Roe vs Republicans

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Speaker 18 I'm Tommy Vitor.

Speaker 16 On today's show, the Republican presidential candidates and Joe Biden are battling with each other over abortion a year after the Dobbs decision.

Speaker 16 The president road tests a new economic message and gets advice about his age from Hollywood. Texas Congressman Colin Allred stops by to talk about his Senate race against Ted Cruz.

Speaker 16 And we take a look at some feuds where it's tough to pick a side in a game we're calling Billion Dollar Baby.

Speaker 16 But first,

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Let's get to the news.

Speaker 16 One year after the Supreme Court ruled that there is no constitutional right to an abortion, the Republican presidential candidates took a victory lap at a gathering of evangelical voters in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 16 over the weekend.

Speaker 16 Donald Trump, the twice-divorced frontrunner who's been indicted for paying hush money to a porn star, told the crowd that, quote, no president has ever fought for Christians as hard as I have.

Speaker 16 And, quote, I'm being indicted for you. Just like Jesus.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 16 He also bragged about appointing the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, while while opponents like Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence

Speaker 16 sort of kind of criticized Trump for not yet supporting stricter abortion bans. Let's listen.

Speaker 19 Exactly one year ago today, those justices were the pivotal votes in the Supreme Court's landmark decision ending the constitutional atrocity known as Roe v. Wade.

Speaker 19 But I got it done and nobody thought it was even a possibility. But I'm proud to be the most pro-life president in American history.

Speaker 20 We have also delivered in Florida on promoting a culture of life. And that means signing the Heartbeat Bill into law that protects unborn children when there's a detectable heartbeat.

Speaker 18 It was the right thing to do.

Speaker 20 Don't let anyone tell you it wasn't.

Speaker 17 Every Republican candidate for president should support a ban on abortion before 15 weeks as a minimum nationwide standard.

Speaker 16 Now, of course, Trump has refused to say whether he would support that 15-week ban, and he has also criticized DeSantis' six-week abortion ban in Florida, which is what DeSantis was obliquely referring to when he said, don't let anyone tell you it wasn't the right thing to do.

Speaker 16 So, now that it's been a year since Dobbs, what do you guys think about the effect that decision has had on voters' belief about abortion and how that compares with where Republican voters are right now.

Speaker 16 Tommy?

Speaker 18 It seems to have drastically increased support for abortion rights in this country. There was a USA Today Suffolk poll that found by almost four to one, so 23% to 6%,

Speaker 18 those whose views on abortion have changed in the past year said they've become more supportive of legal abortion, not less supportive, including among independent women, a critical swing group.

Speaker 18 They became more supportive by 28% to 5%.

Speaker 18 So pretty big swing.

Speaker 16 Yeah. I mean, this is what, look, polls are polls.
They're all over the place. This is one issue where, like, you know, a lot of

Speaker 16 outlets did something about this for the one-year anniversary of Dobbs. Like, every single poll says the same thing or it's moved in the same general direction.

Speaker 16 The New York Times had a nice roundup of all of them. For the first time, a majority of Americans say abortion is morally acceptable.
Most now believe abortion laws are too strict.

Speaker 16 They are significantly more likely to identify in the language of polls as pro-choice over pro-life. And this is for the first time in two decades.

Speaker 16 Also big jumps in support for legalized abortion among Republican men, black Protestants, Hispanic Catholics, three groups that were not very supportive of abortion before Dobbs.

Speaker 16 So it's pretty, it's a pretty big change.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I mean, Mike Pence

Speaker 17 is at least voicing the position that has been held, whether out loud or not, by Republicans for a very long time. The support for national ban isn't just unpopular in the country.

Speaker 17 The country supports abortion rights. It's unpopular among Republicans.
So two to one in that same poll that Tommy mentioned, it was like 58 to 30

Speaker 16 oppose overturning Roe.

Speaker 17 80 to 14 percent oppose a national ban, which means a sizable portion of people who are anti-abortion or say they're anti-abortion still oppose the national ban. Not just Democrats.

Speaker 17 83% of Independents and 65% of Republicans oppose

Speaker 16 a national ban.

Speaker 18 Yeah. The other thing that's interesting, I think historically, I think the narrative has been that Republicans are really motivated by the abortion issue more so than Democrats.

Speaker 18 That is completely flipped. The NBC poll found that 87% of Democratic voters strongly disapprove of Rose overturn versus 52% of Republicans who strongly approve.

Speaker 18 So it's a 35-point gap in terms of the intensity of feeling about the change.

Speaker 16 And in terms of Ron DeSantis' six-week abortion ban,

Speaker 16 18% support. Terrible.
That's it. 18%.

Speaker 16 And I mean, the only thing I'll say, you know, just there are still, and one of the polling, the polling director, Gallup, said this, there still aren't a lot of all or nothing people.

Speaker 16 So if you ask people, you know, do you want no restrictions on abortion whatsoever? That is still, I think it's like 25% quarter right now.

Speaker 16 Now, look, I also think that has to do with people not really knowing exactly what happens or why people get abortions very late in the pregnancy, which is usually because there is a fetal abnormality or the health of the mother or, you know, know, various other reasons.

Speaker 16 So it's like these do not happen all the time. But every other number, every other number shows a country that is rejecting intensely the abortion bans that have been put in place in stops.

Speaker 17 And, you know, I do think there's also like a little bit of a subtlety in terms of what this does inside of Republican politics because

Speaker 17 you hear the enthusiasm inside of that crowd. And these are people that are going to get behind candidates early.
These are people that knock on doors.

Speaker 17 So I think there's a little bit of that dynamic at play. But on the other hand, I I also wonder what this does to the electability argument that someone like Ron DeSantis is going to have to make.

Speaker 17 It's gone.

Speaker 16 Annihilates it. Gone.

Speaker 16 Well, do you guys see any evidence that hitting Trump from the right on abortion,

Speaker 16 like, you know, DeSantis and

Speaker 16 Pence are sort of kind of doing,

Speaker 16 might peel off enough Trump voters to make a difference in the primary for them? Forget about the general.

Speaker 18 Not yet. I mean, DeSantis is currently dropping like a rock in most of these national polls, so it's not really showing up for him.

Speaker 16 Rolling down like a rock.

Speaker 18 Rolling down like a rock, picking up speed down like a rock. Pence is not exactly popping.

Speaker 18 I mean, DeSantis is basically running his entire campaign to the right of Trump on all sort of culture war issues to the extent that he thinks he can, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything for him.

Speaker 17 Yeah,

Speaker 17 I think the question is, like, how salient is this inside of Republican politics right now, the difference between a bunch of candidates who all completely agree with appointing right-wing judges who will continue to

Speaker 17 support not having national abortion rights versus what level of ban

Speaker 17 at the national level they're going to get behind like it's just not clear you have you have trump refusing to do it thinkie haley gave a whole speech on abortion refused to take a position on a national ban and then then when she's asked about it uh she dodges the question i mean the the strategy would be take these right-wing positions on abortion and make a hard play in iowa for the evangelical voters there but DeSantis doesn't seem to be doing that effectively and it doesn't seem to be working.

Speaker 16 At least not so far. I'll go as far to say that, you know, it doesn't seem to have a lot of salience in the Republican primary issues.
That's fair.

Speaker 16 It feels like the big issue that is going to be predictive of how you vote in the Republican primary is what you think about Donald Trump, right? And it was interesting.

Speaker 16 Ralph Reed, who runs the conference that they all went to in D.C. Terrible person.

Speaker 16 Yeah, longtime like evangelical Christian activist in Republican politics. He sat down with Politicos Ryan Liz a few weeks ago, and Liz asked him, like, what's the deal with Trump, right?

Speaker 16 Like, twice divorced, hush money to a porn star, clearly not a natural ally of the evangelical community.

Speaker 16 And he said, Trump knew that evangelicals helped him win the nomination, and he felt like he had a debt to repay, and he repaid it. And that mattered.
And that matters now.

Speaker 16 And all these other guys, he's like, they're great people, and they're probably like, you know, closer, more closely aligned to right-wing Christian values. But like, Trump won and Trump delivered.

Speaker 16 So that's all I've ever said.

Speaker 17 Just also, like, you sort of step back from this, what would any of these people do as president? They would nominate anti-choice judges and they would sign whatever Republican Congress passed.

Speaker 17 They would all sign a national abortion law. We'll talk about this during the Biden section, but the end result of any of them will look very similar.

Speaker 16 So Politico has a story about vulnerable House Republicans in California and New York and a lot of those Biden districts who are now saying they aren't afraid of Democratic attacks on abortion in 24, so long as they support exceptions for rape, incest, life and health of the mother, and or first trimester abortions, which a lot of them do.

Speaker 16 What do you think about that? What do you think about their

Speaker 16 views on?

Speaker 17 I found this all like, it's a bunch of people confusing like strategy for geography.

Speaker 17 You know, they're acting as though they're dancing on the head of the pin on this issue to try to create some kind of distance from national Republicans made any difference.

Speaker 17 One thing we did see is that voters in states where electing Republicans might lead to a ban in that state, the issue was more salient.

Speaker 17 So it is true that the issue was more salient in, say, a state like Pennsylvania than it was in a state like New York or California.

Speaker 17 Does that mean the reason some of these Republicans hung on is because they didn't take as extreme a position as, say, a Mike Pence? I don't think we know that.

Speaker 17 I think the question for us is less, how do we

Speaker 17 tar them as looking like other Republicans? I think there's some truth to the argument that that didn't necessarily work as well. It's more how do we make,

Speaker 17 how as we head into 2024, when a Republican Congress would meet a national abortion ban, how do we make that feel real and pressing and central to the argument we make?

Speaker 17 And then it won't matter what some Republican who is not as far to the right on the issue as MTG says.

Speaker 18 I forget what the name of the Republican, the story, the political story quoted some

Speaker 18 New York representative bragging about fighting off these attacks in 2022. The Democratic Party was a mess in New York in 2022.
If you think it's me the same electorate in 2024, you're an idiot.

Speaker 18 I don't think you really believe that. You're just trying to posturate the cameras here.

Speaker 18 Maybe they could create a position that included a bunch of exceptions on paper that, you know, would look good on a Gallup poll.

Speaker 18 But I would just, if I was running against these people, I'd say, if you support Trump, you support his judges, you made this outcome happen. You own this.
You own this.

Speaker 16 Of course, you do. I totally agree with that.

Speaker 16 I think that if you're a Republican who supports exceptions and first-term abortion or whatever, I could see you squeaking through if you really hit that message hard.

Speaker 16 Where I don't think, I think that if you tag these Republicans, though, as supporting Republican leaders and Republican presidential candidates who are much more extreme, then you're going to have a much tougher time.

