Is Trump Snoozing on Iowa?

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Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm Jon Favreau.

I'm back from the playa.

Jon Lovett.

You made it.

That would have been funny if you went.

Thank you. Welcome to Pod Save America.
I'm Jon Favreau. I'm back from the playa.
Jon Lovett. You made it.
That would be funny if you win. I'm Tommy Vitor.
On today's show, Biden shakes off concerns about his age with a five-day trip around the world. Kevin McCarthy may shut down the government to keep his job.
Republicans in Wisconsin may try to overturn last spring's state Supreme Court election. Legal scholar Lawrence Tribe talks to Lov it about the gambit to keep trump off the ballot using the 14th amendment and later we take a look at the right-wing propaganda that states like florida and oklahoma are now including in their public school curriculum in a game we're calling prager who for kids yeah that's what we're calling it yeah that's what we're calling it but first trump and desSantis both went to the Iowa versus Iowa State game this weekend.
It was only Trump's seventh visit to Iowa this year, where NBC News reports that some of his supporters are getting a bit nervous about his campaign operation, including apparently Don Jr., if you believe the story. Before taking his seat in a luxury box with his casino magnet donor, Trump stopped at a frat house on the way to the game and noted the crowd's enthusiasm.
What do you think about this? This is some turnout. I guess the youth likes Trump.
The youth likes Trump. DeSantis, who's already visited more than half of the state's 99 counties, drew less enthusiastic crowds, but did sit with popular governor Kim Reynolds and claim that he's taking the state more seriously than Trump.
And I'm actually starting to hear a lot of people saying, because you're showing up, I'm supporting you because that's the way you got to do it. Iowans don't want the campaign to be about the past or to be about the candidates' issues.
They want it to be about their future and the future of this country. And that's what I represent.
I have to say, I hadn't heard Ron DeSantis's voice in a while. And just hearing it now is like, oh, that's why he's losing by 40 points.
So frustrating. Yeah, that's why there's so many people he's meeting coming around.
Does DeSantis have a point there? Is Trump taking Iowa seriously enough? Or is this just wish casting from DeS from desantis and i guess to a lesser extent the media both of whom want a closer race yeah look i if the media wanted a closer race there's a lot of ways they could be covering ron desantis other than constantly asking the question over and over again can ron desantis save his foundering campaign but that's true yeah i think it's wish casting with the kernel of truth showing uping up does matter. Does it matter enough to close a 23 point deficit in the last Des Moines Register poll? I don't know.
That's a lot. It's two to one.
Yeah, there's also I think I think the other piece of it is, is there could Trump be going Iowa more? Yes. I think it's a difference between seven visits versus 11 visits by this point, something like that.
Well, so Trump's only done 12 campaign events in Iowa and five in New Hampshire, 42 total, and you add up the whole country. I think his opponents are in the States a lot more often, the early States at least.
Right, but I'm talking about Trump this campaign versus the last campaign. Right, when he lost Iowa.
Right, but the, well, that's a good point. Touche.
Well, but the point I was going to make is that it seems like there is more truth to the fact that it seems like his staff is probably pretty fucking terrible uh and had nothing compared to the other campaigns having had on the ground a uh source close to trump uh was reported to have heard donald trump jr on a call saying like they really got to get some adults in the room the iowa staff is like amateur for trump and yada yada yada i know because half of them in any room

yeah i was gonna say yeah which which room are the i was doing coke with eight of them and they

were terrible i mean like could de santis mount a surprise comeback yes absolutely but like they

keep people keep making this obama iowa caucus comparison from 2008 that i think is silly

one we were never down by two to one to hillary clinton or john edwards two obama had something

Thank you. In this Obama-Iowa caucus comparison from 2008 that I think is silly, one, we were never down by two to one to Hillary Clinton or John Edwards.
Two, Obama had something called a message that distinguished him from his opponents. It was like change and also I oppose the Iraq war.
You don't think I represent the future is the right message? Yeah, or I hate Disney more or whatever it is. I mean, it could happen.
But the cynic in me read that story and wondered if this was Trump's team lowering expectations for themselves in Iowa. Speaking of lowering expectations, did you see the story where DeSantis' camp is now saying that a strong second in Iowa could be good enough? Yeah, I couldn't tell which camp was trying to lower expectations.
Because it seems like DeSantis' camp is going around saying, oh, look, it's basically a two-person race. There be two tickets out of iowa and we'll be one of them it was like the quote is just great from the the de santis campaign operative who asked to be remain anonymous uh because he wants to go work for somebody else right yes a strong second place showing gives us an opportunity to go into new hampshire and show success no one it's so silly game is so dumb.
I mean, we did this all the time in 2007 in Iowa. We were not allowed to say Obama's going to win Iowa because you want to position yourself to just exceed expectations, whatever that means.
And the expectations are set by the press corps. But strong second place, DeSantis, and then you're going to go to New Hampshire and like lose to Chris Christie.
And then you go to South Carolina where Trump's and what happened more than half the vote come on and you're also potentially still facing Nikki Haley and Tim Scott if they haven't dropped out yet I mean it's like what is happening I just it was also like one of the lessons of 2007 2008 is all this sort of narrative around the timing and the momentum fell by the wayside to the demographics in each state as they came up. Right.
Yeah. And Jeff Rowe was, you know, was on audio talking to donors saying like, well, Iowa is just a great state for us because it's highly educated and super conservative.
And we think we're going to do good there. We think we're going to win, blah, blah, blah.
And then New Hampshire is a terrible state for Trump. He'll only get 28% there.
And suddenly he loses the first two states and it's like, all right, man a little ahead of yourself here a little wish because jeff wrote the the guy running the super pack for desantis the other quote from the desantis team i saw was on caucus night every republican caucus goer will have had the chance to meet the governor and probably the first lady at least want and that's a big advantage is that a good thing yeah we've seen the video they're saying that's positive it's like positive like i met Ron DeSantis. He insulted my kid for getting icy.
Well, what they're also saying is like, oh, so underneath the polls, there's some strengths that you can't see. But like, how many points is that worth? Okay, let's say it's worth three or five.
It's not 20. Well, so, and you mentioned the Des Moines Register poll, which is obviously the gold standard, not only in Iowa, but like one of the best polls in the country.
There wasn't a poll from Iowa State on Friday that came out just before they both were at the game.

Trump 51, DeSantis 14, Haley 10, Ramaswamy 9.

So per the, maybe you get a few points here and there, but like 51 to 14, if that's anywhere in the ballpark.

You know, and I know everyone, if you were online, people made a lot of like,

Trump got some booze.

It's like, well, it's also,

it's a college town with some college teams.

And it was at Iowa,

not Iowa State, right?

I think it was Iowa State.

Is it in Ames?

Either way, it's like,

those are more liberal towns.

Yeah.

So they both got some middle fingers,

but it's like, right,

they're, you know,

DeSantis and Trump.

And then I also like that

there was a plane that flew overhead

with a banner that said,

where's Melania? Who paid for that? Who cares who cares she doesn't like him that's where she is she doesn't like her husband yeah is anyone surprised by that what a funny thing to pay for it's just like oh melania is not showing up at the campaign events with them we got them it's like yeah guess what she fucking hates them yeah right ron i don't think she'll like you either I thought that was so funny I thought that was funny too where's Melania

you've got this

b**** Yeah, guess what? She fucking hates him. Yeah, Ron, I don't think she'll like you either.
I thought that was so funny. I thought that was funny too.
Where's Melania? You've got this big budget line on. You're going to drop like, what, 10 grand on a plane to drag a message? You pick where's Melania? There's also people with like, there's two people with inflatable, they were wearing inflatable Trump and Fauci costumes, both with like masks on them because like Trump listened to Fauci, I guess.
Well, they're all, they're all hoping, DeSantis is hoping that the lockdowns will come back, the masks will come back so he can make the whole campaign about his, you know, anti-COVID. Two of them, two of them bending over backwards is like, prove they tried to kill more elderly.
It's unbelievable. What a country.
But it's just like, it shows what they're like, they're just grasping at straws. The DeSantis people see like, where's Melania? Let's get Fauci and Trump with masks on.
What are you doing? I'm hearing from more and more people that my being here might be a reason to make me president. There was also a New York Times story over the weekend with a headline and lead that really could have been written in 2016.
Trump's resilience leaves anxious GOP donors in despair and denial. It says as he barrels towards the nomination, they're reacting with a mix of hand-wringing, calls to arms, and fatalism.
Seems like a potent mix, huh? Yeah, I really was like, I was like, wait, I read this story before. We've all read it many times.
April 2021, Trump lashes his enemies anew as GOP dances around his presence. A of republican leaders and top donors in florida this weekend is less a reset of priorities and more reminder of the tensions that donald j trump instills in his party literally no one more useless than rich republican donors i mean that's some democratic donors that was the only thing we love you guys that was yeah that was the the only part of this story that was like fun was just being just appreciating that this was a story about hand wringing among Republican donors.
You know, we read the Democratic one so much. I mean, one thing it highlights, too, is that these people, it's pathetic that they're not doing anything with all of their money and influence.
But they also just don't have the power that they used to because grassroots fundraising is such a big deal now, both on the Democratic side and the Republican side. So it's like the grassroots, the base just loves Donald Trump.
And if a bunch of rich assholes don't agree, it doesn't really matter at this point. They're all pulling different directions and wondering why they're not moving.
Right. Larry Ellison gave $10 million to Tim Scott's super PAC.
DeSantis has $100 million super PAC. Nikki Haley says she got a big fundraising bump after the last debate and reportedly has become the donor favorite.
That means you're splitting the vote still. And like, I was looking around to see, is there a big super PAC running ads against Trump somewhere that we just don't know about? The club for growth said they're going to spend a few million on, on anti-Trump ads.
The Koch brothers, American for prosperity announced the $1.68 million ad buy. There was someone who was running ads against Trump in North Carolina for some reason.
Nobody's doing some organized, concerted effort to try to stop him. And the reason, as Bill Kristol says in the piece, is he's like, I think, because he told everyone, all these donors and whatever, at the beginning of the year, they've got to all spend their money actually persuading Republican voters not to vote for trump instead of just like throwing some money at tim scott nicky hitler whoever and he said i don't think they're going to because ultimately they tell themselves they could live with them and it's right they could you're a rich republican donor and trump's president yeah you're be fine he's sending signals today that he's gonna do another round of tax cuts he becomes president sort of softens the opposition there's also by the way a lot of money that's just on the sidelines and even in that piece there's somebody in there saying i'm just waiting to see what happens these indictments once somebody weakens them then i'm coming in with all my cash and it's just like okay and then they're hoping then they're hoping for glenn youngkin which like give me a fuck you really think you look at you look at the republican base you look at republican voters out there you think that what they're looking for and they love donald trump but what they're really looking for is the guy in a fucking vest smiling and come on ridiculous my favorite part of that new york times article was it mentions that trump's super PAC got a one million dollar check from charles kushner jared kushner's dad trump pardoned him by the way on the way out the door in the final of the administration.
That piece of data is mentioned, the fact that there was a pardon. But the donation was broadly framed as, quote, how some big donors have stuck with Mr.
Trump. Not as like a kickback.
I read that line. A million dollar kickback.
I've never seen such Tommy bait than this part of the story about Trump. The only difference, he got a pardon.
He stuck with him and pardoned him. the only difference between that and how Jared Kushner got into Harvard is Kushner promised the Harvard money in advance.
That's right. Though maybe in this case he did too.
I think it was two mil. Yeah, you're right.
He probably did. So Joe Biden did not get to enjoy any Iowa football this weekend.
The president took a quick trip around the world with stops at the G20 in India, a few meetings and events in Vietnam, and an event with U.S. service members in Alaska to commemorate the 9-11 anniversary.
During his press conference in Hanoi, the president was a little bit punchy, a little bit wonky, and extremely Biden. Let's listen.
Good evening, Mr. President.
How are you? Well, thank you. Good.
These five-day trips around the world are no problem. I can imagine.
It is evening. I'd like to remind you.
Well, there's a lot of lying dog-faced pony soldiers out there about global warming. But not anymore.
But I tell you what, I don't know about you, but I'm going to go to bed. Now, look, I read the whole transcript.
I watched some of the clips. He he held forth for 40 minutes he got right into the weeds on all these foreign policy issues and the fact that even even joe biden's critics like uh peter doocy from fox news had to admit that uh joe biden really uh put in a lot of time on that trip he has been basically working all through the night at the equivalent of an all nighter Eastern time.
So he's probably pretty tired, pretty jet lagged. So Dan and I talked about the Biden age concerns on Thursday.
We don't have to rehash the whole thing here. But do you guys think the trips like these help with those concerns? Does the coverage of the trip even break through to people? What do you think? So, I mean, just on the trip itself, they are absolutely brutal.
The time change to India is nine hours from Washington. That's 11 hours to Hanoi.
So you're basically like, you flip the AM PM and that's how you're living your life. You work on the flights because nothing's ever done in time.
Everybody wants a piece of Joe Biden's time. So you're scheduling meetings, you're doing briefings about the meetings, there's protocol events, there's these leader dinners.
And that final press conference

was at 9.30 p.m. Hanoi time.
So like, yeah, Peter Doocy's not wrong. I mean, he's working hard.

I do think that the way you tackle the age problem is you show you don't tell.

The foreign trips help tell the story. It's obvious that the administration believes that

because they've taken his Ukraine train ride trip to Kiev and made that the first campaign ad. I

think it's pretty powerful and effective whether or not people support the sort of underlying

Thank you. believes that because they've taken his Ukraine train ride trip to Kiev and made that the first campaign ad.
I think it's pretty powerful and effective. Whether or not people support the sort of underlying policy of arming the Ukrainians over time is another question.
But I think the

challenge is I looked for coverage of this trip and I turned to like BBC News. You know, there

was a good print coverage. There wasn't a lot of TV coverage.
And I think the perils of campaigning

in the internet age is that clip that we played about, you know, I want to go to bed at 10, 15

Thank you. turned to like BBC news.
You know, there was a good print coverage. There wasn't a lot of TV coverage.
And I think the perils of campaigning in the internet age is that clip that we played about, you know, I want to go to bed at 10, 15 PM local time, by the way, is what gets pushed around social and is circulating the internet. So like, you know, one step forward, two steps back sometimes, but I do think like, you know, it was a good trip.
You got a lot done. Yeah.
You and Dan had a good conversation about this and, but you also were talking about how some of the hardest people to reach are the young, disaffected, not particularly political young people who Biden is going to need. And I can't think of a group of people less likely to see anything substantive or good out of the trip and more likely to see 30 or 40 seconds taken out of context.

