Trump Vows to Root Out "Vermin"

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

Speaker 5 I'm Tim Scott's girlfriend's gay friend, John Levin.

Speaker 7 I'm Tommy Vitor.

Speaker 6 On today's show, Donald Trump says Americans who disagree with him are vermin and plans to put immigrant families in camps.

Speaker 6 And Joe Biden starts to fight back as he gets plenty of unsolicited advice from increasingly nervous Democrats.

Speaker 6 But first, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott became the second major candidate to drop out of the Republican primary after a Sunday night announcement on Fox that shocked even his own campaign staff.

Speaker 8 But when I go back to Iowa, it will not be as a presidential candidate. I am suspending my campaign.

Speaker 8 I think the voters who are the most remarkable people on the planet have been really clear that they're telling me not now, Tim.

Speaker 9 I'm trying to process this information, and I'm trying to do it on live television, so forgive me.

Speaker 8 You know, Romans 8.20 is such an important scripture. It says that all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose.

Speaker 8 I think the message is clear for me right now.

Speaker 6 That was Tim Scott speaking on Trey Gowdy's show on Fox. Trey Gowdy, former congressman.
I didn't even know he had a show. Oh, it's great.
It's a great show.

Speaker 6 Yeah, you watched a lot.

Speaker 6 How are you guys doing? Apparently, Tim Scott and Trey Gowdy are close, though, and he was pretty surprised. Pretty surprised.

Speaker 5 It's a small thing, but I find it like it's actually very obnoxious to surprise your campaign staff. Yes.
I find that to be so fucking rude.

Speaker 5 Like, oh, so these people that devoted their lives to you, like, even if it was an, I'm not like, sooner the better, but like even if it's right before, like to show these people the respect of giving them the information.

Speaker 6 Do a conference call. Jump on a quick conference call with the HQ.

Speaker 5 Let them hear first. Like thank them for everything they did for you.
Like they're taking low pay to come help you, Tim Scott, run this fucking Don Quixote mission.

Speaker 6 Not a good look, Tim Scott.

Speaker 7 It is so unbelievably shitty to do to your staff, to do to your donors, to the people who volunteered for you. And like, what's the upside of surprising Trey Gowdy on Fox News the news?

Speaker 6 I've got it for content. It was

Speaker 6 for a content.

Speaker 6 Maybe he just decided literally in the moment at the end.

Speaker 7 I mean, I thought like watching the campaign or watching the last debate, it seemed like he was going to drop out the whole time. He just didn't want to be there.

Speaker 6 So Tim Scott and his super PAC spent millions and millions on ads and staff. He couldn't even break 7%

Speaker 6 in the early states, including in South Carolina, his home state that he represents in the U.S. Senate.
A lot of big donors and pundits from across the political spectrum had high hopes for Tim Scott.

Speaker 6 Here's one of them.

Speaker 5 I thought the speech was really good. There's a coherence to what he's doing that makes him a legitimate alternative in a way that no one else, not even DeSantis, can really offer.

Speaker 5 He did better than I expected. I really was impressed by it.

Speaker 5 Yes, obviously he's not doing, he's trying to say, hey, we don't need to do grievance politics to a group of people that have become inavert of grievance politics.

Speaker 5 But it took someone like Trump to drag them this far down.

Speaker 5 And whether or not it worked this time, like this is very clearly to me the best and only person I've seen make a case for a way to kind of drag Republicans back over time.

Speaker 5 And if it doesn't work now, it might work in the future.

Speaker 6 I'll stand by that. Love it.
What happened to Tim Scott?

Speaker 7 Who is that famous fundit? Did I recognize that voice?

Speaker 7 Like good politics, but with like a comedy edge?

Speaker 5 First of all, if you see the video, you can tell that Tim Scott's campaign lasted exactly as long as my Manjaro journey.

Speaker 5 Just like exact length of time. I think it was like day one.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 so I was thinking about what happened to Tim Scott because I thought I might be confronted by my um words and uh your irrational exuberance well, yes, and I know there was a moment where you guys gave me shit at the time and I did say like look I'm not I like I'm not saying he's gonna it's gonna work I just like him better than I like the other ones but I won't say it wasn't just us I remember after that podcast I got like a text from Tim Miller who was just on our show in New Orleans and Tim was like what's going on with Lovett liking Tim Scott so much I And by the way, here's the crazy part.

Speaker 5 I still kind of like him. But the so I was thinking about it.
I was like, well, what happened here?

Speaker 5 I think, first of all, like when you see Tim Scott on the stump, he just like, forget like the message and all the rest. He's just kind of a goo.
Like he has like,

Speaker 5 he's got a Senate brain problem. He just like answers every question in the most like roundabout fucking way.
But there's a like one thing we talked about at the time was.

Speaker 5 Is there an appetite for someone attacking grievance politics when the king of fucking grievance is their leader?

Speaker 5 And when someone like Tim Scott isn't willing to go after Trump, like Scott minimized Trump's responsibility for January 6th.

Speaker 5 He claimed the justice system was being weaponized and dismissed Trump's efforts to overturn the election in Georgia.

Speaker 5 When he was asked if he would make the same kind of perfect phone call Trump did, he refused to say he wouldn't.

Speaker 5 He raised his hand and said he would support Trump as a nominee, even if Trump were convicted.

Speaker 5 And there was this moment on the campaign trail in August where some person, some podunk diner, went up to him and said, like,

Speaker 5 how are you running? and not being able to stand up to Trump. Like, how are you going to stand up for America as president if you can't stand up to Trump? He got into this back and forth.

Speaker 5 And that was when he said, like, he didn't really hold Trump responsible for January 6th. He hold the riders January 6th.
And the voter responded by saying,

Speaker 5 your leader did nothing to help you out for two hours and kind of got the better of it in this moment.

Speaker 5 And like, if you look at what Tim Scott's message was, it is not possible to have that message and believe it if you're not also going to repudiate Trump.

Speaker 5 But he was such a kind of weasely politician about Trump.

Speaker 5 The Venn diagram doesn't overlap.