Speaker 16 And also like these people have all taken votes that are, that are bad votes, anti-abortion votes, and you can hold those up too.

Speaker 16 So it's like, yeah, if you're a brand new candidate who hasn't governed yet and you want to have some like mealy-mouthed

Speaker 16 middle-of-the-road position, yeah, maybe you can squeak through. But like at some point, someone's going to say, so do you support Donald Trump? Do you support Ron DeSantis, right? Yeah.

Speaker 16 Or do you support what Kevin McCarthy's doing and Mitch McConnell's doing? And it's not going to work.

Speaker 17 And also, if it's a referendum on

Speaker 17 electing a Republican House means they will attempt to

Speaker 17 do a national ban, electing a Democratic House means codifying Roe.

Speaker 17 Getting these people on the record squirrely and afraid to come out either for a national ban or against it, while certainly refusing to say they'd support codifying Roe is, I think, you know, that's what we have to do.

Speaker 16 Before we move on, we should say that before we even get to 2024, there are a couple of big fights over abortion that we should all pay attention to this year.

Speaker 16 On August 8th, in Ohio, Republicans put a measure on the ballot that would raise the threshold to pass constitutional amendments from 50 to 60 percent.

Speaker 16 They're hoping that they can defeat an amendment in the fall that would guarantee the right to an abortion.

Speaker 16 And then in Virginia, Glenn Young is trying to pass a statewide ban unless Democrats hold their four-seat majority in the state Senate. That'll be November election.
So go to votesaveamerica.com.

Speaker 16 We'll have ways for you to help both in the Ohio ballot initiative elections, plural, and then in Virginia in the fall. Sorry about Joe Biden.
It's got quite a bit on his plate right now.

Speaker 16 President spoke to Vladimir Zelensky on Sunday about the Wagner rebellion in Russia. He'll deliver a major speech in Chicago on Wednesday about Bidenomics.

Speaker 16 And he's signaling that he intends to campaign on abortion rights in the next election. President and vice president held events to mark the Dobbs anniversary over the weekend.

Speaker 16 Here's what Biden had to say.

Speaker 19 I know I'm 198 years old,

Speaker 19 but all kidnapped,

Speaker 19 think about that. I never ever thought

Speaker 19 I'd be signing an executive order protecting the right to contraception.

Speaker 19 But the only sure way to protect a woman's health and rights is for Congress to pass a law.

Speaker 19 As I said before,

Speaker 19 the court got Roe right 50 years ago, and I believe Congress should restore the protections of Roe v. Wade once and for all.

Speaker 19 But we need your help. So I'm asking, are you with us? You're going to get this done?

Speaker 16 Just as an aside, I do like that every time he jokes about his age, he picks a new big number. That's great.
It's funny. It's great.
It's a great joke.

Speaker 17 Works every time.

Speaker 16 What do you guys think is the best way for Biden and Democrats to make abortion matter as much in 24 as it did in 2022? Like,

Speaker 16 what's the right message here?

Speaker 18 I would lean hard into the consequences of what the Republicans have already done and how the party, as we discussed earlier, how the party is pushing them to go further and make it part of a broader narrative about how extreme the Republican Party is, you know, the extreme MAGA GOP stuff that Biden is already doing.

Speaker 18 You know, the other helpful thing for Democrats in making this argument is everyone knows this is happening. You know, this is not an issue that some people are paying attention to.

Speaker 18 It's like 92% of the country in polls know this is happening, and it's causing a cultural backlash. I remember last year, the CEO of Barstool Sports came out and said how Roe v.

Speaker 18 Wade is a litmus test for him and how it went against the Republican rhetoric on limited government.

Speaker 18 Like, this is an issue that can splinter the Republican Party because I think there's some Trump fans even that like the version of him that's like the rich guy on the apprentice and the kind of playboy, you know, like that image of him.

Speaker 18 They're not, they didn't buy into a party that has this like moral, right-wing, crusading, Mike Pence, invasive, scolding, awful strand of the GOP.

Speaker 18 And so I would just talk about the consequences, push this as hard as we can, make this a part of every story and make it part of this broader extremism narrative.

Speaker 17 Aaron Ross Powell, I think Mike Pence coming out there and saying every Republican needs to come out for a 15-week ban is going to force a lot of them to either say they agree or avoid the question, which is just a way of saying that they're open to it and would sign it.

Speaker 17 I think we just be crystal clear about this. If Republicans win the Congress, they will try to pass a national abortion ban.

Speaker 17 Every single Republican that has a chance of becoming president will sign one.

Speaker 17 So the question is, do you want a national abortion ban or do you want to elect people who will fight to protect abortion rights and a whole bunch of other freedoms that are currently at stake in a court that may come for contraception next, may come for gay rights next, may come for a whole host of other

Speaker 17 freedoms next.

Speaker 17 And I think that that sort of we're going to have a Congress that protects freedom or we're going to have a bunch of busybodies that tell you how to live and what you can teach and what you can read and what your doctors can do.

Speaker 16 And, you know, there are Republican candidates like Nikki Haley who are going to try to weasel out of this, already trying to weasel out of this by saying, like, well, really, you can't pass the national abortion ban unless there's 60 votes in the Senate.

Speaker 16 So it's very unlikely.

Speaker 16 But all we need to say is like, if Republicans get enough power, they will pass the national abortion ban. That's all you need to know.

Speaker 16 If they get the votes, they'll do it.

Speaker 17 I don't think we need to explain the filibuster to people.

Speaker 16 I think we've done enough of that.

Speaker 16 No, no more of that.

Speaker 18 And then DeSantis, I'm sure, will attack everyone else on the debate stage with him for not coming out in support of a heartbeat bill, which is a six-week abortion ban.

Speaker 18 So he's going to push them to be more extreme and he's going to attack them from the right over and over again. I don't think it'll work for him, but I think it'll harm the party.

Speaker 16 I think your point about consequences and talking more about the consequences is very important.

Speaker 18 The stories are gut-wrenching.

Speaker 16 They're gut-wrenching. And it's also, you know, as this is talked about in politics and in the media, it becomes very,

Speaker 16 there's some antiseptic language used. People are talking about weeks and policies and exceptions and all this kind of stuff.
And it's like, no, you know,

Speaker 16 Republicans supported a decision that forced a 10-year-old rape victim to cross state lines to get an abortion, force women to give birth to babies that their doctors knew would suffer and die right after birth, and force women to give birth who were on the brink of death.

Speaker 18 Or essentially force them to miscarry before they'd give them a treatment, like nearly kill them.

Speaker 16 And like, the other thing to your point about like everyone knows what's going on, like

Speaker 16 more and more people have stories about people that they that they know who went through this and not just

Speaker 16 actually mostly not Democrats in blue states, mostly people who are living in states that have implemented restrictions.

Speaker 17 It's remarkable just how much local news coverage, just local news coverage there is about all these different experiences that people are having that are making it real for people in a way that just goes far beyond anything like a political debate can do.

Speaker 17 It's more akin to what happened, happened, I think, with the quick shift on gay rights, which is just more people started coming out, people started to know gay people, it became unassailable.

Speaker 17 You can convince someone to go from being anti-gay to pro-gay. You can't make them go the other round.

Speaker 17 And there are people out there that have

Speaker 17 that

Speaker 17 in the abstract would have told a pollster that they were against abortion access, but they start hearing these stories, they start seeing it in their own lives, and all of a sudden you see the numbers moving.

Speaker 16 I mean, you can imagine an ad, not hard to make, where you have people who've been through through some of this tell these stories and then you have Donald Trump saying they never thought I could do it but I did it I overturned the constitutional atrocity of Roe v.

Speaker 16 Wade I put the justice there all he's doing is bragging and bragging and bragging about it and you just have that voice running in the background as you have all these stories and I just and as we get closer to I think just

Speaker 17 the reality of I do think even now You see that the sort of the same people that said it was hysterics to say that Roe v.

Speaker 17 Wade was about to be overturned are now saying it's hysterics to say that a national abortion ban is possible. It is absolutely possible.
And we need to really start driving that home for people.

Speaker 17 If Republicans, the Senate map is fucking terrible. Republicans could win the House.
They can win the White House. They will pass a national abortion ban.

Speaker 16 Yeah. And now, you know, we were talking about the percentage of people who opposed a nationwide ban, which is like 80%.

Speaker 16 53% want a federal law ensuring access to abortion. Biden is promising to do that.

Speaker 16 Considering the current Senate map, which is not great, do you have any concern that Biden's over-promising when he talks about codifying Roe?

Speaker 17 I mean, he doesn't describe it as we will do.

Speaker 17 He describes it as if we win, we will do it. That's something we need to do.
I don't think there's anything wrong with laying out the stakes.

Speaker 17 If enough people come out

Speaker 17 and make this an issue, we can do it. If they don't, we can't.

Speaker 18 Nap is tough. Best pickup chances are Florida and Texas for Democrats.
It's tough.

Speaker 16 So here's what we'd need to do. We need to win all of the slightly easier Senate races in Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.

Speaker 16 Not states where you usually put easier Senate races next to the

Speaker 16 slightly right now. Democrats probably favored in those states slightly.
Then we'd need to win Ohio. Sherrod would need to win.
And Tester would need to win.

Speaker 16 Manchina doesn't really matter because if he loses or he stays, he's still going to be a pain in the ass about this, right? But you wouldn't need that.

Speaker 16 You just need Ohio and Montana, but you'd need to win both. And then we'd need Gallego to win in Arizona.

Speaker 16 Then you would have have possibly 51 Senate Democrats or 51 votes because you'd have Harris breaking the tie to get rid of the filibuster to codify abortion rights. And then we'd also need the House.

Speaker 16 So we can do it. It's not

Speaker 16 impossible to do that. Well, I think that's like how like you'd also then need to make sure all of the Democrats would be willing to get rid of the filibuster.

Speaker 16 But I do think at that point, if there are some who are a little nervous about it, would they want to be the one to stand up and say, no, I'm blocking this? Like Tester, who just won six years?

Speaker 16 I don't know.

Speaker 16 I think then you'd have a good chance.

Speaker 17 We just went through the first midterm elections we've had since the overturning of Roe, and we saw the way that it already scrambled some of our expectations in politics.

Speaker 17 So I think we have to fight for it.

Speaker 16 All right. So the White House released a memo this morning on Bidenomics, where they argue that the president's economic policies are both working and supported by most Americans.

Speaker 16 What's your take on the memo, the strategy,

Speaker 16 the name Bidenomics?

Speaker 17 I'm into Bidenomics. I like the name.
I kind of like it too. I really like it.

Speaker 17 It reminds me of when we just embraced calling it Obamacare, and then as Obamacare became more free economics.

Speaker 17 What I was going to say is only that you read the memo that the White House put out, kind of walking through all the policies, and it is just sort of a, you know,

Speaker 17 it's a strategy. It's a restatement of their policies into a kind of coherent message.
But it's just a reminder, too, and seeing them all laid out.

Speaker 17 You're like, we spend so much time in the swirl of culture wars and the latest bit of like right-wing bullshit and Trump going off and all the nonsense and the noise we deal with day to day.

Speaker 17 And then you read the memo walking through the policies, like, oh, that's right. That's why this world exists.
Democratic economic policies are incredibly popular.

Speaker 17 Republican economic policies are incredibly unpopular.

Speaker 16 It's also a memo that has just like so much language that we used to put in speeches all the time.

Speaker 17 Yeah, all the time. All the time.

Speaker 17 The middle up and the center out, the top through and the bottom forward.

Speaker 16 This investment spurred private investment to the tune of a lot of money.

Speaker 16 I like that they are framing their economic message as a strategy to follow instead of just a record to brag about.

Speaker 16 Because I think they are going to have, and you can see both of these at tension in the memo a little bit because it does go on and on a little bit about the accomplishments, which you can tell.

Speaker 16 There's obviously a constituency in that White House, like there wasn't our White House, like there isn't every White House who's like, no, no, no, we just got to talk about the accomplishments more.

Speaker 16 We got to talk about the accomplishments more. And it's fine.

Speaker 16 Go for it. Talk about the accomplishments.
But I think you're going to have more luck convincing people that the Biden approach to the economy is better than Republicans than you will.

Speaker 16 Biden deserves more credit for the economy than he's gotten.

Speaker 18 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, I mean, they have a genuinely good case to make, I think, on the merits.

Speaker 18 When you total up the COVID stimulus, the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, there are tons of examples of things happening right now because of things Joe Biden signed into law.

Speaker 18 There's roads and bridges. A couple of days ago, the government made a $9.2 billion loan to Ford, I believe, to begin construction of three battery factories for electric vehicles.
Well, cars.

Speaker 18 They're using the CHIPS Act to create jobs in the U.S.

Speaker 18 And they're forcing companies who get that funding to do things like guarantee high-quality childcare for workers who construct the plant or work at the plant.

Speaker 18 So they're like really leveraging all these different ways. The problem is just it takes a while to get the money flowing.

Speaker 18 Even when you get the money flowing, you have to convince people that this was because something Joe Biden did and not just something happening in the world or, you know, maybe they just don't read the news about it.

Speaker 18 So it'll take some time, but I'm glad they're pushing on it. Economics is fun to say.

Speaker 16 Look, at the end of the day, this is going to come down to sort of a simple argument that Biden and Democrats are going to have to make on the campaign trail, which is just like, what do you want your government doing?

Speaker 16 Do you want it to spend time and money and policies on reducing the cost of health care, prescription drugs, building roads, reducing the cost of education?

Speaker 16 Or do you want to spend like $4 trillion on tax cuts for rich people? Because that's what the Republicans want to do. Or burn books.
Yeah.

Speaker 16 Here's the thing.

Speaker 17 On this side, we're going to try to build a train track. On this side, we're chasing Adam Schiff around with a fucking torch until we catch him.

Speaker 17 One thing I will also say is that I... Both are a good time.

Speaker 17 I also appreciate, too, like, I know you're right about sort of, you know, you feel the tension and the desire to like, we have to tat our accomplishments. We have to tat our accomplishments.

Speaker 17 I appreciate that there was only a couple places, maybe only really one in that whole memo where they did what we used to feel like we had to do all the time, which is like, we know there's a lot left to do.

Speaker 17 We know there's more work to be done.

Speaker 17 It was just on inflation, where clearly they must see a lot of sort of headwinds in the polling, that they made sure there's a, like, there's more work to be done here.

Speaker 17 We're not all the way there, but we're seeing some improvement.

Speaker 18 And we are, the United States is doing better than a lot of other countries, if not all of them, when it comes to inflation.

Speaker 16 They do love that point, too.

Speaker 18 It's a global problem thanks to the war and a bunch of other challenges, supply chains.

Speaker 16 Blah, blah, blah. No, I get that.
I just think that voters are going to be like,

Speaker 16 I don't care that folks in the UK are paying more for their bread than I am. I'm still fucking annoyed.

Speaker 18 No, if you go to a supermarket and yell at a woman buying eggs, I'm like, there was a bird flu cull, like, it's not going to work for you.

Speaker 16 But again, if you just say,

Speaker 16 look, elections are a choice. You either get cheaper health care or you get tax cuts for rich people what do you want that's an easy one

Speaker 16 it's an easy one uh there's also a new nbc poll that has biden ahead of trump by 49 to 45 percent we like that uh though his approval rating is at 43 percent and 55 percent of voters say they have major concerns about biden having the necessary mental and physical health to serve another term what do you guys make of those seemingly contradictory numbers and were there any other parts of that poll that stood out to you yeah i don't think they're particularly contradictory because I think

Speaker 17 everyone's concerned

Speaker 17 about Biden's age, but they also don't like Donald Trump, and now they don't like Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 16 If they have bigger concerns about Trump's personality than Biden's age, right.

Speaker 17 The part that really stood out to me was actually not just how unpopular Ron DeSantis already is, but how unpopular and well-known he already is, right?

Speaker 17 He's at 30% to 46% disapproval to approval. That's three-quarters of the country that's already gotten to know him.
He's already nearly at 50% disapproval. That is really fucking bad.

Speaker 17 And it turns out becoming nationally known for picking fights with librarians and Disney is not the winning strategy to rally the country he might have otherwise have thought.

Speaker 16 Apparently, not even a winning strategy in your own Republican primary.

Speaker 16 So far, Trump has widened his lead in the primary in this poll, which I want to mention because last week I think there was some poll that Dan and I talked about where it did seem like Trump was slipping a bit.

Speaker 16 CNN. A CNN poll, right.
But in both polls, Ron DeSantis isn't gaining. Well, no.
Neither poll was he gaining.

Speaker 18 The good news for Ron is that in the expanded poll, it's 51% Trump, 22% DeSantis. The head-to-head, it's 60% Trump.
DeSantis at 36%. So he's just getting crushed.

Speaker 18 I mean, I found that poll depressing, but what I expected, but more than anything, bad news for DeSantis.

Speaker 18 Although half the Republican primary wants Trump to be the leader of the party going forward, half of them want new options. There's an opening there for somebody to make a play.

Speaker 18 DeSantis is just flailing at it.

Speaker 17 I was at Disney with my family the other week, and I don't know if this is a story that's real or not.

Speaker 17 I hope it is real, that no one ever dies at Disney World because they continue to resuscitate until you're off the grounds so that no one ever, ever dies in Disney World.

Speaker 17 I was just thinking about that and that. What if you choke? Disney has defeated death itself.
You think they're going to lose to Ron DeSantis?

Speaker 17 Mickey Mouse?

Speaker 16 Are you?

Speaker 17 I was at this,

Speaker 17 they do these light shows and things. People People were calling for Mickey to come out like they wanted to kill him.
They were like, bring me Mickey.

Speaker 16 Ron's not going to beat that.

Speaker 17 You can't beat that.

Speaker 16 That's in our blood.

Speaker 16 You can't beat that.

Speaker 17 That's what I wanted to say about that.

Speaker 16 Run, Mickey, run. Yeah.
I was, look, a four-point Biden lead where he's at 49%. I almost didn't believe it.
I didn't believe it.

Speaker 17 Honestly, it was better than I thought.

Speaker 16 I don't want to even talk about it.

Speaker 16 All I'll say about that is I never thought I would be excited about just a four-point lead over Donald Trump, but now that we've lived through 2016 and 2020, I'm like, yeah, that's true.

Speaker 16 That'd be amazing.

Speaker 17 Well, it's also like, it's not like,

Speaker 17 do people need to get to know their options? Joe Biden versus Donald Trump is mostly

Speaker 17 over-determined thing. We went through that completely.

Speaker 18 Well,

Speaker 16 and on that note, the other part of this poll that stood out at me that got me a little nervous was, so

Speaker 16 they asked us about support for a third-party candidate. Would you be open to a third-party candidate? And then they compared it to that same question that they've asked in the last four elections.

Speaker 16 So support for a third-party option is lower than it was in 2016. That's the good news, but pretty much much higher than it was in 2012 when Obama was running for re-election.

Speaker 16 So it's somewhere in the middle. It's not quite as worrisome right now as 2016 was when

Speaker 16 it's determinative.

Speaker 18 Who's going to say that you wouldn't consider it?

Speaker 17 Like, would you consider a third-party candidate?

Speaker 18 What if a really great one emerged? Sure, I'd consider it.

Speaker 16 Yeah, you know why? So then they broke it down into like definitely and probably, and the definitely is I was looking at, because probably you're right. Probably is just like, yeah, probably.

Speaker 18 Like, I would definitely consider it.

Speaker 16 Not in this cycle, but

Speaker 17 I think that's true.

Speaker 16 I also just think

Speaker 17 a country choosing between Obama and Mitt Romney and a country choosing between Biden and Trump is just in a different mood. You know, like, like people have a lot of concerns about Biden's age.

Speaker 17 Those concerns did not exist for Obama. People have a lot of concerns about Donald Trump as a human being.
Those concerns didn't exist for Mitt Romney.

Speaker 17 It's a different context.

Speaker 16 So speaking of Biden's age, the Wall Street Journal just ran an interview with George Clooney where he talks about how Hollywood studio exec Jeffrey Katzenberg has been advising Biden to, quote, own his age and turn it into an asset, citing 80-year-olds Harrison Ford and Mick Jagger as examples for Biden to emulate.

Speaker 16 What a sentence.

Speaker 16 Didn't this guy be saying that today? You guys think that's good advice? I don't even know what the advice really is. I guess to own his age?

Speaker 18 I think own your age, laugh about it, make jokes like the one we heard earlier. That's great advice, but it has to be coupled with great management of the country and things generally going well.

Speaker 18 The part in that story that made me flinch was the

Speaker 18 like Democrats need to come to Hollywood for narrative and storytelling help.

Speaker 18 If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say that, I would be as rich as George Clooney post-tequila sale because it's this cliche thing you always hear out here.

Speaker 18 But again, like, yes, of course, there's lots of great screenwriters in L.A., but you get to write the movie and then shoot what's on the page, right? Joe Biden, like,

Speaker 18 deals with the things happening in reality.

Speaker 16 It's a different way. I love that.
That's why we came here. That's why we do the show here.
We look for our narratives here in L.A., and then we come on the pod and give our takes.

Speaker 17 The quote is always, I always just say, look, everybody keeps coming to Hollywood for cash, and they don't come to us for the one thing we do better than anybody, which is tell stories.