I first heard about that press conference because a friend of mine texted me the one minute excerpt that the GOP war room sent around. Which one did they pick? That was the dog face pony soldiers.
And I then went and looked at the transcript and then I have to say to them, there's nothing wrong with the actual, I mean, there's things wrong with the anecdote, but not that he's too old. But the challenge, and I think we just, they are going to be doing to Biden on age what everyone else has done to DeSantis on being an unlikable weirdo, which is he can do an hour that's fantastic.
Everyone's going to push around this one minute. You do have to show and not tell in a defensive way.
We have to just have Biden out there being Biden. Every point you made last week was to me right.
But there is no version of that on the left about Trump. There's plenty, as you pointed out, about Trump being crazy.
There is no operation. There's nothing that's just finding those moments of Donald Trump seeming really fucking old.
And it sucks that that's the world we live in. It sucks that that's the way this election is going to play out.
But we need to see clips of Trump seeming as old as he is, which is a far less healthy version than Joe Biden.

I think I said this to you guys while I was on vacation. I said to someone, but when I watched the Tucker Trump interview after the Republican debate, I was like, someone should forget about I realize there's a lot of important ads that we need to create that are about message and policy and what the Republicans are going to do what Trump's going to do all that right there's also a space for like a 30 second cut of Trump talking about the mosquito killing 35,000 people and selling the Panama Canal where he sounds fucking nuts that would have been fun to cut and send around like what we're actually not doing that as much.
No, and if you go look, and there's a lot of, I think, democratic apparatus sort of finding the worst moments of Haley and Trump and Chris Christie and putting those out. But to our detriment, they're just about how they'll hurt the country and do such a bad job on policy and really on the substance.
Great, covered. We've got to make, like, it can't just be old versus crazy.
It has to be old versus old and crazy. And there just needs to be more of that.
And we need to collectively stop handling all the time. Like we got to stop asking, why won't they talk about the fact that Donald Trump is old, too? We've done that.
Now we have to go out there and be part of helping to drive that. I mean, it's show not tell, just like Tommy said, Biden, but on the Trump side, too.
Yeah, I think like taken as sort sort of an abstract question, like can you, if you're convinced that a candidate is too old, can you be unconvinced of that? I don't know. You know what I mean? I think that might be a decision you make and it sort of hardens.
I do think you're right though, when it becomes a choice between Joe Biden, who like is a good person doing good things, maybe you feel like he's just going to be too old by the end of the second term and that worries you. But Donald Trump seems crazy.
And like, if you look, I think it was John Oliver used to do transcripts of Trump answers and then have a normal person read them in a normal voice. And that's when you really realize like how out of just completely insane gibberish languages.
But it also speaks to Trump's energy and charisma. And like that that is what is carrying him through.
And just the fact that we're a bit inured to it. And the reality is that Joe Biden, he's not as fast as he used to be.
He's not as loud as he used to be. Those things are just real.
And it just, it can't just be, it has to be a war of the grandpas. Good grandpa versus evil grandpa.
I will say that I was looking at the coverage as well and i i know that the white house press team is just like furious over the coverage of the press conference and i think they have a right to be um with a lot of it because when you i i did the same thing i was just like i'm just a just a news consumer googling about the press conference see what happens and what you got was the joe b Biden saying he wants to go to bed, the lying, which is why we played that, by the way, not because we were trying to add to it for this discussion, the dogface pony thing. And then to Biden's credit, the opening line about, oh, these five day trips around the world are no problem.
And I do think because he's always going to gaffe, he's always going to do Biden things, they're always going to be able to take things out of context to make him seem old, right? That's just, that's baked in. If he's able to joke a bunch, if he's able to give people more interesting material that is positive, you can't just be like totally on message the whole time and just talking about details.
And because if you only do that, that's never going to get covered. And then the gap's going to be the coverage, right? You got to sort of give a material, whether it's a joke or whether it's him fighting like he did during the State of the Union and really like taking it to Republicans like that.
You know, you got to give him something to cover. Yes.
But like on TikTok, there are so much Joe Biden is old floating around. We need the other side of it.
We just need the other side of it. We need people that make fun of millennials to make fun of Donald Trump too.
Just, we got to get some of that in there. Yeah, I did.
I watched the whole press conference. I mean, the questions were all like, it was like four to five are like, you know, fastballs about the US-China relationship.
You know, it wasn't easy stuff and he handled it very deftly. The dog paste pony soldier thing is, look god help me when i'm reaching for a cultural reference point when i'm 80 right like it's just a movie he watched that no one else knows what the fuck he's talking about i will also say i'll be saying raptors checking the fences till 2075 that's right another thing he did well in that press conference is like having read the frank for book and interviewed him uh last week like obama and some of these foreign policy press conferences could get like really, really wonky.
Biden, knowing that he's always trying to figure out, even with foreign policy, like how can I make this easily accessible for the average American, right? And not sound like I'm using all these terms. And you can see him doing that with a complicated issue like the United States relationship with China, like on the fly in the middle of a press conference when he hasn't slept for 10 hours, you know, like, of course he's there, you know, like it was, it's almost like the opposite of the transcript problem.
Joe Biden seems older. You look at what he's saying.
He is able to walk you through the intricacy of policy in a way that Donald Trump never could on his best day with all the at peak through his coercing through his veins. Allegedly.
Tommy, in terms of policy or diplomaticals, what was the administration trying to get out of this trip? And what do you think they achieved? Well, so it was the G20 and then this visit to Hanoi, to Vietnam. So you guys remember the G20 was, it still is the premier forum for economic cooperation globally for the biggest economies in the world.
In 2009, it was a super important venue for dealing with the financial crisis. It was lots of Obama fighting with the Germans over spending versus austerity, right? They kind of went into this wanting to prove that the G20 still matters, that they can get stuff done.
That was harder this time because Chinese President Xi Jinping did not show up. He sent his deputy.
So that's a little awkward, but they still got some things done. They did a lot of stuff to improve the way multilateral development banks work, like the World Bank.
That will, again, not probably make the news in the US, but is really important if you're a low-income country or a middle-income country or in the global south. There was a joint statement on Ukraine that the Ukrainians felt like didn't do enough, but still the White House would say it was an important statement from the G20 countries.
So I think that these forums are very important. When you think about the last, what, 60 years of the U.S.
relationship with Vietnam, Biden going there and having the U.S.-Vietnam relationship elevated to this like peak level in the eyes of the Vietnamese government is a big deal. And it just shows what a difference, you know, 30, 40, 50 years can make.
So they got a lot done. I mean, it's an important event.
And it's supposed to like put some pressure on China too or not? China is the backdrop of the whole thing. The whole idea is to, you know, reassure allies in the region that we're going to be there, that we're a Pacific power and that the Chinese aren't going to steamroll them.
And I think they accomplished that. Do you see that some Republicans are already attacking Biden for commemorating 9-11 by being in Alaska? Who's attacking him, really? Yeah, they were on Fox News saying, like, it's just a stop in Alaska with some troops.
That's not how you commemorate 9-11. No, you invade the wrong country.
Just ridiculous. I think anyone our age, obviously, that was a horrifying day and something will be seared into our memory we should also probably remember that 9-11 at the center of our politics led us to do a lot of really terrible things and make a lot of bad decisions over the last 20 years and maybe commemorating it uh not at ground zero or in the pentagon or in shanksville is a good thing yeah all right back in Washington, Congress has finally returned with just 19 days until the government runs out of funding.
And even people close to Kevin McCarthy say they're doubtful the Speaker will be able to avoid a shutdown and still keep his job. The MAGA hardliners are demanding some combination of a border crackdown, cutting off support for Ukraine, defunding the Department of Justice's Trump prosecutions, and an impeachment inquiry into joe biden of course the white house and the senate would never agree to any of that but if mccarthy decides to cut a bipartisan deal with democrats to fund the government the hardliners are threatening a motion to vacate that could oust him as speaker guys can you see a way out for kevin here there's always one way out for kevin but the the resigning uh what

what You see a way out for Kevin here? There's always one way out for Kevin, but the... Resigning.
You know, how's Kevin going to get out of this mess? You know, he doesn't have dignity. He doesn't need it.
System doesn't need it to function anymore. You know, there was a period of time during that endless fight for him to become speaker where it was like, does someone else have to do it now? Is he really going to be able to eke this out? He ekes this out.
Then we went through that default fight and there was a lot of similar everything's on the table. Kevin will lose the speakership if he doesn't go along with us.
And then we end up with a vote where it's he's still still more Democrats than Republicans, but was 165 Democrats, 150 Republicans in the House, 150 to 70 something, which tells you what the actual appetite inside the Republican caucus is at maximum for a fight that's about ousting Kevin McCarthy over this. But just because the group of people pursuing this don't have a majority, they do have enough people to cause a lot of fucking mayhem.
Yeah. Right.
And they all want different things. I mean, I think this could be a really rough ride for him, for the country, for anyone who wants the government to function and remain open, but I keep coming back to what's the alternative to McCarthy? Who's running against him? Who's going to put their hand up and say, okay, I'll compete with you.
Yeah. Until that happens, I mean, I'm not entirely sure where the threat is coming from yeah so he doesn't have many votes to spare i think he's down four votes because of absences health and family health and family and then there's a fifth where chris stewart i think is resigning for something um so he doesn't really have any votes to spare he would have to basically get all the republicans on board that he has which is going to be really tough for anything that the hardliners want.
So therefore, it looks like he would have to cut a deal with the Democrats and any deal he cuts with the Democrats is really going to piss off the hardliners. So now they're threatening the motion to vacate.
But a couple of the McCarthy allies, I think they were telling Politico, like, fine, if they want to do the motion to vacate, they can can but there's a bunch of them that will vote for McCarthy for speaker as many times as it takes right so it would like lead to chaos but the the only thing I the only thing I could see is like Republicans Tommy I think you said it was unclear all the different things they wanted and I think that's of their problem. If they could come around to pick like one thing

that they're all demanding,

like if they could all,

if they all got together and said,

all right, forget about the impeachment stuff.

Forget about the DOJ defunding.

It's just about border security.

We're going to do a crackdown on the border.

That's something we can get all the Republicans

in the House on board with.

We'll pass that bill.

We'll jam the Republicans and Democrats in the Senate.

We'll jam the White House.

And then they can be, they can say, all right, let the government shut down over like, you know, what they'll say is wanting an open border. Right.
Like that. You could have made me imagine that.
But I don't think he I don't even think he can get all the Republicans in the House around that. You need all of them.
Well, that's what happened with the debt ceiling. Yes.
So it is what happened to debt ceiling. And now they're pissed because they think the debt ceiling was a betrayal, which is why we're in this spot.
And part of what they want to do is use their leverage now to renegotiate that deal and no longer be on the spending levels of that deal. Yeah, they want $120 billion more in cuts than Biden and McCarthy agreed to, which is crazy.
So it doesn't seem like there's any—like, we are—the government will shut down or there will be something that can pass in a bipartisan way in the Senate and in a bipartisan way in the House, because it doesn't seem like anything that can pass with all Republican votes that you need has any chance of hell and passing in the Senate. And so then like you look at the list and it is this mix of normal and abnormal politics.
The part that's like normal in this day and age, right, which is the border stuff, right? There is, Biden has requested a bunch of money for disaster aid and for the border. Republicans say it's too much on processing, not enough on border security.
That's just political. That's a political fight that you can have.
No, it's not going to be impeachment for government funding. I don't think that is going to happen.
The question I have is, okay, McCarthy got through this once. They said they would oust him if he ever did anything like this, then he did it.
he got through it. Can he get through it again? Yeah, I mean, that's, he has to kind of deal with Democrats.
But I mean, it does raise the question, who, if not McCarthy, but I think you at least go through something where someone, all it takes is one asshole to trigger the motion to vacate and then now they're voting, right? And the other part of it too is like, some this is like the debt ceiling fight was a fear of this fight. This fight is the fear of the next fight.
What Republicans in the House have said for a very long time, and actually I think fairly, is, hey, the way we've been funding the government is ridiculous. We've been doing these giant bills that if we say no to because we don't want to fund the State Department, we're also not funding the Pentagon, what have you.
The Senate and the House have both now been doing individual appropriation bills, which is something that hasn't happened for a really long time. And what they're worried about is if they go along with another resolution that keeps that that looks bipartisan, that they're gonna end up in another situation where they're jammed again for another big spending bill.
So it's like, how can McCarthy make another set of crazy promises to kick the can down the road one more time? And you know what, assholes? You are going to get jammed again and again and again because you only control one House of Congress and you don't control the presidency, assholes. And the 20 of you causing this don't even do that.
And by the way, in the Senate, the Democrats and Republicans have been steadily producing bills together to fund the government in the way that House Republicans claimans claim they want senate republicans don't want the shutdown no they all and they also support they support the disaster relief money they support the funding for ukraine of course mitch mcconnell is like a stalwart defender of ukraine he wants that to be part of his legacy which will probably not be much longer in elected office right and like he really wants to get through this another what 24 billion $24 billion in funding for the U.S. ever because he knows that might be the last money that goes through.
Which is why, again, I would look to the border stuff as the only possible area of some kind of movement on this because I think that the impeachment stuff, the defunding DOJ and the Ukraine stuff are just like dead on arrival. It's not happening.
I gotta tell you something. I love something i love a fun invite i just love i just like it's just a little bit of normal politics because if you look like some of these even like these like these far right wingers they keep saying they keep they throw out all these these threats and everything's on the table and then they say we won't do a clean cr right well that leaves a lot of room underneath for a lot of things that would make it not a clean cr which is something like that yeah i also.
I also think that, by the way, Biden and the Democrats are in a great position heading into this fight, too, because it's like it's going to look like Republican chaos. You're going to have a split between McConnell and McCarthy, the House and Senate Republicans.
You're going to have a campaign going on where these guys want to make it about Joe Biden. And instead, he's going to be making about crazy Republicans who are trying to shut down the government over.
They don't even know what. Yeah.
The like both like McConnell and Thune have like referred to this problem. Like we don't have a mess.
They have a mess. They don't say we which is which tells you something.
And the White House is lifting up very popular parts of the spending like money to deal with the fentanyl crisis. Yeah.
You want to you want to shut down the government over this. This is your priority.
Right. And by the way, a lot of House like I think that the Republican Party is changing on questions about like whether we should support allies like Ukraine.
But a lot of those Republican politicians haven't been voted out by there. There's still a size.
I don't know what the exact number would be, but a lot of those House Republicans want to support Ukraine, too. And they don't want to be in this fight.
I think more money for Ukraine is probably far more popular among members of Congress of both parties than the broader electorate.

Yeah.

Which, you know, could be a down the road problem.

Right now, I feel pretty good about it. One last item before we get to Lovett's Larry Tribe interview.
I briefly mentioned this on Thursday, but Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature are threatening to impeach newly elected state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protosawitz. Still remember how to say the name.
We both can't. both we both nailed it we both on our separate pod said it and then took a little moment to say look what we did it took a long time we went to wisconsin for days to figure that out you got to be you got to be a protosewitz okay uh anyway they want to impeach justice janet unless she recuses herself from any cases involving gerrymandering because she accurately pointed out during the campaign that the maps are rigged for Republicans.
Actually, the most rigged maps anywhere in the country. And because the maps are rigged for Republicans, they have a supermajority with which to impeach the new justice.
If she is convicted, Democratic Governor Tony Evers could appoint her replacement. So the plan is for the General Assembly to impeach her and then for the Senate to do nothing, which would leave her in limbo, unable to hear any cases or rule on anything, and thus would leave the court split three, three.
So there would be no majority on the Supreme Court and the Republican legislature would just do whatever the fuck it wanted. Very normal thing to happen in a democracy, huh? If Wisconsin was a foreign country, the State Department would be putting out a press release like attacking their democracy and saying these elections are a sham and what's going on here i mean it is wild what is going on right i remember when we were in we were in wisconsin like knocking on doors and and sort of in that final run and ben wickler who's always got his on a swivel uh you know i feel like uh you know know, he's, Kevin McCarthy's playing chess, but he's always two moves behind.
But Ben was like, now the next fight is going to be over this. And he was right because he saw this coming.
Yeah. And just so everyone, you know, they're like, oh, well, it's because she talked about this in her campaign.
First of all, the actual rules that Republicans have set in Wisconsin says that it doesn't matter if you said anything during a campaign about an issue if you're running for judge. That's not only true in Wisconsin.
There was a Supreme Court opinion written in a majority opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court written in 2002 byin Scalia, that said when there are judicial elections, you can't force a judge to recuse themselves for anything that they said or a political belief that they stated during a campaign because it's an election for a judge.
And that's what happens. There's never been an impeachment in the history of Wisconsin.
There's one judge who's been impeached for taking bribes was later acquitted in the Senate. That was like 1853.
No judge has ever been impeached in Wisconsin for anything else. And no judge has ever been impeached in the entire country before they ever heard a case, ever issued a ruling or for any of their political beliefs.
And we know this, of course, because we have nine Supreme Court justices, six of whom have been very clear about their beliefs. I'm not big fans of recusals.
And the hypocrisy is so galling. So the chief justice in Wisconsin became the first sitting Supreme Court justice in the state's history to be reprimanded by her colleagues for not recusing from a case.
And as a circuit judge, she presided over 11 cases involving a bank for which her husband was a board member. That's incredible.
The Republicans, led by Robin Voss, the Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, are the ones who changed campaign finance rules to allow political parties to make unlimited donations to the state Supreme Court candidates. So the reason money is such an issue in these state Supreme Court races is because of the current Republican leadership in the state.
And then two of the three conservatives on the court have gotten financial support from the Republican Party. Neither recused themselves from the redistricting case that established the least changed standard, this horrible map, the most gerrymandered map in the country, according to a lot of experts, is in Wisconsin.
One conservative justice on the court right now in Wisconsin has compared abortion to the Holocaust. And another one has accused Planned Parenthood of being a wicked organization that kills babies.
Neither has recused themselves from any of the abortion cases that have come to the Supreme Court. Can you believe it? That's unbelievable.
So let's talk about what's happening here. So Ben Wickler and the Democratic Party have launched a website, defendjustice.com.
We mentioned this on Thursday.

And they are trying to get a pressure campaign going so that people can call your legislators to find out where they stand. They already had one defection, one Republican in the General Assembly who has already said, I don't think I want to do this.

I don't think it's fair to impeach a justice for not doing anything.

Literally.

