Trump's Perfect Interview (plus Jake Tapper!)

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Speaker 3 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, Donald Trump employs the novel legal strategy of confessing his crimes on television.

Speaker 3 Hunter Biden Biden strikes a plea deal with a Trump prosecutor. RFK Jr.'s anti-vax, anti-Wi-Fi candidacy gets a boost from Joe Rogan and Elon's VC fanboys.

Speaker 3 And Justice Sam Alito is mad that we all found out he got free rides on a billionaire's private jet, whose hedge fund he later ruled in favor of.

Speaker 3 Then, CNN's Jake Tapper stopped by the studio to talk to Tommy Lovett and me about Trump, CNN, Fox, and his new novel, All the Demons Are Here. First, a few quick housekeeping notes.

Speaker 3 Crooked's award-winning podcast, This Land is back with a bonus episode that's going to be out this Friday that delves into the recent surprisingly good Supreme Court ruling on the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Speaker 3 Host Rebecca Nagel discusses this pivotal court case in most of season two of This Land, which reveals how the far right is trying to use Native children to chip away at American Indian tribes in their sovereignty rights.

Speaker 3 In this case, they failed, which is great. And you can find out why this Friday on this land, wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 3 Also, a reminder that Crooked Media Reads' first ever book, Mobility, by Lydia Kiesling, is available right now for pre-order. Vulture included Mobility on its 14 books.

Speaker 3 We can't wait to read this summer list. Head to crooked.com/slash mobility to pre-order your copy today and be the first to read when it's released on August 1st.

Speaker 3 Finally, quick thank you to all the Votes of America volunteers who made nearly 1,000 voter contacts to help defeat anti-abortion Virginia State Senator Joe Morrissey in Tuesday's primaries.

Speaker 3 Democrats currently hold a slim majority in the Senate, while Republicans have the majority in the House of Delegates.

Speaker 3 If Republicans win both chambers of the legislature this November, these are off-year elections, