Supreme Malarkey

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Speaker 8 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, Donald Trump can't stop incriminating himself after he's caught on tape talking about classified war plans.

Speaker 8 The Supreme Court rules against affirmative action. Joe Biden delivers a major speech on Bidenomics.
And White House Communications Director Ben Labolt stops by to talk about the strategy behind it.

Speaker 8 Then, the on-again, off-again bromance between Trump and Kevin McCarthy has hit the skids once more.

Speaker 8 But first. Presale tickets for Pot Save America live shows in DC and New Orleans are available now.
And you know what, Dan? They're going fast. Are they? Yeah, they are.
That's what it says here.

Speaker 8 Presale codes are only available to members of our subscription community, Friends of the Pod, where you can also access exclusive bonus content like our terminally online pod that Dan and I had a very fun time recording with Priyanka and Elijah yesterday.

Speaker 8 We also have a fun Discord channel where all the friends of the pod hang out and yell about the news. That's a lot of fun.
And there's a lot more content. So sign up.
It's crooked.com/slash friends.

Speaker 8 And And again, the pre-sale for the live shows ends at 11.59 p.m. on June 29th.
So go get that code. Sign up.
Get those tickets.

Speaker 8 All right, let's get to the news. Moments after we recorded Tuesday's pod, there was, as always, some breaking news.

Speaker 8 CNN obtained the audio recording of the 2021 meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Donald Trump tells a few random ghostwriters to look at highly classified war plans that he admits he couldn't declassify.

Speaker 8 Let's listen.

Speaker 9 These are bad, sick people.

Speaker 10 That was your coup, you know, against you.

Speaker 11 Well, it started right at the end of the day.

Speaker 10 Like when Millie's talking about, oh, you were going to try to do a coup. No, they were trying to do that before you even were sworn in.
That's right, trying to overthrow your elections.

Speaker 12 Well, with Millie,

Speaker 9 let me see that. I'll show you an example.
He said

Speaker 9 that

Speaker 9 I wanted to attack Iran.

Speaker 9 Isn't it amazing? I have a big pile of papers. This thing just came up.
Look.

Speaker 9 This was him.

Speaker 9 They presented me this. This is off the record, but they presented me this.
This was him.

Speaker 9 This was the Defense Department and him.

Speaker 9 We looked at some. This was him.
This wasn't done by me. This was him.

Speaker 9 All sorts of stuff. It's pages long.
Look.

Speaker 9 Wait a minute. Let's see here.

Speaker 9 I just found, isn't that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know.

Speaker 1 Except it is like highly confidential, secret.

Speaker 9 This is secret information.

Speaker 1 Look at this.

Speaker 9 You attack.

Speaker 10 Hillary would print that out all the time, you know.

Speaker 9 She'd send it to Anthony Wiener.

Speaker 1 The pervert.

Speaker 14 By the way, isn't that incredible?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 9 I was just saying, because we were talking about it. And he said, he wanted to attack Iran and what?

Speaker 1 And he said the page.

Speaker 9 This was done by the military, given to me.

Speaker 9 I think we can probably get.

Speaker 10 I don't know. We'll have to see.
Yeah, we'll have to try to

Speaker 11 figure out a

Speaker 9 president. I could have declassed it.

Speaker 14 No, I can't.

Speaker 9 But this is tough.

Speaker 10 Now you have a problem.

Speaker 1 Isn't that interesting?

Speaker 9 Yeah. It's so cool.

Speaker 9 And you probably almost didn't believe me, but now you believe me.

Speaker 1 No, I believe.

Speaker 11 It's incredible, right?

Speaker 1 No, no.

Speaker 9 bring some coaxing, please.

Speaker 8 Bring some coaxing, please.

Speaker 8 It's so awesome listening to it. Every time.

Speaker 8 Every time it's really, it surpassed all expectations.

Speaker 8 Just, you know, I was reading about it. I'm like, well, we finally hear the audio.
What's that going to do? You know what? It's worth it.

Speaker 8 To quote Donald Trump, do you think that totally wins his case?

Speaker 11 This is one of those examples where sometimes the movie is better than the book because it is so good.

Speaker 11 There are so many good parts of this. My favorite may be when one of the women speaking feels a need to clarify that the coup she is referring to is not the coup he did.

Speaker 11 It was the fake coup against him. She's like, this is the coup.

Speaker 11 The coup against you. It's so good.

Speaker 11 It's honestly perfect. He goes out of his way to admit to all the crimes.

Speaker 8 Out of his way, so many times. He says so many, like if there was any, he erases any doubt just in the,

Speaker 8 look at this. I just found this.
This was him. This was the Defense Department.
Hillary would print out stuff like this all the time. It's classified.
It's secret. It's off the record.

Speaker 8 I could have declassified it before, but now I didn't. Look at my secret war plans that you're not supposed to see.
I mean, it's just,

Speaker 8 now, Dan, you might be thinking, uh-huh. I'd like to see Trump wriggle his way out of this one.

Speaker 8 Well, unfortunately for us, he used his persuasive powers and command of details to put on a masterclass in crisis communication when he was asked about this.

Speaker 11 You're not concerned then with your own voice on those on those recordings?

Speaker 14 My voice was fine. What did I say wrong on those recordings? I didn't even see the recording.
All I know is I did nothing wrong. We had a lot of papers, a lot of papers stacked up.

Speaker 14 In fact, you could hear the rustle of the paper, and nobody said I did anything wrong other than the fake news, which of course is Fox, too.

Speaker 11 Are there any other recordings that we should be concerned of?

Speaker 14 I don't know of any recordings that you should be concerned with because I don't do things wrong. I do things right.
I'm a legitimate person.

Speaker 8 He is a legitimate person.

Speaker 8 There is no one more legitimate than him.

Speaker 8 He then took another swing at this during an interview aboard his plane with ABC and Semaphore. He said, quote, I would say it was bravado, if you want to know the truth.
It was bravado.

Speaker 8 I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents. What do you think? Will any of these compelling explanations work on a jury?

Speaker 11 While it is almost certainly a bold-faced lie, Donald Trump's claim that this was bravado might be the most authentically honest thing he's ever said because there is truly nothing more Donald Trump and frankly believable than the idea that Donald Trump would lie to make some people, particularly women, think he was more important than he was.

Speaker 11 Like that is, like, that is a believable thing.

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 11 There's a gigantic caveat here that we're about to get to, but I'm just saying as a point,

Speaker 11 like he is a man who is driven by a bottomless well of insecurity. And that is what someone like that would do.
It has done, I mean, he is a man who has a fake Time Man of the Year

Speaker 11 cover in his office to make people think he was time man of the year. Like this is something he could possibly do.
But we can get to the butt, if you will.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I was going to say, this would absolutely be his, the best defense he has trotted out yet, were it not for

Speaker 8 what you hear in the tape, what you hear on the tape, right? Which is, he's like, yeah, I had some papers rustling around.

Speaker 8 He did not say on that tape, I have a paper here that shows whatever, right? He said, look at this. Look at this paper.
So, and then later he said, oh,

Speaker 8 he also said in the semaphore interview, it was, did I say, they said, oh, you said it was plans. You said it was, you said it was plans.
And he said, did I say plans?

Speaker 8 That's, it's not war plans. It was building plans.
So we are now to believe that during that meeting, Donald Trump had some papers that he told us were rustling. You could hear the papers.

Speaker 8 And that what he did was he showed the two ghostwriters building plans, but pretended that it was classified war plans. And they were like, yeah, yeah, no, we believe you now.

Speaker 8 And he also told them, by the way, this is secret. This is classified.
I could have declassified it, but really, it's just a bunch of building plans and some other papers.

Speaker 11 And I think you're leaving out the punchline to this, which is building plans for a golf course.

Speaker 8 You know what? I fooled all these people.

Speaker 8 I told them it was an, it's, you know, it's bravado and I like to lie a lot. So I told them it was war plans, but honestly, it was just golf course plans.
And they're just these fucking idiots.

Speaker 8 Also, do we think that Jack Smith has built his entire case just on the audio recording that he hasn't interviewed the two ghostwriters?

Speaker 8 Because when Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, or whoever she wrote the story with the New York Times, reached out to those two writers,

Speaker 8 they didn't respond,

Speaker 8 which probably is because they're fucking witnesses.

Speaker 8 there's also another part of this that is really interesting which is he must just have them sitting on his desk it's not like he went and got them in a box the con it came up like he was doing an interview there's no reason why he brought this plan to the meeting he took it out of the box in whatever locked door bathroom where he was keeping it he it came up in conversation and he found it in a pile on his desk hence the rustling of paper well well probably he had taken it out because susan glasser of the new yorker had had recently written the piece about millie saying that he was worried that trump was going to start a war in iran and so when he got that piece i'm sure he said ah i have a secret classified document that i stole from the white house and kept in defiance of a federal subpoena and it's over here in my box that i bring everywhere with me because i know that there are classified documents that i'm not supposed to have in those boxes.

Speaker 8 So yeah, he probably had it at the ready.

Speaker 11 There is one interesting little footnote here, which is CNN reported that the Iran war plans are not listed in the documents in the indictment that Donald Trump is accused of keeping from the government.

Speaker 8 But,

Speaker 11 and so that's been seen, aha, this proves Trump's right. That it's not the case because Jack Smith did not charge Trump for any of the documents he gave over

Speaker 11 after months and months of trying to get them.

Speaker 11 So it's very possible that he turned this particular document over, but that does not excuse him for showing a classified document to someone who doesn't have security clearance before he handed it over.

Speaker 11 So, just the fact that it's not in the indictment does not mean that that document was not in Trump's possession.

Speaker 8 Well, he also, I mean, they didn't charge Trump with dissemination of classified information, and it might not be.

Speaker 8 So, the New York Times also says that the government, Jack Smith, views this piece of evidence as among their strongest pieces of evidence in their case.

Speaker 8 Maybe because it pretty clearly shows intent and it shows knowledge that Trump knew that he didn't have the power to declassify, knew that he held on to secret information that he wasn't supposed to have.

Speaker 8 And so even if you use that evidence to tell a jury what his state of mind was

Speaker 8 on all of the other shit that he had that he was charged with, it seems like a pretty strong piece of evidence.

Speaker 8 We also got some new details about the Bedminster crime scene from both that Times piece and a Washington Post piece that ran this week.

Speaker 8 Jack Smith's team initially wanted to search Bedminster, but didn't think they had enough evidence to get a warrant. They did, however, successfully subpoena surveillance footage from Bedminster.

Speaker 8 So again, Trump's bravado.

Speaker 8 We're going to

Speaker 8 see if that holds up once we see the surveillance footage. They have reportedly asked witnesses a lot of questions about the war plan incident.

Speaker 8 And of course, they view it as one of their strongest pieces pieces of evidence. So it does sound, you know, doesn't sound too good for Trump.

Speaker 11 No, it doesn't seem that way.

Speaker 8 Also not good is Jack Smith just apparently interviewed Rudy Giuliani about trying to overturn the election and is reportedly close to charging decisions in that investigation.

Speaker 8 You seen any good legal news for Donald Trump lately?

Speaker 11 No, I have not. I've looked.

Speaker 11 It is not there.

Speaker 8 Jack Smith has also asked Judge Cannon to move the trial to December, and Trump has until the 6th, July 6th to respond, which, you know, some legal analysts are saying is sort of a shrewd move because by Jack Smith offering to move it ahead, it makes it harder for Trump to delay even further than that.

Speaker 8 The judge in the hush money case seems inclined to reject Trump's request to move that trial to federal court from state court, so he's not doing well there.

Speaker 8 And we also learned that the person he showed the classified war map to, that's different than the war plans, that's the map of the war that wasn't going very well, and he showed it to a PAC representative.

Speaker 8 That was Susie Wiles, who is currently his top campaign aide. So that makes things a little tricky as well.
Yeah,

Speaker 11 it technically means, according to the rules put down by Judge Cannon, that Donald Trump and his campaign, essentially as a campaign manager, cannot talk about the case because she is now a witness in the case.

Speaker 8 Yeah, that's tough. That's tough.

Speaker 8 And on the Rudy stuff, a lot of the legal analysts are saying that this was a proffer session, which is a chance for a witness or a subject to voluntarily tell prosecutors what they'd say if subpoenaed, knowing that what they say can't be used against them unless they lie.

Speaker 8 So prosecutors could have asked Rudy to come in or Rudy's lawyers could have offered to have him come in because they're afraid he might get charged.

Speaker 8 And they either want to avoid charges or they want to cooperate to reduce the sentence. So,

Speaker 8 you know, we could have Rudy flipping as well, which would be funny.

Speaker 11 I can't wait till that happens around 2 p.m. on a Thursday, one week in our future.

Speaker 8 Could be happening right now. That's right.
That's right. While we're making good use of our fake legal degrees, let's talk about the Supreme Court's final week of big rulings before their term ends.

Speaker 8 We will start with the bad news. This morning in a 6-3 ruling, the court struck down affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina as unconstitutional.

Speaker 8 Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, did say that colleges can consider how race has affected an applicant's life, but that students, quote, must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual, not on the basis of race.

Speaker 8 Justices Jackson and Sotomayor each wrote dissents, with Jackson arguing that, quote, deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.

Speaker 8 And Sotomayor saying, quote, the devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated. There is plenty of evidence to support her claim.

Speaker 8 In the nine states that have already banned the use of race-conscious admissions at their public universities, the share of black and Latino students has dropped.

Speaker 8 President Biden spoke out on the decision this morning. Here he is.

Speaker 15 We cannot let this decision be the last word. I want to emphasize that we cannot let this decision be the last word.
While the court can render a decision, it cannot change what America stands for.

Speaker 15 America is an idea, an idea unique in the world. an idea of hope and opportunity, of possibilities, of giving everyone a fair shot, of leaving no one behind.

Speaker 15 We've never fully lived up to it, but we've never walked away from it either. We will not walk away from it now.

Speaker 15 So today I want to offer some guidance to our nation's colleges as they review their admission systems after today's decision. Guidance that is consistent with today's decision.

Speaker 15 They should not abandon, let me say this again, they should not abandon their commitment to ensure student bodies of diverse backgrounds and experience that reflect all of America.

Speaker 15 What I propose for consideration is a new standard where colleges take into account the adversity a student has overcome when selecting among qualified applicants.

Speaker 8 So not surprising from this court, but still infuriating, where does this go from here? You know, President also said he's directing the Department of Education to assess

Speaker 8 what factors are contributing to more diversity at colleges and what factors are holding back diversity at colleges.

Speaker 8 And he also mentioned legacy admissions, which, of course, the court did not say anything about. Alumni who went there, their kids, donors who gave money to the college, their kids, right?

Speaker 8 The court didn't say anything about preferences there. So Biden did direct the Department of Education to

Speaker 8 assess those factors. But where do you think this goes from here? And what's your overall thought on this?

Speaker 11 I mean, you're exactly right. It is infuriating, if not unexpected.
I thought Justice Katanji Brown-Jackson's dissent summarized exactly how absurd this ruling is.

Speaker 11 It is a ruling of a court being willfully ignorant about America's past and present. And to your point, this is going to have a very real impact.

Speaker 11 In the states that have banned it, it has gone down and precipitously.

Speaker 11 Michigan banned using race and college admissions in 2006. The percentage of black students at the University of Michigan has been cut nearly in half since 2006.
That is a huge deal.

Speaker 11 It's going to have a huge impact.

Speaker 8 And by the way, it was cut in half from 9% to 4%. So it

Speaker 8 wasn't that great to begin with.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 11 And we were already underperforming massively, even with the previous regime in place.

Speaker 11 What this is going to mean and how colleges are going to do this, because there is still, many colleges will continue to seek out a diverse student body as

Speaker 11 they have been doing. How that happens is going to be very different.
What is this going to mean for standardized testing?

Speaker 11 will that go away how is this going to affect the admissions process in general in terms of interviews and um

Speaker 11 and essays and all of that but there is no question that this is a huge step backwards on the path to try to make america more equitable it's going to have a real impact on real people's lives

Speaker 8 the uh president of harvard was out with the statement in response and he noted that the part of the opinion that said that they could still take into account essays in which applicants discussed how race had affected their lives and said that they would be figuring out how to preserve their values that place importance on diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.

Speaker 8 We should also note, and

Speaker 8 hat tip to Melissa Murray for noting this on Twitter, that this sort of tiny carve out in the ruling about, oh, you know, colleges can still consider in essays sort of individuals' experiences with race was likely the result of questions that Katanji Brown Jackson, Justice Katanji Brown Jackson asked during oral arguments when she was like, so kids can talk about how they're the

Speaker 8 fifth generation to attend UNC, but they're not supposed to talk about racial discrimination in their life. And it was a powerful enough point that it ended up in the majority opinion.

