What he did do was be the person who

Speaker 4 made it so that Roe v. Wade was overturned.
What is going to happen are all these things that are in this agenda.

Speaker 4 And we just have to bring that down to people because otherwise, if you don't explain it specifically, it's going to sound like partisan noise to people. No, I completely agree.
And

Speaker 4 it's the agenda, if you, if all of the things that I mentioned, extremely unpopular with the majority of Americans, there's one group that's been drifting away from Democrats who will

Speaker 4 probably also hate this, which is young men.

Speaker 4 It does seem unlikely to me that the guys who love bar stool sports and Joe Rogan are going to be into banning birth control and porn and all the other crazy shit that the Christian nationalists want to do.

Speaker 4 These guys aren't letting their dads monitor their porn like Mike Johnson and his kid.

Speaker 4 That's a double porn monitoring reference in this podcast. Good job.

Speaker 4 Can't get enough of covenant eyes.

Speaker 4 And, you know, some people are like, well, Republicans are saying, you know, they're for birth control and contraception.

Speaker 4 Well, Republicans in Congress just last year blocked a bill that would have enshrined the right to birth control into federal law. Why? Why are they doing that?

Speaker 4 Like,

Speaker 4 this is just like what happened before Dobbs, too, right? Which, or right after Dobbs, right? Which is some people say, oh, don't worry. It's going to, states are going to do their own thing.

Speaker 4 It's not going to be as bad. And then, you know,

Speaker 4 how many years later, we're about to talk about the IVF case in Alabama.

Speaker 4 We are seeing the downstream effects of what happens when right-wing nationalists, right-wing Christian nationalists, burrow into government, are given power, and decide to force their agenda on the rest of the country.

Speaker 4 And if you don't think that that's what's going to happen when Donald Trump becomes president, right, could some of it not happen? Yeah, yeah, he's lazy, who knows?

Speaker 4 But a bunch of it is really could happen, this agenda. And I do think it's like incredibly important for Democrats to talk about it a lot from now until November.

Speaker 4 We just got another preview of what a Christian nationalist agenda might look like.

Speaker 4 A week ago, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created in an IVF lab count as children under the state's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

Speaker 4 This is a big win for abortion opponents who argue that life begins at conception.

Speaker 4 Already, three Alabama hospitals, including the University of Alabama at Birmingham, have hit pause on all IVF care as a result of the ruling.

Speaker 4 So for people in Alabama who are considering IVF as their best or only shot at having a child, or have frozen embryos awaiting genetic testing, or are going through already the very expensive, uncomfortable, sometimes painful IVF process right now, this is just, it's devastating news.

Speaker 4 Dan Playbook also called this a, quote, nightmare scenario for the GOP. So one in six Americans have had fertility issues.

Speaker 4 Pew says that more than 40% of Americans have personally used fertility treatments of some kind.

Speaker 4 And more than 86% of Americans support IVF, including around 80% of people who consider themselves pro-life or evangelicals, according to polling shared by none other than Kellyanne Conway.

Speaker 4 How do you think this issue plays out beyond what's happening in Alabama?

Speaker 4 Look, I think if you get a poll from Kellyanne Conway that says 86% of people support IVF, that seems pretty bad for Republicans.

Speaker 4 I think that we should treat this much like the Christian national. The two stories we're talking about here are absolutely interconnected.

Speaker 4 The people who are trying to staff Donald Trump's administration, who put in place his Christian national agenda, want to take what Alabama did and make it national.

Speaker 4 They want to at least make it so that this is a national policy. Maybe it becomes a policy that states can do.

Speaker 4 Either way, access to IVF is under tremendous threat if Donald Trump is elected president. And he, no, it doesn't matter what Donald Trump says about this.
He might say he doesn't agree with it.

Speaker 4 He probably doesn't know what it is, but

Speaker 4 that we should take this threat very seriously.

Speaker 4 And people will say, well, you know, this is one kind of narrowly written decision and it's Alabama and there's a history of that sort of stuff in Alabama. That's how Roe v.
Wade got overturned.

Speaker 4 It was. the work

Speaker 4 of right-wing state-level activists working at a process to get cases that end up before the Supreme Court. Now, this court case is not yet headed to the Supreme Court, but it very well could be.

Speaker 4 And if Donald Trump is president of the United States, what side do you think the Department of Justice is arguing on?

Speaker 4 I think it's on the side for access to healthcare choices for women, or you think it's going to be the side of what the Christian nationalists who staff as government want.

Speaker 4 And so I think we should take it very seriously. We should talk about it.
And this is one of those things that just like anecdotally in your life, you know, is breaking through. People who

Speaker 4 in my life who follow politics, but don't obsess about it like we do, who don't generally bring up politics to me, have brought this up.

Speaker 4 You see it on social media, people who don't generally post about politics, posting about this, because so many people have used IVF, contemplated using it, did research on it to see if they were going to have to use it, know people who used it.

Speaker 4 And just like, and the things that really break through in this era of politics are the things that have a direct impact on people's lives.

Speaker 4 They're not theoretical policy positions taken by the government or tax policy. It's, I can do one thing today, and if these people get elected, I can't do it tomorrow.

Speaker 4 And that's why Dobbs was such a consequential moment in politics. And I think the IV, IVF is a, is, it comes from Dobbs, but is very happened, is of the same vein.

Speaker 4 And it is a very, I think this is one of those, one of those moments that it could be very impactful.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I mean, Republican politicians right now, as we are recording this, are tripping over themselves to say that they support.
IVF and they, you know, they don't agree with this. And,

Speaker 4 you know, some Republican told Politico, like, I don't know why we're talking about this.

Speaker 4 No Senate candidates, Republican Senate candidates have supported this, have said that they're against IVF, all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 4 But it is, like you said, it is an example of the conservative legal system doing whatever the hell it wants and Republican politicians enabling conservative judges to do whatever the hell they want.

Speaker 4 This is what happens when you legislate religious beliefs that haven't been validated by science or medicine.

Speaker 4 You are free to believe, as Nikki Haley said she did in response to this news, that an embryo is morally equivalent to a newborn baby.

Speaker 4 But if you turn that religious belief into a law, if you decide that you need to make an embryo legally equivalent to a newborn baby, you get a decision like Alabama's, which is currently preventing people from having children through IVF, which Nikki Haley said she supports just today.

Speaker 4 This is the logical logical conclusion of what the Supreme Court set out in Dobbs.

Speaker 4 And all of these Republican politicians, right, like they think they have their religious belief that life begins at conception and that

Speaker 4 embryos are humans and that fetuses are all human and all this kind of stuff. And it's like, and they want to give them the same legal rights.