Literally. And so they got one and they're trying to build as much pressure as possible.
It seems like the Republicans in the state Senate do not really want this to happen. The majority leader in the state Senate was on record to a reporter a couple of weeks ago saying, quote, impeachment shouldn't be used as a tool to overturn elections, acknowledging that that's what this would be.
Now, that same major leader has been like a couple of weeks later is like, well, we do have a judge that has that has openly said the maps are rigged. So we have to do something about that.
Right. So changing, changing his tune a little bit.
But this thing is not over by any means. And Republicans that were like going to go forward with impeachment as of last week, and they just now they keep putting it off and putting it off.
And I think because the blowback is so severe, but that means like, go to defend justice.com. If you're in Wisconsin, you can call your legislators.
And if you know friends in Wisconsin, or you just want to help, you can, you can help that way too, by going on the website. And so just so people know, like what happens here, if she is impeached, and then the Senate does not take it up it up and she's in this limbo then one thing that could happen is that justice protosewitz could resign and then tony evers the governor democratic governor could appoint her replacement if that happens before janet protosewitz with a little mustache if that happens and that happens before december 1st then that new justice would have to run in a special election in april of 2024 on the same day as the wisconsin republican primary which is for president which which is for turnout reasons for turnout reasons which seems like what their their play was and if he nominates someone after december 1st to take over then they would get the they would be in the seat until uh for like a couple years but it's uh or are you gonna appoint somebody then they resign i mean it's just let's say they they they want they want to play games tony evers he likes to here's the thing he likes to play games here's here's something so do that thing where he crossed out all the letters.
Here's why it's so important, too. I mean, it's important for Wisconsin.
It's important for gerrymandered maps. It's important for the abortion cases that they might hear.
But if they get away with this, they impeach a justice over absolutely nothing. Imagine 2024 rolls around, and it's another close election in Wisconsin between Biden and Trump.
And the assembly decides, instead of just leaving it a 3-3 limbo, let's impeach another justice just because we can't. They will take it to the extreme.
Did you guys know there's a great New Yorker article about all of this that everyone should read? That Robin Voss, the crazy Republican speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, was college roommates with Reince Priebus. Talk about a room you want to avoid.
You know what I'm saying? What's going on there? You guys want to come by and have a drink? No, Robin's a man. Oh, sorry.
That makes more sense. Oh, yeah.
You know that's what was notable. Confused for a second.
Anyway, defendjustice.com. Go help out.
All right, a few quick housekeeping items before we go to break. It's now been one month since Crooked Media Reads published our first book, Mobility, by Lydia Kiesling.
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Sign up today at crooked.com slash friends or through Apple Podcasts to start your 30-day free trial. As if 91 felony counts weren't enough, former President Trump's legal troubles keep mounting.
Last week, voters in Colorado filed a lawsuit seeking to remove him from the state's election under the 14th Amendment. Here to help make sense of this legal theory is a preeminent constitutional scholar who believes states should boot Trump from their ballots.
Professor Larry Tribe, thank you for being here. Thank you, John.
So you wrote a provocative article for The Atlantic titled The Constitution Prohibits Trump from Ever Being President Again. The title told me everything I needed to know.
I read no further. Completely relieved.
Can you explain why the GOP frontrunner, who is an American citizen, former one-term president, born in New York, 35 twice over, is ineligible for federal office? Well, first of all, it was not just my article. It was an article with Judge Michael Ludwig, a very well-respected conservative former judge.
The reason we both concluded that he is ineligible is that although he is 35, actually a good bit older, and although he's a natural-born citizen and meets those qualifications, there is one he does not meet, and it's quite explicit in the 14th Amendment. One of the qualifications is that you not engage in or give aid and comfort to an insurrection against the constitution of the united states after taking an oath of office to uphold it that's something that's been in our constitution since after the civil war and it's been there as a protective measure quite apart from criminal prosecutions or civil suits that basically says whatever may happen to punish you, if you take an oath to uphold the Constitution and then basically commit treason against it, we can't trust you to hold office again.
It's a very dramatic remedy, and it hasn't been used on an American president before because because no American president has done what this one seems to have done, and it's going to be up to the courts of Colorado, where the main lawsuit has been filed, to determine in the first instance whether he is guilty of insurrection, and whether, if he is, that's what the 14th Amendment tells us must happen. Namely, he can't be on the ballot.
It'll go all the way up to the Supreme Court, where the final word will be that of a very conservative court. And we'll just have to see.
So obviously, it hasn't been used in the case of a president before. But other than immediately after the Civil War, has this argument been invoked? Has this been used to ever keep someone from the ballot? Yes, it's been invoked several times.
In modern times, the most important probably was that of a county commissioner in Minnesota, not a very high office, but he was actually arrested for trespass, not insurrection,

but trespass on the Capitol, and he was removed from office. They didn't catch him in time, and actually, when he took the oath, he hadn't yet committed insurrection, but he was disqualified.
He was removed from office and because he was removed and then he lost his attempt to be elected again the whole thing became moot but there have been no major cases other than that there was one involving Madison Cawthorn you may remember the guy yeah um he was effectively challenged on the basis of of this law a district court uh in his state federal district court ruled for him on the bizarre ground that Congress in 1872 by a mere statute had gotten rid of this part of the Constitution that was was a crazy ground. The Fourth Circuit said that

can't happen. It didn't happen.
But that too became moot when he lost his election bid.

But apart from those relatively minor incidents, it hasn't been invoked,

but it's still a living part of the living Constitution.

So Donald Trump hasn't been convicted of any crimes as of this recording. He also hasn't been charged with insurrection or rebellion or treason or anything like that.
You and Judge Ludig say that you don't need a conviction, that that's actually a separate matter because this is self-executing. What does that mean? Who decides that, you know, it's easy to tell when someone's 35 years old or not.
It's harder to tell when, you know, when being, who is exactly engaged in an insurrection or even what the insurrection is. Who makes that kind of a judgment call? Well, it is much harder.
It's not a simple mechanical thing. That's what makes this an interesting and difficult lawsuit.
In the first instance, as the Colorado voters who have standing in Colorado to sue the secretary of state to tell her to do her job, in the first instance, she's supposed to decide, and if she won't, the state court in which it has been filed in Colorado will hold a hearing and it will render a decision and that will be appealed. The reason that it doesn't matter whether he has been criminally charged with insurrection, much less convicted, is that this was deliberately put in the Constitution at a time when we couldn't trust the chief executive and the justice department to charge people andrew johnson who was basically a confederate had become president after lincoln's assassination he wasn't going to have people prosecuted in the confederacy in fact he he pardoned the ones he who had been convicted.
The people who wrote the 14th Amendment very deliberately, and the history is clear, they very deliberately said we can't rely on the executive branch and its prosecutions when it comes to disqualifying people from office who have taken an oath and then turned tail on the Constitution and basically waged war on it doesn't matter whether they're indicted this isn't a punishment it's simply you know it's like saying if you've had two bites at the apple two wins as president you can't run a third time you know i think you work for barack obama very popular

president if the democrats decided that joe biden was a little too old and they wanted to put obama forth on the primary it would be a relatively easy matter to say he's not eligible this is not so easy but the fact it isn't easy doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.

We've got to enforce the Constitution. A lot of parts of the Constitution are a little blurry,

like the meaning of liberty, equality, privacy, equal protection. This is a little bit like that,

although wherever you draw the line of insurrection, if this was not an insurrection,

and if Trump didn't lead it, then I don't know what is or who would be a leader of an insurrection. What, to your mind, is the insurrection? Is the insurrection what happens at the Capitol on January 6th? Is it the effort to do fake electors? If there had been more security on January 6th and people weren't able to get into the Capitol, would you still believe Donald Trump had engaged

in an insurrection? But it would be a slightly harder case because insurrection usually means force and violence. But here the insurrection was the whole plan from the beginning to the end.
Fake electors, pressure on Raffensperger, pressure on the vice president, the gallows that threatened him and then if if he didn't give in, the mob that almost got to him and threatened his life. That whole course of conduct was an insurrection against the Constitution of the United States.
It's hard to draw lines. Maybe if it had been a much less elaborate plan, maybe if it hadn't included attempts to kill the vice president and pressure on him, maybe it would have fallen short of an insurrection.
But wherever the line is, the argument that is going to be considered by the courts of Colorado is that this falls on the insurrection side of that line. I guess the reason I ask that is because, look, you can, someone is 35 or they're not 35, and that could be under dispute, but it's not a subjective question.
Whether somebody was a member of the Confederacy or not, you know, that could be disputed, but this was written to address the Civil War. I'm not a, I took the LSAT.
That was the end of my legal career. But it does seem to me that like in a democracy, one thing we try to practice right is forbearance.
Right. This idea that, you know, this is a subjective call.
This is a difficult question. And when in doubt, we ought to defer to the democracy itself, that people of good faith can disagree on this question.
And so why not leave it up to the voters rather than to partisan secretaries of state or judges who are unaccountable to the voters to make this kind of a decision? Well, that was one of the arguments that people made who didn't want Section 3 to be in the Constitution. They basically said, you know, it might be a close call, although this one doesn't seem close why not leave it to the

voters and the answer was the voters are entitled in a democracy to have the rule of law prevail and they are entitled to have only those who are eligible and the answer that was given was that if the power is abused we have to build in a safeguard and they did at the very end of this provision of the Constitution, they said that if someone is basically railroaded out of contention, without sufficient reason, on the basis of too loosey-goosey a definition of insurrection, then if you get a two-thirds vote of both houses, you can lift the disqualification. Maybe that wasn't written the way it should have been, but there are a lot of parts of the Constitution.
I can name some, the Electoral College, two senators per state, regardless of its size, maybe the Second Amendment, that don't make a lot of sense today. But that doesn't mean we just erase them.
A democracy requires the rule of law, and that means applying the Constitution even when it's not convenient.

