Trump “Not Joking” About 3rd Term

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Restrictions apply. Welcome to Pod Save America.
I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett.
I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's show, Trump says he's not joking about trying to serve a third term and that there are, quote, methods to get around the very clear constitutional amendment that prevents him from doing so.
Of course, Trump's already acting like a dictator. The Supreme Court will decide whether he can round up people without due process and send them to a foreign gulag, which apparently ICE agents are now doing based on tattoos that they think might be suspicious.
The first pair of elections that could give us a hint as to how voters are feeling about America's golden age are Tuesday. We'll talk about Elon's last-minute Wisconsin trip to quite literally buy people's votes.
Then you'll hear my conversation with newly minted Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona about how he's feeling about Trump's second term, and what more Democrats can do to fight back. But first, by the time you're hearing this, we'll just be one day away from Liberation Day.
Big day, guys. That's what Trump is calling Wednesday, April 2nd, the day he's expected to announce a set of reciprocal tariffs, which are tariffs on other countries that impose tariffs on us.
But in remarks aboard Air Force One on Sunday,

he indicated that he'll's going to boom. We're going to have boomtown USA.
We're going to boom. We're going to boom.
It's going boom all right. We're going to boom.
So no one seems to know what Trump is actually going to do here, including his own advisors. There's been a bunch of reporting that he may just do blanket tariffs of up to 20% on all imported goods from everywhere, which is what he talked about during the campaign.
Peter Navarro, Trump's trade guy, told Fox over the weekend that the tariffs will raise $6 trillion over 10 years. Only.
Which experts say would be the largest tax hike in American history, although Peter Navarro calls them tax cuts. Sure.
Yeah, of course he does. And when Kristen Welker at NBC asked Trump about the 25% auto tariffs that are scheduled to go into effect this week, he said he, quote, couldn't care less if car companies raised their prices.

Couldn't care less was the quote.

Sure enough, the S&P ended March with its steepest monthly decline since the Fed raised rates in December of 2022 and the worst quarter at the start of a president's term since the financial crisis in 2009.

Not good moments. Right.
What do you guys think? How's America's golden age looking right now? So the only way I can make sense of what Trump is doing with tariffs as a policy matter is it's got to be part of a negotiating strategy where he's just trying to convince these other countries that he's so crazy that he's going to tank the global economy so they come to the table and cut a deal. Because the stated rationale for all these tariffs are self-evidently ridiculous, like cutting off fentanyl flows from Canada, right? It doesn't make any sense.
And that's because tariffs are a tool. They're not a strategy.
They're designed to protect existing industries against unfair trade practices by other countries like China dumping a bunch of steel or aluminum into the US market. But they're not designed to grow a US industry on its own like the CHIPS Act was, which Trump says you want to get rid of.
And so even like in the most charitable scenario where Trump tariffs the auto industry, so Mexico, it becomes more expensive to create, assemble vehicles in Mexico. So GM and Ford rev up some plants here.
That's going to increase prices for everybody. And I know Trump doesn't care, but the companies can't eat that hit.
So labor costs are much higher in the US than in Mexico. So it's going to raise prices for everyone.
So just like none of it makes sense. You know, it's like tariffs when used effectively, they're targeted, but we're talking about a broad base 20 to 25% tariff on every country maybe.
And if China is the real threat and the real problem, why are we starting by tariffing the EU and Canada and Mexico and all the allies that we actually need? Or all the countries, as he sort of hinted at. Right.
It's maybe reciprocal tariffs if it's tariffs on the whole world. The other fundamental problem is the more money your tariffs are raising, the less your tariffs are working to produce the result that you claim they're going to produce.
If putting tariffs on the world leads to a boom, a manufacturing boom domestically, then the revenue coming from those tariffs should slowly tick down. If tariffs really are raising $600 billion a year consistently, it means we are still importing huge amounts of goods.
The other part of this that's confusing is on the one hand, you have Navarro out there saying this is going to raise vast sums of money, the greatest tax increase in history, which would be extremely disruptive to the economy. And then today you watch as the markets kind of flit around, but still are behaving as if this is sort of an idle threat.
Like they're not, you know, we're not seeing the kind of like chaos in the markets you would expect. If we thought we were going to see the biggest tax increase in history and some of the most, some of the greatest disruption to trade that we've ever seen.
I mean, I think that the markets are pretty... The fact that we had the steepest decline in a couple of years in just one month of the first term, and it's entirely self-inflicted.
I think that obviously there's some uncertainty on what's actually going to happen here. But I think most of the economic indicators and most of the people...
Everyone's raising their's like, I'm not saying the signs are good. I'm not saying the signs are good, but like the Dow is still up year on year.
The S&P is still up a year on year. NASDAQ is still up year on year.
Like everybody is still behaving as though Trump is going to do these kind of chaotic tariffs. He turns off, turns on, he turns off.
No one is behaving. The markets aren't behaving as if what we're about to see is like a fundamental shift in US economic policy that's going to last.
I think what the markets think is that what will happen this time is what will happen last time, which is Trump will threaten this universal tariff and then he'll delay it. And then an army of lobbyists will storm into the White House and they'll carve out special deals for big companies like Apple or GM or whichever foreign leader buys enough Trump coin will get an exception, half kidding there.
And so I also think that these countries that like cut a deal with Trump, they know that Trump only cares about the day one headline. Like the Chinese in the first term said they were going to buy billions and billions of dollars of American exports.
And Trump trumpeted that and took a huge win. And then they bought none.
They bought zero additional exports. They just didn't care.
So you can give Trump the win on the negotiation and then win for real in the implementation. He also said over the weekend that these, someone's like, are you going to lift them at some point? If something happens, he's like, no, these are permanent now.
I have been trying to envision a scenario where this trade war doesn't ultimately inflict real political damage on trump and the republicans i am coming up short i think that there have been certainly many times in the first term and even at the beginning of this one where he has gone forward backed off delayed back up but like i i think that it is i don't i think that he believes, and his advisors believe, some of his advisors, at least most of them, that they are sort of restoring economic nationalism to America. And they're going to remake, I saw somewhere that he thinks he's going to remake the global economy, not just for years or decades, but maybe centuries.
Centuries. Centuries.
Centuries. That's what they said this morning.
I love a century. I love it.
I love a time horizon on Trump that's centuries. And so I do feel like it's more of an ideological project, a crazy one, but an ideological project than I had originally assumed just based on what Navarro is saying, what Trump's been saying, what Vance has been saying and Bannon and all the and all the big economic nationalists.
I think it's fucking crazy. And I think they're going to find out pretty quickly that it is very damaging.
But I don't know what you guys think. Yeah.
I mean, there's another school of thought that some economists think that the Trump plan is to, long story short, weaken the American dollar by cutting a bunch of deals with other countries and forcing them to stop currency manipulation to make it cheaper to export American goods and thus resuscitate American manufacturing. That too sounds a little far-fetched to me.
You also have, Politico was reporting this, that Republican House members, industry groups are scrambling right now for exemptions, like to the point Tommy made earlier, that they are desperately trying to exempt. Farmers are already being hit hard by the impact of tariffs, that there are tons of industries in Republican districts that these congresspeople are worried are going to be adversely affected.
There are industry groups desperately trying to figure out how to lobby. And so now, look, maybe they are doing some grand ideological realignment.
But one way to make sure you are in control, able to do the kind of corruption you want to do where companies and Republicans have to come and pledge fealty to you is by being deadly serious right now. So you can then claim you've put on these big tariffs while there's tons and tons of holes cut into them for which you've gotten God knows what concessions, promises, etc.
It is just worth quickly pointing out that there's no legal authority to do this. Trump is claiming he's going to do it, or some of his team is suggesting they're going to use a law called AIPA, which allows the president to regulate commerce in response to a national emergency overseas.
So we're going to declare there's a national emergency in every single country, and therefore we're slapping a 20% tariff? It is. It's nonsensical.
The legal basis for many of his foreign policy decisions.

Yeah.

Quite fragile.

Not there.