Speaker 4 And once you jump to giving them the same legal rights, you get things like the Alabama Supreme Court making a decision on IVF that is now ending the practice in the state of Alabama.

Speaker 4 You get women who are fighting for their lives because they have a pregnancy that could kill them and not being able to get an abortion because some fucking judge has to figure out whether the doctor can save the life of the mother or not.

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 4 you can have your religious beliefs. It is totally fine.

Speaker 4 But the idea that we now have to enshrine your religious beliefs into law has led to all kinds of pain and suffering in this country and will continue to if we go down this path.

Speaker 4 And the Biden campaign just put out a clip of Trump announcing his nomination of a judge in 2020 who was deemed not qualified by the American Bar Association.

Speaker 4 She now has a lifetime appointment on the federal bench. He considered her for the Supreme Court and she is anti-IVF and anti-surrogacy.
And do you think Trump knew that when he was saying it?

Speaker 4 Probably not because he doesn't get, like you said, he's not a details guy. He doesn't give a shit.
But the Federalist Society wanted the judge. And so Trump said, sure, here's your judge.

Speaker 4 And then we get decisions like this. And then you get Republican politicians like, what? Someone asked fucking dipshit Tommy Tubberville about this.

Speaker 4 And he was like, oh, no, yeah, no, I support the Alabama Supreme Court. Oh, no, no, I want IVF.
I like, babies are good. Oh, let me look at the bill.
And the reporter's like, there is no bill.

Speaker 4 What are you talking about? There's no bill. This is a decision for the Supreme Court.

Speaker 4 Like, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, which is why they shouldn't be involved in decisions, healthcare decisions that families are making with their doctors. It's crazy.

Speaker 4 It's a bunch of weird politicians who want to be involved in what you read, what you can say, who you love, who you can marry, how you have sex, when you have kids, your healthcare decisions.

Speaker 4 That's what they want. They want to be in your life.

Speaker 4 And I think that that is something that has was a very effective political argument for Democrats for a long time, but it's sort of gotten lost in the Trump era as we talk rightfully so about the fall of democracy and authoritarianism authoritarianism and all the other things it's you still got a bunch of a bunch of politicians men who weirdly want to get deeply involved in people's personal issues and but it's

Speaker 4 the I see I think it it connects oh absolutely absolutely with the minority rule

Speaker 4 and that's why that's why the weird Christian nationalists are talking about the fucking insurrection act

Speaker 4 because it's not enough for Republican states and Republican legislatures and governors to pass these laws they want to send the military into blue states and blue cities.

Speaker 4 And if you don't agree with their fucking right-wing agenda, they are going to force it, literally force it on you with military, with the United States military.

Speaker 4 And if that sounds like it sounds dystopian, it is not. It is exactly what Trump and the people who are going to serve in his second term want to do.

Speaker 4 Okay, in case Trump's Christian nationalist government in waiting hasn't freaked you out enough, the Love Thy Neighbor crew also has some pretty terrifying immigration plans.

Speaker 4 The Washington Post reports that Trump and Stephen Miller, yeah, he's going to be back, want to launch, quote, the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.

Speaker 4 This would go far beyond migrants who recently crossed the border and would target an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country.

Speaker 4 These are immigrants who've lived here for decades, who came here as kids, who work and pay taxes.

Speaker 4 The plan involves, again, sending the military and law enforcement into cities, rounding up immigrants, putting them in new internment camps, and then deporting them to countries where many of them have never even lived because they've been in this country for so long.

Speaker 4 Here's Trump talking about it during his town hall with Laura Ingram.

Speaker 7 How do you plan to deport the millions of people? I mean, there's probably 12, 13 million people under Biden alone that have come here. And how will it work?

Speaker 8 It's going to work that we get the bad ones out first. They're coming in from prisons.
They're coming in from jails and mental institutions.

Speaker 7 How will you find them?

Speaker 8 We're going to find them through local police. Look, the local police, they're so phenomenal.
I love them. They love me.

Speaker 4 I think I have 97% support.

Speaker 9 They know everything.

Speaker 4 So Trump and

Speaker 4 Stephen Miller wanted to carry out this massive deportation operation in the first term. They couldn't get it done for various reasons.

Speaker 4 They got some pushback from local law enforcement, particularly in blue states and cities. Got some pushback from the bureaucracy, the federal government bureaucracy.

Speaker 4 This is why they're always railing against the deep state.

Speaker 4 They got some pushback from the courts, but they think they have learned some lessons this time and will be able to pull it off in a second term. What do you think?

Speaker 4 I think they certainly learned some lessons, just like the right-wing folks learned some lessons about how to use Trump to implement their agenda.

Speaker 4 Trump also learned some lessons from his first term, right? In the first term, he had two kinds of people: he had

Speaker 4 loyal knuckleheads who couldn't get shit done, and he had disloyal, quasi-serious, quasi-effective people.

Speaker 4 And the lesson of what his failed effort to overturn the election is he needs true, die-hard loyalists who will effectively carry out his agenda. He can't have people like Bill Barr.

Speaker 4 I can't believe I'm just citing Bill Barr in this case, but Bill Barr stopping him from doing things or as one of his many defense secretaries.

Speaker 4 But he also has to have people smarter and better than like Jeff Clark to actually get the stuff done. And so, and this is, this is, you see this in the Trump campaign this time around.

Speaker 4 He has hired real people to run a real race. And I think there will be people who can actually get this shit done in his White House.
And so we should take all these things seriously.

Speaker 4 And all the reporting about what a second Trump presidency would look like, we got to take that seriously because that stuff can and will happen. We are, it should, this is what he wants to do.

Speaker 4 And I think he has a much better chance of getting it done this time than last time. The Post has done some great reporting on this in this piece.

Speaker 4 The Times also did reporting on this a couple months back. And it is maybe the immigration plans, the Trump immigration plans are maybe the most detailed of all the plans we've heard.

Speaker 4 Stephen Miller gave like a long interview to Charlie Kirk about this, where he sounded like a fucking lunatic.

Speaker 4 Was very open about what they want to do. In the post story, there's a quote about Trump and Miller's plans in their first term that they didn't completely carry out.

Speaker 4 Quote, their ideas were psychotic. You're talking about officers in tactical gear going into communities, being videotaped in the streets, putting kids in car seats carrying baby formula.

Speaker 4 Then what do you do with those families? Are you going to go into neighborhoods in Philly, New York, Baltimore, and start tugging people out of communities? That's what they want.

Speaker 4 It puts law enforcement and the communities at risk. That quote is from the chief of staff at ICE,

Speaker 4 Jason Hauser. Not exactly a bunch of libs at ICE, the people who carry out the deportations.