Speaker 6 It wasn't just, though, that he didn't go like full-throated repudiation of Trump.

Speaker 6 Like, I think only the vape Ramaswamy has has been more deferential to Trump than Tim Scott of any of the Republican candidates. And none of them have been like big hero.

Speaker 6 I mean, Christie has obviously gone after him pretty hard, Asa Hutchinson. But like DeSantis has gone after him more.
Haley has gone after him more. Like you could,

Speaker 6 Tim Scott is fundamental. Well, first of all, good speaker, decent speaker, bad debater.
Terrible debater. He was bad in all the debates.

Speaker 6 But the more fundamental problem is he couldn't consolidate the anti-Trump or post-Trump people who were looking beyond Trump.

Speaker 6 He couldn't consolidate that vote because he offered no critique of Trump whatsoever.

Speaker 6 And he also couldn't get any of the MAGA vote, like DeSantis has been able to get a little bit because his style isn't MAGA at all. Even if most of his positions are MAGA, his style isn't MAGA.

Speaker 6 So like he had no home. Yeah, he was.
He was a man without a home.

Speaker 5 He was nothing to no one.

Speaker 7 He was even corny in his honest moment of dropping up. Like, listen, man, you're quitting the race.
You don't have to pretend you like loved the process or loved the voters. We know you didn't.

Speaker 7 He didn't do well.

Speaker 5 Like, even when he was asked, like, would you want to be vice president? He never says no, but he goes, like, I ran to be president, and it's not on my to-do list.

Speaker 5 It's like, there was a, there's a, like, a, a political cageiness in every facet of what he was doing. Yeah.

Speaker 6 I mean, I thought, look, he had high approval ratings with voters, even as he dropped out. I think he's, people, Republican voters, thought he was a nice guy, but he didn't have a message.

Speaker 6 He didn't have a message to win. Now, I know Love is trying to backtrack here.
I think we actually have one more.

Speaker 6 I could say, let's hear it. Let's hear it.
Let's listen.

Speaker 5 The thing about Tim Scott is that he's not just compelling, he's inspiring. He has a voice, a vision, a plan for the future that is working with voters in Iowa and, frankly, working for me.

Speaker 5 The question isn't: will Tim win or not? Tim has already won. The question is: will I, John Lovett, famously liberal podcast man, fall in love with him? I guess time will tell.

Speaker 6 I don't know what we're doing. That didn't age well, did it?

Speaker 6 That's not a good idea.

Speaker 6 I didn't realize you guys were able to pull that. Is that from Love or Leave It?

Speaker 5 That sucks.

Speaker 6 That was a good

Speaker 6 oppo of a phone.

Speaker 6 Nice work. Fucking sound.
Nice work.

Speaker 6 Your voice is sounding pretty. That's

Speaker 6 getting pretty good.

Speaker 5 It's funny, then it's going to be not so funny.

Speaker 6 It's pretty good.

Speaker 7 It was one other one that Saul flagged.

Speaker 5 We stopped recording, right?

Speaker 6 Okay, cool.

Speaker 5 God, I am so sick of these fucking Beyonce and Taylor Swift fans.

Speaker 5 What boring, basic bitches.

Speaker 6 Oh, my God.

Speaker 6 I can't believe you said that. That is...

Speaker 7 VMI $5 a month AI software.

Speaker 6 Too far.

Speaker 5 Too far. Yeah, no.

Speaker 5 And look, I obviously regret it. I didn't know we were still rolling.
I thought that was another thing. And that's in Milo's retirement folder

Speaker 5 from back in the day.

Speaker 7 To be clear, that was all fake news.

Speaker 6 It was all fake news clips. Fake news.
Tommy, do you think Tim Scott's exit has the potential to change the race at all?

Speaker 6 He says he's not endorsing, but his fellow South Carolinian Nikki Haley is reportedly planning a $10 million ad blitz in Iowa and New Hampshire all the way through the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary that's apparently five times more than what DeSantis is spending in the same time.

Speaker 7 He's putting some money on the line now. I mean, the short answer is Tim Scott didn't have a lot of support to begin with, so it won't.
go very far if it gets redistributed.

Speaker 7 I think he was at about 4% in the most recent national polls. He had 7% in the last Des Moines Register poll, and that was down from 9% in the August one.

Speaker 7 So I think if Scott's Iowa numbers get split evenly between DeSantis and Haley, it probably doesn't change the race because those two were tied.

Speaker 7 If Scott's voters go overwhelming to one or the other, I think it helps narrow the primary into a two-person race.

Speaker 7 But again, the big problem for all of these candidates is that Trump is running away with the election. He doesn't show up at the debates, and none of them have decided to run against him.

Speaker 7 They're all running against each other and trying to destroy each other. So it does clear the field for Haley in South Carolina if there is sort of like a favorite son, favorite daughter vote.

Speaker 7 I don't know that there will be. I do think that she is the most sort of interesting, viable path, but it's a very challenging one.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I feel like with Haley, it's not much, but it's not nothing.

Speaker 6 Like she, she, you could see her getting a lot of his donors to the extent that he had whatever donors he had, especially because they're both from South Carolina.

Speaker 6 And so if he had some South Carolina-based donors, maybe they go to Haley.

Speaker 6 You know, you get 7% to throw around in Iowa, New Hampshire, maybe South Carolina. Exactly.
Like you said, Tommy, though, if they split evenly, it doesn't really matter.

Speaker 6 So she'd have to really get that.

Speaker 6 I think if Christie drops out at some point and Vivek keeps losing steam, now you're getting closer to like the three-person race where a Trump-DeSantis-Haley thing, you know, in our fantasy scenarios that we've sketched out many times now, this is all what she would need to have that happen, even though it still seems highly unlikely.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think it's if you left either Trump or DeSantis to go to Tim Scott and now Tim Scott's gone, all the reasons to not be with Ron DeSantis remain.

Speaker 5 So like maybe there's some way in which this redounds to Haley kind of helping her get to that true second position, which has so far been like, you know, is she, isn't she?

Speaker 7 I mean, the question is, does money matter at all? We don't, it hasn't so far.

Speaker 7 But we now live in an era of campaign finance where the laws are a joke and basically you run for president by finding yourself a special billionaire to seed your super PAC and then you run with that person.

Speaker 7 Tim Scott's billionaire was Larry Ellison, who I think cut him $35 million worth of checks and then, you know, turned it off.

Speaker 7 So if Larry Ellison decides to go with a Haley or go with the DeSantis or go with an anti-Trump super PAC and put some more money on the table, that could be interesting.

Speaker 6 Did you see right before we started recording, there was a New York Times piece that Larry Ellison didn't, before Scott ran, he put a bunch of money into like aligned Scott super PACs, but he didn't actually cut the check once once Tim Scott got in the race.

Speaker 5 That would be a good decision.

Speaker 7 From 2020 to 2022, Ellison donated $35 million to Scott Aligned Groups and then just didn't.

Speaker 6 Tough afterwards. Tough, tough, tough.

Speaker 6 I do think, I hate to say this about friend of the pod Chris Christie, but because I do think he's been more courageous than the rest of that field in calling out Donald Trump.

Speaker 6 But at this point, if you're really in this to make sure that Donald Trump doesn't become president or doesn't become the nominee of your party, like I think Chris Christie has to look at Nikki Haley and be like, she's probably a better bet than me, because he just it hasn't caught on what he's, I thought he would go harder at Donald Trump in some of these debates, and he really hasn't.

Speaker 6 So, like, I don't know what he's doing. Christy being in the race, I don't know, I don't know what that does except make it more likely now that Donald Trump wins the nomination.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it was a um, it'd be a nice little uh bookend

Speaker 5 when he was one of, if not the first, major establishment figure to line up behind Trump and say the nomination was over for him to get out of the race and get behind Haley.

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Speaker 6 All right, so back on Earth, the probable Republican nominee and possible next president celebrated Veterans Day by pledging to, quote, root out Americans who disagree with him, who he referred to as, quote, dangerous vermin.

Speaker 6 Trump's entire speech in New Hampshire was fairly deranged, even for him. Here are the highlights.

Speaker 13 Like tens of millions of people within our nation, I'm proud and strong.

Speaker 13 Election, I'm a very proud election denier. We had no terror during my administration.
The only terror we had was Nancy Pelosi, who's a crazed lunatic.

Speaker 13 She is a crazed lunatic. What the hell was going on with her husband? Let's not ask.
By the way, she's got a wall around her house. Obviously, in that case, it didn't work very well, did it?

Speaker 13 Deranged Jack Smith. Have you ever heard of him? He's a lovely.

Speaker 13 His wife and family despise me much more than he does, and he decides, I think he's about a 10. they're about a 15 on a scale of 10.

Speaker 13 Today, especially, in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.

Speaker 13 They'll do anything. whether legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.

Speaker 13 The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.

Speaker 13 Despite the hatred and anger of the radical left lunatics who want to destroy our country, we will make America great again.

Speaker 13 Thank you, New Hampshire. God bless you.

Speaker 6 I can't believe Tim Scott's sunny optimism didn't work in this party. The Washington Post headline about the speech said Trump's use of the word vermin was, quote, echoing dictators Hitler Mussolini.

Speaker 6 Though a lot of folks on Twitter were wondering why I didn't get as much coverage and headlines like The Washington Post as Hillary Clinton's deplorable scaff.

Speaker 6 Tell me, what was your take on the speech?

Speaker 7 So that line, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, was delivered one hour and 44 minutes into the speech.

Speaker 7 It was an hour 45. So he riffed for an hour and 44 minutes, and then that was his, I guess, Stephen Miller prepared close.

Speaker 6 I think it was definitely prepared because it was also

Speaker 6 he truthed it. He truthed that exact riff after the speech.
So it was clearly a set. And you could tell when he's reading off the prompter, you know, and he's not doing his freewheeling performance.

Speaker 6 He's definitely reading it.

Speaker 7 The rest of it was a mix. It was a lot of greatest hits.
It was a lot of, you know, in Afghanistan, they left the equipment behind, and the generals told me not to.

Speaker 7 There was the death penalty for drug dealers.

Speaker 7 He talked about, again, how hot the pilots on Air Force One are.

Speaker 7 Hotter than Tom Cruise and taller was my takeaway. The funniest part of the whole speech was

Speaker 7 he did a bit making fun of DeSantis walking off the stage at the debate. Did you guys catch this? No.

Speaker 6 Yeah, we're going to go. He talked about he looked like he's wearing ice skates.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 6 That's good.

Speaker 5 Pretty good stuff. That's good for a guy that's that, listen, I've done my,

Speaker 5 what's it called? Defamation training. So I don't know that Trump wears lifts or not.
But sometimes Trump looks like he's wearing lifts to me.

Speaker 6 Oh, interesting. To you.
To me.

Speaker 7 I do think that ending was written in the hopes that it would get picked up and that progressives like us would freak out and say the, you know, could be the owning the lips part of the speech.

Speaker 5 At a time when they knew that what we'll talk about next, this big immigration story was also coming out because they knew that they'd sent them to Stephen Miller to talk about it.

Speaker 5 When a spokesperson for Trump was asked about the comparison to Vermin and Mussolini and Hitler, and that spokesperson said, you're all just a bunch of snowflakes and your existence will be crushed in a Trump second term, which is sort of like...

Speaker 6 First, he said your entire existence. And and then he clarified.

Speaker 5 How dare you wonder if calling your opponents vermin evokes the darkest chapters in our political history? You will be destroyed upon our victory on a pyre of vengeance.

Speaker 5 The woke communists compare us to Nazis again. You're going in the camps with the foreigners and the fags.

Speaker 6 I mean,

Speaker 6 referring to Americans who disagree with you as vermins, like Americans that you want to represent as president, is dehumanizing language. It is the language of dictators.

Speaker 6 Hitler used the words to describe Jews and the left, not once or twice, often. Hitler used that word.

Speaker 6 Now, the most charitable explanation is that it was designed to provoke and troll liberals and get attention.

Speaker 6 Even if you go with that explanation, it is incredibly dangerous to do considering that there have been so many instances where his supporters, who include neo-Nazis and white nationalists, take that as a call to violence.

Speaker 6 But there's also a darker possible explanation is that it's not just a provocation, but it's a threat that he intends to follow through on if he becomes president.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, it's sort of like root out.

Speaker 5 There's no, it's not a, this is not a policy critique. He's going to roost them out.

Speaker 6 We all lived through January 6th, right? A bunch of his supporters violently assaulted the Capitol, violently assaulted police officers. And now he's talking about vermin.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, look, I think that he does this hoping to get the story he got in the Washington Post, where a bunch of historians compare it to the language used by Hitler and Mussolini.

Speaker 7 And most people read that and they don't really have a basis to draw from to know if that's right or wrong, but they do probably think it sounds a touch alarmist and a touch extreme.

Speaker 7 So then the spokesperson gets to call a snowflake's. It's dangerous rhetoric.
It's bad. I think there's like much more on the speech that

Speaker 7 is worthy of focusing on. I mean, I do think the comparison to Hillary Clinton's Basket of Deplorables quote is imperfect because she said that in September of 2016, right?

Speaker 7 We were like a couple months out from the election. It was the heat of the campaign.
She was the nominee. Everyone was paying a lot of attention.

Speaker 7 And so it became a big thing, but mostly because Republicans made it a big thing. Every single one of them brought that up.
The right-wing media ecosystem brought it up. Like they made that a story.

Speaker 7 It didn't just happen. So that's the opportunity for Democrats.

Speaker 6 That also was a gaffe. Right.
That was like she like stumbled into that. It was that statement.
This was, like you said, this was designed to do something,

Speaker 6 either provoke or send a warning.

Speaker 5 It's also, I mean, there's also just, there really is

Speaker 5 an asymmetry in what is allowed in our politics.

Speaker 5 Republican politicians are allowed to mock and deride and describe as terrible whole parts of the country, Americans that they don't like as not being real, as their cities being overrun and being terrible.

Speaker 5 Urban areas are terrible. But the reverse is not true.
A Democrat cannot say,

Speaker 5 cannot insult rural America, cannot insult all the many problems that exist at rural America that is seen as beyond the pale, and they pay a price and they have to apologize. And that

Speaker 5 Trump benefits from that.

Speaker 6 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: But it's also the type of language Democrats use versus what Trump's doing, right?

Speaker 6 Which is like Democrats who are insulting rural America or insulting Trump supporters are like they're rubes or they're deplorable, like vermin that need to be rooted out.

Speaker 6 It is, it is dehumanizing language, whether he intends to use it to his troll or not. And like, you know, we've had people send fucking pipe bombs to people.

Speaker 6 We've had like the, I mean, there's just, it's a, it's a dangerous thing to do at this point.

Speaker 7 On that point, okay, so we heard that bit he did where there were there were no terrorist attacks during my administration except for Nancy Pelosi, ha ha ha, plazong.

Speaker 7 Of course there were terrorist attacks. Yeah, I didn't get to that.
Remember when the ISIS-linked guy mowed down like eight people in New York City with his car?

Speaker 6 That was a terrorist attack.

Speaker 7 There was a Saudi service member who shot up a base in Florida and killed a bunch of U.S. airmen.

Speaker 6 The shooting in El Paso?

Speaker 6 Right.

Speaker 5 He doesn't include white nationalism.

Speaker 6 Right.

Speaker 6 Even though that language was directly linked to Trump's rhetoric.

Speaker 7 Again, so like the days of fact-checking Trump until he loses are long over. But I do think highlighting things like that, it's like, I'm sorry, do you not remember this?

Speaker 7 The worst terror attacks since 9-11 happened on your watch in New York City, your home city.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 I will say, too, like, to your point, Tommy, about deplorables was a thing because Republicans made it a thing.

Speaker 6 Like, so the White House put out a statement from Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates attacking Trump for this language, for the speech.

Speaker 6 I kind kind of think Joe Biden should call it out next time he has a chance. Like, I know they need to set up the right thing.
It needs to be a campaign environment, right?

Speaker 6 You don't want to do it from the rose garden or whatever it is. But some reporter is going to ask him about it.

Speaker 6 Either do it then or do it at the next campaign stop.

Speaker 6 But like, I think the few things lay out the stakes of the race better than making sure every person and not just news junkies know that this is what Donald Trump is saying out there.

Speaker 5 And I do think the, like, if Joe Biden were to say, you know,

Speaker 5 I saw Donald Trump out there the other day. He said he's a proud election denier, and he said Americans he don't like, they're vermin.
He called them vermin. And that's not the America I know.

Speaker 5 That's not the America I believe in.

Speaker 5 I love all Americans, even the ones that vote against me. And I think we want to get past the kind of chaos and the cruelty and the divisiveness that we've been dealing with.

Speaker 5 That's what I ran the soul of the country.

Speaker 5 It's right there. And you know he cares about it.
You know he's passionate about it.

Speaker 6 And it has the benefit of both being a great attack on Trump and just a contrast because it's such a strength of Joe Biden's because that's always who he's been.

Speaker 5 Back when the truth meant something, people used to talk about something called a Kinsley gaff, which is a gaff when you accidentally tell the truth.

Speaker 5 Hillary calling the MAGA voters deplorables was a Kinsley gaff. Trump saying he's an election denier is a Kinsley gaffe.
If we see that clip over and over again, that will get through to people.

Speaker 5 I am an election denier.

Speaker 5 He is so confident

Speaker 5 in the kind of fractured media environment and the fact that a lot of what he does is just noise, that people aren't paying attention, that only his people see it.

Speaker 5 He's gotten so cocky about that that he's forgotten that you can't go in front of the cameras and say, I'm an election denier, that there is still, there is still a way to make someone pay for something like that.

Speaker 7 You can use that in a clip.