And the argument that it's not democratic to abide by the rule of law really assumes that democracy is majority vote no matter what.

But it isn't.

We have a lot of safeguards, guardrails, against just allowing someone, because they are popular, to automatically succeed to the presidency, however popular they are. And, you know, the framers predicted there might be someone who would come into power, who would be so charismatic and yet so greedy for power that they would turn our democracy into a dictatorship.
Donald Trump may be the guy they had in mind, and this is the safeguard they wrote into place. We'll have to see whether the Supreme Court takes it as seriously as Judge Luding, and I think it should be taken.
But we can't just erase it because it's inconvenient or because it doesn't accord with the common sense way of doing things. The exact text is about those who have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the country or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
There are Republicans who say that the Obama administration gave aid and comfort to America's enemies through the Iran deal or that the Biden administration gave aid and comfort to our enemies when it left Afghanistan. Do you think a Republican secretary of state who sincerely believes those statements is on firmly legal ground to remove Joe Biden's name from the ballot? Oh, the reason is that those are not insurrections against the Constitution of the United States.
They may be policy decisions that one can disagree with. but I think it's very clear that if someone tried to leave Joe Biden's name off the ballot on that basis, that the U.S.
Supreme Court wouldn't agree. And in any event, I think even two-thirds of the current Congress would regard that as an abuse of power.
But the fact that a power in the Constitution can be abused, which is something that people say about the impeachment power and almost everything else, the indictment power can be abused, doesn't mean that we get rid of the rule of law and simply, you know, take a poll of the national electorate whenever we have a difficult decision to make. We have rules, and among those rules is this disqualification rule.
Right, but obviously this is novel, right? Like, you've introduced this in a piece that became news because it was, to many people, a completely novel theory. Like, you recognize there's a lot of people that disagree with this point of view, that see this as anti-democratic, that see this as like a slippery slope towards people trying to use the legal system to prevent their opponents from being on the ballot.
People that aren't just, you know, Trumpist or MAGA, people with a genuine disagreement and a genuine fear about what this would do, that this introduces yet another way in which people can abuse their office and use their subjective judgment to try to undermine a democracy. And given that we have a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court, which is, it seems to me, and I don't want to make a prediction, you're a lawyer, I'm just a schmuck, unlikely to decide that Republicans can't vote for Donald Trump, that this will only result in simply a new way for Republicans to make trouble without getting to the result that you think is so important to protect our democracy? Well, first of all, if I thought we could prevent Republicans from making trouble, whether it's with Benghazi or with the impending impeachment of Joe Biden by disregarding the Constitution, then I really don't belong in the business of constitutional law.
I think if you appease people in order to prevent them from making trouble, you are well on the way toward chaos. We can't decide selectively which parts of the Constitution might make too much trouble.
If you ask me to put on my gambler's hat, and I don't like gambling, I wouldn't gamble that the current U.S. Supreme Court would keep Donald Trump off the ballot.
It's pretty unlikely. But when the vapor trail of these times is written in the book of history, I wanted to show that there were people who took the whole constitution seriously, even if the result might not be the one that they would like politically.
And I think that we can't simply refuse to let the voters of Colorado, in accord with the law of Colorado, bring a lawsuit to keep an ineligible person off the ballot. They're just using their rights as voters in Colorado.
If they don't succeed, they will at least have tried. And I think that of the whole crisis we face, if we're not going to succeed, we will at least go down trying.
And I don't want to abandon the Constitution in the course of that enterprise. Given that this is so unlikely to succeed, I just worry that we are giving fodder to the people that believe all these legal efforts, all these legal endeavors, the criminal cases, the civil cases, that all of them are about damaging Donald Trump politically, when this to you is about upholding the rule of law, but it is so explicitly about using the law to stop Donald Trump from ever being able to go in front of the electorate again? Well, you know, if we lose, we lose.
But it seems to me that the alternative is a kind of appeasement. The idea that weaponizing the law for political purposes is terrible.
It's hard to square with the idea that the guy who is running on a program of revenge, saying that if he becomes president, he'll go after all of his enemies. That's his program.
It's a program of retribution. He says, I am your retribution.
And he says, I will suspend the Constitution. I will basically terminate the Constitution.
If that's what we confront to tell us we shouldn't use the Constitution for all it's worth to disqualify someone on the basis of his having engaged in an insurrection seems to me to be a you know pretty one-sided game i think we cannot afford to say well let's all get along let's be peaceful let's be undivided we're not going to have unity by appeement. We're going to have to stick with the rule of law and hope that in the end, we emerge a more unified country.
In the meantime, there's going to be division and acrimony whichever way we go. What is the strongest legal argument against invoking the insurrection? I suppose the strongest legal argument is a very technical one, which I don't buy at all.
It's one that former Attorney General Lucchese made and the Wall Street Journal made, and that is that for strange grammatical reasons, the presidency is not an office. That's crazy.
But it is legally stronger than some of the other arguments, like the arguments that this provision expired somehow because it was all about the civil war. It's not a strong argument.
As I say, the presidency is described as an office nine times in the article defining the presidential power. Honestly, I don't think there are any strong legal arguments.
There may be strong factual arguments. It may well be that Donald Trump's personal engagement in the whole plot to overturn the election was sufficiently unclear that he is not, I suppose you would say, not by a preponderance of the evidence guilty of engaging in an insurrection.
That's a factual, not a legal argument. It will have to be tried out in the courts.
But I don't think there is any really strong legal argument. There's a strong political argument that this is a very scary part of the Constitution.
But that's not an argument that I can credit as sufficient. David Larry Trime, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you next time. Just pure ad-free joy.
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And before we go, with us is the legendary Hallie Kiefer. The legend being Sasquatch or Loch Ness.
But here I am in the flesh. Where's your Fannie Willis candle that I bought you? Oh, it's burning.
It's going to be burning in eternal flame. Okay, good.
Probably. Gentlemen, last week, Oklahoma announced a partnership with PragerU, approving educational videos from PragerU kids to be used as part of a classroom curriculum in the state's public schools.
This comes after Florida made the same announcement basically in August. What's PragerU, you might ask? Well, unfortunately, it's a right-wing media outlet founded by conservative talk show host Dennis Prager.
And what's their angle? Well, I'll leave it to Oklahoma's superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, to sum it up. When he said in the announcement, PragerU is challenging the left's domination of academia, of education, and this is what has to happen.
It is of the utmost importance that we're able to correct this leftist bent of history, get that radicalism out, and go back to teaching true history to our kids.