Speaker 8 So thank goodness for Katanji Burn Jackson.

Speaker 11 And on that, the very specific question she asked was, someone could say they had been a five-gen, you know, a five-term legacy five generations, but someone else couldn't point out that they couldn't be a five-term legacy because

Speaker 11 previous generations of the family were not allowed to attend that school because of segregation. And that really flummoxed all the people making the argument.

Speaker 11 Like it was one of those made it very clear that she had narrowed in on the exact flaw in the argument.

Speaker 11 And that has given, you know, based on Melissa's interpretation here, room for something that may be not positive compared to previous status quo, but a way that allows some students to still get access to

Speaker 11 higher education.

Speaker 8 Yeah, and looking around just on

Speaker 8 Twitter since the ruling, a lot of statements from a lot of colleges saying like, this is not going to deter us in our mission to make the student. Now, these are all words, of course.

Speaker 8 We got to see what happens. But, you know, hopefully we can imagine scenarios where colleges develop admissions standards that exactly, while not as

Speaker 8 robust in making sure that student bodies are more diverse than it was before this ruling, at least still continues that mission.

Speaker 8 I noted with some irony that I got an email from Holy Cross where I went to college and where Clarence Thomas graduated.

Speaker 8 from college and the new president of Holy Cross, first black president of Holy Cross, said that he was very much opposed to the decision and that the college would not be deterred from their mission to make sure that the student body is diverse.

Speaker 8 So

Speaker 8 we'll see what can happen there. But not a great ruling, not a great ruling at all.

Speaker 8 But we did get some good news from the court earlier in the week when Roberts also wrote a six to three opinion rejecting what's known as the independent state legislature theory, which essentially argues that state courts don't have the authority to review voting or election laws passed by state legislatures.

Speaker 8 Dan, there there have been differing views from various legal experts on just how good this news is. What do you think?

Speaker 8 Did John Roberts save democracy once again?

Speaker 11 This ruling is way better than it could have been. Had they adopted this radical interpretation of the independent state legislature theory, what it would mean is twofold.
One,

Speaker 11 theoretically, a state Supreme Court, like in Wisconsin, could not rule on an alternate slate of electors passed by the state legislature.

Speaker 11 The state legislature decided to reject the results of the popular vote. That could happen.

Speaker 11 The state Supreme Court cannot weigh in on voting suppression laws like voter ID or poll taxes or any of the other things that had previously been subject to constitutional and judicial review.

Speaker 11 But also... In a Supreme Court case of a few years ago, the Supreme Court said that the Supreme Court had no role in rendering judgment on partisan gerrymandering.

Speaker 11 Racial gerrymandering could still be judged by the court, as they just had in a relatively positive decision pretty recently. But if you stack the deck along party lines, not

Speaker 11 racial lines, that was up to the state to figure out.

Speaker 11 And this was the whole point of this case was that a Republican supermajority in North Carolina redrew the districts in a completely absurd and ridiculous way.

Speaker 11 The state Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional, violating a whole host of equal protection rules, and then they sued saying they could not do that.

Speaker 11 Now, ironically, we have since lost the majority of the Supreme Court in North Carolina, and now that Supreme Court is undoing all the good that was done.

Speaker 11 And had they passed the independent state legislature, that would have stopped that. But this is protecting a role of the state Supreme Court that's going to matter in 2024 and beyond.

Speaker 11 The dangerous part here is what essentially John Roberts did and Rick Hassen, a law professor at University of Berkeley, pointed this out is that what they've essentially done is codified

Speaker 11 some of the footnotes from the Bush v. Gore decision, which will give the Supreme Court more aggressive judicial review in election, federal election cases that occur at the state level.

Speaker 11 And so there is a potential for, and just a potential. And this is definitely the alternative.

Speaker 11 This is better than the alternative, but a potential for them to be more involved in overruling state Supreme Courts like they did in the Bush v.

Speaker 11 Gore case that stopped the recount in the middle of Al Gore trying to determine who actually won Florida.

Speaker 8 That was

Speaker 8 a very good summary, Dan, of what happened here. So I, as I always do, listened to the brilliant strict scrutiny episode on this ruling.

Speaker 8 I believe they are also recording one on the affirmative action ruling that will be out very soon as well. So you should listen to both of those.

Speaker 8 Having listened to that, having like read Rick Hassen's piece and a bunch of other pieces, like I, you're right.

Speaker 8 There is, there's clearly the potential for the Supreme Court to get involved down the road. I think that potential was always there.

Speaker 8 Like the majority said here that, so basically it is, it was so, it was so ridiculous to put forward a theory that state legislatures could do whatever they wanted without any kind of judicial review whatsoever.

Speaker 8 To say that that is like antithetical to the U.S. Constitution, to like 200 and something years, it's just, it's wild.
It's wild. So basically the majority said that,

Speaker 8 yes, of course state courts have a role in reviewing what the state legislature does and interpreting the state constitution. Of course.

Speaker 8 But they do not have free reign to rewrite election laws from scratch.

Speaker 8 And so basically there may be instances where the state courts are so wrong in interpreting state legislatures and state constitutions that federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have to step in.

Speaker 8 And like, I tried to put out of my head what, like, whether the Supreme Court

Speaker 8 is in its current form a very right-wing Supreme Court or a liberal court, whether state courts in question are liberal or conservative.

Speaker 8 Like, I don't think you would want a state court to be all-powerful just as you wouldn't want a state legislature to be all-powerful.

Speaker 8 You would want some option for federal review of a state court's decision.

Speaker 8 Like, just from a pure partisan perspective, if there was a state legislature that was like a MAGA legislature and then there was a MAGA state court, basically like there is in North Carolina now, and they trampled all over the rights of voters.

Speaker 8 And also the state court decided, yeah, you can have new electors there. You can just basically send your own electors.
Wouldn't we want a federal court to to step in at that point? Probably.

Speaker 11 I don't know, John. Were you a 24-year-old standing in Palm Beach County when the Supreme Court ruled in Bush v.
Gore?

Speaker 11 I was.

Speaker 8 Right, but what I'm saying here is that all of this goes back to like, we just got to have the right people on the right courts.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 11 I mean, that's 100% right.

Speaker 8 You can't say, like, well, I want the state courts to have all the power because right now we have a right-wing Supreme Court.

Speaker 8 But if we change that Supreme Court and then we have suddenly a MAGA Supreme Court, then I'd want the U.S. Supreme Court to have all the power.

Speaker 11 The issue here, as I understand it, is, and I agree with you. Like, there are three options here.
There is terrible, there is this, and there is slightly better than this.

Speaker 11 And we ended up in the middle, which is basically all we can fucking hope for these days with the Supreme Court. So, I'm not saying this is not,

Speaker 11 I'm not saying this is the world, I'm not saying there's some secret plan to take down the election or anything like that.

Speaker 11 No one thought in 2000 that the Supreme Court was going to weigh in on that election because there had been no previous precedent for the Supreme Court to get involved in a matter, a state election matter like that.

Speaker 11 They basically created a new legal doctrine for the sole purpose of stopping the recount and giving the election to Bush. Now, would Bush have won anyway? Who the hell knows? But

Speaker 11 they went out of the way to do it. And then they went out of their way to basically say that was a one-off.

Speaker 11 It was only in some footnotes that they adopted.

Speaker 11 It was one of those footnotes is where the independent state legislature theory comes from.

Speaker 11 And then in this case, the far right, the people who brought the case, went so took the most radical interpretation of that original independent state legislature theory.

Speaker 11 What this does is it's going to make it easy. You're not going to have to invent a new legal doctrine to weigh in here.
Now, does that mean they wouldn't have done it anyway?

Speaker 11 Maybe they probably would have because

Speaker 11 they did it in 2000. They could do it again.
So there, I just, this is not to say, to panic, to say there is like a secret time bomb here or anything like that, but there is a reality that

Speaker 11 a repeat of Bush v. Gore is at least slightly more likely because of the way this decision was decided with a 6'3 majority, including appointees from Democratic presidents.

Speaker 8 And also no surprise, again, because Kevin On Barrett were involved in bringing the case to the court in 2000. Yes.

Speaker 8 On the bad side. So no shocker there.