Speaker 7 Absolutely.

Speaker 6 Absolutely.

Speaker 6 Well, he's also got crazy plans to go along with his crazy speeches.

Speaker 6 The New York Times ran a long story that included an interview with Stephen Miller about the extreme immigration crackdown Trump will carry out if he wins.

Speaker 6 The piece says he's, quote, preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.

Speaker 6 Trump will carry out what he's calling the largest deportation in American history without Congress, without due process hearings, and with the help of local police and National Guard troops from Republican-run states that are deputized to work along with ICE officials to do these raids.

Speaker 6 The raids will also target undocumented families and children known as DREAMers, many who've lived and worked here for decades. And Trump and Miller both feel confident,

Speaker 6 according to this story and according to Miller's interview, that this Supreme Court will uphold all these actions. Were you guys as terrified of this story as I was?

Speaker 6 Like, obviously, some of Trump's immigration proposals are more popular in polls than we would like. And I think some of Biden's worst polling is on the issue of immigration.

Speaker 6 But how much do you think he and the Democrats can make Trump's plans an issue in 2024?

Speaker 7 I mean, it is, it's notable that they are taking some of the things that they were criticized for the most and amping them all up.

Speaker 7 The Muslim ban, like you mentioned,

Speaker 7 they want to eliminate political asylum, reinstating Title 42, which is what Trump and then Biden used to keep asylum seekers out of the country during COVID.

Speaker 7 They want to use that for diseases like the flu or tuberculosis, basically just broad-based, getting rid of asylum.

Speaker 7 They want to kick all the refugees from Afghanistan out who came here after the Taliban took over and even re-vet the ones who helped U.S. forces.
So like this is incredibly extreme.

Speaker 7 I think one important note for listeners is this didn't come out because of a leaked document or someone saying something they should have.

Speaker 7 This was Stephen Miller laying it out on the record to the leading, you know, mainstream media progressive publication, right?

Speaker 7 So what this says to me is Trump wants immigration to be the focus of the primary and the general election. And so I think we hear these proposals and we find them horrifying.

Speaker 7 But you also need to realize that I think the polling on immigration is so bad at this point and people's feeling about the handling of the southern border is so bad that some of these things might be more popular than we think.

Speaker 7 We just don't know. Like 73% of the country thinks the government is doing a bad job at the southern border.

Speaker 7 52% of respondents say it's very important to require people to apply for asylum before they travel to the border. 70% of Republicans say illegal immigration is a very big problem.

Speaker 7 47% of the country total thinks that. This is from a Pew Poll in 2023.

Speaker 7 So what I think President Biden needs to do is lay out this comprehensive immigration plan of his own, show that he's concerned, that he's tackling the issue, because I think what people are seeing on the news is constant stories of crisis on the southern border, chaos.

Speaker 7 If they're watching Fox News, they're seeing worse. And then highlight some of the least popular, most alarmist and scary things that Trump laid out and lift those up.
But you got to do both.

Speaker 7 You have to show that you have a plan, you're on it. This is something that's important to me.
This is the alternative.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I think to your point about the polling and obviously Trump is trying to conflate a whole bunch of things here.

Speaker 6 A lot of people worried about the border, worried about the influx of migrants coming to the United States. They want more border security.
They want an immigration system that is orderly and fair.

Speaker 6 But this is not that, right? What Trump is laying out here.

Speaker 6 Imagine police officers, National Guard from Republican states, conducting raids, rounding up immigrant families and children who are suspected of being undocumented, suspected. putting them in camps.

Speaker 6 They're building new camps in Texas. That's what they want to do.
And then deporting them without due process. Imagine how that could go.

Speaker 6 He's going back to the idea of mass deportations of the 10 to 15 million undocumented immigrants who are currently in the United States, many of whom have been here for decades, who are the vast majority of whom are working, which, by the way, deporting them wouldn't just be inhumane and difficult to pull off.

Speaker 6 It would be devastating to the economy. And all the polling that you cited was right.

Speaker 6 When you ask people, and this is from a June 2023 Gallup poll, when you ask people whether they're sympathetic towards undocumented immigrants who are here today, 64% are very or somewhat sympathetic.

Speaker 6 61% oppose or strongly oppose mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Support for Dreamers still polls in the 70s or 80s.

Speaker 6 Even when Trump won in 2016, the same exit poll that had him winning also gave voters a choice between offering, would you offer legal status to undocumented immigrants who are already here, or would you deport them back to their home country?

Speaker 6 Legal status won by 70 to 25%.

Speaker 6 So it's totally about lifting up the mass deportation side of things, which is not very popular, but also taking seriously that people are pissed off about what's going on at the border.

Speaker 5 It's worth remembering the three biggest drops that Trump ever had in his approval rating were January 6th, health care, and the effort to repeal Obamacare, and the chaos around issues like the Muslim ban and the incredible fear of what Donald Trump would unleash in the early days of his presidency.

Speaker 5 This is not also just about undocumented immigrants. This is about the American citizen children of people that might be undocumented.

Speaker 5 This is also one thing they talked about in that article is about attempting to deny citizenship to the American-born children of undocumented people. That is illegal and

Speaker 5 not, it is no more Trump's decision who is an American than it was Mike Pence's decision who won the Electoral College. It is just a made-up right-wing

Speaker 5 birthright citizenship. It is in the Constitution.
It is a made-up thing.

Speaker 5 They're trying to abuse the fact that when a diplomat from another country comes to this country, they are there as a representative of a foreign country to try to deny citizenship to Americans because they're the wrong color.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 the thing that I also think is just the amount of chaos they want to unleash in the early days of this administration, the cruelty and chaos that this would cause, the disruption to the economy, the disruption to businesses,

Speaker 5 the protest and and divisiveness that this would cause is exactly what people dislike the most from the Trump era.

Speaker 5 And I think highlighting that, talking about the fact that this would be a brutal, cruel, divisive, polarizing, and ultimately unsuccessful effort to disrupt

Speaker 5 the lives of millions of people and the economies, I think, the thing we have to do.