Speaker 17 We were joking about that like two days ago.

Speaker 16 That is such an old fucking joke. I will also say, I love George Clooney and he's actually one of the more politically astute actors in Hollywood for sure.

Speaker 16 But it's just funny that none of them can help themselves. No, I know.

Speaker 17 It's also like the other thing too is it's like Katzenberg doesn't tell stories. He makes Quibi.
Writers and directors tell stories.

Speaker 17 Katzenberg gives notes. And I'm sure maybe they're good, but he still gives notes.

Speaker 16 But back to Biden. Kind of what this article is.

Speaker 16 Right, I guess that's true.

Speaker 17 He wants to give Biden notes.

Speaker 16 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 17 He wants to give him known.

Speaker 16 I think

Speaker 16 what Biden can control is, in terms of his age and perceptions of his age, he's the age that he is. He can't control that, but he can joke about it.

Speaker 16 He can show some fight with Republicans like he did during the State of the Union. And he can connect with people, which he does very, very well in like small settings, right?

Speaker 16 When he meets someone on a rope line and remembers them and remembers their family, like he's very, very good at that.

Speaker 16 And I think if he keeps those three things in mind, that to me is better than like getting in your head that, because they think I'm old, I have to like be sharp or I can't stop, you know, like I can't gaff, right?

Speaker 16 Sometimes I don't put him out because they're worried he's going to get, like, I wouldn't, I would rather him figure out the jokes, figure out the fight with Republicans, and then figure out how to connect with you.

Speaker 17 And then just protect that painting of him as a young man in the White House attic at all costs.

Speaker 18 And then tighten up Act Three.

Speaker 16 And then just write out that Putin.

Speaker 17 Biden's going to trip over

Speaker 17 an extension cord and fall down at Catsburg's beer like, we shouldn't use that tape.

Speaker 16 We have something better where he doesn't get down for sure.

Speaker 17 Do you use one where he doesn't fall down?

Speaker 16 All right, let's do a few quick hits on the latest headlines. Tommy and Ben recorded an excellent bonus episode of Pod Save the World over the weekend on the Wagner Rebellion in Russia.

Speaker 16 You should check it out if you haven't. And if you want to know what the hell is going on there, it's great.

Speaker 16 Progozhin, leader of the Wagner group, said Monday that he never actually meant to overthrow the government.

Speaker 16 He just wanted to lodge a protest, which is, I guess, to lodge a protest, you get a bunch of troops together and you march on Moscow. It was a civil rights march.

Speaker 17 It's like I fell down and ate a pizza.

Speaker 16 Tommy, for people who haven't been paying close attention to what happened over the weekend, what should they know and where do things stand right now?

Speaker 18 So the gist is this guy, Yevgeny Progozhin, who's this Russian oligarch who.

Speaker 16 Thanks for saying his first name, Kyle. No problem.
No problem.

Speaker 18 He runs this private mercenary force called the Wagner Group.

Speaker 18 He has been in a fight with the Russian military for months now, and then he claimed that his guys got hit with a Russian airstrike, and then he went nuts, and he started marching his troops towards Moscow.

Speaker 18 He stood down after basically getting on the phone with with the president of Belarus, who's a Putin stooge and cutting this deal where Progozhin will now be exiled to Belarus.

Speaker 18 This idea that he was just protesting is very funny.

Speaker 18 It's kind of, I don't know, it's a tough sell when you march 25,000 guys towards Moscow and shoot down Russian military helicopters and planes on the way.

Speaker 18 It feels like a little more than just sort of a march. But right now, basically, Putin came out today.
He's very, very angry. He's trying to reassert control.

Speaker 18 Progozhin says, oh, I wasn't trying to undercut Putin, but clearly he was. The problem for Putin now, though, is Prokozhin underscut the entire rationale for the war.

Speaker 18 He said the Ministry of Defense was corrupt and that the war is based on lies and corruption. And then Putin looks like he lost control because he did.

Speaker 18 And now he has to keep on trying to be a dictator of a country where there's a lot of people who would like to take him out. So it's a very fraught moment.

Speaker 16 I'm no foreign policy expert, but Vladimir Putin doesn't seem like the kind of guy who will just let bygones be bygones.

Speaker 16 She's going to let him live in Belarus and just forget about him.

Speaker 18 I'm wondering if Brogozin's going to fall out of a very tall building in the near future. We'll see.

Speaker 17 I would not,

Speaker 17 if he offers to pour you tea, I would say

Speaker 17 that's a teacher.

Speaker 18 No.

Speaker 17 You drink from a different pot.

Speaker 18 Yeah, you bring your own tea.

Speaker 16 We got a few 2024 primary updates for you.

Speaker 16 Ron DeSantis is taking his deaf political talents to New Hampshire, where the most influential Republican women's group there released a statement attacking him for scheduling an event at the same time as their annual fundraising lunch.

Speaker 16 One New Hampshire Republican strategist called it, quote, the worst strategic move he has exhibited thus far, which is really saying something.

Speaker 16 I don't know, guys. I'm starting to think this Ron DeSantis thing might not work out.

Speaker 16 What do you guys think?

Speaker 17 Women be kneecapping Ron DeSantis' campaign?

Speaker 16 Republican luncheon.

Speaker 17 What do you think? Olivia, you think that's okay?

Speaker 16 Yeah, it's good. We'll leave it in.

Speaker 18 I love this story so much. I have no idea if it means DeSantis' campaign in New Hampshire is good or bad.
It just shows you how fucking entitled

Speaker 16 early state primary voters are.

Speaker 16 This group, especially activists. Voters are one thing.
The activists are the really entitled. I already said worse.
They attacked him. I'm not running for anything.

Speaker 16 It's the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women.

Speaker 18 They attacked DeSantis for holding a town hall meeting the same day as one of their events that featured Trump. Even though their event is sold out, it's an hour away, and it's at different times.

Speaker 17 So it seems like that's just a

Speaker 16 shot. Just a shot to take a shot at that.

Speaker 17 That's because he's so weak. That's great.

Speaker 16 It is funny, though. It's like you do not pick a fight with the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women.
I didn't even know that group existed until I read this story today.

Speaker 18 It seems just incredible.

Speaker 16 But there isn't, like, the larger point here, there isn't a single state or national poll that has shown Ron DeSantis making any progress at all.

Speaker 16 There is no fundraising metric, no endorsement metric, no nothing.

Speaker 16 You can't see a sign anywhere of Ron DeSantis making up any ground yet.

Speaker 18 That's the other fun thing about the story is DeSantis rolled out a bunch of state-elected endorsements and like four of them had already announced that they endorsed Trump.

Speaker 18 So then they got into a big fight. The DeSantis super PAC got in a fight with these state-elected officials.

Speaker 16 And it's like, what are you guys doing? That's awesome.

Speaker 17 I love it. It's also just like, it's a little bit of a, it's a, it's a virtuous circle from our point of view, which is that he's covered as an unpopular weirdo.

Speaker 17 And so all the stories that lend themselves to the narrative of an unpopular weirdo. And this is we're in Hollywood where we tell stories

Speaker 17 you know, you can't get away from it. There's reporters chasing Ronda Sanders around, waiting for to eat a hamburger weird.
And so eventually they're going to get it.

Speaker 18 You know, it's not good. Because he's weird.

Speaker 18 Freaks and geeks, too.

Speaker 16 Sure.

Speaker 18 I think that's a good show, though.

Speaker 16 I think about that. That's a bad show.
Here's a shocker. Rolling Stone looked at the federal election commission filings and found out that the super PAC supporting Robert F.
Kennedy Jr.

Speaker 16 was created by people who've also worked for Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos, and Herschel Walker. Great stuff.
Great stuff, huh?

Speaker 18 We got him.

Speaker 17 The fucking RFK Jr.

Speaker 16 Are we saying that this is not on the level? Is that what we're being told here?

Speaker 18 The treasurer of RFK Jr.'s PAC got paid $372,000 by Marjorie Taylor Greene and her entities in 2022.

Speaker 17 What a terrible fucking person. Yeah, you're a drinker.

Speaker 17 Just what a garbage human being.

Speaker 16 Well,

Speaker 16 you know.

Speaker 17 It doesn't help anything, but it's just what it is.

Speaker 16 Here's all you need to know about all of the, you know, tech bros and Elon Musk and all them who are telling you to give a look at RFK Jr.

Speaker 16 There are a bunch of MAGA grifters out there who are doing everything they can to get Democrats to support RFK Jr. And they're doing it publicly.

Speaker 18 That's all you need to know. Steve Bannon is doing this publicly.
Roger Stone praised him publicly.

Speaker 18 RFK Jr. went to one of those Reawaken America events that Mike Flynn runs around the country doing, like the craziest of the crazy things.
RFK reportedly interviewed for a job with Trump in 2017.

Speaker 18 He wanted to do something on vaccines.

Speaker 16 You see what Trump said today, too, about him? He's praising him. Yeah, Trump's like, he's a great man.
He's a great man.

Speaker 16 Okay.

Speaker 16 It's so frustrating.

Speaker 18 Did you see how swole RFK Jr. looked when he was lifting weights, shirtless, and jeans?

Speaker 16 I just didn't want to pretend I didn't see any of that.

Speaker 17 I also just love the idea of these states right there. Yeah, I know.
It's like, you know,

Speaker 17 there's the vaccines. They have

Speaker 17 lead in them from deep underground. Yeah, yeah, I'll take steroids from a failed actor with muscles in my neighborhood.

Speaker 16 Sure.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 16 So because there aren't enough Florida men in the Republican primary, the New York Times reports that 70-year-old Senator Rick Scott is considering running for president, though his office then responded by saying he's still running for re-election in the Senate.

Speaker 17 Not a denial.

Speaker 16 What do you think? Is a rich hospital executive who wants to privatize Medicare and Social Security just the candidate the Republican Party needs?

Speaker 17 A rich hospital executive connected to massive health care fraud.

Speaker 16 Who wants to privatize Social Security? Who ran the Senate Republican campaign arm in a year where they lost the Senate?

Speaker 17 Who has the message instincts of the villain from seven?

Speaker 18 Is this my camera?

Speaker 17 Rick, oh no. Don't listen to them.

Speaker 16 Oh, no. America needs you, buddy.
He knew it was his camera.

Speaker 18 Look, the way Mitch McConnell and these liberals disrespect one camera over there.

Speaker 16 It's insane.

Speaker 17 It's insane that Ron DeSantis would think, oh, my God, he's the brightest star in Florida. Look at the camera if you're going to be able to do it.

Speaker 16 I look at him.

Speaker 17 You're talking to Rick Scott. Don't look at this.

Speaker 17 There's a sky full of stars.