Speaker 4 Here's what David Leopold, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told Ron Brownstein about this in The Atlantic.

Speaker 4 What this means is that the communities that are heavily Hispanic or black, those marginalized communities are going to be living in absolute fear of a knock on the door, whether or not they themselves are undocumented.

Speaker 4 What he's describing is a terrifying police state, the pretext of which is immigrations.

Speaker 4 Literally, as people are leaving for work or their kids are going to school, they're going to see mass deportation centers with children and mothers who were just in the community working and thriving.

Speaker 4 I just, I've been thinking about this for a while because it is a very, I think when people think about deportations, they think about, you know, undocumented immigrants crossing the border.

Speaker 4 There's this border crisis that's getting all the attention right now.

Speaker 4 So they think people who are just, you know, just coming over for the border, then they get stopped and they figure out what to do with them. Do they get asylum? Do they not?

Speaker 4 What Trump and Miller are talking about is undocumented immigrants that have the 11 million, most of whom have been here for a long, long time.

Speaker 4 By the way, a lot of these undocumented immigrants are living in families and in homes with people who are citizens.

Speaker 4 So you're also going to see images of parents being torn away from their children who have citizenship.

Speaker 4 But also, by the way, Trump and Miller want to revoke birthright citizenship, which is in the 14th Amendment, so that

Speaker 4 children who were born in this country to undocumented immigrants don't have their citizenship anymore. But so there's going to be families torn apart.

Speaker 4 There's going to be people who are at work on jobs, taken out of their workplaces, dragged through the streets in internment camps.

Speaker 4 And what happens if Trump sends National Guard in or the military, local law enforcement doesn't want to cooperate, the governor's National Guard in a blue state doesn't want to cooperate with the Red State National Guard that Stephen Miller was talking about Trump sending Red State National Guard into blue states that didn't want them.

Speaker 4 So he said, oh, if there's immigrants, undocumented immigrants that we want to round up in Maryland, but the Maryland governor, but Wes Moore doesn't want to use the Maryland National Guard to help round up those immigrants, we'll have Glenn Youngkin send the Virginia National Guard into Maryland.

Speaker 4 Like, what? What the fuck are they talking about? This is insane. Can you imagine like the clashes between various national?

Speaker 4 This is like,

Speaker 4 I'm telling you, it's.

Speaker 4 Have you seen the trailer for the Civil War movie?

Speaker 4 I have. I have.
I have.

Speaker 4 Just saying.

Speaker 4 They picked a very good or very bad year to release it, depending on how you think about it. Again, it's like

Speaker 4 I always go back and forth.

Speaker 4 It's a tension. You don't want to freak people out too much and sound like a crazy person, but it's like you just, you read.

Speaker 4 what these people are saying, you think about the power that they're going to have, and you think about the guardrails that have already come off.

Speaker 4 And, you know, it's, it might not definitely happen, but it's a pretty big risk.

Speaker 4 It's a real challenge because, you know, Sarah Longwell had this tweet the other day that was something like, I continue to believe we're underreacting to the urgency of this moment.

Speaker 4 And I think that, or the threat of this moment or whatever it is, I think that's very true. We absolutely are.
We are sleepwalking right into something very, very dangerous, right?

Speaker 4 You already see, you know, like Jamie Dimon and Bill Ackman and these people just sort of already walking themselves towards we're going to be okay with Trump because we're going to get our tax cuts.

Speaker 4 And like, you see it happening.

Speaker 4 But at the same time, the voters we need to persuade don't really believe us when we talk about it in this way, in part because they just lived through the Trump presidency and they didn't send the Virginia National Guard to go fight the Maryland National Guard over taking out some nine-year-old immigrant children, right?

Speaker 4 It's just, right. So

Speaker 4 it is a real challenge, but you are correctly identifying the natural conclusion to what the Trump people are telling us they're going to to do, and we should take them seriously when they say it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I do think that to that very good point, there are incidents and images from the first Trump term that I do think people should be reminded of, like the family separation crisis

Speaker 4 towards the end, certainly even before January 6th, when Trump

Speaker 4 wanted to send the military out into Lafayette Park to use them against the protesters after George Floyd was murdered, right?

Speaker 4 Like we got we got pretty close a couple times at the end of Trump's first term to some of this stuff, which I think will help people to understand that it is very possible that he continues to act like that in his second term.

Speaker 4 Absolutely. That's what January 6th is, why it's so essential this election.

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Speaker 4 All right, believe it or not, Trump still has a primary opponent who says she isn't going anywhere. Nikki Haley is within spitting distance of Trump ahead of Saturday's South Carolina primary.
Just

Speaker 4 a margin of error, 30 points behind, Dan, according to 538 polling average. But if she's going down, she's going down in flames.

Speaker 4 Haley gave a speech on Tuesday, vowing to stay in the race, even if she loses tomorrow. Let's listen.

Speaker 21 Some of you, perhaps a few of you in the media, came here today to see if I'm dropping out of the race.

Speaker 4 Well, I'm not.

Speaker 21 Of course, many of the same politicians who now publicly embrace Trump privately dread him. They know what a disaster he's been and will continue to be for our party.

Speaker 21 They're just too afraid to say it out loud. Well, I'm not afraid.
to say the hard truths out loud. I feel no need to kiss the ring.
I have have no fear of Trump's retribution.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 All right.

Speaker 4 So no real suspense about Saturday's results.

Speaker 4 I mean, slow down, buddy. Slow down.

Speaker 4 Just

Speaker 4 anything's possible. Anything's possible.
Anything's possible. I mean, you're gonna, I know you're gonna be just glued to the Cornaki cam watching those, watching those precinct level results come in.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'm not a model for all you people.

Speaker 4 You people out there should consume political coverage, preferably in podcast format, but yes.

Speaker 4 Any, any, is there, is there a Trump margin of victory that would surprise you? I think anything over 40 or under 20.

Speaker 4 Okay, so if he wins by over

Speaker 4 40 or by less than 20,

Speaker 4 it doesn't change the outcome of this.

Speaker 4 There were a bunch of polls that came out today, like Trump's up by like 50 in Vermont, 50 in Maine. Like this is, we know where this is going.

Speaker 4 But just as a, just be interesting to see if Haley can somehow improve her performance from New Hampshire in a much tougher state, even if just when she governed for six years.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'm sort of wondering if she, like, I,

Speaker 4 this is, this is embarrassing to say, but I think if she cannot wait

Speaker 4 if she gets over 40%, I would be surprised at how well she did, is what I'll say.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. That would, I mean, because she's, she's sort of polling in the low 30s.