Or as I would have put it, uh-oh. Oh, no.
So as you can imagine, their content library is available online. You can check it out.
You know what's going to be there. It's climate change denialism, ahistorical history lessons, and sort of an overall curating of history to focus on the heroism of white Christian, the white Christian headset, and disparaging the innate evil of wokeness, which for us is sort of just what we would have learned in a normal history class in the 90s.
There's a big thumbs down to that. So I thought, what better way to highlight the dissolution of the American educational system than the game I'm calling Prager Who for kids? Gentlemen, I'm going to read two quotes from PragerU for kids videos, okay? One of them is a real quote from a real video.
The other one, a superb facsimile created by yours truly with help from Fiona and Reed. Also, shout out to Media Matters and whatever poor bastard over there had to watch all these videos.
Because they have an excellent breakdown. Dear reader, check out Media Matters if you want to look at that.
Again, it will destroy you. Let's begin.
Okay, so one of these. One of these two is real and one is fake.
All right. Embrace your idea of being a wife or mother and allow yourself to stay at home to raise your children.
This of course is from the video How to Embrace Your Femininity. The other one.
As you grow up you'll find hair in strange places. Your voice will deepen and you will take your rightful place as the head of your household with your wife as your helpmate.
And that is of course from How to Embrace Your Masculinity. I know the answer.
How? Because I'm a freak. Did you read these? I've seen that one.
I've seen one of them. You can go last.
I think the fake one is the... I'm going to say the femininity one because it's...
Okay. I'm going to say Hair in Strange Places is fake, which I think is the masculinity one.
Okay, great. And having seen this? They really want to teach the femininity.
The masculinity is fake. Right, exactly.
I thought it was just too... No, no, but unfortunately, these could all be real.
That is, of course, the joke of this, is it funny? No, it's terrifying. On to the next one.
Renewable energy sources don't contribute that much energy, unlike coal or fossil fuels. Energy from wind or sun is unreliable, expensive, and difficult to store.
That, of course, is from the video Poland, colon, Anya's Energy Crisis. And the next one.
While some rush to say humans are causing this extreme weather, the truth is flooding is a historical event dating back to biblical times and simply part of the Earth's natural cycle.

That is, of course,

from Germany,

colon,

Hans Rainy Day Dilemma.

Gentlemen,

which of these two is real

and which is fake?

I think the Germany one is fake.

Me too.

I agree.

Okay, you're right.

It's too good.

It's too funny.

It's too funny.

Oh, damn it.

Rainy Day Dilemma

was too funny.

I'm simply too funny

to do this. Other than Rainy Day Dilemma, I wasn't sure.
it is a true statement. I wasn't sure.
It did go back to the Bible. I'm convincing Favreau.
He's like, wait a minute. These are good.
I need to show this to my kids. They got a point.
They got a point. Yeah.
In one PragerU for a kids video, the narrator criticizes Rosa Parks for, quote, grandstanding during the Montgomery bus boycott. No.
No. But concludes, in the end, Parks was able to work with her white neighbors to resolve their differences over bus seating.
That's... And then in another video, the narrator describes George Floyd as a black man who resisted arrest and claims the accusations of racial targeting leveled by protests against police were false.
I mean, Rosa Parks is gonna be the fake one. Oh, my God.
I kind of think the Rosa Parks one is real. Love it.
Where did the word grandstanding come from? The grandstanding is in quotes. I can't believe I can't believe what you're.
But okay, I think that Rosa Parkland is fake.

Yeah, the George Floyd one is right.

And it's from a video called Los Angeles.

I mean, it's all horrible.

The video is called Los Angeles colon Mateo backs the blue.

And it's like, oh no, of all the things you want them to teach you about,

your kids about it is not, of course, George Floyd.

Without fossil fuels, humanity never would have created so many wonderful things

like jet fuel, asphalt, and heating oil. This is, of course, from Leo and Layla Meet the Dinosaurs.
And I never thought about how plastic makes modern life easier. I've only ever heard about the negatives of plastic.
That is from Leo and Layla Meet Leo Bakeland, who is the Belgian chemist who is known as the father of the plastics industry.

I think... Here's my...
I think the dinosaur

one is fake because I don't think

they want to say that dinosaurs are old enough

to become fuel.

Wow.

Because those are some old dinosaurs.

I agree with Levin on that one.

I think you're twisting this and they're both real.

Good guess. The real one

is Leo and Layla meet Leo

Bakeland, who is the Belgian

chemist who is known as the father of plastics.

Also, they probably have money from

big plastics. Yes, for sure.

Yeah, big dino's not coming

up with lunch.

We need them now.

Don't believe in dinosaur bones.

Please believe in plastics. And finally,

our final two, our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong, and they knew it would do terrible harm to the nation. They wanted it to end, but their first priority was getting all 13 colonies to unite as one country.
The founding fathers made a compromise to achieve something great. That is from Leo and Layla's history adventures with Frederick Douglass.
And of course, pay your employees too much and your business will fail from lack of profit. Pay them too little and you'll also fail because your employees will leave.
It's the invisible hand that will lead you to the right decision. When done right, everybody wins with capitalism.
That is from Leo and Layla's History Adventures with Adam Smith. So I know they have, I know PragerU has a video with Frederick Douglass in which it's basically like, America, imperfect but awesome.
So that's why I think that's the real one. I think that's the real one too.
They are, of course, both real. I twisted too early.
I twisted too early. Real quick for all of you.
Guess how many views on YouTube PragerU's account has?

Tommy, please.

The total of the account.

Total since 2009.

2009.

Oh, no.

Like 100 million?

Yeah, I'll say 200 million.

300 million.

1.78 billion.

Oh, Tommy.

Oh, wow.

That's no good.

That's no good.

All right, we gotta start making some content for kids.

That's a lot.

Oh, yeah, let's do that. Let's get it in the- Back the bluey.
Paw Patrol, but with some criticism. Yeah.
With some salient criticism. Gentlemen, thank you for letting me come on here and bum you out.
We had a laugh. You did it in a jovial way.
Thank you. But the other thing about this is this is like, finally, a way for schools to really thrive by showing kids videos.
Oh yeah. The famous way teachers who have given up make the class time go away.
Yeah. You know? Oh, you gotta think they're just not even gonna be hiring teachers.
It's just gonna be those videos. Yeah, that's true.
Yeah, because they fired all the teachers. Oh no, I gave them a genius idea.
Oh no. It's just chatGPT welcoming the kids and putting on the PragerU vids.
One of the little robot dogs comes out and presses the play. They don't even need a person anymore.
Thank you, Hallie Kiefer. Thank you for having me.
Thank you to Lawrence Tribe, and we will talk to you soon. Bye, everyone.
Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our producers are Olivia Martinez and David Toledo.
Our associate producer is Farrah Safari. Writing support from Hallie Kiefer.
Reed Churlin is our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.
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