Speaker 8 But as Clarence Thomas criticized the majority in his dissenting opinion on this, he was like, you didn't, there is no standard now of when the federal courts or the Supreme Court should weigh in.

Speaker 8 And you guys didn't set a standard in this majority opinion. So it's sort of up to a case-by-case basis here.

Speaker 8 Which it was before, which I think is, which is, yeah, that's why I feel like it seems, it seems more status quo than not. What does this mean for 2024?

Speaker 8 So this was mostly about the elections clause, not the electors clause. They're two different clauses in the Constitution, but the language in the two cases is basically identical.
And so

Speaker 8 it does seem like

Speaker 8 if a state legislature, after the fact, decided to just send in a new slate of electors like Trump wanted them to do in 2020, the Supreme, it seems like from this ruling, the Supreme Court would say, like, of course, the state Supreme Court could say that is blatantly unconstitutional based on the state constitution, which in a lot of these states says you can't change the law after the election happens and suddenly decide to send fake electors.

Speaker 8 So that's good news.

Speaker 11 Yeah, so take the wins where you can get them.

Speaker 8 That's good news. All right, let's talk again about President Biden.
He spoke this morning on the Supreme Court ruling.

Speaker 8 He also delivered a major economic speech in Chicago yesterday where he compared Republican trickle-down economics with what the White House is calling Bidenomics. Let's listen.

Speaker 9 And guess what?

Speaker 16 Bidenomics is working. When I took office, the pandemic was raging and our economy was reeling.
Supply chains are broken.

Speaker 16 millions of people unemployed, hundreds of thousands of small businesses on the verge of closing after so many had already closed. Literally, hundreds of thousands on the verge of closing.

Speaker 11 Today, the U.S.

Speaker 16 has the highest economic growth rate leading the world economies since the pandemic, the highest in the world.

Speaker 12 Now, Republicans are at it again, pushing tax cuts for large corporations and the wealthy and adding trillions of dollars to the deficit.

Speaker 1 Trillions.

Speaker 12 Folks, let me say it as clearly as I can. The trickle-down approach failed the middle class.
It failed America.

Speaker 15 By the nomics is about the future.

Speaker 11 By the domics, just another way of saying, restore the American dream because it worked before.

Speaker 8 What did you think of the speech?

Speaker 11 It was good. I liked it.

Speaker 11 It is his best-to-date distillation of not just his economic accomplishments, but what they say about what he would do in a second term.

Speaker 8 Yeah. I think that they framed the accomplishments in the context of

Speaker 8 here's our theory, here's our approach to the economy, it's working, not it has worked, it is working, and it is a lot more effective than the other side, than Republicans.

Speaker 8 And that to me is a much more useful and effective message than just look at all the good stuff we did. Maybe the economy is better than you think it is.

Speaker 8 I think we haven't focused on this yet, but it was really smart, I think, how he hit the tax cuts cuts really hard.

Speaker 8 That like trickle-down economics is Republicans wanting tax cuts for the rich versus Biden's policies, which are focused on better jobs and lower costs.

Speaker 8 The winner of the election will decide what happens to the Trump tax cuts, which expire at the end of the year.

Speaker 8 And basically, Biden hit the Republicans in the speech for wanting to pay $2 trillion to keep in place tax cuts that mostly benefit the rich when we could be spending that money on, you know, lower health care costs, lower education costs,

Speaker 8 investment in infrastructure, right? And so that is a great fight to have. It's a fight with real consequences because you can tell people, whoever wins after the election, this is a choice.

Speaker 8 Do you want more tax cuts for rich people or do you want investments in the middle class? So I think that I like that they framed it like this.

Speaker 11 Would you say that there's a fiscal cliff coming?

Speaker 8 Wow,

Speaker 8 that's a callback.

Speaker 11 Well, I mean, it does speak to an ability to repeat the strategy of 2012 because the Bush tax cuts, in part because they were extended by a bipartisan deal cut with Obama and McConnell in 2010, but the Bush tax cuts expired after the 2012 election.

Speaker 11 And a big fight in that election was, what are you going to do with those tax cuts? Romney wanted to extend all the ones for the rich people.

Speaker 11 Obama wanted to keep the ones for the middle class and the ones for rich folks. And that was a very advantageous issue environment for Obama.

Speaker 11 And Biden is going to get to repeat that play against whoever the Republican nominee is.

Speaker 8 And by the way, if you give voters a choice between tax cuts for the rich or the child tax credit, tax cuts for the rich or lower prescription drug costs, tax cuts for the rich or privatizing Social Security and Medicare, which is what Republicans want to do, the numbers are wild.

Speaker 8 Like they will choose the investments over the tax cuts for the rich every single time by a margin of like, I just saw a Navigator poll this morning.

Speaker 8 I think it was like 75% were against the tax cuts for the rich, including like 70 something percent of Republicans. It is a very good issue for Democrats.

Speaker 11 Yeah, it is one of those issues that divides the Republican base because in all the polling we've seen on various Biden initiatives, particularly when he was trying to raise a bunch of taxes on the rich as part of the original Build Back Better Plan, working class Republicans, Republicans who make under a certain income threshold, support those initiatives at a level commensurate with Democrats.

Speaker 11 Like that's how, that's how where that is.

Speaker 11 And it also, I will just note that comparing child tax credit and tax cuts for corporations or investments in X with tax cuts for rich people actually undersells populist sentiment in this country.

Speaker 11 If you ask people, do you want to give tax cuts to the rich or you personally have a root canal? Most Americans would pick root canal. Like that, that is, that is where populism is.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 8 And that's why he also emphasized in this speech what the administration has done to eliminate junk fees, hotel fees, overdraft fees for banks, which are also, you know, some people could argue that they're small.

Speaker 8 They're a very big deal to a lot of people in this country who have to pay those fees.

Speaker 8 And so I think that'll be a part of the message going forward.

Speaker 8 So the White House seems to be more confident in making the case that the economy is doing better and that Joe Biden's policies are the reason why.

Speaker 8 Polling still suggests that people don't quite buy that, though, as you'll hear from Ben LeBolt when we talk to him, he cites a poll that most people say their personal financial situation has improved or is improving.

Speaker 8 What do you think about the argument they're trying to make here about, you know, the economy doing better? Which is, I should say, empirically correct according to all of the data.

Speaker 8 Inflation is down, consumer confidence is up, the job market is still churning out jobs, they're good jobs, unemployment is at its low. I mean, like all this stuff is right.

Speaker 8 But, you know, as we talked about a million times during the midterms, at that point, people weren't feeling the improvement. Are they feeling it now?

Speaker 11 They are at least more more optimistic about the future.

Speaker 11 Inflation is down for 11 months in a row. It is particularly down in gas and groceries, the things that hit people the hardest.
Biden folks were in an impossible situation throughout 2022.

Speaker 11 Inflation was such a dominant and very real and painful issue for so many people that they could not talk about all the other stuff because people were so mad about inflation and gas prices in particular.

Speaker 11 That is,

Speaker 11 we're now in a much more nuanced environment. And on top of the polling that Ben cites, earlier this week, the consumer confidence measure came out and it's its highest level in 17 months.

Speaker 11 And the consumer confidence measure is probably the best measure of how people really feel about the economy because it indicates what they want to do going forward.

Speaker 11 It correlates with buying homes, buying cars, going on vacation. And so if consumer confidence is up, that speaks to a change in the economy.

Speaker 11 Now, the challenge for President Biden is not just how people feel about the economy, but how they feel about what he is going to do on the economy, because he still is operating at a fairly historic deficit with Republicans in terms of who you trust on the economy, and particularly with Donald Trump.

Speaker 11 And so this

Speaker 11 speech, this ensuing public relations campaign, and frankly, the entire presidential campaign is going to be an effort to change that dynamic, to undermine what Republicans are for and build trust in the president as an economic steward.

Speaker 11 An economic steward really means who are you going to fight for and what are you going to fight for.

Speaker 8 Right.

Speaker 8 Because, you know, if you just frame it as how has biden managed the economy you're going to get people who are cranky because they don't think the economy is humming along yet or you're basically going to ask people to judge based on their own financial situation and how they view the economy if you make it do you want this set of policies this approach um do you want someone like and probably more effectively do you want someone like joe biden who is fighting hard for the middle class or do you want republicans who if they win, will shower rich people with more tax cuts?

Speaker 8 Right. And if that is the choice, they are going to win that argument.
Now, the question is: how do you think Biden's argument, economic argument, fits into the larger campaign message?

Speaker 8 Like, should this be the central focus? Should he spend more time on issues like Trump or democracy or abortion like he did in the midterms?

Speaker 8 Like, we've had this conversation before, it's incredibly difficult to get an economic message to break through in a time of Donald Trump and threats to democracy democracy and

Speaker 8 abortion bans and everything else that

Speaker 8 are serious threats that we're dealing with.

Speaker 8 How would you run a campaign where you really want to get that economic message to break through?

Speaker 11 The economic message is going to be central.

Speaker 11 When Celinda Lake was on this podcast, one point in a recent interview, she pointed out that no one in modern political history has won the White House without being the person who won the economy in exit polling.

Speaker 11 And Biden barely snuck that by. He was joining for most of the campaign.
And then the way Trump mishandled the pandemic and the ensuing recession, Biden ticked ahead by a little bit at the end.

Speaker 11 So he's going to have to do that. And it's worth remembering that

Speaker 11 as high as turnout was in 2022, it is going to be significantly higher in 2024. There was, there's about a 50 million people who voted in

Speaker 11 more than 50 million people who are going to vote in 2024, who did not vote in November. And those people will tend to be people who are less politically engaged.

Speaker 11 Therefore, they're going to be people who are going to be less motivated by some of the democracy, Trump, the sort of more process arguments about extremism that were effective in 2022.

Speaker 11 So how do you do this? I think you make a mistake by doing this from an issue perspective. Like we need, it's not a recipe.
We're not making cookies, right?

Speaker 11 We don't need, you know, two cups of flour, two cups of democracy, you know, two teaspoons of court reform or whatever. You need a narrative about the differences between

Speaker 11 President Biden and the Republicans, most notably Donald Trump, who will serve as the avatar for all Republicans, whether he's a nominee or not, what they're going to fight for, what they stand for, and then each individual issue, whether it's abortion or democracy or the economy, is something that undergirds that larger narrative.

Speaker 11 So you start with narrative and then issues are the supporting parts of that. The economy is going to have to be a huge part of that.

Speaker 11 I suspect it will be a dominant part of paid advertising because to your point, you can't get the press to cover the economy in ways that are, especially with the diminution of local news, to get people to really understand how the economy's doing so you're gonna have to pay to do that but it it's gonna have to be a bigger part of the 2024 strategy than 2022 because you're gonna have more economically sensitive voters in this voter pool than we had last time

Speaker 8 yes and the only chance to get it to break through or and i imagine this will be the bulk of the pay to ads as well is you got to pick a fight over it Because if you're just out there touting accomplishments, which again, I'm not saying they are, they didn't do that in the speech on Wednesday.

Speaker 8 But if you're just doing, if Democrats are out there just touting the accomplishments, that's not going to break through. That's not going to be new.

Speaker 8 If you are out there fighting with Republicans because they want to screw up this economy by giving a bunch of tax cuts to rich people and fight for their rich friends and fight for themselves versus Joe Biden, who's out there wanting to fight for middle-class workers because, you know, he's Scranton Joe, then that's going to be something that has at least has a chance to break through more.

Speaker 8 And so I do think that like constantly picking fights with Republicans, drawing the contrast, talking about their agenda, talking about what Trump would do.

Speaker 8 Because Trump, you can see that Trump in the primary sees this coming in the general, which is why he's trying to hit DeSantis on cutting Social Security and Medicare, even though Trump's budgets did the same thing, you know, sales tax, stuff like that.

Speaker 8 Like Trump gets this.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 8 what Biden and the Democrats need to do is be like, no, no, no, Trump also gave us these tax cuts that have increased the deficit and just made rich people richer.

Speaker 8 And he would do more of that if he comes to office. So we will talk more about all of this with Ben LeBolt, the White House Communications Director, right after this.

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Speaker 8 Joining us now. He's been Joe Biden's White House Communications Director for just about four months.

Speaker 8 He's also a longtime friend and colleague of ours from the Obama days, and the only person in the world who's lived with me, Tommy, and Lovett, and worked for Dan, Ben LeBolt. Welcome to the pod.

Speaker 13 That sounded very incestuous. I am sitting in Pfeiffer's old office.
I've not done much with the decorations, but I have put one picture so far.

Speaker 13 And I will say out of all the roommates, Just this sea of clothes and trash all over the floor in Lovett's bedroom is a sight I'll never fully get out of my mind, but I've been working working on it.

Speaker 11 I was going to say, I can't say this on the video, but just to the left is the plaque that they have to commemorate the fact that it was my office.

Speaker 8 Ben, first question: Is this the best day of your life?

Speaker 13 You know, John, every day is the best day of my life. No,

Speaker 13 this was an exciting day for us. It was a day we've been building up to

Speaker 13 for a long time

Speaker 13 because

Speaker 13 it was the day that we came forward to really tout the president's economic accomplishments with the speech in Chicago. And

Speaker 13 I'm excited to talk to you about it.

Speaker 8 A lot of stuff in that speech. Great speech.

Speaker 8 His economic approach, his accomplishments, work he's got left to do, contrast with Republicans' approach.

Speaker 8 Your communications director, what's your dream headline out of the speech, or at least one part that you really want people to take away?

Speaker 13 That President Biden took on the failed concept of trickle-down economics,

Speaker 13 and he's rebuilt the economy around the middle class who are really the backbone of the economy in the first place. And if you think about his career,

Speaker 13 you know,

Speaker 13 we've been talking about trickle-down economics for 40 years, and a lot of economists had felt that this was an effective policy for the country. We've been talking about it since...

Speaker 13 the 80s, that if you rewarded the wealthiest corporations with tax breaks, that somehow that would trickle down to middle class families and the economy across the country would be strong.

Speaker 13 But growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania and Claymont, Delaware, President Biden never saw those policies impact his family. It never trickled down to the kitchen table.

Speaker 13 And so he really believes in reverse engineering that concept and centering economic policies around the middle class. from the beginning.
That means basically three things.

Speaker 13 Number one, we should invest in the United States. We shouldn't reward corporations that are shipping jobs overseas.

Speaker 13 We should take a look at what industries can be built here in the United States from clean energy

Speaker 13 to

Speaker 13 superconductors, or I'm sorry, semiconductors, chips, industries that were being built overseas in China over the past decades.

Speaker 13 Even though we invented that technology here in the United States, a lot of people said reviving manufacturing in the U.S. wasn't possible.

Speaker 13 800,000 manufacturing jobs have been created under this administration, and that's just the beginning. So that's one piece.
The second piece is empowering workers. We have a tight labor market.

Speaker 13 13 million jobs were created under this administration and unemployment has been lower than 4%

Speaker 13 for 16 months. That's the longest in decades.
And that means workers are empowered, their wages are up.

Speaker 13 Workers are unionizing, even young workers are unionizing in new sectors, and employers have to compete for their talent. And that means that workers are doing well and they're very empowered.

Speaker 13 And we've got the strongest labor force participation rate that we've had in years. And this is impacting everyone.
It's particularly impacting workers that were making lower wages.

Speaker 13 They've seen the most wage growth of anybody else. We've seen the lowest black and Hispanic unemployment.

Speaker 13 in history under this administration.

Speaker 13 So it's having a real impact and it's a result of all of the big pieces of legislation that the president was able to get through Congress over the past couple of years.

Speaker 11 The political challenge for the president is that people like the things he has done when they hear about him, but not enough people have heard about him.

Speaker 11 What's your theory or strategy to keep people paying attention in the days and weeks after this speech?

Speaker 13 Well, Dan, you wrote a bit about this today. As you know, it's harder and harder to break through in today's communications environment.
The media is fractured.

Speaker 13 A lot of people go off in their their filter bubbles. We know that in the 2020 election,

Speaker 13 for the average persuadable American, the number one show wasn't the news. It was the bachelor.

Speaker 13 And so I have to wake up every day and figure out how we communicate with people across the country that aren't necessarily watching the network news in the morning, that certainly don't get their newspapers.

Speaker 13 in print anymore.

Speaker 13 And so frequency becomes really the challenge of the job. How How do we reach people on a repeated basis

Speaker 13 with the president's economic accomplishments in a way that they'll remember? Because the average person has to hear something seven times before they'll remember it at all.

Speaker 13 And so, you know, what this bidenomics frame allows us to do is to start to talk about things that people are feeling in the economy. You know, consumer confidence is up.