There was a great story in the journal

about Harley-Davidson and tariffs.

Harley-Davidson, great American company.

They could face a 50% retaliatory tariff

on selling Harleys abroad.

So they did the math on a Harley-Davidson sale in Denmark.

It would go from $28,000 to purchase here in the United States to $124,000 all in with all the that tax and everything else over there. So it's just going to decimate Harley-Davidson.
And they dealt with this in the first Trump term. And in response, they actually moved some production from the U.S.
to Thailand. So there's like effects you cannot anticipate.
They're not going to be good. I was going to say, not only are prices going to go up, and he doesn't care about that, but the stated goal of the tariffs to bring back production and manufacturing in the United States isn't going to work on a whole host of industries because it's just, it's not the way the world works anymore.
It's like, it's just, it's cheaper to move stuff overseas. And just even on its own terms, like look at cars, right? Navarro's out there saying it's going to generate $100 billion.
Let's say there's 8 million cars imported that were sold, right? That's over $10,000 per car. There's not some immediate increase in the supply of American-made cars to make up for the more expensive cars that would be coming from abroad.
The cost of all of these cars goes up. The cost of everything goes up.
And for the American car companies, the cost of the materials to make the car is going to go up because they rely on materials from overseas. And these materials cross the border like three, four or five times.
Are we going to tariff them every single time? I've heard a lot of people make the argument that the Trump tax bill that we're going to be debating soon is going to be like when Bush tried to privatize Social Security in 2005.

I actually think that Trump's tariffs

could end up being the more apt comparison here

because he's just sending out a lot of signs

that he doesn't really give a shit about the prices.

He, you know, there was-

He overtly said as much.

Yeah, right, exactly.

And, you know, there was this thing

that like maybe the stock market,

he cares so much about the stock market

and like that'll be, you know, I kind of bought into that too. It doesn't seem like that he cares about that either.
Yeah. It's, but it's only been a 10% correction.
I mean, like we haven't felt real pain in the stock market yet. That's like, there's, but I think the bigger, the thing he cares about more than that, right? Like if you watch Fox right now, they're like, Donald Trump's approval rating has never been higher because it touched like 49.
right? And while his approval on the economy has gone down, his approval on immigration has never been higher. And you watch his immigration number.
He is at the lowest he's ever been on economic approval since he's been president. His approval on handling inflation is going down.
These are Fox polls. Those are numbers he does care about.
And those are ticking down and down and down. Yeah, the Fox poll said that 53% of people said that tariffs will hurt the economy versus help the economy at only 28%.
69% accurately say it'll make products more expensive. So it's not like people don't understand tariffs or don't get what's going to happen here.
They're pretty sophisticated in these answers. Very sophisticated.
And the new AP poll in the economy does have him at 40.58 on the economy and trade even lower at 38, you know, his approval is sitting at 42. There's also now talk about sagflation, which he was asked about, which is, you know, when you have both inflation and weak economic growth.
Seems bad. And high unemployment.
Yeah. Ask Jimmy Carter.
Yeah. How that went for him.
Can't ask him anymore. But we could try.
Yeah. I agree with you though.
I mean, I do think the big caveat is always like if implemented as currently described, I think these tariffs would be disastrous. And we're already seeing polls where you have people saying Trump is too focused on tariffs.
Only 23% of people think Trump's policies are making them feel better off financially in the CBS poll. And to the point on the stock market, like there's been a 10% correction so far, which basically means like the stock market has given up the gains it had from election day until now.
But if these tariffs really go into place as described, that could lead to another 10%, 20%, 30%, like a serious hit to the stock market. And that's when all of his donors are going to be calling him and be like what the fuck are you doing this is not what we you know bought you for yeah and also like stock market aside just if economic indicators outside the stock market keep getting worse then it's just going to be bad for everyone and his popularity pod save america is brought to you by article.
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Let's talk about the other news Trump made on Sunday that I referenced at the top of the show in his call with Kristen Welker, which sadly there's no audio of. Trump apparently said he was, quote, not joking about serving a potential third term.
When asked why he wanted to do that, Trump said, quote, I like working. Yeah.
He also talked about this in that press avail on the plane. Let's listen.
You said you were not joking about a third term, about possibly wanting a third term. Does that mean you're not planning to leave office on January 20th? I'm not looking at that but I'll tell you I have had more people ask me to have a third term.
Does that mean you're not planning to leave office on January 20th? I'm not looking at that, but I'll tell you, I have had more people ask me to have a third term, which is in a way a fourth term because the other election, the 2020 election was totally rigged. I'm just telling you, I have had more people say, please run again.
They said, we have a long way to go before we even think about that.

Please, please, sir, run again. More tariffs and run again.
Here's the 22nd Amendment. Quote, no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice.
Trump fans are pointing out that the amendment only refers to being, quote, elected and not serving. Welker also said she floated to Trump the idea.
Like, why did she do this? but she floated to Trump the idea of J.D. Vance running with Trump as his running mate, winning and then passing the baton off to Trump.
Like a little Putin Medvedev thing there. Yeah, yeah, that's really cool.
I'll definitely emulate that. Trump said that that was one method.
He acknowledged that was one method, quote, but there are others, too, which he then refused to elaborate on. I should note here that the 12th Amendment states that, quote, no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice president of the United States.
So the whole swap thing doesn't seem like it would fly with the 12th Amendment. But it does fly with the 12th Amendment because he is eligible as long as he's not elected.
If he's not, that he can become president. Like, there's a.
think it's just you and larry tribe think that i just i just think we should assume i like the greatest legal minds we've been down this road before i believe last time we were on the opposite side of the issue and i won in front of the supreme court larry tribe zero love it one are we taking trump seriously and literally on this one absolutely i think I like I think Trump is first of all, I think he's having fun with this.

He's enjoying this.

Right.

You know, the idea that we're in a place where Trump is so resoundingly popular that the country is clamoring for yet another turn is, of course, ridiculous and exists only in his mind. for what it would take for Donald Trump to become president a third time is a kind of Medvedev as president, Putin as prime minister, an actual campaign in which Republicans are fully admitting that they are just vassals for a Trump dictatorship or some other ridiculous scheme in which he is made speaker of the House or some other cockamamie shit in which the whole Republican party is now completely given over to the idea that Donald Trump is a dictator.
But we don't really need to worry yet about the possibility that Trump is gonna behave like a dictator three years from now because he's behaving like a dictator right now. We probably should focus on that.
And our job is to make Trump so completely unpopular and unpalatable to the American people that this becomes a joke. Yeah, we need him to have a Katrina level approval ratings.
Yeah, I think these things start as outrage bait. It's just like chum for media attention.
It's chum to get MSNBC fired up like Steve Bannon being intimately involved in this, I think is a real clue. But over time, I do think the outrage bait evolves into something real in a lot of cases like Greenland, invading Greenland, example.
Overturning the election? Yeah. And once Democrats get really worked up about literally anything, negative polarization can take over and Republicans in Congress, for example, decide that politically they would rather be opposed to what the annoying Democrats say than in favor of what the constitution says.
And so I do think there's like a real risk here and there's, it's part of a very rapid authoritarian slide, but I I agree. Like I just don't want to take the bait on it.
I don't think we need to have members of Congress putting forward bills to focus on it. Like focus on the here and now.
I was going to say those bills aren't going to go anywhere anyway. Right.
I mean just so people know like how this would work if it happened right is he would try to seek his party's nomination right which the party probably would just let happen. Maybe let's say the Republican Party doesn't stop him there.
He eventually would need to get his name on the ballots and all the different states. And certainly the blue states wouldn't put him on the ballot.
So then it would go to the Supreme Court. And then we hear the support the Supreme Court said.
And then the Supreme Court would either be like, obviously, this is fucking crazy. You can't do it.
Or they would do what sometimes they've done in the past and surprise us all and say go for it right but if they tell him no and then that's this is we're getting to the point where he clearly does not give a fuck about the judiciary right they are testing this out as you said like we don't have to think about this four years from now they're testing it out right now um and they're gonna they're testing it out with birthright citizenship which they'll get a ruling on right like there's gonna be a whole bunch of things like this but yeah i mean i i forget which one of you said it but one scenario is he just doesn't leave office which is basically the scenario he tried last time yeah we saw that one yeah yeah so we don't have to think about a campaign or handing off to jd vance you could imagine a scenario where he either says i'm not leaving office and i'm staying or there's an election between j Vance and some Democrat and it's close enough and it's like a 2020 situation and he's like oh well while we do a recount and while we fix this out I'm just going to stay in power for a little while and then it just goes and goes and goes and goes so yeah I think everyone should like be I don't think we should like laugh about it right but I do think we should be like fuck you you're not doing this it Yeah, I just think he would do it. He would love to do it.

I think he would do a fucking make J.D. Vance his little puppet.
That's a fun way for there's a lot of methods that look, if you don't believe in the Constitution, we should also say like it is a like we're so used to this now saying this is disqualifying. It's despicable.
The clear intent of the 22nd Amendment is that that he should not be able to seek a third turn. The is not, like the language leaves like a loophole for him to seek the office in some ridiculous roundabout way.
But there's lots of ways that if you just, you know, if you don't believe in the Constitution, don't care about its precepts, there's all kinds of workarounds, including with the pardon power that he uses every fucking day lately. So this is vaguely, this is like on the verge of an impeachable offense to claim you're going to kind of not leave office.
Um, but it's not our job to kind of, you know, let's leave it at that. Obama should run.
Yeah. That'd be fun.
We should mop the floor with this piece of shit. So he would run it back, sir.
Right before we recorded, Trump was doing an avail in the oval office again for another one of fucking executive order. I don't know what it was.
Kid Rock was there. He was asked about the Obama thing because Mike Lawler, a Republican from New York, was asked about Trump running again on CNN.
And instead of just saying, no, of course not. That's crazy.
He was like, well, we wouldn't want Obama to run for a third term, would we? So that was so then Trump was asked about it. He said, I'd love it.
But I think if he's going to try to, you know to bait us and make us freak out and have some fun with it, we should have some fun with it every time. Number one, we should just say, yes, Obama's going to run and mop the floor with him.
We should also, reporters should be asking J.D. Vance about this because if I was J.D.
Vance, I'd be pretty pissed. Yeah.
Right? Like there was a story today that J.D. Vance is doing his first fundraiser tonight by himself and he's getting this network of donors getting ready for 2028 so i'm so cute yeah i would ask jd vance and even better if jd vance and donald trump are ever together and do a joint interview i would ask them together so the jd vance could be really sad when when donald trump is like i don't know i don't know if i'm gonna do like there's so much we can do with this i there's there's gotta be a little bit of uh yes we don't freak out but we also don't say like oh we can't talk about it like let's fuck them no you're not going to run again you asshole yeah I think the mere act of asking him about it suggests we're taking it seriously and their response will be like chill out libs but yeah I'm with you like mock him back you chill out when Barack Obama is the nominee against him I do like thinking about the scenario where like J.D.
Vance has just won and been elected president of the United States. And it's now like kind of the deal.
The deal is that he's the deal is that he's supposed to resign. Right.
Yeah. Good luck.
And like, yeah. What are we talking about here? He's like, no, no.
My loyalty is to the guy that I once called Hitler. That's no, I'm sorry, sir.
I got to I got to I got to stay here and go be, you know, take go go take over greenland yeah and presumably unlike some of the reporting we've seen unlike biden trump believes his vice president's actually up for it well he was asked is he the heir apparent remember like like a couple weeks ago a month ago and he was just like he could be couldn't be more like biden than we think so as we were saying Trump's already in his dictator era. One sign of that is the administration is seeking to dictate which media outlets get to cover the president and how.
On Sunday, Axios' Mike Allen wrote that the White House plans to hijack the White House briefing room seating chart from the White House Correspondents Association in the coming weeks. Back in February, of course, they took control of the press pool, another historical prerogative of the Correspondents Association.
and separately they barred the AP from the pool and from covering White House events,

which... February, of course, they took control of the press pool, another historical prerogative of the Correspondents Association.
And separately, they barred the AP from the pool and from covering White House events, which the AP is now in court over. Seating chart.
Big deal? Not a big deal? Tommy, what do you think? Much like a wedding, it matters. It sounds silly.
We're literally talking about where reporters sit in the White House briefing room, which sounds silly. But it matters for a couple of reasons, because the seating is supposed to reflect a pecking order in terms of which outlets get to ask questions and when.
Traditionally, it has gone. The Associated Press, major TV networks, other wire services up in the front two rows, followed by big newspapers and so on.
Press secretary gets to jump around, but that's how it's supposed to go. So the most influential outlets that are the most serious, traditionally, get to question.
The Trump people want like Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend whose name I can never remember. There's a bunch of them, I bet.
They're all Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend. Yeah, they want to stack the briefing room full of right wing propaganda sycophants and make sure that more of the briefing room is eaten up by sycophantic questions.
And that like lets them get off, you know, get out of the briefing without making a mistake, but also lets them own the media. And I do think like the things you mentioned at the top, the bigger picture is they just want to control the press.
And when you combine this step with kicking the AP out of the pooled press rotation, which for folks who don't know, the press pool is the group of reporters who go with the president into smaller venues or rooms into the Oval Office, et cetera. And then the White House dictating which non-wire service news outlets rotate as part of the print pool.
So instead of the Washington Post, you have some right-wing YouTuber shouting questions at Trump. That really matters.
It's a significant erosion of press freedom. And I will say at the same time, Trump is taking way more questions from the press than Biden did or past president to have.
So I don't want to sound hyperbolic here, but the press core writ large is dealing with industry disruption and a collective action problem that we're seeing everywhere else. And they just do not know how to fight back.
They're fighting back by like wearing a pin. And they're doing it individually.
And canceling Amber Ruffin. Canceling the comedian at the Correspondence Center.
Fascism is rising. No jokes.
But the one impact of this is, you know, we're used to like, sometimes the questions are funny. There are famous like, you know, reporters shouting questions like, what about your gaps when when when the when questions were shouted at the president they would be substantive questions about and now some of the questions coming from these people starting to hear they're like they're like how long have you been this handsome what are we going to do to stop these liberals from from from stopping you from protecting our citizens why aren't you wearing a suit right zelensky why aren't you wearing a suit like and you still get at least at this stage you're still getting some tough questions here and there but you can already tell that the the balance between the softballs and the ridiculous ones and the tough questions is way off at this point and like he the that the question right is like who owns that briefing room like who owns that space right and trump wants to control it he wants to own like it's it's what he's doing with doge it's what what he's doing to colleges, what he's doing to law firms.
He's exerting control. And it starts with seating charts and like fucking cares about seating charts.
But it ultimately ends with like, you know, you see, you know, AP is having to fight to get their way back in. You slowly but surely have fewer and fewer major outlets with access and with regular frequent ability to ask questions of the White House, of the secretary the president and then uh uh now that briefing room is just another it's kind of another place controlled by donald trump i think what about your gas was a great question i agree next thing you know we're gonna have like nbc and cnn sitting in greenland asking questions yeah just fully kicked out of the white house complex did by the way, did you catch J.D.
Vance's speech in Greenland? I saw the photo

of him standing sadly in front of a

group of people that have to be there because

it's an order. And he was sort

of, he had like a little

Zelensky outfit on kind of. Yeah, he did.

But the creepiest thing that he said

because someone asked him a question like

what are you doing

saying that you're going to take over Greenland? Like what's going on? And he goes, we can't just ignore the president's desires. It's real fascism.
Also just like creepy and weird. We can't ignore the president's desires.
That's why we're in Greenland today talking about taking it over? It's really strange, right? It's what he's saying, right? Is that like, I am a representative of the president. This is the policy of the president.
I'm not going to ignore that. But it's this deep, the way in which it's all revolves around Donald Trump's psychology.
Also, the trip started as Usha Vance going, doing a bunch of cultural stops. And it evolved to J.D.
Vance, like, big footing the trip. And then they never left the U.S.
military base because everyone hates them. Yeah, they couldn't find a person who wanted to talk to Usha Vance.

Did you see J.D. Vance with his tray getting a meal with the service members there?

And you can just feel him having no place to sit at lunch in high school.

You just see it in his face.

I related to him.

I felt it.

I felt it.

I was just trying to make sure he listens to the president's desires. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace.
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free trial. One more update on our budding dictatorship.
After the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that Trump can't just ship people to El Salvador's torture dungeon without due process, one of the judges actually said that, quote, Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act.
The administration asked the Supreme Court to settle the matter. Should see what happens when they visit Mar-a-Lago.
Get a full meal. Yeah, get a shrimp cocktail.
Get to meet Kanye. It's great.
If you've been following this, you might have come across the heartbreaking story of Andriy Hernandez Ramiro, a gay makeup artist who came to the U.S. legally to seek asylum, but is currently being held in that Salvadoran prison after the government decided he's Trende Aragua.
Well, we know from court filings that the government's only evidence are tattoos of crowns on his wrists, one with the word mom under it and the other with the word dad, which a random ICE officer decided were Trende Aragua tattoos, even though Hernandez Romero repeatedly denied any affiliation with the gang.

We also learned from this about the existence of the so-called Alien Enemy Validation Guide,

which is a checklist that ICE agents use to assess whether someone is a TDA member,

which includes whether the person's friends say they're in the gang,

whether they're thought to associate with known members of the gang, and of course, whether the person has tattoos that could indicate gang membership. I think what's most alarming about the story is how hard the administration is also fighting judges who are merely asking for evidence and due process here.
Nothing more at this stage. Stephen Miller posted a fucking hysterical rant over the weekend.
Part of it said, quote, America voted for liberation. If every foreign trespasser gets to have their own federal trial prior to removal, then there is no liberation.
There is no restoration. The invasion will be made complete.
What do you guys make of all this? And why do you think it isn't a bigger story right now why aren't like more elected democrats talking about this i would like to just quickly start with the dumb part which is hysterical is the right way to describe that stephen miller tweet the guys are such drama queens like we were invaded and occupied entire neighborhoods were conquered entire towns were subjugated our treasury was plundered what are you talking what do? What country do you live in, Stephen? Where is that? Join a community theater troupe. The actual specifics in the documentation, it's so paltry and so pathetic and so damning.
And you look at this guy, Andre, who did truly nothing wrong. He applied for asylum at a port of entry, seized, not deported, but kidnapped.
Legally showed up at the port of entry like you're supposed to. There's another report out of Miami of a Venezuelan who has been going to his appointments, had an appointment on February 25th.
It got moved up, gets grabbed, was showing up, was doing what you're supposed to do. Applied for asylum, was, and then seized because he had a tattoo, that tattoo he got with his ex-girlfriend uh again a crown then you look at some of the documentation that ice has used at least in the past one and the the symbols are just random tattoos taken from what looks like a google image source including a known gang symbol being a jump man jump man being the air jordan symbol with the 23 above it pretty popular means a lot of kids in my middle school were in Tranday, Aragua.
Based on their shoes and T-shirts, they didn't have the tattoos. The Jewish mothers would never allow it.
But nevertheless, yeah, where are those guys? And then you see all of, I think, look, obviously this is horrible on its own. But then you see Republicans refusing, you know, they go right to the politics.
Democrats are defending gang members, which is, of course, not what's going on. They go right to these sort of Kafka-esque evasions, which is there can't be due process for invaders.
Well, first of all, that's ridiculous. But also, how do you know they're fucking invaders without the due process? That's the whole point.
Victoria Sparts, who's a congresswoman from Indiana, had a couple of rowdy town halls over the weekend where people were just yelling at her the whole time. They were complaining about this and asking her about this and she yells at one point, you violated the law so you're not entitled to due process.
That's when due process, that's how it works. That is, well, you missed something there.
You missed something. I do, look, to your question of why aren't more Democrats talking about this, I do think in the very beginning, the stated objective by the Trump administration is like, we're going to get the worst of the worst and we're going to send them out of here, right? And so no one wanted to be seen as supporting, you know, a Venezuelan murderer, gang member or whatever.
But clearly the implementation of the policy is anything but getting rid of the

worst of the worst. And we should have, this was easy to anticipate because hardened gang members

and criminals go to ground. They're hard to find.
It's the people who are here legally,

who brush up against the system, who let the authorities know where they are. They're the

ones getting swept up. And I do think that as these individual specific cases get surfaced,

there has been a lot more coverage of this. I mean, Andre's story is so shocking.
A mom and a dad tattoo gets you deported. If the outcome wasn't so evil, it would almost be funny.
But he's far from the only one. There was a guy deported because he had a tattoo of a Rolex logo.
There's the Michael Jordan Jumpman logo you talked about.

I love it.

There was a guy with an autism awareness tattoo.

Oh, that's so sad too,

because it's like in honor of his brother.

Yeah.

And there's like videos of him,

like helping kids swimming and everything.

It's just like.

Yeah.

And this, you know,

clearly ICE Googled these tattoos

and put that in their lookbook.

And that somehow got swept into this absolutely evil bureaucratic process where you get points for various gang affiliations. So if you had a roommate in Turandayaragua, you could get two points against you for living with him, two for closely associating with him, two for being in a group photo, two for social media posts where you're both in the same post.
And just with that, you're sent to rot in hell in a prison in El Salvador. So what's also like, these are meant like, we're really conflating.
The news is conflating too, like deporting someone versus rendering them to a foreign jail, right? Like some of the people that I'm sure the Trump administration, maybe they will, maybe they won't. They don't have told us fucking anything.
Some of these people were already in detention, right? For crimes, what have you. Those people were sent to a jail.
But some of these people showed up for appointments. They were not in prison.
They were free. They were doing their jobs.
They were showing up for their appointments. They are free.
They're not being deported. Like Andre told his family that he thought he was going to be deported.
This guy in Miami thought he was going to be deported, right? Next thing you know, they're not sent back to Venezuela. They're sent to a prison.
They have no sentence. They've not been charged with anything.
I mean, there may be some there may be some charges coming related to undocumented immigration. We have no idea.
But we have no idea. But as of right now, these people haven't been certainly publicly charged with any crime, convicted any crime that would warrant them being in prison in the United States, let alone being sent to a gulag in El Salvador without any time frame.
Like how long is this person meant to be there? And the rationale in the first place for the El Salvador prison and for Gitmo again, for some of these deportees is that you can't send them back to some countries, their own country, some of them, because they're not accepting flights, deportation flights. So for a while, Venezuela was saying like no you can't send people back here and so then they're basically the trump administration justification is okay so if you have this dangerous terrorist a criminal gang member who has a bad criminal background has murdered people whatever um and we are overcrowded in our detention centers here then we're going to use guantanamo and we're going to have this deal with el salvage to do that which is like maybe for the worst of the worst you can like make an argument for it but now now when you are just like there's people have are picked up with no due process and don't have a background and they're making mistakes all the time now we're just shipping them to a fucking prison they're free the day before another country the other part of this too is i really like i it was i you know it things are bad it's, I think, sometimes not valuable to like to live in even worse hypotheticals.
But I do think it's worth noting that they are calling tariff day liberation day. They're referring to going after immigrants as a kind of liberation.
They're putting these things together. Right now, we don't know what their plans are.
But I don't believe obviously, the Trump administration is not planning to ramp down deportations. They want to ramp this up.
Does anyone believe that the number of errors or mistakes, if we're going to not even, they seem quite purposeful at times, are going to go down as they do this more? Does anyone think that legal permanent residents aren't going to get swept up in this? Does anyone think citizens aren't going to get swept up in this? Like that is what's coming. That's what they want.
They want like Trump likes a circus. He likes the circus of these deportations.
When this ramps up and they do it on a broader scale, there's going to be a circus too. They're going to look for the worst of the worst to make them the face of it.
Then there's going to be all these harrowing stories and all these examples. And like, that's what we're heading towards.
And so if we're not fighting for the due process of people like Andres, of people like these Venezuelans who applied for asylum, did what we told them to do, then watch as this happens and gets closer and closer to affecting more and more legal permanent residents, citizens, more and more people. The one silver lining is that you're seeing some like really fringy, even far right conservatives say, this is crazy.
We shouldn't be doing this. But the thing that really worries me is that, so you've got Rubio and Bukele, Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, saying that these individuals sent down to El Salvador are going to get a one year sentence and it's renewable.
On what legal authority are they being held? How long are they going to be locked in prison for being accused of a crime and even more scary to me let's say a judge says this is effed up you got to get him back trump administration bukele is just going to say no like f you to the judiciary like come invade my country and steven miller and rubio and all the gang and the administration are going to cackle and love it. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, he could say no because Rubio was like, hey, you can say no if you want.
I don't care. Yeah, I don't want the problem.
Supreme Court can't touch you. Well, we've already seen that, right? He's the secretary of state for the United States.
A judge ruled that these flights had to be turned around. The president of El Salvador says, ha ha, oops, too late.
And Rubio doesn't say, excuse me, you know, how dare you on behalf of the United States. He reposts it.
He loves it. Yep.
I do. I do want to talk about the Democrats issue just before we move on, because I ask Ruben Gallego about this.
You'll hear in the interview. And it was a bit of a frustrating exchange, I would say.
Like on one hand, Gallego, so he started off by basically saying like, no, we shouldn't fight. I was like, why aren't more Democrats talking about this? And he's like, well, we shouldn't walk into the trap he set for us.
And he was like, and then he said, he was like, we should talk about, you know, the people who were getting deported without due process and all this kind of stuff. I'm like, well, that's what I'm saying.
I was like, I actually haven't heard a bunch of Democrats just condemn deportations just writ large. Right.
Like people are making these specific stories. And I feel like we should.
He's like, yeah, it's just that they they want us to do. And so it's like a political sort of Democrats are going to get in, you know, get stuck in a trap on immigration for arguing.
And I just, I understand where he's coming from. And like I said to him, I've been critical of Democrats on immigration as well.
But if like, if we go back to the first term, when he was separating children from their families, there was a huge outcry so big that he had to reverse course on that mostly. Right.
And he had to stop it. And like, I just think that if you're a Democratic politician right now, you just have to have the confidence to know that you can make a case that, yes, you can deport criminals and gang members, but don't deport or don't rendition someone without due process to a foreign prison.
I feel like that's an easy case to make. Also, like, OK, let's say it is a trap.
Let's say it's bad politics. The U.S.
government is kidnapping people. That guy, he doesn't know that there's people fighting for his freedom right now.
He doesn't know that. He thought he was being deported.
Next thing you know, he's on this flight to El Salvador. He's in a waking nightmare.
He's been there for, what, two weeks? Not hadn't spoke to a soul. Many of them now.
Many of them. How many stories? Well, most people in that prison, their families haven't heard from them in years.
And they are, and they, this guy, you are in a, it's not his country, right? I'm sure they're all, you know, all Latinos are the same to them. It's not his country.
He's in a, he's in a foreign country. It has no idea how long it will last.
Who knows what he's being told. Uh,'s being tortured.
This is torture. If we're not, like, the politics, I just, I think the politics are good.
I think, like, due process is something everyone should care about and want. We should make it something people care about.
We should make it something. That's why I want more.
I want more Democrats out there just, like, yelling about People came to learn. People learn through these debates.
They really do. Maybe not as well as they used to.
Maybe it's all fucked up by a lot of noise and misinformation. But if we don't have the debate, we will lose on due process and watch as this gets worse and worse.
Before we go, we want to talk about some important elections taking place on Tuesday. Maybe as you're listening to this in Florida, there are two special elections for the House seats vacated by Matt Gaetz and signal enthusiast Mike Waltz.
Gaetz's seat is widely seen as being safely Republican. But the race for Waltz's seat, which he won by 33 points just in November, is making Republicans quite nervous.
A poll from last week showed Republican state senator Randy Fine ahead of Democrat Josh Weill by only four points. Again, this is in a district that Waltz won just four months ago by 33 points.
The other election, a swing seat on Wisconsin's Supreme Court, which we've talked about a lot before, has turned into the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history.
Over $90 million has been spent. $20 million by Elon Musk alone, who held a town hall in Green Bay Sunday night,

where he gave away two legally questionable million-dollar checks to voters who signed a petition against, quote, activist judges.

Here's what else Elon had to say.

I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it's going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.

I mean, it was inevitable that at least a few Soros

operatives would be in the audience.

Give my regards to George.

Say hi to George for me.

The richest man in the world demagoguing

George Soros. I'm sorry, buddy.
It just doesn't work.