Speaker 16 Oh, and I think I see you, buddy.

Speaker 18 The next president of the United States.

Speaker 16 Come on. Rick Scott.

Speaker 16 Okay, well,

Speaker 16 we wish you the best, Rick Scott. We wish you the best.
Please run. All right, finally, two pieces of great news.

Speaker 16 You might remember that President Biden got quite a bit of criticism from the left for supposedly abandoning railroad workers after he signed legislation ending the strike that didn't include paid sick days because of Republicans in Congress.

Speaker 16 Well, last week, the Railroad Workers Union announced that its members at the largest freight carriers finally have paid sick days.

Speaker 16 And And the union specifically thanked the Biden administration for quietly pushing behind the scenes to make it happen. They thank them for playing the long game and never giving up.

Speaker 16 Any lessons from this story?

Speaker 17 That John keeps a list and he's checking it twice.

Speaker 16 But I would say two things. I'm not naming names.
I'll say two things. I'll tell you that.
I'll say two things about this because I don't want to give them any fucking

Speaker 17 points about this. I think that there was two kinds of criticism.
from the left that Joe Biden received when this when the original deal was made.

Speaker 17 One was, I am disappointed that this deal doesn't include paid sick leave. I hope the Biden administration continues to work on it.

Speaker 18 The deal being when Biden and Congress enacted legislation to block the strike.

Speaker 17 To block the strike, to get them back to work, or to prevent them from going on strike the first time. That was one kind of criticism.
Fine.

Speaker 17 There was another kind of criticism, which was, this is exactly what we can come to expect from Democrats who are corporate chills and evil, and this is corruption, and every kind of assumption of bad faith.

Speaker 16 And that's the money from the railroads. And every assumption of bad faith.

Speaker 17 Just some sign that like, you know, that Biden and Democrats are irretrievably corrupt and you can't trust anything they ever say. This is exactly what we always knew they were going to do.

Speaker 17 That kind of like throw the baby out with the bathwater stuff.

Speaker 17 And I just would say, like, moving forward, the people that are, I think, critical, but still believe that there can be work done are better to listen to than the people who use every instance like this to

Speaker 18 reinforce the same narrative.

Speaker 16 Yeah, same narrative. The work of government doesn't usually progress on the same timetable as Twitter

Speaker 16 is one lesson.

Speaker 16 I also think, to your point, Lovett, the Biden administration deserves the presumption of good faith. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be criticized when they make bad decisions.

Speaker 16 It doesn't mean that we shouldn't push them to make good decisions. But it means that we should start with the assumption that their intentions are good.

Speaker 16 And if they're not making the progress we expect, there might be other reasons, which by the way, like at the time, even the constructive criticism at the time, right?

Speaker 16 Congress sends Joe Biden a bill because there's a bunch of Republicans in Congress that stops the strike but doesn't give paid sick days.

Speaker 16 If Biden vetoes that legislation, he's not going to get the sick days. The strike's going to continue.

Speaker 16 Then there were people who are like, oh, he could just do executive action because this is the new thing. When something doesn't happen that we want, it's, oh, Biden should do an executive action.

Speaker 16 Well, now we have faced many executive actions that are being. currently challenged or have already been overturned by a right-wing judiciary.
Right.

Speaker 16 And so from the Biden administration's point of view, it's like, would I rather do an executive action that is probably going to get overturned by the judiciary?

Speaker 16 Or do I want to just keep pushing behind the scenes, try to negotiate, and get the sick days? And that's what they did. And it was the right move, right?

Speaker 16 And so I think, again, like, you can be critical, you can propose things, you can push them on stuff, but like, there are usually, if something's not getting done, more often than not, it's because there are constraints, political, legal, or otherwise, that either we don't know about or the Biden administration is just trying to work through and they're still trying to fight.

Speaker 18 Or government is just slow sometimes. Yeah.
And I wish it was faster too, but like you got to go to the outcome.

Speaker 17 I do agree with that too. It's like at this point too, like the Biden administration has earned the benefit of the doubt.

Speaker 17 They are, I think, far more progressive than even some of the most progressive people could have ever hoped that they would be. Now, does that mean they're perfect? No.

Speaker 17 Does it mean they fight every fight the way you'd want to? No.

Speaker 16 But. Yeah.
And I can, look, and I can tell this is coming with, you know, we're waiting for student loan relief decision from the Supreme Court.

Speaker 16 And there have already been proposals like, well, if they overturn this, then the Biden administration should just do another executive action. It's like, well,

Speaker 16 it's not going to work.

Speaker 16 It's not going to work. We need a new court or we need a majority in Congress to pass this legislation.
And that's what we should work for. Also, it's just one more annoying thing.

Speaker 16 It's about 100 times easier to find criticisms of Biden on the railroad workers thing than to find almost any story that. They just praised him for getting the deal.

Speaker 16 Just in preparing for this, I was like, oh, who wrote this up? It was on Twitter as the union put out a statement. and I don't know, almost no one wrote it up.

Speaker 16 Yeah. Typical.
All right, last but not least, when a big section of I-95 collapsed in Philadelphia on June 11th, experts predicted it would take months for the government to rebuild the highway.

Speaker 16 But thanks to the Biden administration, Governor Josh Shapiro, and a lot of union workers, it opened this weekend. What do you think? Is it time to bring back hashtag DemocratsDeliver?

Speaker 16 A couple points about this.

Speaker 17 One, Jews get shit done. That's all.
That's all I want to say that, okay? I don't know if I can say that in this country anymore.

Speaker 18 Depends on the audience. But two,

Speaker 17 we can build a highway in two weeks.

Speaker 17 In this state of California, it takes six months to get an environmental impact statement for a bike path. It's just going to be a lane.
They don't have to move anything.

Speaker 17 There's no digging. Just paint.

Speaker 17 So we can build things really quickly. So maybe we fucking should.
a highway in two weeks. Think about how long it takes.
LAX has been a pit.

Speaker 16 Oh my gosh

Speaker 16 for years. God is the worst.

Speaker 17 There's a pit in the courtyard of our office we can't seem to fill.

Speaker 16 We can go. I'm going to New York, and I was trying to...

Speaker 16 It was insane.

Speaker 17 Yeah. Every day they put up another window.

Speaker 16 What is happening with that?

Speaker 17 What's happening at LAX? Bring Josh Shapiro.

Speaker 17 Get Shapiro on that.

Speaker 17 Some kind of a czar.

Speaker 16 I don't care what it is.

Speaker 16 The Biden administration, though,

Speaker 16 whether it's the infrastructure bill, like Biden and Mitch Landrew, who's sort of overseeing the infrastructure spending, plus Shapiro. They were all at a press conference about this, touting this.

Speaker 16 And I'm like, you know what? This is good. This is good.
This is awesome. This is another one that's not going to get a ton of attention, but like that is.
In Philly, it will. In Philly, will.

Speaker 16 That's where it matters. That's actually an important statement.

Speaker 18 I don't think we should be covering that out here, but yes.

Speaker 16 It would be great. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Sure, we should.

Speaker 16 Sure, we should. We have problems of our own that we could be fixing.

Speaker 17 Gritty drove across, got Taco Bell, drove back.

Speaker 16 All right. When we come back, Tommy talks to the man who wants to finally get Ted Cruz out of the Senate, Texas Congressman Colin Allrid.

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Speaker 18 Colin Allred is a member of Congress and he's running for the U.S. Senate in Texas.

Speaker 16 Welcome to the show.

Speaker 18 Yeah, thanks for having me on. Thanks for being in L.A.

Speaker 18 You have the coolest path to Congress that I've heard of, which is via the NFL, which I want to get to later. But you are currently running against Ted Cruz, who I believe is a full-time podcaster.

Speaker 16 So he's one of your main competitors.

Speaker 18 You're a part-time senator.

Speaker 18 Does he show up still?

Speaker 16 I can't tell anymore.

Speaker 18 We're very excited. We're supporting you, obviously.
We're also big Betto Rourke fans here at Crooked Media. We threw our heart into that race in 2018.
He fell a little short.

Speaker 18 What do you think makes Texas different this time? What's different about your race?

Speaker 16 Well, we're going to build on what Beto did. I think what Betto showed is that Texas is a place where change is possible.
And

Speaker 16 the folks he got excited in 2018 was incredibly important. It's going to be important for this election.

Speaker 16 But I've never lost an election and I don't plan on starting now. And I have experience beating Republicans.
Back in 18, I ran against a 22-year incumbent Republican who had been unopposed in 2016.

Speaker 16 At this time,

Speaker 16 before that election, no one thought I was going to win that race. It was a big flip.
It was a big flip. And we ended up beating him by nearly seven points.

Speaker 16 So we know what we're doing. I think Texas is ready, but it's also true that Ted Cruz has shown that he's not serious about this job.

Speaker 16 As you said, he's a mostly full-time podcaster. He's podcasting three times a week.
I don't even do that. It's my full-time job.

Speaker 16 Honestly, just think about representing 30 million Texans in the United States Senate, all the responsibilities that come with that, and finding time to demagogue three times a week.

Speaker 16 Or when you're not doing that, finding ways to get onto Fox News every chance possible. But that's actually not the job.
The job is to pass legislation to help Texans, to help the country.

Speaker 16 We can't afford six more years of him in Texas, but also at the national level, I was there on January 6th, about 50 feet away from him when he was the senator who objected to the results in Arizona.

Speaker 16 I'm sitting there thinking, what does my home state senator know at all about what happened in the election in Arizona? And we know, of course, what happened that day.

Speaker 16 And we have to have a response to that. And I think we will.

Speaker 18 Were a lot of people kind of making their way over to you on January 6th, kind of introducing themselves for the first time?

Speaker 18 I feel like you could have, like, look, the QAnon shaman was not going to get past you and pass protection or anything else.

Speaker 16 I have to say,

Speaker 16 anything physical that comes up in the House Representatives, people look to me, but especially that day,

Speaker 16 you know, it's funny and it's not funny, right?

Speaker 16 I texted my wife, who was at home with our son, who was not yet two, and she was about seven months pregnant.

Speaker 16 And I sent her a text that I thought I'd never have to send in this job. You know, whatever happens, I love you.
Oh, my God. And I took off my jacket, which I've never done on the house House floor.

Speaker 16 It's against our rules to remove your suit jacket.

Speaker 16 And I stood up and I was ready to defend my colleagues who, as you said, were going to need me to do it from whatever came to that door.

Speaker 16 We had barricaded the door with furniture that we used to hold paper.

Speaker 16 It's the ceremonial doors that the president walks through when the sergeant-at-arms says, you know, Madam Speaker, the President of the United States, it's that door.

Speaker 16 That's where the banging was and the glass was being broken. And folks like Ted Cruz, who whipped up that mob,

Speaker 16 have to be held accountable electorally.