Speaker 5 So the part that I was sort of thinking about as I read the piece was, what are the guardrails to protect us from this and which are still there and which would be gone?

Speaker 5 And I just sort of wanted to take us through what some of those were. So Donald Trump wins and he decides he's going to implement this broad plan.

Speaker 5 I was just trying to think through some of the things that stood in the way of Trump doing these kinds of things in the first term. One is just Trump's incompetence, right?

Speaker 5 The other is just with judges. There were a ton of judges that stepped in.
There were Republican squishes in the administration that refused to go along with it.

Speaker 5 There were non-political bureaucrats that refused to go along with it. And then there was political pressure from congressional Republicans

Speaker 5 who were either a problem in and of themselves or as a weather vein for political pressure that republican felt and the incompetence will still be there but the the the judiciary has shifted to the right this whole thing is about a plan to make sure there are no more republican squishes in the second term uh there this is a plan to put what 50 000 right-wingers into positions of the bureaucracy and A lot of the Republicans that stood in the way of Trump in any way, rhetorically, any kind of criticism, many of them are gone and most of them have brought into the fold.

Speaker 6 That's all. Yeah, well, that's, I mean, to your point about

Speaker 6 the plan to put all the

Speaker 6 Trump loyalists in, there's that Axios did a pretty well-reported story today about these ideological screenings that they're doing right now for federal employees.

Speaker 6 And they're sort of breaking them into tranches, right? Like there's the ones that they could, like, they want to get rid of the civil service protections and insult everyone.

Speaker 6 But they also, for just the political appointees, right, which they know they're going to get, they're going through these ideological screenings.

Speaker 6 That's like Stephen Miller is running this operation and Johnny McIntyre, who was the head of personnel.

Speaker 6 And they're basically going through their combing through their social media histories, asking them questions. And they just want, they want Trump loyalists, but they also want like experts.

Speaker 6 And they don't want the incompetent buffoons. They want to actually get people who just don't love democracy and the rule of law, but are like smart.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, there's this whole like, I think, Heritage Foundation plan to cobble together the most right-wing possible government they can find.

Speaker 7 They're also going to try to fire all the civil servants and replace them with political hires. I mean, this whole thing is just a piece of a broader accelerationist puzzle

Speaker 7 where they're not going to be building the plane on the fly this time. They're going to have some scary shit ready to go from the first day he's in office.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's like it's a like Chris Christie was ostensibly supposed to run the transition last time. That is not going to be charged.

Speaker 6 No, Jared and Ivanka either.

Speaker 7 Or like Pat Sipollone, right? The White House counsel, who was like a real lawyer who would say, no, we can't do that. That's illegal.
That's unconstitutional. Like, those people are gone.

Speaker 5 Like, a lawyer that is going to sign off on denying social security numbers to the American-born children of undocumented immigrants is a lawyer that will sign off on fucking anything.

Speaker 7 And say, fight it out in the courts we packed last time.

Speaker 6 Right. And also, yeah, exactly.
And, you know, is

Speaker 6 this Supreme Court, is John Roberts and, you know, gonna round up a majority to stop some of this shit? Yeah, some of it, maybe.

Speaker 6 Probably not all of it.

Speaker 5 Well, yeah, the majority that existed where John Roberts could join Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Speaker 5 and the other liberals is gone because Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously died.

Speaker 7 I think that's true.

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Speaker 6 One big thing we can do to avoid this, elect a Democratic president, Joe Biden, current Democratic president.

Speaker 6 In the New Orleans show we just had, we talked about how Biden showed a little more fight in last week's speech to UAW workers.

Speaker 6 NBC is reporting that Biden personally made the decision to hit Trump harder in that speech and that he's planning to, quote, shift more into campaign mode with plans to increasingly attack Trump after some of his allies have urged him to do so in recent days.

Speaker 6 He's apparently getting lots of advice these days. Politico's Jonathan Martin just spoke to dozens of Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans.

Speaker 6 Some of their suggestions, so Jay Mart writes this column, and it just basically, voices, it sort of like summarizes all the suggestions he got from these dozens of people he spoke to.

Speaker 6 Some of the suggestions included enlisting Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney in his re-election fight, making Rahm Emmanuel chair of his campaign, and appointing Bill and Hillary Clinton as Middle East peace envoys.

Speaker 6 What did you guys make of all the advice contained in the NBC and JMART pieces?

Speaker 7 It's no bad ideas in a brainstorm. Yeah, it's.

Speaker 5 I mean, look, so

Speaker 7 current strategy not working, time to get more aggressive. Yes, I support that.

Speaker 7 I think Jonathan Martin's story was revealing in that it reflects a high level of anxiety among the kind of operative and consultant class, but also the fact that good ideas are hard to come by for how to fix it if you're Joe Biden, right?

Speaker 7 And so I think there weren't a ton of ideas that I think I'd pluck off that politico shelf, but

Speaker 7 getting never Trump Republicans out there on the campaign trail, not a bad idea. Maybe ditching Bidenomics if it's not polling well, not crazy, focusing on abortion.
Absolutely right.

Speaker 7 I do think there's been some polling and focus groups recently that show most voters don't think Trump is as extreme on abortion as he is.

Speaker 7 And he has given us thousands of judges and quotes and votes to use to put in an ad and get that out there.

Speaker 7 So, you know, we've already seen the White House office, press office, ramp up their messaging.

Speaker 7 They've, you know, there's these new social media accounts that are putting out clips of Trump stumbling, getting the the name of the president wrong seven times in a month, like things that weren't getting out there six months ago that I think has been effective.

Speaker 7 I do like to hear that Biden himself is like, all right, no, it's time to start punching Trump in the face.

Speaker 5 Yeah, there was a third category to add to your two of the kind of advice in the piece, which was please run a campaign in 2024. Right.

Speaker 5 Like a lot of the advice, like you should like make it a choice, not a referendum. Like, yeah, that's like a really good idea.

Speaker 5 And presumably not something that wouldn't have occurred to the 2024 Biden campaign. Make abortion an issue.