As he goes to

pay people for votes. George Soros is I'm sorry, buddy.
It just doesn't work. As he goes to pay people for votes.
A million dollars. George Soros is a great man.
He's a great man. A couple of operatives right here.
Also, he's so hyperbolic. It doesn't matter if it's the space race or a Wisconsin judicial race.
The future of humanity is always at stake. Come on.
Big race in Wisconsin. We've been saying that.
It's very important. I don't know if it's civilizational.
A little much there. A little much there.
I don't know if it's civilizational. This is not the most important point about this, but the idea that anyone who's opposed to him is a Soros operative.
Everyone who's against him is evil. This race is civilizational.
Everything has become like Manichaean, this sort of good versus evil struggle. It's almost like he's taken on the personality of the social media app he bought.
Well, yes. And well, and he's taking on the politics of someone who just found out about politics.
He's talking about it like a 13 year old who's doing their first like debate tournament. And like he goes on these tirades about like liberals don't under their they're only doing this because they want they want uh undocumented people to get social security and also vote it's all just like this bullshit and then he's confused why people aren't like he he acts as though there's no legitimate criticism that could possibly exist of what he's doing dismissing half the country and then wonders why he's not more beloved and why these protests are all popping up uh i found it very frustrating.
By Monday, he he's offering $20 to literally anyone willing to get a Wisconsin resident to hold up a picture of Brad Schimmel, who's the Republican candidate for the court, in the thumbs up sign. The Wisconsin attorney general, Josh Call, tried to get the Wisconsin Supreme Court to shut down the million dollar checks, but they declined to take the case.
And, you know, I guess last minute Musk tried to make the whole contest less legally questionable, maybe by saying that it was an appreciation. He originally said the million dollar checks would go to people who in appreciation for taking the time to vote.
But you're not supposed to do that because you're not supposed to induce anyone or reward anyone for voting. So he- Can't buy votes.
It's a pretty bedrock principle. He reframed it the giveaway to focus on the petition.
And so that's that. But I don't know.
It still seems a little shady. Yeah, look, I think Elon Musk has now made himself the main character of this race.
And I think like a lot of people assume, oh, that must backfire, right? Because everybody, I mean, Elon Musk is not a popular figure and I want that to be true. I think there's a little bit of method to the madness, which is Republicans are doing the math and saying in this lower turnout off cycle election, if they get 60% of their Trump vote, they can win.
And they're begging on the fact that the hardcore Democrats are already pretty well motivated, which they are. I was there.
They're motivated. That's exciting.
That's great. They know that we have this midterm advantage, this hyper-engaged advantage.
And so they're assuming that Elon Musk, as much as it does damage for him to be in Wisconsin to them, which I think it does that they need him there to to make this a trump referendum because that's their only hope of getting enough of the trump people out and and when you look at what the the republicans were putting on doors in wisconsin it like the the democratic flyers the the pro crawford flyers are crawford and schimmel and they're two sets of positions the the the republican flyers is a big old picture of trump. And it just said that Trump is winning for America and radical judges are trying to stop him.
Yeah. They need the Trump voters that usually only vote in presidentials.
Base versus base turnout election. Maybe Elon going there will help motivate some significant number of people to turn out who wouldn't otherwise have known about the election and voted.
So we'll see. I do think Elon, he claims the spending is about free speech.
It's a disgusting perversion of democracy. So I don't know, like Ben Wickler was saying he might've spent up to 26 million at this point.
He has made himself the face of this campaign. If they win, that sucks.
And I'll be very sad. And if they lose, we need to tie it around Elon Musk's neck, make this an argument that there's a political cost to everything he does of being associated with him, of even his money, because that's a pretty significant check on his political strength early on.
I think that's right. You see one of the million dollar checks went to the chairman of the Wisconsin College Republicans.
Nice. So just grab it.
He was a Turning Points USA ballot chase representative in 2024. Well, everybody's talked about the illegality around buying votes.
But in the run up to the election in November, there were questions about whether this was a true random drawing. And it's clear that it wasn't like they're like this is why, you know, the joke is like, oh, liberals sign up sign up, sign up.
No, they're not choosing at random. You can't win.
They're going through and finding ideal candidates to give this money to, which again feels completely ridiculous. The image of a billionaire who is also one of the most powerful figures in the government flying in on a private jet to throw shekels down in front of people to come crawl and grab them to get votes for people is so fundamentally un-American.
It's so disgusting to see this guy who's basically now acting as like the grand vizier to the sultan. And, you know, we just, if you have a friend in Wisconsin, text him.
If you, like, you can go to voteshoffamerica.com slash Wisconsin. They still need some cash.
They still need people to make calls. But I do think right now, the most important thing, if you're in Wisconsin, if you're near Wisconsin, text friends, text people in that state.
We got to get every last vote out because it will be a lower turnout election. And it's just, this has to be stopped.
Yeah. What do you guys, I mean, while we still don't know the results of any of these races uh what do you think they will say about uh how people are feeling about trump 2.0 and republicans if uh do you think like uh are you what are your expectations oh i i'm like so afraid so we went through this cycle and judge janet protosewitz uh beat uh the Republican.
He's crushing that name now. Yeah, I'm a Protosayate.
Takes a Protosayate to say Protosiewicz. But I think what's interesting, right, is that we're already seeing the impact.
Like Elise Stefanik is not going to be ambassador to the UN because even in her deep red district, they're not sure they can hold it, right? That makes me so happy. It makes me so sure to get her farewell tour.
She had so many meetings. It's awesome.
With so many boring, boring briefings. She gave up her leadership job.
She gave up her leadership. That job has been filled.
It's awesome. She went apartment.
I guess they have an apartment for you, but she went shopping for furniture in New York. Nope.
I will say if we lose Wisconsin, I think it will rightly it it will rightly be quite bad for us oh no absolutely this is all politics substantively very bad obviously right but um like not like we should win this but and you know and if if if the margin is like the same as 2024 then it's gonna be like the the general election in 2024 then it's just fucking frustrating you know but if you know if everything that's happened over the last couple months and then we get that result, Wisconsin. I think it'd be pretty devastating, yeah.
It also just would tell us about the Trump base and their willingness to do what they're told, right? And to show up, which would be, make them more formidable than we thought. And I will say if we win, and we win by, you know, a couple points here and there elon musk going there and then dumping 26 million dollars and then coming up short uh is best then then we should feel pretty good you know and then i'll be looking at the margin in uh in that florida race too to see if uh you know if if look if a 33 point uh district and he only loses by like four or five that's fucking that should be a combination yeah that yeah.
That should be a huge siren for all Republicans going into the midterms. Also, just bigger picture, $81 million have been spent on a Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
That is disgusting. Like Citizens United was such a disaster.
Our campaign finance system is such a disaster. Like, I don't know how we can fix it at this point with this Congress, with these courts, with these judges.
But this is just a terrible way to run a railroad. I will say, too, that the timing of these races, the week that they are going to be debating this tax bill in Congress.
So if it is bad for Republicans and Randy Fine barely squeaks it out or whatever, you're going to see the Mike Lawlers and some of these Republicans in swing districts in the House. Like they're going to be thinking twice about how many Medicaid, you know, how much in Medicaid cuts you want, what to do about the tax hikes, what to do about some other budget cuts.
Like they're going to be thinking about that. Absolutely.
Look, I mean, yeah, if in the same week they learn that Republicans have lost like 10, 15 or more points in the generic ballot and they learn that Elon Musk's money can't protect them if they vote for Medicaid cuts, tax cuts for the rich. That's pretty damning.
All right. When we come back from the break, you'll hear my interview with Senator Ruben Gallego.
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Sign up today at crooked.com slash friends or through Apple Podcasts to start your 30-day free trial. Ruben Gallego, welcome back to the show.
First time on since I've been able to call you senator. It feels good.
Considering how Trump's second term is unfolding so far, would you say your win was more of a blessing or a curse? Look, it's always a blessing, man. Like that.
Yeah, you know, it's a hard situation, but I get to say that I'm a U.S. senator.
And if you kind of look at where I started in life, all things aside, and I never even ended up, you know, being in Congress. And the fact I get to be the first Latino U.S.
senator from Arizona is pretty cool. How does what we've seen from Trump in the last few months match up with your expectations for what a second term would bring? Are you more alarmed, less alarmed, or is it about what you expected?'m more alarmed look i kind of saw some of the like autocratic bullshit that he's doing ahead of time um but not at the level he's doing it now i kind of foresaw some of the stuff when it comes to the government cuts firing of these workers but not the way they're doing it right now uh and then some of stuff, I'm just like, what the hell is going on here? Like the cuts to federal, to the VA, cuts to firing all these veterans.
This is the kind of stuff that makes no logical sense, makes no political sense, and just tells me he might be out to lunch when it comes to a lot of this stuff. I mean, what's most alarmed me in the last month has been what they're doing on immigration.
And like, you know, I'm good with deporting criminals. I get that any president has quite a bit of power over immigration and deportations, even if I don't agree with the policy.
But they are grabbing students off the streets, detaining legal residents, jailing people in this foreign prison in El Salvador with no due process, no trial, in some cases based on guessing what tattoos might mean. And then when a judge asks for evidence, they are threatening him with impeachment.
Mike Johnson's talking about eliminating district courts. And I guess I'm just wondering, like, why more Democrats aren't hair on fire about this? Well, because most Americans actually agree with what the president's doing on immigration.
And that's actually one area where he's still pulling well. He's still at 54% to 55%.
And one of the things that we have to focus on are, and I talk about this all the time, it's like, when we fight on the grounds of immigration, let's fight smartly, right? So we should talk about the fact that, you know, we have, for example, a stylist who has no contact with criminal world that was deported without due process, right? That's a really good example. But to overall argue that, like, we shouldn't be deporting criminals to El Salvador, I think it's a very dumb argument that will, politically, it's not going to win.
Because if you talk to a lot of people and you tell them, like, hey, we be deporting these hardcore criminals to another country since we can't hold them in jail here anymore? A lot of people are going to say, absolutely. Now, if you add, can we do that without due process? That's when people understand like, no, obviously we need to have due process.
Due process is important, obviously, not just for the immigrants, but also important for United States citizens. Because you will see, unfortunately, from my experiences, you'll see U.S.
citizens get wrapped up in this kind of stuff without due process. So we have to be very smart about how we fight when it comes to issues of immigration and border security.
I think a lot of what we want to do will sound very good on a little circle and bubble. But when you get out and talk to real America, including Latinos, they're going to agree a lot with what Donald Trump is doing.
And we have to figure out a way to kind of get in there with a precision strike of a good argument that kind of keeps our morals together, but also allows us to have some type of ability to bring these voters back to us. So I get that.
And I was one person who, after the election, has been fairly critical of democrats position on immigration and letting people know by the way most people in this country want people to come here legally they don't want people to come here illegally they are you know more likely to be in favor of deportations than not it just this to me feels like something so much different than well it's. It's designed to be different.
It's designed for you to get into this fight with him instead of focusing on the fact that he's deporting mothers and children. The fact that he is, you know, causing, you know, some of them, a lot of, you know, foreign students that usually are great contributors to our economy to be missing.
He wants you to fight him on this. There's a reason why this is all happening right now.
He wants us to be talking about these majority of them Venezuelan gang members that got sent over there. And he wants us to get into his nitty gritty.
So we have to have arguments in public about due process, knowing that the American public understands almost zero of it, right? Don't get into the trap.