Speaker 4 And then if he, if he, but conversely, if he gets, and this is sort of what you were just saying, like, if he gets over 70%, which he could,

Speaker 4 then that's, yeah, that's, that's telling. That's the math of

Speaker 4 2840. Yep.
That's right. That's right.
So, really, the only suspenseful question here is: what's Nikki Haley's endgame?

Speaker 4 After that speech, I think it's getting harder to see her endorse Trump, but who knows? She also just said in an interview with NPR that she has even more concerns about Biden as president than Trump.

Speaker 4 So, I don't know what's going on.

Speaker 4 I know we talked about this before, but you know, just to like to do a gut chuck every other bot on Nikki Haley's endgame.

Speaker 4 She sounds less and like someone who's going to endorse Trump. And I tweeted something about this, which I haven't been tweeting that much recently, so I did it.

Speaker 4 I even put in there, I'm preemptively prepared to be disappointed, but she doesn't sound like someone who's going to endorse Trump based on one of these clips we displayed.

Speaker 4 And everyone's like, you naughty. Get some good responses.

Speaker 4 Thoughtful ones, people who definitely did very well in reading comprehension in school.

Speaker 4 You see me jump into a tweet thread and you thought, ah, John's having a good time. I'm going to go in too.

Speaker 4 I was like, just John's just, the way John has been spending his weekends recently on Twitter, I should try to do that too.

Speaker 4 So, but then I remembered being myself when I was doing political commentary for CNN at the Republican convention in 2016 and watching Ted Cruz stand on stage and telling people to vote their conscience while being booed mercilessly.

Speaker 4 And then endorsing Trump like two weeks later in that famous photo of him making, sadly making photos on Trump's we have.

Speaker 4 So, and I listened to our friends at the Bulwark in their podcast and they are negative on Nikki. I think Tim Miller has it at less than 1% chance that she doesn't endorse Trump.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Tim and JVL both have it like under 1%. Sarah.
It's like 35%, but it's all 35%. I'm really the Sarah of this pod.
Sarah is at like 35%.

Speaker 4 Yeah. But it's always good to check in with Republicans because Democrats are the ones who have Aaron Sorkin-like fantasies about Republicans saving them.

Speaker 4 And then you go listen to the bulwark or other Never Trump Republicans and some things they can disabuse you of those pretty quickly. And so I have no idea what she's doing.

Speaker 4 I think she liked running for president. I think she's probably pretty personally offended at the way Trump has talked about her and her family.

Speaker 4 She probably can't imagine that she is losing by this much to this guy.

Speaker 4 I imagine she's been given, she has some money commitments through Super Tuesday from her super PACT donors, which is why she said that. But she's definitely not voting for Joe Biden.

Speaker 4 She's not going to be on stage with Chris Christie, Liz Cheney, John Lovett. Romney.
Yes.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 John Lovett moderating a panel at the DNC with Liz Cheney and Chris Christie.

Speaker 4 John Kasich coming back for whatever he is.

Speaker 4 Now that his pal Tim Scott's going to be VP. Yeah.

Speaker 4 No,

Speaker 4 the best I could hope for from her is to just, like, you're right. She's definitely not endorsing Joe Biden.
She just said she thinks he's more of a threat than Trump. So whatever.

Speaker 4 But she could, at the very least, she could just say, I'm out. I'm out.
And I'm just going away. I'm not saying anything.
And Trump is bad. Biden's bad.
And that's it.

Speaker 4 And I think that would be, I would take that. I would take that.
I mean,

Speaker 4 what would that get you? Just like a, I think, I mean, this is back to our friends at the, at the, at the bulwark, but like, I, I do think that her,

Speaker 4 her saying all these things about Trump

Speaker 4 and then endorsing him does give some of these Republican voters a permission structure to go ahead and vote for Trump, even if they don't like him. Yeah,

Speaker 4 I agree with that. I agree with that.
And remember back previous election cycles when I had my imaginary super PAC and I had a lot of ideas that I was hoping billionaires would fund. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, I'm back because I got one, which is we should be doing

Speaker 4 calls into

Speaker 4 Battleground states to ID people who want to vote for Nikki Haley.

Speaker 4 Now, we're going to have some real voters like in Mission with Michigan votes on Tuesday, but even some of these states who may be voting after Super Tuesday, anyone who says they're voting for Nikki Haley should be put for at least for for a time being in our persuasion universe that people we can go get either to convince to vote for Joe Biden or to convince them that voting for Donald Trump is a bridge too far for them.

Speaker 4 And so I totally, that's cool.

Speaker 4 And if Nikki Haley were to endorse, I think that makes that not impossible because I think a lot of our voters would be quite disappointed in that outcome, but I think it makes it a little bit harder.

Speaker 4 And it gives Trump a weapon to go bring some of those people back. Yeah.
No, I think that's a good idea. Maybe it didn't.
Who gave Nikki Haley some money? That's a Reid Hoffman? Can he do that?

Speaker 4 Who else could do that? If you're listening.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, I think that's a great idea.

Speaker 4 All right, before we get to your interview with Ben Wickler, let's talk quickly about our elderly president who just keeps doing whatever he can to help the American people. Joe Biden's out there just

Speaker 4 fighting every day to transform more lives. President Biden announced a new round of student debt relief this week that will benefit 150,000 people enrolled in the save repayment plan.

Speaker 4 Biden has now canceled the debt of 3.9 million borrowers since he took office. So Republicans reacted to this news by accusing Biden of violating the law in order to buy votes.

Speaker 4 Why should I be paying for these

Speaker 4 student loans? And the Supreme Court said no, and now

Speaker 4 he's a fascist because he's rejecting the Supreme Court's ruling and just doing it anyway. anyway.
Ridiculous. And then some lefties are saying, you know, helping 4 million borrowers isn't enough.

Speaker 4 Like, sure, of course it's not enough, but this is what he can do because there is the law. Can this guy catch a break or what? I don't know.

Speaker 4 You got to feel for Biden sometimes. I really do.
All the time. You have to feel for him all the time.

Speaker 4 He made a bold decision to try to cancel student debt.

Speaker 4 Then the Supreme Court overturned his decision and he said and promised on that day he would do everything he could within his power to try to help as many people as possible.

Speaker 4 And he has been pulling every lever of the federal government to help as many people as possible. And it's just,

Speaker 4 it is just a reminder that Joe Biden is what we want in politicians, right? He is trying to do everything he can. He can't fix everything.
There is no magic wand.

Speaker 4 He can't make the Supreme Court go away. He can't, he doesn't have a majority in Congress that could pass a legislative solution to this.