Speaker 5 Do stuff to combat the age concerns yeah no i think that that's a really important thing to do

Speaker 7 and i every time we say this i try to like unpack it because do something well okay we he he's not gonna he can't get any younger that's that's off the table get one of those machines from star trek insurrection right if you know you know well and they'll say look he went to ukraine he went to israel like he's out there he's in war zones like he's doing real things this is not you know someone who's not on top of his faculties i a lot of the advice was like super inside baseball stuff about where current staffers should be working out of.

Speaker 7 Like, should they work in the West Wing or should they be in Delaware? I think the reality is that Joe Biden is incredibly,

Speaker 7 he leans on a small group of staff very hard, and he's going to want them in the White House sitting with him, not in a campaign office in Delaware.

Speaker 7 So, like, some of that stuff didn't land with me, like sending Mike Donnell into the campaign.

Speaker 6 I just don't think that's maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I don't think he does it as a bad thing.

Speaker 6 I also just like, um, if Hillary and Bill want to go to Gaza, I guess.

Speaker 6 Tell me, what do you think about the Clintons as as that Middle East peace envoys?

Speaker 6 I don't know that that would work as well. I do think

Speaker 7 thinking about a way to make the wars in Ukraine and

Speaker 7 Gaza not your constant day-to-day focus is a good idea.

Speaker 7 If you can name some envoy or something to kind of like get that off your day-to-day messaging plate and focus on economics or other things, that might be good.

Speaker 6 I'll tell you.

Speaker 7 Easier said than done.

Speaker 6 I cannot think of a better way to bring back disaffected young progressives than bringing back Ram Emmanuel as your campaign chair.

Speaker 6 Well, you know what I took? It's such strange. What? But here's what I took from that.

Speaker 6 Who gave that advice?

Speaker 5 Here's what I heard from that, though. Here's what I heard.
What I took from that was someone who's like just sitting in their house fucking nervous.

Speaker 5 Be like, we need somebody who's going to really make things, who's someone who curses, who's someone who's going to really make things good, someone who's going to be, who's going to yell a lot.

Speaker 6 I just, well, at one point it was like, bring back Ron Klain for some big role. Yeah, sure.
Great. Love that.
Yeah, they should.

Speaker 7 And that's probably going to happen.

Speaker 6 Yeah, exactly. I also think there was a point about, you know,

Speaker 6 it is fun and often warranted to complain about media coverage, complain about people underestimating Joe Biden, complain about the polls.

Speaker 6 I don't know that it's always the best use of energy and focus. And I don't know that it always moves the needle that much.
I think like.

Speaker 6 really focusing on the choice and getting people to think about the choice all the time and attacking Donald Trump all the time if you're the campaign.

Speaker 6 I think that's probably a better use of time, but you know.

Speaker 5 Well, I think, I think that's, I think that's, of course, right. I do think that there's like a confusion in the piece between projecting confidence and having confidence.

Speaker 5 Like Joe Biden should not be out there being like, I'm really worried about these polls and the age is going to be a huge problem. Like, no, he should be out there saying I'm like...

Speaker 5 Every president believes his accomplishments are being undercovered and underappreciated. And for Joe Biden, that is a real and serious problem for him as a candidate, but for our country.

Speaker 6 Don't know if the polls are real or not, but I'll tell you, I'm going to change the minds if I need to, and I'm going to show people what the choice is in this race, and I'm going to run the race and tell them the stakes and what's going to happen if Donald Trump becomes president, and what's going to happen if I'm president.

Speaker 6 Absolutely.

Speaker 7 I think that the job of president is incredibly hard. Every president ever in history feels like they're treated unfairly by the media.

Speaker 7 I think you do, though, have to project a little more confidence.

Speaker 7 Like there was a clip where Peter Ducey from Fox News was asking Biden about the bad New York Times poll, and he kind of got in his face and wagged his finger and was like, we'll send you eight other polls.

Speaker 7 I'm like,

Speaker 7 that's not the way to do it. Don't send any polls.

Speaker 6 Like, that's not any

Speaker 7 less defensiveness, a little less focus on the kind of briefing room and more getting out in the country with mostly with paid media to reach the voters that you've lost because they're not reading politico.

Speaker 5 Well, the other thing too is it's like that's a moment where whatever you're going to say is going to be newsy and covered.

Speaker 5 And it's like, that was now a little referendum that you don't agree with that polling as opposed to what you were saying.

Speaker 5 But like, it is absolutely true that it is Joe Biden and the Biden campaign's job to address the fact that vast numbers of Americans have absolutely no idea what he accomplished. But like,

Speaker 5 it frustrates me sometimes when the coverage puts that entirely at the feet of Democrats. Like, yes, practically in reality, we can't just complain about it.
We have to live in that environment.

Speaker 5 But like stepping back for a second, like, yeah, that's a huge indictment, not just of Democrats, but of our entire media ecosystem about the way politics is covered, about our attention spans, about all of it.

Speaker 5 Like we are on, we are, we just talked about. The Republican candidate referring to his political opponents as vermin, planning to set up camps and deport millions of people.

Speaker 5 And it will barely get coverage and most people won't know about it. Trump is so cocky about that.

Speaker 5 He's saying incredibly unpopular things on the stump, relying on the fact that most people won't be able to separate the signal from the noise. Like that's an American problem.

Speaker 5 It's not just a Democratic problem. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Well,

Speaker 6 but also,

Speaker 6 you're not going to solve that.

Speaker 6 Your campaign,

Speaker 6 what you can control is the ads that you run, what your candidate says, what all the surrogates say, and hopefully what most of the party says. And I think to that extent, you know,

Speaker 6 the advice that keeps coming up is on they got to figure out the economic message.

Speaker 6 And I do think the, here's all we did, here's all we did, here's all we did, like, I just think it's of limited value when so many people are still pissed about prices that won't go down.

Speaker 6 And we've talked about this before, that it's like, yes, inflation has come down, but prices are still high. And again, it's a place where you draw the contrast, right?

Speaker 6 And like, what is Donald Trump going to do to bring prices down?