This is like, you know, if you see an ambush coming, you have no responsibility to actually

walk into that ambush, right?

And this is just my personal advice to Democrats.

Fight your fight.

Talk about dreamers.

Talk about the fact that there's this Colombian couple that's been here for 30 years that

was recently deported who had no criminal history whatsoever. Talk about, you know, green card holders.
But don't jump into the fight where they want you to fight. They're doing this on purpose.
They're doing this on purpose. But do you think there's I haven't seen I've been pleasantly surprised.
I have not seen a lot of Democrats in the last couple of weeks sort of just be fighting the deportations in general. I actually think that the people who have raised alarms have been over these specific cases where people just aren't getting any due process.
And I guess one of the things I worry about, and I do think this would be appealing to a much broader part of the electorate, is now it's Venezuelans that they think are gang members and a foreign student who they say was participating in pro-Hamas protests. But if there's no due process, where does it end? How do we even know someone's a non-citizen that they're rounding up? Exactly.
How do you know that it's citizens that aren't being rounded up and taken away without, well, they shouldn't be taken away because any citizen needs to stay in the United States. You focus on the actual case.
Don't get involved in this bigger fight that is very popular. I'm telling you right now, if you get into this fight over, should it be said to people to assault or not, you're giving him the ground that he wants.
Fight for the individual cases. Fight for the actual stylist that we're talking about.
But if you try to get into this bigger argument, you're losing. And that's where they want you to be.
They want you to be on that losing ground, because then we have to explain due process. We have to explain why it's different for these gang members versus non-gang members.
It's just not smart. We need to figure out how to fight so we can win, so we can stop this shit.
Yeah. We're talking at the beginning of a week where Republicans in Congress will be figuring out how to pay for the massive tax cut that Trump wants.
Senior White House official told Axios that they're actually discussing getting rid of the tax cuts for the top 1% because, quote, if we renew tax cuts for the rich paid for by throwing people off Medicaid, we're going to get fucking slaughtered. Do you think your Republican colleagues would ever give up on tax cuts for the rich and Medicaid cuts? I mean, they're more likely to cut Medicaid cuts than they are to, you know, give up on tax cuts to the rich.
I mean, that's that's their bread and butter. That's, you know, the whole reason of living for the Republican Party.
But politically speaking, I mean, I was out in rural Arizona. I mean, this is the part of the state where you have to drive hours and hours in order to get to some cities, and they're not big cities.
And in rural Arizona, people are worried because rural Arizona, 30% of rural Arizona is on Medicaid. So when you shut down or start throwing people off Medicaid, it's going to end up having huge impacts.
Hospitals shut down, everything else like that. And people will know that the only reason they're doing this is to give tax cuts to the rich.
So what I think they're going to try to do is they're going to end up doing a couple of things. Number one, they're going to try to shave Medicaid, see if they can politically get away with it by coming up with bullshit reasons why people should not be on Medicaid.
Number two, they're going to try to change the law, the rule, as we call it here in the Senate, and saying like, well, we don't actually have to justify these cuts. We actually don't have to find any further cuts.
They're already existing in law, so who cares? Just keep expanding them, right? And that way they don't actually have to go and find somewhere else to cut. And then the rich get their tax cuts.
At the end of the day, we still end up getting screwed if you're working class because they're going to end up borrowing a ton of money. It's going to keep inflation higher.
It's going to keep interest rates higher. And, you know, it's not going to be, I think it's probably going to slow down the economy even more.
So, you know, working class America is going to end up paying one way or the other for the tax cuts for the rich. I'm not going to relitigate the politics of the shutdown fight, but one takeaway seemed to be that Democrats in Congress need to do a better job of communicating their strategy.
Obviously, you guys don't have the votes to stop this tax bill from becoming law. But what are you thinking in terms of the strategy around this fight? Well, I mean, the strategy on the fight is we have to show why they're doing this.
You talked about this, right? The only reason they want to do this is because they want to give their rich buddies, Elon Musk, more money. And the only way they're going to do that is they're going to gut the working class at some point.
We need to, you know, trying to give an oppositional view and a contradiction to that, something that actually people can, you know, talk about. You know, I think the Democrats should be talking about, you know, trying to bring a child tax credit instead of giving tax cuts to the rich.
I think Democrats should be talking about a minimum wage that actually people can live on instead of giving tax cuts to the rich. This is the thing that we need to kind of be giving a viewpoint of what you can get is an alternative.
So just being a party of no is not going to work. And just saying, hey, we're the party that's going to stand up for working class people, we don't actually introduce any real legislation to actually make people feel that that's the case, is not going to be a winning message.
And I think my lesson from the CR shutdown was a lot of lessons, but a lot of my colleagues felt uncomfortable because they felt that there was no messaging that could give them a higher ground against the bully puppet of Donald Trump.

My argument to them like, well, yeah, you guys, we got ourselves in a situation because we never actually had an affirmative oppositional view that people could actually jump on it and grab a hold. And I think that's what we need to really do when we get into reconciliation coming up.
It's interesting you say that because I've talked to some of your colleagues, particularly your younger, newer colleagues, who also seem a little frustrated that there's not been enough conversation about a sort of an alternative vision and agenda from the Democratic Party. Is there resistance to that from leadership? Or why haven't? That's good.
I think a lot of us showed our frustration and were very clear uh what what direction the the party was heading unless there was we were listened to and i think that's uh they're they're listening now what do you in terms of that alternate sort of vision agenda i know you mentioned the child tax cut but what does it sound like to you like what is a we haven't had a lot of debate about what sort of vision agenda. I know you mentioned the child tax cut, but what does it sound like to you? Like, what is the, we haven't had a lot of debate about what sort of that forward looking vision in the party might sound like, you know, I just sat down with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
I'm going to sound like I'm just going to be repeating their shit. I haven't read the book yet, so I can't plagiarize.
I think it's very simple. Number one, the problem that we have is we have a lack of energy, right? And we need to make sure that when we take power, we use power.
What does that look like? You know, like, you know, A, actually fundamentally changing people's lives for the better. You know, and, you know, right away I would do, you know, a good minimum wage increase, $15, $17, whatever it is.
Peg it to inflation automatically, so it keeps growing every year. Child tax credit, as I said, $200, $300 per family.
Everyone that's making less than, I'd say, $100,000, $120,000 a year for child care. I mean, right now, it's more expensive for you to send your kid to child care than it is to pay for tuition, in-state tuition for most universities.
Let's just give direct child care subsidies to families to take care of that, to take care of their kids. These are the kind of impactful things we should be doing right away.
I think we should help do a credit buster. There's so many people right now that are paying off credit card debt that they were living off of inflation.
During inflation, they basically survived by putting on credit card debt. Now they're carrying the highest amount of credit card debt in the history of this country.
We should help these families at least pay off a good chunk of their credit card debt. Now that could just be a direct direct subsidy to them.
But that would be a huge relief like that. We need to get Americans to understand when you elect Democrats, good shit happens.
And I feel better. Right.
It's that simple. And a lot of times we get into these very kind of like wonky bureaucratic process that we think will end up getting credit credit for and we never, ever, ever do.

And, you know, that's the one time, you know, I can tell you, like, my family, working class family remembers, especially not my direct family, but my sisters and my cousins, they finally remember when they were all getting the child tax credit. And that's what they remember at Democrats as being good, right? So, you know, having a real focus on, you know, an energetic response really

to the... credit.
And that's what they remember at Democrats as being good, right? So, you know, having a real

focus on, you know, an energetic response, really, to the needs of working class America would be huge, something that every time there's an election, like Democrats got me this, right? That's it. What lessons do you take from the Biden administration, which obviously passed quite a bit of significant legislation around infrastructure, climate.