Speaker 16 And that's what our chance is in this election.

Speaker 18 Yeah, it's important to remember his role in this whole thing because, boy, there were a lot of enablers that helped Donald Trump. Is it true that your campaign headquarters will be in Cancun?

Speaker 16 No, although Ted Cruz thinks it's very funny that he jetted off to Cancun when 30 million Texans were freezing in the dark.

Speaker 18 He thinks he can laugh that off. I don't know how any politician laughs off a dereliction of duty that glaring and obvious.
That's right.

Speaker 16 Over 240 Texans died, and every Texan knows where they were when the power went out.

Speaker 16 And I was a congressman at the time, and I know how busy I was at that time. There was

Speaker 16 calls with FEMA, with state agencies, trying to direct resources, trying to find what we called warming centers. We're just basically places that had the power on where folks could come get warm.

Speaker 16 And to think that that was a good time to go on vacation is just a perfect just encapsulation of the way he sees the job. Yeah.

Speaker 18 So clearly you would do the job better. So if you get to the Senate, we keep reading these horrible stories about the Supreme Court.

Speaker 18 They're accepting private jet flights and all kinds of like goodies from these billionaires.

Speaker 18 And then we keep reading their horrible rulings on all kinds of issues that are stripping away people's rights, like abortion rights.

Speaker 18 Do you support any Supreme Court reforms, like term limits and things like that?

Speaker 16 Well, listen, you know, I actually represented Harlan Crowe for the last four years. He's a constituent of mine.
I know him. You've been to his museum?

Speaker 16 I've been to some properties of his. I don't think I've seen that.

Speaker 16 And I just think it's ridiculous what we're looking at right now in terms of this being the most unaccountable body really in our government.

Speaker 16 All of the lower courts have some system of ethics, some code of conduct, and they're self-policing. And so we have to change that.
I think that when it comes to the Supreme Court,

Speaker 16 the most important thing we can do is have 50 senators who will vote for Joe Biden's next nominees.

Speaker 16 Because as you know, we saw the last time Mitch McConnell was in charge of the United States Senate, how long, 11 months, he held open the seat that Merrick Garland was nominated for.

Speaker 16 And I think that'll happen again. And so that's why it's so important that we win this election, because it could determine who controls the Senate.
And we can.

Speaker 16 That's one of the things that folks have to really, I think, understand and get on board with. This is a very winnable race.
It's a tough race, but it's a winnable one, and we need your help.

Speaker 16 So if you're listening to this, go to colinallred.com and get involved.

Speaker 18 So it's been about a little over a year since the Supreme Court stripped away abortion rights by overturning Roe versus Wade. President Biden is promising to codify Roe versus Wade into law.

Speaker 18 That would probably require getting rid of the filibuster in the Senate so that we can get to a vote so the Republicans couldn't block a vote. Is that something you'd consider doing?

Speaker 16 Well, I've been calling for us to get rid of the filibuster. I was a voting rights lawyer before I came to Congress.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 16 our big push in the last Congress, as you probably remember, was the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Speaker 16 I spoke with Senator Manchin about it. I was actually asked to give him a call and talk to him about it from a voting rights perspective.

Speaker 16 And I thought we had an agreement on moving to a speaking filibuster. It's obviously a legacy of some of the darkest days of our country.

Speaker 16 But it's also at this point just standing in the way of fundamental reforms that are necessary to keep our democracy thriving.

Speaker 16 And when you can't address voting rights, because you have to have 60 votes in a body that's determined by geography, then you're locking yourself into a future where you can't have any kind of legislative advancements.

Speaker 16 And we know the Supreme Court's not going to do it.

Speaker 16 And of course, I actually have been thinking this for some time, that the model of relying on the courts to be sort of our advancer of our civil rights is long past.

Speaker 16 And we now have to do it through legislation. We had 50 votes in the Senate to do that in the last Congress, but not 50 votes to get rid of the filibuster.

Speaker 16 I will certainly not let the filibuster stand in the way of that or anything else. I think

Speaker 16 we will have to still work in a bipartisan way in the United States Senate. That's going to continue to be true.
But I don't think that we should allow this supermajority threshold to stay in place.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 18 The other thing that I imagine is probably really important to your constituents in Texas is immigration or immigration policy.

Speaker 18 I think for a lot of people in other parts of the country, it can feel like a problem that's far away, right? The southern border is not where you live if you're in Michigan or something.

Speaker 18 For you guys, it's literally on your southern border. I saw a poll from last year that showed 52% of Texas voters supported busing migrants to other parts of the country.

Speaker 18 So clearly there's enormous frustration about, you know, feeling like this is a problem that's being put on Texas. What are you hearing from voters?

Speaker 18 And what do you want to see President Biden or Congress do to solve the problem?

Speaker 16 Well, I have kind of a personal relationship with this because after the Second World War, my grandfather fought in the Navy in the Pacific and then came back up as a customs officer in Brownsville, Texas, the very tip of Texas.

Speaker 16 That's where my mom and my aunt grew up, went to high school, and then I spent most of my summers driving down my mom to Brownsville to see my grandmother there.

Speaker 16 And, you know, I think that when you talk about the border, it's not just a political backdrop.

Speaker 16 You know, and that's what I see tech crews using it as, is to go on almost like a political safari and be like in the bushes pointing out migrants. That literally happens.
It literally happens.

Speaker 16 You're a United States Senator.

Speaker 16 Where's your legislation to do something about it?

Speaker 16 How are you going to help these border communities deal with these surges, which, as you know, are driven by geopolitical forces, sometimes by climate change, sometimes by many factors, right?

Speaker 16 You know, Venezuela's in collapse. You know, five million Venezuelans have left the country.
We're seeing a lot of them showing up at the southern border.

Speaker 16 So we have to support those border communities much more. And this has been across multiple administrations where the burden of

Speaker 16 these geopolitical impacts and of our inability to pass any kind of comprehensive immigration reform ends up falling on communities on the border that then have to have the Catholic charities maxed out, local communities maxed out, people sleeping under the bridges, people sleeping on the street corners, and that's frustrating.

Speaker 16 But it doesn't have to be that way.

Speaker 16 As you know, we've had frameworks both in the Bush administration and the Obama administration around a comprehensive reform that would have billions of dollars for border security.

Speaker 16 Every country has to secure their own border, but that would also much better allow us to process folks who are seeking asylum, much better allow us, I think, to treat people consistent with our values, which is the kind of false dichotomy that I see Ted Cruz and others setting up, which is that if we're going to have an immigration system, it either has to be so harsh

Speaker 16 that it's completely out of whack with our values, that

Speaker 16 we are going to try and make it so

Speaker 16 hard and mean for folks.

Speaker 18 Separating families.

Speaker 16 Yeah, that they're not going to want to come, which we know from the situations they're leaving, that's not going to work.

Speaker 16 Or that we can't do anything at all. That's just not true.
We can do something about this.

Speaker 16 And so that's my frustration, I think, on the issue by and large, is that it's been used as such a political divider.

Speaker 16 But we pretty much know what we need to do to address it. And we need a senator from Texas who will do that.
We know Tech Cruz won't.

Speaker 18 Yeah. I mean, one thing I wonder about, I worked in the, we both worked in the Obama administration.
I was on the foreign policy side.

Speaker 18 I saw the administration use sanctions to punish countries frequently. Currently, the U.S.
is sanctioning the hell out of Venezuela, which you mentioned.

Speaker 18 I think a quarter of the population has left the country in recent years. Do you think, I mean, what do you think about sort of the international, we talk a lot about the border.

Speaker 18 Are there things you would like to see Joe Biden or any president do, like sanctions relief for Venezuela or Cuba or other places that might kind of reduce the flow of migration.

Speaker 16 Well, I remember when in the Trump administration, they cut foreign aid to the northern tribal countries because they weren't doing enough to stop migration.

Speaker 16 And it's like, you understand that cutting that aid is going to increase migration from these countries?

Speaker 16 I mean, we do have a role to play, certainly, in helping to stabilize, particularly the countries that are in our own backyard.

Speaker 16 And I think that

Speaker 16 when we're talking about competition with China globally, great power competition, the global south is where that competition is being held.

Speaker 16 And that includes our own hemisphere in South America and Central America, where the Chinese are making big investments.

Speaker 16 And we need to be on the field and playing a productive role, helping as much as we can to be a stabilizing force.

Speaker 16 yes looking at things like our sanctions policy and how that's contributing to some of this suffering but also seeing you know the programs that we know have worked around the world and applying them you know in our own hemisphere and so to me it we're not going to be able to solve all the problems of the countries that are around us, but we certainly shouldn't be contributing to their problems.

Speaker 18 Yeah. I mentioned earlier, this amazing path of the NFL to Congress, but you also worked in the Obama administration at HUD.
You also

Speaker 18 went to the NFL to get your law degree, right, at Berkeley, I believe.

Speaker 16 Yeah, that's fair.

Speaker 18 Can you talk a little bit like what were you doing at HUD as a civil rights lawyer? Like, what was that work like?

Speaker 16 Yeah. Well, I took a normal route to Congress.
You know, I was raised by a single mother, played in the NFL, went to law school, and became a civil rights lawyer, right? You know, just

Speaker 16 the normal route.

Speaker 16 Well, I had spent my last year of law school basically working in the administration, like in the White House Counsel's Office under Kathy Rumler, and then DOJ under Rod Rosenstein,

Speaker 16 at that time well-respected U.S. attorney.

Speaker 18 Oh, he led one of the leak investigation cases that I had to get interviewed for. I didn't do anything wrong.
I was absolved. Someone else was indicted and scared the shit out of me.

Speaker 18 So I know of Rod, yeah.

Speaker 16 Yeah, he was the U.S. attorney there.

Speaker 16 And then I was doing my voting rights work and was asked to come back into the administration as an appointee at HUD in the general counsel's office.

Speaker 16 And, you know, basically trying to tie together different programs and make sure that the trains were running on time and kept everything legal.

Speaker 16 And I was working there with another Texan, Julian Castro, who I was very proud of and was proud to work under him.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 16 when the transition came,

Speaker 16 I remember preparing a lot of of documents, particularly around ethics and Hatch Act and things like that, for the incoming administration, thinking, they're not going to read any of this stuff.

Speaker 16 But it was a lot worse, actually, than I could have even

Speaker 16 imagined. And it was an honor for me

Speaker 16 to serve in the Obama administration. I know you feel the same way.
Obviously, you run the campaign.

Speaker 16 But as an African-American,

Speaker 16 to serve in the first black president's administration, it's something that I'll always just cherish.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I feel incredibly lucky to have met the guy and then got to work there.