Speaker 13 Inflation has come down over 50% over the past year. We've had the strongest recovery in the United States of any developed nation.

Speaker 13 But these bills are just starting to be implemented. And so shovels are going into the ground to rebuild roads and bridges, 35,000 projects across the country.

Speaker 13 You know, the price of insulin is now capped at 35 bucks across the country. But we've got to make sure that people are connecting those things.

Speaker 13 to all of the legislation that the president passed through Congress in the past couple of years.

Speaker 13 And so that will require the president, the vice president, the first lady, the second gentleman going out on the road to talk about this, coordinating with members of Congress, coordinating with members of the cabinet.

Speaker 13 And we're trying to be, you know, on the road in districts, on conventional media platforms, and to be communicating digitally.

Speaker 13 It's sort of an all-in communication strategy to make sure that people are seeing that these economic gains, this progress that they're seeing coming out of the pandemic.

Speaker 13 is related to the policies of this administration.

Speaker 11 You know, as you remember from the days we worked together, we always had a tortured relationship with the term Obamacare. Sometimes we embraced it.

Speaker 11 Sometimes we thought that it would turn people who did not love President Obama but did like more affordable health care away from the program.

Speaker 11 But with this speech, you guys are clearly embracing the term bidenomics. Why are you doing that? Are there any downside risks to making the economy so personally tied to the president?

Speaker 13 Well, we think we have a really strong story to tell.

Speaker 13 And it's countering a narrative that's been out there for some. You know, there's been this prediction of a recession from some economists and economic commentators for months now.

Speaker 13 When all the data is coming in, you know, 330,000 jobs created last month, for example.

Speaker 13 As I said, the strongest recovery of any developed nation,

Speaker 13 stable and steady economic growth. We believe that there's a really strong story to tell.

Speaker 13 And this manufacturing boom that we're seeing in the the United States that we're not seeing in any of our competitors in the West.

Speaker 13 We know it's a result of passing the Inflation Reduction Act that had the record funding for clean energy in it, for example, and the Chips and Science Act, which are building these semiconductor plants across the country.

Speaker 13 And so our view is that, you know,

Speaker 13 ultimately,

Speaker 13 Americans' perceptions of the present will be linked to the performance of the economy. And we believe there's a very strong record here that we need to start communicating forcefully about every day.

Speaker 13 And so I don't think Bidenomics will just be today and just be this speech, but that's really going to be a key part of our frame moving forward.

Speaker 8 Hey, Ben, thanks for joining our filter bubble. I just wanted to say that.

Speaker 8 A lot of diverse viewpoints here.

Speaker 8 One of the president's favorite lines is: don't compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative.

Speaker 8 Sure enough, House Republicans started the day with two tweets about Hunter Biden and one celebrating the end of Roe v. Wade.

Speaker 8 Do you find it easier to convince people that they are better off with Biden's approach versus the Republicans' approach than it is to convince people that they should feel better about the economy than they might?

Speaker 13 Well, look, we're going to do both. Number one, we think people are feeling better about the economy.
We're not going to tell people something that they don't believe.

Speaker 13 And when you ask somebody, for example, today,

Speaker 13 how do you feel about your personal economic situation? 76% of Americans are saying that they feel good about it. And consumer confidence is up.

Speaker 13 The job market is booming. Unemployment is at a low.
And so those things are factually true. And they're the reason we can go out and talk about them.

Speaker 13 At the same time, what are Republicans offering people today? I think that's... Economically, we know what they're offering.
They're offering tax cuts to the wealthiest in corporations, which

Speaker 13 seem to be this recycled Republican idea over and over again that didn't bring manufacturing back to the U.S., didn't create record low unemployment.

Speaker 13 We know that it doesn't work and it created record deficits that we're all paying for as well.

Speaker 13 Secondly,

Speaker 13 they've gotten into such an extreme position across the board on so many issues. Another one that I would point out, you know, you talked about Roe, they're really out of step with the public on that.

Speaker 13 They're certainly out of step with with millennials and Gen Z.

Speaker 13 But this notion of freedom and individual liberties, that used to be something that Republicans liked to go out and talk about.

Speaker 13 But MAGA Republicans today, if you're a woman who wants to make her own healthcare decisions, if you're a parent that believes that you should decide what books your kids have access to instead of, you know, an ideological politician,

Speaker 13 if you're somebody who cares about gay rights in this country or LGBTQ rights broadly, Republicans

Speaker 13 are really conducting an assault on freedom and an assault on individual liberties right now.

Speaker 13 And they're way out of step with the public on that. And I think it really puts them in a vulnerable position.
So the president has been a champion to go out and defend these things.

Speaker 13 He believes we should codify Roe. He came out.
after Dobbs and did what he believed was everything he could do in his executive authority to defend reproductive rights.

Speaker 13 He made sure that we're defending marriage equality and passed legislation to do so.

Speaker 13 And so, you know, Republicans are just drifting further and further down the MAGA ideological spectrum here and really putting themselves in political peril.

Speaker 8 We're still waiting.

Speaker 8 on some of the big Supreme Court decisions to come down, but looks like the Senate's moving forward on ethics reform legislation after a series of stories about Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito failing to disclose private jet rides with rich right-wing donors.

Speaker 8 So President's Commission on Supreme Court reform has recommended a code of conduct for justices. Senate looks like they're going to do something similar.
Does he support that kind of reform?

Speaker 13 We'll have to take a look at

Speaker 13 the text of the legislation to understand what's coming through.

Speaker 13 But I can point out that he signed the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, which requires federal judges to disclose their stock purchases and sales and post their financial disclosures online.

Speaker 13 And obviously, you've seen a lot of news that's come out of that recently.

Speaker 13 You know, in terms of the courts more broadly,

Speaker 13 you know, placing the president's mark on his federal on the federal courts has been a big part of this presidency. He's confirmed 136 federal judges to appointments to the federal bench.

Speaker 13 So far, two-thirds of them have been women.

Speaker 13 It's been the most diverse slate of judges in history.

Speaker 13 You know, the president used to be chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Speaker 13 And so every Supreme Court justice that was appointed by a Democratic president, you know, President Biden has played a key role in making sure that they were confirmed.

Speaker 13 There just couldn't be a bigger priority for this administration than making sure that

Speaker 13 the courts

Speaker 13 are upholding opportunity and equal justice under the law. And the president's really dedicated his career to that.
And so he keeps a very close eye on the courts.

Speaker 8 I was yelling on the pod earlier this week about how a few months ago, Biden got all kinds of shit from the left about supposedly abandoning the rail workers on the issue of paid sick days.

Speaker 8 And then we learned this week from the rail workers that the administration was quietly working behind the scenes the entire time to help them successfully negotiate for those paid sick days.

Speaker 8 There was a similar dynamic around Biden not going out more forcefully during the debt ceiling negotiations.

Speaker 8 How do you guys decide which fights you're more likely to win by just quietly playing the long game, even if it means eating shit in the short term?

Speaker 13 I think that that's part of the president's DNA, and he doesn't get fun up by the daily news cycle and focuses on the long game and focuses on getting to the outcome.

Speaker 13 So, you know, something like when he was negotiating with the Speaker and Republicans in Congress

Speaker 13 over the bipartisan budget agreement, where we thought at the end of the day, we got a very good deal that protected all the president's signature programs and things like the largest investment in history in the clean energy economy.

Speaker 13 You know, he is, he's very hands-on in those negotiations and in the communications to the point where you know some of the statements i put out the president personally dictated during that process to make sure that um they were very carefully written that they wouldn't disrupt the negotiations um and so i think he's i think he's an extremely smart negotiator you know i'm somebody who likes to win every argument um and that isn't always the smartest negotiating strategy uh and i think that's that's just one you know hallmark of of his long career in public service is that he knows how to drive towards an outcome.

Speaker 8 Speaking of winning an argument, I just saw

Speaker 8 that one way the White House press office celebrated Pride was by delivering rainbow cupcakes to the Fox News reporters in the briefing room. What was that all about?

Speaker 13 You know,

Speaker 13 there was a crazy story that Rand and Fox that called

Speaker 13 the Pride flag a flag of groomers and pedophiles, just complete, you know, insane

Speaker 13 QAnon internet stuff that just has no basis in reality.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 they never corrected the story and took it down. And so, you know, as you know, we had a big pride celebration at the White House, and we were glad that everybody was welcome to participate.