Yeah. do you take from the Biden administration, which obviously passed quite a bit of significant legislation around infrastructure, climate, and then didn't really get much credit for any of it, even if you put the worries about cost of living aside, which was hard to put aside, but not a lot of people sort of felt in their lives any impact from the Biden administration's legislation.
Like, I hate to be the Cassandra here, but I was telling this to people in the administration

from day one that they're too focused on, first of all, infrastructure.

Like, every president runs on infrastructure.

Do they pass it?

Do they not?

But no one ever gets credit for it.

You know, if you look at even the unions that benefited from infrastructure ended up voting for Trump, I think we have to understand that unless people feel it, then it's not real. You can talk all you want about the quick chargers for electric vehicles that run across the whole country, but unless somehow someone sees it and how it affects them, they're not going to fit.
You could talk about the IRA and all this kind of stuff, but until you actually see the results, it's not going to impact you. One of the things that was really messed up by the IRA, people forget, is that a lot of the stuff that really, really, really had impact, for example, the negotiations for Medicare prescriptions, drugs.
The other one was, for example, like bringing down the overall costs of what people have to pay if you're a senior on Medicare to $2,000 a year capped. None of that started till 2026.
It was whenever they were negotiating the stuff that would be actually impactful to people, I think purposely it was put off so it would actually not have any real impact on people's lives until after the election.

And, you know, when when the Biden and his administration were negotiating this, I think they were just happy to take the victory and walk away.

And they should have realized that it was a whole thing was was one big setup because we ended up creating a trillion dollar bill that no one really felt the effects of right away. And, you know, I think that was that that probably cost us a lot of the election right there.
I don't know if you saw over the weekend, Gavin Newsom was on Bill Maher's show and said that the Democratic Party's brand is, quote, toxic. And then Ro Khanna responded and said, it's not toxic.
And we shouldn't be sort of joining in the chorus of people attacking the Democrats. We should be unified against Trump.
Where do you come down on that? I don't want to get involved in this little California civil war. Most people don't really care about parties.
Like this whole it's toxic versus not toxic.

That's like a bunch of political scientists, pundits, and they're all talking. If you want to change the opinion that people have for the Democratic Party, we need to start winning.
That's it. The reason we're right now, quote unquote, it's toxic is because we lost.
Right. And once we start having some some wins, we start having some people actually, you know, I think showing, you know, what the Democratic Party is in a, you know, real personal way for people running for office, you know, the presidential canister coming up, everything else like that.
Then, you know, I think we'll get our mojo back. But some of the stuff that we're doing right now is just kind of, you know, it's like public therapy, I guess, when we should really just be focusing, and I'm all for therapy, don't get me wrong, but I really think we should be

focusing on just like trying to figure out how to like immediately bring wins, wins, wins.

So just from my experience in Arizona, you know, in Arizona, it's always been a swing state.

What happened in Arizona for many years when we started winning, you know, elections, Democrats,

because we started in a momentum of just winning. And eventually the message in Arizona, especially among voters, was like, oh, damn, these Democrats, they know how to win in Arizona.
So there was always this excitement. And right now, we just don't have that.
We need a couple of wins under our belts. We need to make sure that we're really showing who we're fighting for.
And I think that's where we get our momentum back. But these kind of sniping that politicians do to each other, it's cute, but it doesn't really make a big difference, I think.
So one story I wanted to bring up, I've lost track of how many stories keep popping up about the wildly corrupt relationship between the Trump family and the crypto industry. Just today, I saw that Don Jr.
and Eric are starting a Bitcoin mining adventure. So congrats to them.
Yeah. I've always been a bit of a crypto skeptic since the industry is largely unregulated and seemingly rife with corruption.
I know you're one of the more pro crypto Democrats in Congress and are the ranking member of the digital assets subcommittee. Why should I not be skeptical of crypto if it is better regulated than it is now? Yeah, I was going to say, if it's not regulated, you should be skeptical of it.
The fact is, crypto is here to stay no matter what, right? It's either going to be a US-based economy or it's going to be overseas. If we could bring it here, base it here and regulate it to American standards, it's going to be a fine asset, right? If we don't do that, it will be a bunch of rug pulls.
It will be a bunch of pump and dump, whether it's stocks, meme coins, whatever it is. That's actually what's going to happen.
I think if we could bring this here, have it regulated under our US systems where you could get prosecuted, you had to have transparency,

you had to have consumer protection. I think that's the better way to go.
Are we there yet? No. This is what Congress is really working on to make sure we get to that point.
But it is better than what is going to exist right now. Because right now, it runs the gam, it runs the gamut.
It can be, you know, legitimate, you know, Bitcoins down to, you know, meme coins that are being like hawked by anybody just to kind of do a quick sale and get out. So I would rather have it regulated under US systems than not.
But right now it's really not. And it's only going to get worse if we don't bring it into, I think, U.S.
compliance. So last question.
Last time Democrats were completely shut out of power in D.C., which was after the 2004 election, one of the party's only new senators went on to become a history making president after just a few years in office. How are you thinking about your role in the Democratic Party right now in your future? Oh, well, I mean, like, for me, I feel like my role right now is to kind of bring some hard truths to the party, right? And look, I won a very hard race.
And, you know, Latinos started moving away from the party, Latino males started moving into the party. And what I what I saw in other in past campaigns is that, you know, a lot of times people just kind of want to whistle past a graveyard.
And I want to make sure the Democrats have a fighting chance. Our only fighting chance is two.
Number one, we need to bring Latinos back into our fold, and as the numbers we said before, and we have to have a fighting chance with men, right? Not that we're going to win it, but we have to do better and stop sliding away. I think like my role right now is to be that person that is unafraid and willing to have conversations with fellow Democrats and be honest about, you know, do we want to win or do we want to feel good? Because sometimes they don't align.
And for me, I want to win to make sure that we could protect, you know, our families, our most vulnerable communities, you communities, our standing in the world. And sometimes that means we're going to have to piss off people within our tent, not on purpose, but in order for us to win.
And I think we have to, my job right now is to kind of have those conversations. And if anybody that wants to run for president wants to talk to me about that, I'm gladly sit down.
I'll talk to you from my perspective. I'm here.
I'm a good Democrat. I want to make sure Democrats win in four years.
And that's going to be my focus. I know it's early, but how are those conversations going so far? Are you feeling more hopeful or are you feeling more frustrated? Well, no one's talked to me yet.
Not just about president, but just the conversations you're having with people about what's wrong with the Democratic Party and where we need to go.

I mean, this is kind of a loaded question.

For those that want to see a path forward, they're keeping their minds open and coming and talk to me.

I think, you know, I have ruffled some feathers, to be honest.

I know I did something wrong or I did something right because sometimes when I do something, I'll get it both from the left and the right on Twitter and social media. And, you know, I think there's some people, you know, from a more liberal bent that are mad at me.
And again, like it's, you know, I do this all with love. Like, I want us to win.
I want Democrats to be competitive. And some of that has to, we have to have a very realistic view of what the world looks like and what these voters want.
And sometimes it doesn't align. Our primary voter is very different from a general election voter.
And it's very easy for us to make our primary voter happy and then lose the general election. I just don't want to see us doing that again.
And this is why, and because it has consequences. What happens when we lose? And I think it's not going to get any better.
The next Republican that wins will do just exactly what Donald Trump is doing. And so we have to win elections from here on out.
And that means that if I have to guide some of my friends in a way that makes sure we win general elections, I'm going to do it. And that may tick off some people, but we have to win.
You know, we don't win. Not winning has really bad consequences on this country as we can tell.
Sure does. Winning is much better.
Ruben Gallego. Thank you as always for doing Pod Save America and come visit us next time you're in LA.
I will. Adios.
That's our show for today. Thanks to Ruben Gallego for coming on.
Dan and I are both off later this week, but fear not. Tommy's going to have a new show for you on Friday.
What? Oh, sorry. This is the way we tell you about those things.
I mean, Jesus, you'd sit in an office with somebody. Thanks, everyone.
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