Speaker 4 What he has is the tools he's supposed to be using to help as many people as possible. Is it all the help everyone needs? Absolutely not.
Is it better than nothing? No one's saying it is.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Joe Biden's not, right?

Speaker 4 Just, and imagine, how many dollars of student debt do you think President Donald Trump will cancel starting in January of 2025?

Speaker 4 Trump, who tried to eliminate the very program that made possible the relief that Joe Biden just announced. Yes.

Speaker 4 And so, and for all the fucking blue check marks in my mentions, these morons who are just getting all this wrong and all the right-wing idiots who are saying that this is like defying a Supreme Court order, two sets of borrowers got relief from this latest announcement.

Speaker 4 One, public servants, and including military members, and George Bush, George W.

Speaker 4 Bush signed a law saying that public servants get their loans canceled after 10 years of service, but the law was administered poorly and people weren't getting the benefits.

Speaker 4 So Biden goes back and fixes the law, and that's why all these people got relief. So entirely within the law.
And number number two is people who are on income-based repayment plans.

Speaker 4 So according to that law, after 20 years of payments, if you still have a balance, the government's supposed to cancel the balance if you've been paying all along. But that actually wasn't happening.

Speaker 4 So Biden went back, fixed that too, and are now sending people checks who like overpaid or who still have the outstanding balance, canceling the balance.

Speaker 4 So again, both of the sets of people who got relief entirely within the letter of the law has nothing to do with what the Supreme Court said. Idiots.

Speaker 4 I'm spending too much time on Twitter. I'm fighting.
I know. I know.

Speaker 4 I got a podcast for you to listen to.

Speaker 4 What podcast? It's called Offline.

Speaker 4 It's hosted by a previously smart fellow. Yeah.

Speaker 4 You know what?

Speaker 4 I'm getting back on. I'm done.
I'm going back on Twitter all the time. I'm getting in fights.
I'm going to regress all the way back to 2012, 2013, whenever I left the White House.

Speaker 4 I'm going all the way back. I was just thinking about this today.
I was already preemptively preparing for my

Speaker 4 having to eat crow during the New Year's resolution episode at the end of this year. And I've decided my New Year's resolution was to reestablish my attention span by spending less time online.

Speaker 4 And in some ways, I am doing that. I'm trying to put my phone away for periods of time.
But we got an election coming. I got to follow the news.
I got to be in there. Just got to do it.

Speaker 4 I got to do it. Also, I forgot, too, because I have a

Speaker 4 toddler who I'm, you know, I'm chasing Charlie around all the time. And when I'm doing that, it's very hard to be on my phone, which is a good thing.
But now we have Teddy. We got the newborn.

Speaker 4 And when you're holding the newborn and you're just trying to rock him to sleep, there's nothing else to do but look at your phone.

Speaker 4 Can I give you a tip that I picked up with our kids?

Speaker 4 Play games. Oh.

Speaker 4 Play games. Because I was.

Speaker 4 Teddy can't play any games. He's just.
No, you're playing games on your phone.

Speaker 4 If you're holding the child, I mean, theoretically, you could pick up a hardcover book and read it with one hand, but if you're not, if you're going to hold this device in your hand and you don't want to be on Twitter when you're doing it, play games.

Speaker 4 That's my advice to parents of newborn who have a phone addiction problem, who also don't want to be red-pilled by Elon Musk.

Speaker 4 Play games better than arguing over an Ezra Klein essay.

Speaker 4 Yes. Play games, argue over Ezra Klein essay.

Speaker 4 So it goes, Ezra Klein essay is worse. Then play games is slightly better.

Speaker 4 then reading a book is better than that, and then just sitting quietly with your own thoughts is the impossible ideal to aspire to. Yeah, no, please, that's terrifying.

Speaker 4 That's more terrifying than a Trump second term. Okay, before we go to break, reminder that everyone should check out Vode Save America's anxiety relief program.

Speaker 4 You set up a recurring monthly donation at the level that feels right for you. VSA will send 100% of it to the grassroots organizations and downballant races that need it most.

Speaker 4 Each month, you'll also get a report about where your dollars went. It's great.
Head to votesaveamerica.com to sign up now.

Speaker 4 Paid for by Votesave America, votesaveamerica.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee.

Speaker 4 Speaking of anxiety relief, if you're like me and polling makes you crazy, you have to check out Dan's new show, Polar Coaster. I think you talked to Harry Enton on the latest episode about

Speaker 4 Joe Biden being old. Is that true? We talked about what the polling tells us about Joe Biden being old.

Speaker 4 We talked about the Ezra Klein column and what the polling tells us about Biden's electability and the electability of other Democrats. And just in general,

Speaker 4 look, we are addicted to the polls. We're going to follow them.
We're going to be happy when they're up. We're going to be sad when they're down.

Speaker 4 But if you want to understand what you should worry about, what you shouldn't worry about, why you shouldn't panic about any of it, I highly encourage you to listen to Polar Coaster, subscribe to Friends of the Pod so you can.

Speaker 4 It is, you'll get access to a whole bunch of stuff, including this podcast, and support this company as it's building out the progressive response to the right-wing noise machine.

Speaker 4 You try to feel that leave episode, being a little bit smarter about polling, understanding in context, and maybe even sometimes feeling a little bit better about things. Yeah, maybe.

Speaker 4 And if you're listening to this right now and you're like, oh, why are you talking about Biden's age?

Speaker 4 If you can't handle hearing about Biden's age, then between now and November, you should probably close your ears and your eyes and not pay attention to politics.

Speaker 4 Because there are constructive ways ways to talk about it. It is an issue.
It's going to be an issue. Just fucking deal with it, everyone.
We're going to get through it. Okay.

Speaker 4 And in this episode,

Speaker 4 you know what? If you were thinking about listening to Bullock Custer, ignore everything John just said, I thought that was not, I thought him taking his response to his Twitter thought. Oh, no.

Speaker 4 Oh, no. An idea I disagree with.
Oh, I'm going to melt. I'm going to melt.

Speaker 4 It's horrible. It's horrible.
Harry Enton's very smart. We help experience what the polling really tells us about Biden's age and

Speaker 4 not just Biden's age, but Biden's age in comparison to Trump being nearly as old and full of crimes. So come with us.
Full of crimes.

Speaker 4 What did he say? He said something to Laura Ingram during the town hall about D.C. And he said, we're going to have powerful crime in D.C.
again. Powerful crime.

Speaker 4 Guy's fucking nuts. He's nuts.
Don't make him president. All right.
So check out Polar Coaster. Fantastic podcast, Dan.
You have to be a member of Friends of the Pod to listen.