Speaker 18 Just a broader question about the Democratic Party. We have been struggling with getting support from young men of all races.

Speaker 18 I don't know if there's a single reason, but it does seem to coincide with the rise of these horrible characters like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson, who preach these deeply misogynistic worldviews.

Speaker 18 You played in the NFL. I don't think that Ben Shapiro is going to hear this conversation and call you like a beta male soy boy or something.
He probably shouldn't.

Speaker 18 Did football teach you anything about how politicians can communicate with and lead young men and convince them to sort of steer away from these toxic speakers?

Speaker 16 It's such a good question.

Speaker 16 Not only did I play in the NFL, I was a linebacker in the NFL. So

Speaker 16 come at me if you want to have a conversation about masculinity on that front, right?

Speaker 16 But

Speaker 16 you're exactly right. There are so many toxic examples out there.

Speaker 16 One of the things I've been most proud of in my time in Congress has been that I was the first member of Congress to ever take paternity leave.

Speaker 16 And I talked about it very openly. I said, I'm going to take paternity leave.

Speaker 16 And just under the kind of pretense that, well, if a former NFL linebacker can do it, then maybe it'll make it easier for some other man in some other field to do it.

Speaker 16 And I took paternity leave twice. I didn't know I was going to be the first.
I just thought it was the right thing to do. And then you see something like what happened when Secretary Buttigieg

Speaker 16 took paternity leave because his twins were in the emergency room. Yeah.

Speaker 16 And they're saying, oh, well, you didn't have the baby. And, you know, much worse than that, of course.
Horrible things, yeah.

Speaker 16 And I think, you know, what is wrong with this culture around men?

Speaker 16 That's the conversation that we're having. But I know that we have to have examples.
And I think, you know,

Speaker 16 One thing that people, I think, don't realize about athletes and my experience in the NFL is that there's a lot of really decent guys

Speaker 16 who are very productive and do good work in their communities, who are thoughtful, who want to be productive citizens, who've overcome tremendous things to get to where they are.

Speaker 16 And they have nothing in common,

Speaker 16 by and large, with these idiots you see.

Speaker 16 taking pictures of themselves with expensive cars and saying you know and spreading these like worst versions of what it is to be a man uh and you know if i can be an example to counter that, I will.

Speaker 16 But trust me,

Speaker 16 if you think that,

Speaker 16 as Donald Trump said, that that was just locker room talk the way he was talking about women, that's not been my experience. And I spent most of my life in locker rooms.

Speaker 16 And there is a much better and different way. And we just have to have examples to model it.
And we have to be out there and out front. And you're right, though.
We have had an issue with young men

Speaker 16 feeling like this democracy is for them as well. And so that's one of the things I've been working on since before I came to office, and I'm going to keep working on it.

Speaker 16 That, as President Obama used to say, this is not a spectator sport. You're not just watching it.
You've got to be engaged. And if you're not at the table, you're going to be on the menu.

Speaker 16 And so that's going to be something we certainly focus on in our campaign.

Speaker 18 That's great. I mean, Ted Cruz, by the way, has also...
been a real spreader of these kinds of views.

Speaker 18 I mean, his co-host for his podcast, but he's also one of the guys who would retweet the videos that people would make of like some Russian military propaganda film compared to a U.S.

Speaker 18 Army recruiting film where they're trying to be inclusive and be like, oh boy, you know, of course we would lose in a war.

Speaker 18 Fast forward two years and the Russian military is getting its clock cleaned by the Ukrainians, right?

Speaker 16 I mean, it's just so ludicrous. Right, exactly.
And we have a diverse military where, you know, you've got to get along with folks who come from a different background than you do.

Speaker 16 And that's the same thing in sports. And one of the things I noticed immediately about some folks is that who were not athletes

Speaker 16 is when

Speaker 16 they just have no ability to get along with others.

Speaker 16 I mean, I kind of feel like it should be a requirement to have to do some kind of team activity if you're going to be a legislator.

Speaker 16 But you're right. I mean, this idea that

Speaker 16 in order to be effective, you have to have this kind of like, you know, stylized, fake,

Speaker 16 you know,

Speaker 16 just completely...

Speaker 16 I think counterproductive version of masculinity or toughness or whatever word you want to use. That's just not true.
And

Speaker 16 Ted Cruz was a debater. I was captain of the Baylor football team.

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 16 I think I know where I'm coming from on that.

Speaker 18 Yeah, Ted could barely beat Jimmy Kimmel in basketball. So you mentioned you played at Baylor.
It's like a real deal D1 program. Shout out RG3, Robert Griffin III.

Speaker 18 Four seasoned in the NFL for the Tennessee Titans. Was playing in the NFL a lifelong dream?

Speaker 16 Yes and no.

Speaker 16 I think that I didn't think that I was going to be able to to play in the NFL. I was all ready to go to law school and

Speaker 16 basically started getting calls and was convinced that I was going to have a chance. And I was like, well, you should talk to my teammate.
He's going to be good.

Speaker 16 And they're like, no, no, you're going to have a chance. We want to represent you in the NFL.
And so finally I decided to give it a shot.

Speaker 16 And,

Speaker 16 you know, while I was playing, I was deferring my law school admission

Speaker 16 until finally they told me to just reapply when I got done. And I remember I hurt my neck.

Speaker 16 So I played four seasons, but I was in the NFL for five years. It was in my fifth year, my fifth game against the Cowboys in Dallas.
My family's in the stands, and I get hit the wrong way.

Speaker 16 Not a big hit, but the wrong kind of a hit. And my whole right side is basically shut down.

Speaker 16 And I knew I'd had a neck issue. And I'm lying on the turf, probably the only person who's ever had this happen before thinking, yeah, I'm so ready to go to law school.

Speaker 16 You know, like, I mean, I just, okay,

Speaker 16 I think I've proved something here. That's time to move.

Speaker 18 Yeah, you proved something here.

Speaker 16 I mean, that's an amazing story.

Speaker 18 I think a lot of people get talked into trying to try out for teams, but to make it and to play for four years, I mean, you knew Reggie Love, I imagine, like Barack Obama's body guy, played at Duke, played football and basketball.

Speaker 18 I think he got talked into, yeah, great athlete, like one of the best athletes I've ever known, got talked into, I think, coming to Cowboys camp and playing linebacker.

Speaker 18 And he said he went and tried to hit some running back and just got his clock cleaned. It was like, I don't know that I can do this.

Speaker 16 I can see Reggie telling that story. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And it happening to him.

Speaker 18 What's tougher covering a tight end or a running back out of the backfield?

Speaker 16 Definitely a running back. I think tight ends are glorified offensive tackles.

Speaker 16 Those are fighting words.

Speaker 18 I've heard some influential people in sports media suggest that Ohio State uses a field for their pro days that might be slightly shorter than 40 yards, which is why you see Buckeye players putting up these blistering 40 times on their NFL pro days.

Speaker 18 Have you heard these series and would you consider holding hearings on 40 times fraud?

Speaker 16 Listen, having played against the Patriots,

Speaker 16 I put nothing past anybody. Urban Meyer, too.
I mean, my God. That's right.
That's right. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Who's the best linebacker ever?

Speaker 16 I think still probably Singletary, maybe, but the best I'd ever seen was Patrick Willis. He was incredible.
Really? Yeah.

Speaker 18 No, no junior Seoul, no, no Trell Sugs, no Rayleigh, Ray Lewis?

Speaker 16 Well, yeah, I mean, I think Ray Lewis is probably a bigger singletary. I think

Speaker 16 he's probably the prototype of the modern inside linebacker. But, I mean, if Willis had played longer, we'd be talking about him as one of the all-time greats.

Speaker 18 I was going to ask you about a 2009 game where the Titans played the Patriots and lost 59-0, but I decided not to do that. It's funny.

Speaker 16 I had just come back from a neck injury, and I was out there in the snow, and we could not hang on to the ball to save our lives.

Speaker 16 It's like it had, you know, I don't know, oil on it or something. And Tom and Randy are out there just playing pitch and catch.
And I'm like, what's going on?

Speaker 16 And of course, a few years later, I hear that maybe the ball was deflated.

Speaker 16 Tough. No, but seriously, that team was so good.

Speaker 16 They set every record.

Speaker 16 You know, I still, I think it's thrilling. I got to play against Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, some of the best quarterbacks in the history of the game.

Speaker 18 Final question for you.

Speaker 18 If you win, have you thought about launching a big and tall caucus with John Fetterman, maybe John Tester?

Speaker 18 We're calling Caucas,

Speaker 16 Haas Caucus. We're spitballing.

Speaker 16 When I win, I will definitely do that. We also will have a very large and growing bald men caucus, although historically that's probably been the case, right?

Speaker 16 That's a good, that's a well-worn group of men.

Speaker 18 Congressman Allred, thank you for coming in. Remind us where we can go to help the campaign out.

Speaker 16 Well, listen, we can win this race, but we need your help. So

Speaker 16 if you care about 30 million Texans getting the representation they deserve, go to colinallred.com or text Texas to 90678. Perfect.
Thanks for coming in. Yeah, thanks for having me.

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Speaker 16 Okay, before we go, we have some feuds to adjudicate.

Speaker 17 Stop talking. Sometimes the enemy.

Speaker 16 I'm sorry. Here's a new one.
I was going for a feud.

Speaker 17 I was going for a feud vibe. Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
Sometimes the enemy of your enemy means two people who suck or write about each other and little else.

Speaker 17 Far right it girls, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are trash talking each other publicly after MG after MTG

Speaker 17 girls, Marjorie Taylor Green

Speaker 16 and Lauren Bobert

Speaker 17 are trash talking each other publicly after MTG called Boebert a little bitch on the House floor for copying her articles of impeachment. Let's take a listen.

Speaker 24 Congresswoman Green claimed you copied her resolution.

Speaker 27 Yeah, I'm not in middle school.

Speaker 18 Can you comment on the report that she cursed at you on the floor?

Speaker 17 Like I said, I'm not in middle school. Meanwhile, the boys are fighting too.

Speaker 17 Last week, Elon Musk was making fun of Meta's upcoming Twitter rival threads when a fan warned him about Zuck's martial arts prowess. Musk responded, I'm up for a cage match if he is LOL.

Speaker 17 And Zuckerberg took the bait, posting on Instagram, SendMeLocation. Ultimate fighting champion president Dana Weitz proclaimed that both these guys are absolutely dead serious.

Speaker 17 But then after Elon Musk's mother seemed to put the kibosh on the whole thing, that's real.

Speaker 17 That's that part. People thought his mom was canceling the fight.
But then Elon tweeted, and this is also real, mom, I'm fighting him. Stop it.

Speaker 16 Did you know that? Yes. No, I did not know that.