Speaker 11 How did the reporters at Fox take that?

Speaker 11 I'll let them comment on that

Speaker 13 so you've worked for biden for about four months now can you give us like one story about what it's like to work for joe biden just to give people a window into uh how he runs his white house absolutely look as as you both know i've worked for a number of of elected officials um over the years they all have their own style and their own ways of dealing with the team

Speaker 13 um and uh

Speaker 13 and we're all familiar with one. I think, you know, the way things work around here is

Speaker 13 it's important to prep for prep. You know, President Biden is extremely detail oriented.

Speaker 13 He likes to attack policy issues and negotiations from every angle and to play out every scenario in every possible way along the chessboard that they could play out. And so

Speaker 13 you better walk into the oval knowing the answer to every possible question

Speaker 13 to make sure that, you know, he works it through. I think of it like the law school class I never had, because after I took the LSAT, I just went and worked on campaigns instead.

Speaker 13 But,

Speaker 13 you know, Socratic method, anybody in the room should be prepared to speak and answer any question, you know, devil's advocate around every issue to understand

Speaker 13 both, you know, the policy and politics of how something might play out and people across the country might respond to it. And that's true on domestic policy, it's true on foreign policy.

Speaker 13 You know, I'm in a position where I feel like I'm learning every day, getting my PhD here

Speaker 13 in the job. And so,

Speaker 13 you know, he's just a very, very hands-on president when it comes to both managing the White House, the government apparatus, and policy writ large.

Speaker 8 We asked Saki about this, but what's different about your second tour in the White House?

Speaker 13 You know,

Speaker 13 it's a little bit different in that

Speaker 13 I think we all wish we could always be in our 20s doing these jobs to just have the limitless energy and ability to deal with anything and to sit here at all hours and throw yourself with all the energy you've ever had at everything that comes your way.

Speaker 13 This is more

Speaker 13 a marathon than a sprint. I guess that was a sprint that was also a marathon.

Speaker 13 And so endurance becomes more important. You also come into the job just knowing more about the fact that you're always going to leave something on the table every day.

Speaker 13 You're never going to get it all done. The executive branch is a massive organization with hundreds of thousands of people.
And so

Speaker 13 For as many moments as you want to sit here and drive news and plan things perfectly, it's so easy for something to pop up in the news or across the government that takes your full attention for a week, two weeks, three weeks, a month, where you really have to divert the team and focus on that.

Speaker 13 So I came in with

Speaker 13 that perspective this time around. And I'm also inviting myself to more of the events that they host at the White House.
I know what to ask.

Speaker 8 Smart. That's smart.

Speaker 8 Last question.

Speaker 8 People don't know this, but in the Obama days, you started a tradition in the press office where you'd respond to overly whiny complaints from journalists with a picture of a crying mime.

Speaker 11 Honestly, started meme culture there. It didn't exist before that.

Speaker 8 When is the last time you've sent a crying mime to someone?

Speaker 13 Well, you know, technology has been updated, John, and we didn't have emojis back then.

Speaker 13 And so now there's actually the eye roll emoji and several other emojis that I'm able to deploy in similar circumstances.

Speaker 8 Excellent.

Speaker 8 LaVaul, thanks for coming on Pod Save America. Appreciate it.
Come back again soon.

Speaker 13 Good to talk to you guys. We'll do.

Speaker 8 Hey, Ryan Reynolds here, wishing you a very happy half-off holiday because right now, Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service.

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Speaker 19 Hey, weirdos.

Speaker 20 I'm Elena and I'm Ash, and we are the host of Morbid Podcast.

Speaker 19 Each week we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 20 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

Speaker 19 It's smart, it's spooky, and it's just the right amount of weird.

Speaker 20 Two new episodes drop every week, and there's even a bonus once a month.

Speaker 19 Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 8 Yay! Woo!

Speaker 8 Okay, before we go, a heartbreaking story. One of Washington's saddest and fakest romances is on the rocks.

Speaker 8 Kevin McCarthy, the legislative and political genius who's fighting off a MAGA rebellion in the House, was asked in an interview whether Donald Trump is the best candidate to run against Joe Biden.

Speaker 8 Here's what he said.

Speaker 21 But do you think he could win an election? Could he win an election? Can he win that election? Yeah, he can. Do you think he can?

Speaker 21 The question is, is he the strongest to win the election? I don't know that answer.

Speaker 8 Also, first of all,

Speaker 8 talk about a swerve. He just had to shut his mouth there.

Speaker 8 It wasn't like the interviewer, when I first heard about this, I thought maybe the interviewer had grilled him and was like, no, no, is Donald Trump the strongest candidate?

Speaker 8 No, he just said, could he win an election? Then Kevin volunteers. Is he the strongest? I don't know.

Speaker 11 Not the deftest of people, I will say, Kevin McCarthy.

Speaker 8 Before we get into the lover's quarrel, was McCarthy right in what he said?

Speaker 11 Feels like a trick question. Like, if I say McCarthy was right, Elijah's going to cut it and tweet it out.

Speaker 11 So I don't really know how to respond in this entrapment that we call a podcast.

Speaker 8 I could not think of a more banal, correct answer. Yes, of course Donald Trump can win an election against Joe Biden.
No, I don't know if he's the strongest candidate against Joe Biden.

Speaker 8 Of course we don't know that.

Speaker 11 There is evidence that he is definitely not.

Speaker 8 There is evidence that he's not. There's some evidence that he might be because Ron DeSantis fucking sucks.
It's like,

Speaker 8 we just don't know. And the reason I want to make the point about what a banal observation that was is because of what happens next.

Speaker 8 So after this, Politico reports that obviously Trump lost his shit. His people were texting what the fuck to each other and calling McCarthy a moron, like there's some fucking Pod Save America hosts.

Speaker 8 Kevin then called Trump to apologize, gave an interview to Breitbart where he said, quote, Trump is stronger today than he was in 2016, and then put up a fundraising pitch that said, Trump is the strongest opponent to Biden.

Speaker 8 But that pissed Trump off even more because apparently you're not allowed to fundraise,

Speaker 8 do a fundraising pitch using Trump's name without Trump's explicit sign-off. So then they made McCarthy take down the fundraising paper that he did to try to correct his fuck-up.

Speaker 8 I guess they're also pissed in MAGA World that McCarthy hasn't endorsed Trump yet, which raises the question, why hasn't he?

Speaker 11 I mean, he's endorsed Trump in all but name only, but the extent the reason he hasn't done it is he has 19 Republicans who are trying to run for re-election in districts that Joe Biden won.

Speaker 11 And it makes it a little bit harder for Kevin McCarthy to campaign for them, raise money for them, appear with them if the Speaker of the House and the leader of the caucus is someone who is shilling for Trump.

Speaker 8 Yeah, also, it's just like he is the top elected official in the Republican Party in the country, and there is a competitive primary for the Republican nomination.

Speaker 8 Obviously, you would expect this in any other world, not the one that we're in, any other one, you'd expect the Speaker of the House to be neutral.

Speaker 8 We would not have expected Nancy Pelosi to jump in and endorse one of the Democratic candidates during the 2020 race

Speaker 8 at the beginning.

Speaker 8 Of course, he should be fucking neutral. It just, it's like,

Speaker 8 what do you think about

Speaker 8 McCarthy's statement to Breitbart that Trump is stronger today than he was in 2016?

Speaker 8 Sure. I actually think that might be true.

Speaker 11 Yeah, that's probably true. I mean, it really depends on what political value you put on multiple criminal convictions and their impact on electability.

Speaker 8 I mean, if you just look at the polls, I went back.

Speaker 8 In 2015, at this exact time, the primary was Bush, as in Jeb, 19, Trump 12, Huckabee, 8. So he's doing a lot better in the primary than he was then.

Speaker 8 And then he is closer to Biden in polling in general election matchup than he was to Hillary. At this time, in the end of June 2015, trial heats were 59% Hillary, 34% Trump.
Yikes.

Speaker 11 Well, and as we know, the polls of 2016 were infallible.

Speaker 8 I just, this to me is an example, this whole story is an example of

Speaker 8 what an unbelievable grip Donald Trump still has on the Republican Party that Kevin McCarthy goes out there and says something fairly obvious, which is, who knows if Trump's the strongest candidate?

Speaker 8 Let's wait and see. Of course, he can win the election.