Speaker 4 So just sign up at cricket.com slash friends. You get Polar Coaster.
You get all kinds of other great content from all of us.

Speaker 4 When we come back, Dan talks to Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, Ben Wickler.

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Speaker 4 What is the secret to making great toast? Oh, you're just going to go in with the hard-hitting questions.

Speaker 4 I'm Dan Pashman from The Sporkful. We like to say it's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
We use food to learn about culture, history, and science.

Speaker 4 There was the time we looked into allegations of discrimination at bon appetite, or when I spent three years inventing a new pasta shape. It's a complex noodle that you've put together.

Speaker 4 Every episode of the Sporkville, you're going to learn something, feel something, and laugh. The Sporkville, get it wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 On Monday, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers signed into law new electoral maps that helped undo years of Republican gerrymandering.

Speaker 4 It's a huge win for Democrats in a state where the legislature has been under Republican control for more than a decade.

Speaker 4 Ben Wickler, who needs no introduction on this podcast, but is is the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, and he's here to tell us more about it. Ben, welcome back to Pot Save America.

Speaker 6 Dan, it is great to be back. And I cannot tell you how different it already feels to live in an actual democracy.

Speaker 6 So I'm here bursting with enthusiasm and gratitude for everything that the Vote Save America volunteers have done in election after election after election to make this moment possible.

Speaker 4 I was actually, when I saw this news, I was thinking about the first ever show that we did in Madison, which was one of our, it was on either our first or second tour we ever did back in 2018.

Speaker 4 And the topic of that show was gerrymandering and efforts to undo what the Republicans had done there.

Speaker 4 And so the fact that it's five years later, but you guys got this victory is just absolutely unbelievable. So tell us, I know you worked on it for years.
Tell us how you got here.

Speaker 6 So it starts in 2011 when the Tea Party wave had swept Scott Walker and the Republican legislative majorities into office.

Speaker 6 And Republicans immediately used the redistricting cycle to construct behind closed doors at a lobbying firm here in Madison where a lot of Republicans like to hang out with kind of computational redistricting experts, the maps of their dreams, which they passed into law and locked in Republican hyper-majorities.

Speaker 6 for the foreseeable future. 2012, Democrats won in a landslide.
Republican, the gerrymander held. And even though they lost most of the votes, they still had many, many more than half of the seats.

Speaker 6 We elected Governor Evers in 2018 by 1.1 percentage points. More than one point is a Wisconsin landslide.

Speaker 4 So we were all thrilled.

Speaker 6 This is a huge effort.

Speaker 6 But, you know, at the same time as he won statewide, Democrats swept every single statewide office for the first time since 1982.

Speaker 6 And in that same year, Democrats won 54% of the votes for state assembly. Republicans got 63% of the seats.
We win more than half. They get almost two-thirds of the seats.

Speaker 6 It was as plain as day for anyone watching what was going on. And in 2020, the battle was to stop Republican supermajorities, which we did not by much.
We flipped two assembly seats

Speaker 6 in an incredibly intensive battle.

Speaker 6 But that year was the year preceding the next census. So maybe there was going to be a chance.

Speaker 6 And in 2021, the governor created a People's Maps Commission to take testimony from people all over the state and

Speaker 6 try their hand at drawing maps that would actually be fair. Republicans completely ignored them, drew hybrid gerrymandered maps, passed them through the state legislature.

Speaker 6 The governor vetoed them because of the save the veto campaign and work by the Assembly and Senate Democrats.

Speaker 6 The governor's veto survived and it went to the state Supreme Court.

Speaker 6 So we get to 2022, or I guess the fall of 2021, and the right-wing majority in the state Supreme Court announces how they will solve the impasse between the state legislature and the governor.

Speaker 6 You have the Republicans in the state legislature pushing for gerrymandered maps. You have a Democratic governor saying he won't sign anything but fair maps.

Speaker 6 The state Supreme Court decides or announces out of whole thought, there's no legal basis for this, that they will choose the maps that make the least changes to the Republican hyper gerrymander from 2011.

Speaker 4 Of course. Why wouldn't you? Yes.
Right.

Speaker 6 Just like the framers intended.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 6 that was the basis that they would choose the maps. The governor's team and the state legislature get to work.

Speaker 6 The governor proposes a set of maps that makes very very small changes, but still doubles the number of competitive districts. And he proposes maps for Congress and for the state legislature.

Speaker 6 And the Republicans don't really complete the assignment. They propose their hypergery-mannered maps to the state legislature again.

Speaker 6 The state legislature says, well, we did say we'd choose the maps with the least changes. So they go with the governor's maps in that moment.
And then Republicans throw a Hail Mary pass to the U.S.

Speaker 6 Supreme Court, which in an unsigned shadow docket opinion, meaning no argumentation from either side, no nothing, The U.S.

Speaker 6 Supreme Court strikes down the state legislative maps, sends it back to the state Supreme Court. State Supreme Court says, oh, well, I guess we can't use those and chooses the Republicans' maps.

Speaker 6 So suddenly the maps that the governor vetoed that were obviously rejected by our political process that build in a Republican supermajority in the state Senate and almost a Republican supermajority in the state assembly.

Speaker 6 They're chosen by our Supreme Court, which is supposed to be the neutral arbiter of the law, in the final moments before candidates have to start running in their districts.

Speaker 6 and Republicans come in for the kill.

Speaker 6 The Republican plan at this point was to get supermajorities in both legislative chambers at the same time as they were trying to defeat Governor Evers in 2022, which would allow them to dismantle our democracy.

Speaker 6 They were openly

Speaker 6 throwing around their plans to dismantle the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is a bipartisan body that's at the top of our election administration system.

Speaker 6 They were coming up with, there was a bill that one legislator proposed that would allow them to cancel the results of an election if the margin of victory was less than the number of absentee ballots in the election.

Speaker 6 I mean, just unbelievable stuff. That was the situation in 2022.

Speaker 6 And in that moment, we were chillingly reminded when we looked through the records that the last time a Democrat had won a governor's race when there was a Democratic president, because Wisconsin is a swing state that has the typical thing of the party in power wins the midterms.

Speaker 6 The last time a Democrat had won a governor's race with a Democratic president was 1962, when JFK won

Speaker 6 with a 70% approval rating, won by a single percentage point. So the chance in 2022 that we'd win the governor's race, the odds were against us.

Speaker 4 And we went for it.

Speaker 6 I mean, people in every corner of Wisconsin working their hearts out. We re-elected Governor Evers by 3.4 percentage points.
He ran an extraordinary campaign. It was just absolutely made the case.

Speaker 6 And for me, it's a template for what's possible in the presidential race. And in the state legislature, Republicans got their supermajority in the state senate and they came in.