Speaker 17 The point is we live in hell, but maybe hell has an octagon because the worst people you know are fighting. So we're going to play a game we're calling Billion Dollar Baby.

Speaker 17 I'm going to give you a current matchup and you you have to tell us who would win that fight. Basically, you have to pick a winner and say how many rounds it would take from one to nine.

Speaker 17 Round one, you think it's a quick knockout, not even close, but if you think it would go all the way to 10 rounds, then you're calling it a draw.

Speaker 17 And basically, they fight until they both collapse into the arms of their trainers, who several of them are also trying to date.

Speaker 18 Could we just say draw instead of 10? Yeah, you could say draw, draw.

Speaker 17 Less confusing. Yeah, it's one to nine or draw.
Go ahead. That's what I was getting at.
Great. Thanks for the correct.
Thanks for helping me. No problem.
Hey, thanks for making me better, Tommy.

Speaker 17 First up.

Speaker 18 Sorry about my sports ball.

Speaker 17 Lauren Bobert versus MTG.

Speaker 17 On one hand, MTG is into CrossFit and is already so enraged she's shit talking Lauren Boebert in the press like she's stone-cold Steve Austin, squaring off against someone called the Brett Hartman hit.

Speaker 18 Hitman Hartman. Brett Hitman Hart.

Speaker 17 A reference I get. Wrestler.
On the other hand, Lauren Bobert co-sponsored a bill with George Santos to make the AR-15 the national gun, so you know she's loca.

Speaker 16 And that goes a long way in a one-on-one brawl.

Speaker 17 There is a correct answer, by the way.

Speaker 16 I think Marjorie Taylor Green would fucking wipe the floor with her in two rounds.

Speaker 18 Have you seen the video of MTG doing those crazy CrossFit pull-ups where it looks like you're going to rip your shoulders out every single time?

Speaker 16 It's called kipping. I wouldn't mess with her.
It's called kipping.

Speaker 18 Kipping. One round MTG.

Speaker 20 Bobert's on though.

Speaker 17 The crooked community thinks 90% MTGV. That is correct.
However, John gets the point because it is round two. Because round one, MTG just toys with her like a kitten.

Speaker 17 And then round two, she beats the average.

Speaker 16 Sorry,

Speaker 16 that's what happens.

Speaker 17 I can see that.

Speaker 16 That's what happens.

Speaker 17 Okay, round two. So point goes to John there.
Round two, it's billionaires versus the ocean.

Speaker 17 Here's why.

Speaker 16 Jesus.

Speaker 17 In a submersible, the ocean's going to win every time. But on the board of a multinational corporation extracting value from carbon-based fuels deep in the ground,

Speaker 17 billionaires getting a lot of rounds in.

Speaker 16 Okay.

Speaker 17 I'm saying that you put the billionaire in the ocean, the ocean wins. Billionaire from the safety of land can kill the ocean.
Right. So you have to decide.
Now they're facing off over the long run.

Speaker 16 Who's facing off?

Speaker 17 Billionaires versus the ocean.

Speaker 16 Oh, billionaires. All billionaires.
All billionaires. Who's going to win in the end?

Speaker 17 When the billionaires go in the ocean, no good. Famously, lately.

Speaker 17 But the oceans themselves, the billionaires from the land, are launching an attack over time.

Speaker 16 Okay. Right, right, right.

Speaker 18 So I'm going to say I think that the ocean wins in the eighth round

Speaker 18 because that ocean is coming for us all and it's going to hit the most expensive beachfront property first where the billionaires live.

Speaker 16 So they're all going to drown. See, I think the billionaires are going to win because they, well, the oceans end up swallowing all of us and all life on this earth.

Speaker 16 The billionaires are going to escape to Mars. Wow.
Wow. Or ceasteading.

Speaker 16 But

Speaker 16 I think that's like round nine.

Speaker 17 Point goes to Tommy. The oceans are going to win.
Oh, wait, yeah. The oceans are going to win, but it's in.
Wait, what did you think was going to win?

Speaker 16 I think the billionaires are going to win because they're going to escape.

Speaker 16 They're just going to leave the planet.

Speaker 17 No, Tommy gets this one. The oceans are actually going to win in round nine, technically.
It won't be pretty, but the oceans will survive and ultimately thrive. Sweet.

Speaker 16 Elon Musk tweeted the other day: there is a slight chance he will end his life on Mars. He will end up on Mars.
With any luck.

Speaker 18 Mark Zuckerberg would kick his ass, though.

Speaker 17 That's what's next. Oh, okay.
That's what's next. That's what's next.

Speaker 18 Sorry, you put the oceans in there.

Speaker 17 I'm alternating abstract. I'm doing the dada ones in the middle of the real ones.

Speaker 18 Trust the process, as Dan would say.

Speaker 17 Next up, Mark Zuckerberg versus Elon Musk.

Speaker 17 In the octagon, things to consider. Elon is 51.
Zuck is 39. Musk weighs an estimated 187 pounds, and Zuckerberg less than 154 pounds.

Speaker 17 Zuck is a white belt in jiu-jitsu, while Elon spends literally every day tweeting in reply to bigoted tweets. And he's not doing that from one of those, you know, treadmill desks, probably.

Speaker 17 On the other hand, maybe.

Speaker 17 You know, if you're in charge of deciding when Zuckerberg gets a new belt, what are you going to, you're going to make him, you're going to say no? You want to keep those.

Speaker 16 Oh, you think he doesn't deserve his belt?

Speaker 17 I don't know, but I'm just saying it's easier to give him the belt than say you haven't earned it yet.

Speaker 16 We also think that

Speaker 16 he took an involuntary nap while

Speaker 16 doing jiu-jitsu. He choked out.
Yeah, he lost consciousness.

Speaker 16 But then

Speaker 16 the Facebook PR people were quick to say, no, that's not true. He didn't lose consciousness.

Speaker 18 He was just like grunting or something like that.

Speaker 18 Here's the thing about Jiu-Jitsu: it's not like it's not a boxing match where you just punch each other out until you win it's like weird pressure points and like twisting your arms in ways until you have to tap out that requires training and knowledge and i think mark would kick his his ass elon is also a soft wimp he could just comes through an issue

Speaker 16 yeah mark zuckerberg will kick his ass how many rounds what do you think

Speaker 18 three for me yeah

Speaker 16 two i'll go two

Speaker 16 uh

Speaker 17 tommy takes it it. It was round three.
That's when it's gonna happen. Uh, though, technically, Elon, and but actually, you know what? I'm gonna give it to both of you.

Speaker 17 That's gonna be a tie because John got at the essential point, which technically Elon is gonna quit.

Speaker 17 They're gonna dance around each other for two rounds, and the second it gets real in the third round, uh, Elon's gonna take one hit of some kind, and then he's gonna have like a knee problem.

Speaker 17 And then he's gonna go on Twitter and say he wish they could reschedule, but it's gonna be hard to find the time to get the real fight back on the books.

Speaker 16 Yeah, that's good. That's dude on Twitter.

Speaker 16 Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

Speaker 17 Uh, next up, and finally, we have Ron DeSantis versus eye contact.

Speaker 17 Ron DeSantis versus eye contact.

Speaker 16 I know how to judge this one. Who's going to win?

Speaker 17 Who's going to win in a fight? That's the question.

Speaker 17 You know, on the one hand.

Speaker 16 I mean, Ron DeSantis is not going to win anything, which means that eye contact will win.

Speaker 17 Well, the thing is that, you know, one of the most important things standing between Ron DeSantis and political success is his ability to relate to another person.

Speaker 17 And so all the ambition in the world, is it enough to teach him how to fake knowing how to interact one-on-one with another human being?

Speaker 16 That's the question before us. That's tough.
No.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I don't think so either.

Speaker 16 How many rounds? What are rounds?

Speaker 18 I think he's going to go in five. Eye contact wins in five.
I actually,

Speaker 16 because he has so much money and is still like second in the primary, I think it could go, I'm going to say nine rounds. Wow.
Wow.

Speaker 17 I'm going to give it to John. John takes that one.
That's one takes the one. Putting you both at a tie.
The question is, basically, it will be round nine, which will be after New Hampshire.

Speaker 16 It has to be after.

Speaker 16 How is round nine after New Hampshire?

Speaker 18 Well, it's going to be a second primary, and then there's a general election.

Speaker 16 What is this rounding? The rules are capricious. Outrageous.

Speaker 18 This fucking time machine telling us who wins.

Speaker 17 Unbelievable. I'm just saying, that's what happened.
That's what happened when the battle.

Speaker 17 I can't believe you don't agree with my judgment as to who would win in a fight between eye contact and Ron DeSantis and when the victory takes place. How dare you? How dare you insult my methods?

Speaker 18 I apologize.

Speaker 17 And that's been Billion Dollar Baby.

Speaker 16 That's too early on the fucking bells, Ben.

Speaker 17 No tiebreaker? No tiebreaker.

Speaker 17 Yeah, all right, here's a tiebreaker.

Speaker 16 All right, here's a tiebreaker.

Speaker 17 I asked for it. Here's a tiebreaker.
On the fly, me versus Dan.

Speaker 18 In a fist fight?

Speaker 17 I think we have gloves. Mathley? It's gloves, just...
Just boxing.

Speaker 16 Let me tell you why this is hard. This is hard.
Because I want to pick Dan, but if I pick Dan, I'm definitely not going to win because you just decide. Future me.

Speaker 16 So you love it, you'd wipe the floor with him in one round.

Speaker 18 I think you would give Dan a run for his money, but he's got the reach and he would beat you in the ninth round.

Speaker 16 But everyone would come out saying

Speaker 16 Tommy tried to go with being a straight lady. Love it won the moral win.
Tommy tried to appeal to the straight shooter. Yeah, it'd be like Rudy.

Speaker 17 It's interesting. I think Tommy's closer for sure.

Speaker 17 I think the question is, I've got those crazy eyes, and does does that come out? Is there a demon inside of me? Because there might be. There might be.

Speaker 17 And I don't know if there's a demon inside of you.

Speaker 18 Have you done any fist fighting in your life?

Speaker 17 These are for writing. These are for writing and signaling.

Speaker 16 High school happens, you know?

Speaker 16 Well, they're more for writing than they are for punching.

Speaker 16 More for hand waving. The game is over.

Speaker 17 Thanks to Colin Allred for joining us.

Speaker 16 Talk about a guy who would kick our asses.

Speaker 17 Thanks to the guy who wins in fight, Colin Allred.

Speaker 16 Bye everyone.

Speaker 16 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 16 Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis.

Speaker 16 Thanks to Hallie Kiefer, Madeleine Herringer, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support.

Speaker 16 And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Mia Kelman, Ben Hefco, and David Tolles.

Speaker 16 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.

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