Speaker 8 And Donald Trump and his people flip flip out so badly that Kevin has to apologize, basically flip his entire stance from saying that he doesn't know if Donald Trump could win to basically endorsing him by saying he's the strongest candidate against Joe Biden in a fundraising pitch that he then had to take down.

Speaker 8 That's what happens when you cross Trump and the Republican Party.

Speaker 11 Well, Donald Trump also has an amazing intuition for very weak people who will degrade themselves.

Speaker 11 And Kevin McCarthy is a very weak person who will, of course, degrade himself in tremendous ways to beg forgiveness. He loves to make people beg, and he knew Kevin McCarthy would beg, so he did it.

Speaker 8 Speaking of people who will debase themselves,

Speaker 11 I can't wait to see where this is going.

Speaker 8 Did you hear Ron DeSantis's answer to a question at a New Hampshire town hall about whether he thinks

Speaker 8 Donald Trump disrupted the peaceful transfer of power power on January 6th. Did you hear that answer?

Speaker 11 I think your use of the term answer is doing a lot of work in that sense.

Speaker 8 Ron DeSantis answers by saying, well, I wasn't near Washington that day.

Speaker 8 And then he said, I certainly didn't enjoy watching what happened. Oh, oh, you didn't enjoy watching the violent insurrection against the Capitol.

Speaker 8 That's what you're saying? So Caitlin Collins of CNN is interviewing Chris Christie last night, I believe, asked him to respond to Ron DeSantis' answer, and here's what Chris Christie had to say.

Speaker 22 He wasn't anywhere near Washington. Did he have a TV?

Speaker 22 Was he alive that day? Did he see what was going on? I mean, that's one of the most ridiculous answers I've heard in this race so far.

Speaker 22 You don't have an opinion about January 6th, except to say, I didn't particularly enjoy what happened.

Speaker 8 People were killed. That's exactly a strong statement.

Speaker 22 People were killed, Caitlin, as you know that day on Capitol Hill defending the Capitol.

Speaker 22 We had members of Congress who were running for their lives. We had people trying to hunt down the Vice President of the United States chanting hang Mike Pence.

Speaker 22 And Donald Trump, the entire time, sat outside the Oval Office in that little dining room of his, eating a well-done cheeseburger.

Speaker 22 and watching TV and doing nothing to stop what was going on until it it got to the point where even he could no longer stand it.

Speaker 22 And he finally at four something in the afternoon put out a video asking people to leave the Capitol. And Ron DeSantis doesn't have any opinion on that?

Speaker 20 If he asked you that question, how would you answer it?

Speaker 22 I would say it was one of the most disgraceful days in American history and that the president was principally responsible for it.

Speaker 8 Not that hard.

Speaker 11 No, great job, Chris Christie.

Speaker 8 He's still around.

Speaker 8 I'm sure Trump put out a few angry truths about this. Nothing happened.
Is he going to win the Republican nomination? No.

Speaker 8 Are Republican voters going to like that? Probably not. Glad he's out there saying it, though.

Speaker 11 No, it's great.

Speaker 8 It's a pretty sharp prosecution of Donald Trump.

Speaker 11 I mean, it is a wild world that Chris Christie, who is an actually talented communicator in a party full of...

Speaker 11 absolute marble mouth losers can't get any traction in this primary.

Speaker 8 I was watching this and I thought to myself, you know what? Chris Christie is basically just a really good cable pundit who fucking hates Donald Trump, who's running for president. That's what he is.

Speaker 11 Yeah, and Donald Trump won in 2016 because he was a really good Fox News pundit running for president.

Speaker 8 Well, it's like, and the thing he does there that's good, that's beyond sort of, you know, politics, ideology, whatever, is he just like is not afraid to sort of say what everyone's thinking about Ron DeSantis's answer, right?

Speaker 8 Like, this is Ron DeSantis' fucking problem: is that he does speak in sort of talking points, like he is like just reading whatever's written for him, typical politician, all the stuff that Donald Trump's running against him for, or running, Donald Trump's message about him, which is that he's like a typical establishment politician.

Speaker 8 Forget about his positions on issues that make him a typical establishment politician. He sounds like one.
He's stiff.

Speaker 8 His speeches suck, right? Like, and I think Donald Trump understands that sometimes you just say what's on your mind, clearly, but Chris Christie is now doing that too, right?

Speaker 8 We've had plenty of politicians in the Democratic Party who've been successful doing that.

Speaker 8 Barack Obama used to do that quite often, where he'd sort of just like laugh about the absurdity of politics or the absurdity of his opponents, right? That's what Chris Christie is doing, right?

Speaker 11 I mean, Chris Christie is full of shit.

Speaker 11 I think he legitimately hates Donald Trump, but I also think if at the end of this election, Donald Trump invited him back into the cabinet, he would go back because he's made this flip like 12 times now.

Speaker 11 But he is a very,

Speaker 11 I'm not going to place a lot of bet on the rigid, straightforward moral compass of Chris Christie, but he does communicate with authenticity.

Speaker 11 Like he does sound like he, he speaks like a human with strength. And that was why he was the first choice of many Republicans to be their nominee in 2012.

Speaker 11 And he missed his moment to at least would have given Obama a better,

Speaker 11 a tougher shot than Romney did. But it's like I said, it's great.

Speaker 11 I will take him on there. I reverse my position where I've been attacking you in private and in public for being willing to give to Chris Christie to get him on the debate stage.
I'm okay with that.

Speaker 11 I think it's good for the world. I want to see it, but that's where I stand.

Speaker 8 I just, I just want to be clear here. I think Chris Christie would be a horrible president with terrible positions on a whole bunch of issues.

Speaker 8 If there was a Supreme Court opening, he'd probably put a justice in there that would fucking ruin the rest of democracy. It would be horrible.

Speaker 8 I don't think he has become a moderate. I think he is genuine in his hatred for Donald Trump, who almost killed him.

Speaker 8 And I think he was probably, he's genuine in his disgust of what happened on January 6th. I think you can hold all of those things in your head at the same time.
That's fair.

Speaker 11 That's fair. I'll give you that.
I give you and Chris Christie that.

Speaker 8 Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 8 it's not like he's a fucking hero for it. Again, it is personal in that Donald Trump almost killed him.

Speaker 8 You would expect someone who was almost killed by Donald Trump to spend a lot of time trying to exact revenge on him.

Speaker 8 Right? That's fair.

Speaker 8 I wouldn't be too happy if someone almost killed me. I probably wouldn't support them.

Speaker 8 I might not accept an invitation to go back into their classes.

Speaker 8 Just a thought. Mike Pence, I don't know if he's there.

Speaker 8 Again, someone who was almost killed by Donald Trump. Okay, that's all we have for today.
Thanks to Ben LeBolt for joining Pod Save America. Everyone have a great weekend and a great fourth.

Speaker 8 Oh, right. So instead of Pod Save America, on Tuesday, you will hear an episode of Terminally Online, our subscriber show that you can get.

Speaker 8 If you go to crooked.com slash friends, you can get all the Terminally Onlines you want. But we're going to put some part one episode in the PSA feed for Tuesday because we'll be off for the fourth.

Speaker 8 And then Dan and I will be back on Thursday.

Speaker 11 I would just say, as someone who was on that episode of Terminally Online, you cannot miss the wormhole that Jon Favreau crawled into

Speaker 11 on the internet this week. It is wild.

Speaker 8 It's dark. It's dark.

Speaker 8 All right. Bye, everyone.

Speaker 11 Bye, everyone.

Speaker 8 Pod Save America is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez.
Our producers are Andy Gardner-Bernstein and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Speaker 8 Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis.

Speaker 8 Thanks to Hallie Kiefer, Madeline Herringer, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support.

Speaker 8 And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Mia Kelman, Ben Hefcoat, and David Toles.

Speaker 8 Subscribe to Pod Save America on YouTube to catch full episodes, exclusive content, and other community events. Find us at youtube.com/slash at PodSave America.

Speaker 19 Hey, weirdos!

Speaker 20 I'm Elena, and I'm Ash, and we are the hosts of Morbid Podcast.

Speaker 19 Each week, we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 20 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

Speaker 19 It's smart, it's spooky, and it's just the right amount of weird.

Speaker 20 Two new episodes drop every week, and there's even a bonus once a month.

Speaker 19 Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 8 Yay! Woo!

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Speaker 23 Sign up for Greenlight today at greenlight.com slash podcast.