Speaker 6 Donald Trump, who ran as a populist last time, and then once he got into office, listened to Paul Ryan, successfully cut taxes for the rich, tried to eliminate Obamacare and health care altogether, tried to cut Medicare and Social Security, right?

Speaker 6 Like you got to...

Speaker 5 You promised another corporate tax cut already.

Speaker 6 Yeah, right. And so you just got it.
You really got to make the economics about a choice.

Speaker 7 It's hard because Trump, his primary message is the economy was better when I was president and now it's bad. Gas was cheaper when I was president, and now it's bad.

Speaker 7 There were fewer wars when I was president, and now look at Ukraine and Israel. So again, like to the to the point about immigration, the media has covered the hell out of this immigration.

Speaker 7 Like the Trump people rolled it out to the New York Times, then he talked about it at his rally. Like it's not not getting covered because they want it to get covered.

Speaker 7 The problem is there's a policy problem at the border that Joe Biden can't solve in large part because Congress won't help him solve it by passing a law or doing anything constructive here.

Speaker 7 So that's like the challenge of being the incumbent here.

Speaker 6 Oh, yeah. Trump is always a lot of bombs.
Which is always the challenge. And that's, but like, you know, we dealt with that when Obama ran in 2012 and we dealt with different challenges.

Speaker 6 But we, you know, ours was like persistent unemployment unemployment from the Great Recession.

Speaker 6 And yeah, we have the jobs chart of all the jobs that Obama created, but he didn't stop at just being like, oh, no, no, I look at I created all these jobs. It's working.
It's working. It's working.

Speaker 6 It's, he said, what's Mitt Romney going to do? Well, what's, you know, like, what is this going to, what's his plan?

Speaker 6 And to, to Tommy's point, even Trump does have this like hazy memory of, you know, the economy was better. It's like, okay, Donald Trump, what are you going to do to lower prices?

Speaker 6 Do you have any ideas?

Speaker 5 And there were so many stories like this. This kind of story.

Speaker 5 The thing that the reason I bring up the fact that it's not just a Democratic problem is like there is this, you know, Republicans think that this, like the mainstream media is biased.

Speaker 5 And I, and I, you know, I think it does treat Democrats as the protagonist and Republicans as the antagonist. And that often redounds to a democratic advantage and the way stuff is covered.

Speaker 5 But in moments like this, that hand-wringing, that hand-wringing, like... It is from the point of view of worried Democrats.

Speaker 5 It is like baked into the piece that

Speaker 5 it is a bunch of worried people trying to figure out what Joe Biden has to do to fix this problem.

Speaker 5 And the thing is, part of what makes it a problem for Joe Biden is like, there's just an there's he is covered in a different way. He is held to a higher standard.

Speaker 5 The worry and concerns about Biden polling, you will never see a story. If there's, if there's a week, a couple weeks of polling, there is no equivalent version of this story on the right.

Speaker 5 Like, there'll be a version of it, but

Speaker 5 it doesn't rise to this level. They don't get covered with this level of specificity.
There's no one doing staffing recommendations for a Republican campaign in this way. Just different.

Speaker 7 I don't know. I think every side thinks the other side.
Like, the Republicans all say, oh, Democrats never do wind fighting. They don't attack each other.
And our side does.

Speaker 7 And we say the same thing about that. I just think

Speaker 7 it's hard to be in charge and it's hard to run. And I don't know.

Speaker 6 And I also like

Speaker 6 this whole standard shit. Messina, Jim Messina, Obama's campaign manager in 2012, wrote a piece that was right next to...

Speaker 6 Jay Mart's piece that was like, you know, no need to panic over Biden and don't sweat the doom and gloom polling and early polls are unreliable.

Speaker 6 And then he had some good advice about like economic messaging and stuff like that. But I, I,

Speaker 6 everyone, no one should panic, of course, but like people are worried because fucking democracy hangs in the balance.

Speaker 6 Well, there's like people are going to get worried, you know, and they're going to want to make sure that Joe Biden can pull this off. And it's like super important.

Speaker 7 And then Biden messages the soul of the nation is at stake. The future of democracy is at stake.
So we're allowed to worry.

Speaker 6 There was one part of the story where

Speaker 5 he says, the country knows exactly who Donald Trump is. Many aren't bothered by it.
And no amount of scolding will make them say, oh, wow, I guess he is a bad guy.

Speaker 5 And I I was like, well, hold on a second. Like, we do, like, this idea that, like, again, that like Donald Trump's badness is like so thoroughly baked in that it's not worth talking about.
Like,

Speaker 5 I do think that like, it's not, maybe people know, but they may not feel it. And we're going to have to make it present for people.
Like, I don't, I don't agree. And I agree.

Speaker 6 And it has to be perspective because at the end of the day, voters care about like, anyone cares about like, what's going to impact my life?

Speaker 6 What's my life going to be like if Donald Trump is president? I don't want to hear about the past.

Speaker 6 I don't want to hear about his character in the past like what is he going to do is it going to be so bad or what's joe biden going to do right like people want to know they want to when the people say elections are about the future it's not this like gauzy optimum it's about like yeah what's going to happen to me like what's my life going to be like and i think that talking about trump's second-term plans is probably even more important than like the vermin comment right like that immigration building the camps is probably more important to get through than oh and he's calling people vermin like i actually think that it's the plans that are gonna

Speaker 6 it's his vision for the country versus Joe Biden's vision for the country that's what people are going to decide.

Speaker 5 And if you're waiting for like a, someone to come along with like a silver bullet to make you less anxious about the two biggest issues facing Joe Biden, like, you know, like the result, the effects of inflation and his age, it's not going to happen.

Speaker 5 There's no magic answer to these very difficult liabilities. They are his biggest liabilities.
We will be dealing with them and fighting to address them.

Speaker 7 I don't know what else. I mean, go get a benzo.

Speaker 6 Go get a benzo.

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Speaker 6 What a segue.

Speaker 5 I like the extended episodes. Is that just you just don't tell Ben the show is over?

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