Speaker 6 They thought they were going to get the supermajority in the state assembly.

Speaker 6 But a flood of volunteers, a ton of work, everyone doing everything they could, we held off Republican supermajorities in the state assembly by 2,499 votes.

Speaker 6 It was 0.01% of all the votes cast in the state.

Speaker 6 And that meant Republicans could not simply unilaterally impose whatever maps they might want.

Speaker 6 And at that point, we had six months until a Supreme Court race to determine the majority on the state Supreme Court.

Speaker 6 So once again we got everyone together we held together this the kind of core team from the governor's race uh people who were now had survived election cycle after election cycle thousands upon thousands of volunteers people uh including people listening to this podcast who had volunteered in the supreme court race in the spring of 2020 in the presidential race in the fall of 2022 in the uh superintendent of public instruction race in the spring of 2021, local elections in 2022, the fall elections in 22.

Speaker 4 We went back to it.

Speaker 6 And in the spring of 2023, we won a jaw-dropping double-digit landslide in the state supreme court race janet protosevicz became the majority making justice on our state supreme court sending dan kelly who was a consultant on the fake elector scheme into the dustbin of political history and boom we were in a new day and as soon as she took the oath of office in august an organization law forward which did amazing work arguing that these maps were unconstitutional they brought a case that said that the Republican chosen Supreme Court chosen map didn't meet the constitutional standard.

Speaker 6 And the Supreme Court reviewed it.

Speaker 6 But as soon as that case was brought, Republicans started plotting to impeach our newly elected justice, which we all realized they had the votes to do.

Speaker 6 They just needed a simple majority in the state assembly.

Speaker 6 If they used their full two-thirds majority in the state Senate, they could actually throw her out of office. But if they did that, the governor would appoint a replacement.

Speaker 6 So it looked like they might be plotting to impeach her and then sit on their hands because an impeached justice of the Supreme Court is suspended until the Senate and the state senate holds a trial.

Speaker 6 So this was this incredibly devious plot to abuse our Constitution in order to stop an actual review of their totally illegitimate power. And

Speaker 6 the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, our allies, we launched a campaign called Defend Justice, where we organized in Republican legislative districts voters to tell their legislators, absolutely do not do this.

Speaker 6 Do not become the first legislators anywhere in the country to impeach a judge before they ruled on something to stop them from making that ruling. And it worked.
The DOP backed down.

Speaker 6 They realized that they were facing a whirlwind that they could not control. And they backed off.
The Supreme Court did look at the maps. They did determine they were unconstitutional.

Speaker 6 They struck them down in December and they told the state legislature and the governor, if you can agree on new maps that meet our constitutional standards, great.

Speaker 6 And if you can't, we're going to ask people to submit maps to us and we'll choose the maps. So a bunch of folks submitted maps, all the parties to the lawsuit.

Speaker 6 They had the gold-plated non-partisan redistricting experts review them. Surprise, surprise, the maps submitted by Republicans were partisan gerrymanders.
The others were fair.

Speaker 6 And the consultants said they were virtually indistinguishable from each other.

Speaker 6 And at that point, as we tick down the clock, the Republicans and the legislature said, well, I guess we'll pass the maps that the governor actually proposed.

Speaker 6 First, they tried to change them to protect their incumbents. The governor vetoed that.

Speaker 6 Then they proposed, then they actually passed the governor's maps, you know, facing a Supreme Court decision that they couldn't control and they were afraid of facing accountability in the court system.

Speaker 6 So they passed the maps and on Monday, the governor signed them. And Wisconsin's new fair maps are law.
And what happened last time where the U.S.

Speaker 6 Supreme Court overruled the state Supreme Court, that cannot happen now because this was passed through the traditional process of how a bill becomes a law. These are Wisconsin statute now.

Speaker 6 The old maps are null and void moot history. And candidates are coming out of the woodwork at this very moment.
I spoke to one just a little while ago was gearing up to announce a run.

Speaker 6 It is so, so exciting that democracy is finally here because people fought and fought and fought in election after election after election after election, even after everything went wrong over and over again.

Speaker 6 That resilience, that persistence, that dedication to the idea of democracy prevailed. And here we are.

Speaker 4 That is the lesson of this whole story is change takes time. but it can happen if we engage in the political process over and over again.

Speaker 4 We fight hard, we move the ball forward, and then you have a day like Monday.

Speaker 4 So, there's been some suspicion from folks outside of Wisconsin who are under the belief, correct, I think, that the Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature are

Speaker 4 not great.

Speaker 4 And so, why did they help explain to me why they agreed to these maps and why the governor did not send it, as some have said, to the Supreme Court on the thought that you could get a more favorable map that way?

Speaker 6 So, this was, you know, this moment right before the finalization of the maps where there were, I think, good faith disagreements and good faith suspicions of bad faith on the Republican side.

Speaker 6 There are kind of two dimensions of disagreement. One is

Speaker 6 what is the channel of greatest legal risk? So if the governor signs the maps, then in theory, someone could try to sue in a federal circuit court. And there's no, these are rock solid legally.

Speaker 6 They're they're impregnable from a

Speaker 6 legal perspective. But if judges go rogue, they do whatever they want.
It's Calvin Ball.

Speaker 6 And so a lot of folks were worried that the Republicans had some kind of trick up their sleeve, some judges in their pocket who were going to

Speaker 6 find some ludicrous basis to strike them down. And by the time that could be corrected on appeal,

Speaker 6 the election cycle

Speaker 6 would be passed. The other risk, of course, is that the U.S.
Supreme Court would do what it did last time.

Speaker 6 And the governor had to weigh those two risks against each other and determine that, you know, in his judgment, the legal risk was much lower if the bills are enacted and signed into law.

Speaker 6 So that's one piece. The other is

Speaker 6 there were four different maps that the nonpartisan experts reviewed that the Supreme Court was considering. Of those, the governor, they're all pretty much fair.

Speaker 6 The governors make it a little bit harder in the in the first year to win an assembly Democratic majority than some of the other maps.

Speaker 6 And then it takes two years to have a chance to win the Senate majority.

Speaker 6 In one of the other maps, it's a little, I think, harder in the Assembly, but

Speaker 6 you know, there's like different levels in the Senate and the Assembly for either side.

Speaker 6 And there's one map that had different numbered Senate districts where it would have been possible for Democrats to win a majority in the Senate in 2024, as well as the Assembly.

Speaker 6 So, you know, from one perspective, maybe the Republicans were doing the thing that could slow down the march of democracy and accountability a little bit.

Speaker 6 You know, I think the difference between the maps is much less than the difference between any maps and any of these maps and no maps. And so

Speaker 6 if there's a legal risk,

Speaker 6 the number one priority is to prevent the possibility that Republicans will pull a fast one and

Speaker 6 block any new maps at all for an election cycle.

Speaker 4 As you indicated, Wisconsin is the quintessential 50-50 state, right? Every election, as you said, comes down to like a point if you're lucky.

Speaker 4 If you had Governor Neavers won by a landslide at 1.8 points or whatever it was.

Speaker 4 But prior to these new maps, the Republicans had two-thirds of the seats in the legislature and were, you know, in elections where Democrats were winning at the state level, they were losing.

Speaker 4 They were, Rome was beginning, as you said, two-thirds of the seats. What is that breakdown now post-maps? Is it more like the 50-50 of the state?

Speaker 6 Now it is very close to 50-50. Now, if either side wins by three points by every single analysis, if you win by three points, you win a majority in the legislature.
And,

Speaker 6 you know, in the 2012 and 2018 election cycle, Democrats won by more than that and still lost, you know, almost two-thirds of the seats in the state assembly. That is unthinkable now.

Speaker 6 So Democrats have to, you know, they have to do a little bit better than 50% to be able to win an assembly majority in 2024. And so that's what we're going to shoot for.

Speaker 6 I mean, it should be the case that both sides try to win most of the votes and get most of the seats if they do.

Speaker 6 And you can see in district after district after district, there's now a realistic shot for Democrats to win seats and for those seats to add up to a majority of the seats in the state assembly.

Speaker 6 And there's four at least state senate seats where we have a really good shot this election cycle. If we do that, then 2026, we have a shot at a senate majority and potentially a Democratic trifecta.

Speaker 6 And of course, the Republicans also have a shot. And that's how it's supposed to work.
That's all we've been fighting for is an equal level playing field. And that's what we finally got.

Speaker 4 I mean, this is all such great news. Let's talk a little bit about some of the other races coming up this fall.
Tammy Baldwin is up for re-election. She got an opponent this couple of weeks ago.

Speaker 4 Talk to me about this person. How much do we have to worry about this?

Speaker 6 So, at one level, if you just watched Eric Hovedy announce his campaign for U.S.

Speaker 6 Senate, where in his launch tweet and launch ad, he didn't mention the state that he's running in, which raises some questions because the guy lives in California in a gigantic mansion overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Speaker 6 He was rated one of Orange County, California's most influential people three years in a row.

Speaker 6 But nonetheless, he is running in Wisconsin. And

Speaker 6 it's, you know, this is who Mitch McConnell thought was their best shot. Um, it's it didn't inspire a great deal of confidence in

Speaker 6 the Republican battle plan. At the same time, this is Wisconsin, and Eric Hovedy runs a bank in California that makes a huge amount of money.
He is a cent a millionaire, at least.

Speaker 6 We'll, we'll, we'll see what his financial disclosure forms say, but he's been saying that he will spend tens of millions of dollars of his own money on this race.

Speaker 6 And that means we have to take this very seriously. That's what Ron Johnson did, who actually lived in the state at the time in 2010.
He announced late, he announced in the election year.

Speaker 6 He bought a ton of ads portraying himself as Mr. Reasonable Businessman.
And he was able to define himself because of the fortune that was spent by him and on his behalf. And he sailed into a U.S.

Speaker 6 Senate seat that we haven't been able to win back. So we need to treat this as though it's a 50-50 race.

Speaker 6 And I'm so glad it's Tammy Baldwin, who's our champion of the Senate, who's up against him because she genuinely connects with voters in every every part of Wisconsin across every line of difference, across geography, across ideology.

Speaker 6 There are died in the wall Republicans who know that they have their jobs because Tammy Baldman fought for them, that they have health insurance because Tammy Baldwin fought for them.

Speaker 6 So we're going to make sure that everyone knows about what she's done and what she will do.

Speaker 6 She's the lead sponsor of the bill that will restore the protections of Roe versus Wade to this entire country if Democrats get a trifecta in 2024.

Speaker 6 Eric Hovety, he, last time he ran for office, he said he he was 100% pro-life and thought life begins at conception and all abortions should be banned.

Speaker 6 So there's a night and day difference between these two candidates. And, you know, go to TammyBaldwin.com, chip in, get involved, volunteer for her, go to wisdoms.org, help us at the state party.

Speaker 6 We're going to be helping Tammy, President Biden. We're going to flip two House seats as our game plan.

Speaker 6 And we'll be working hand in glove with Greta Neubauer in the state assembly and Diane Hesselmine in our state senate.

Speaker 6 These are names that you will come to know of champions who are fighting to make Wisconsin actually work for everybody.

Speaker 6 This is an all-hands-on-deck election where we're going to try to build reverse coattails where the local candidates help turn out voters to help us win up and down the ballot and vice versa.

Speaker 6 It's all one big fight for freedom and democracy in the Badger State.

Speaker 4 I think that is a great place to end there. I will just endorse what Ben said.
I have been a monthly donor to the Wisconsin Democratic Party for going on years now.

Speaker 4 There is no better way to spend your money than to give it to the Wisconsin Democratic Party because you can have the full faith that Ben is going to invest in organizing strategies that work.

Speaker 4 There's a proven record of success here. And we know, as exhausting as this is for Ben and everyone in Wisconsin, that this election will once again come down to Wisconsin.

Speaker 4 We will be waiting for you guys to count those votes. Hopefully it happens a little less dramatically than it did in 2020, but to find out,

Speaker 4 that's when we will find out that Joe Biden and Kamba Harris have been re-elected. It'll be because of the work in Wisconsin, the work that everyone has done.
So support, Ben.

Speaker 4 Support the Wisconsin Democrats. Ben, congratulations on this victory.
And I know we're going to talk to you a bunch before this election is over.

Speaker 6 Den, thank you so, so much.

Speaker 6 And for everyone who has made phone calls, who's chipped in, who's become a monthly donor, who's helping us with our local elections this April 2nd in Wisconsin right now, everyone who's doing this work, this victory is yours.

Speaker 6 You took a state that was functionally a democracy desert and turned it into a democracy. And now in that democracy, we can win and pass policies that make a difference in people's lives.

Speaker 6 So thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.

Speaker 4 Thank you.

Speaker 4 Thanks to Ben Wickler for joining. Everyone have a fantastic weekend and we'll have a brand new show for you on Tuesday morning.
Bye, everyone. Bye, everyone.

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Our show is produced by Olivia Martinez and David Toledo.

Speaker 4 Our associate producers are Saul Rubin and Farah Safari. Kira Woakim is our senior producer.
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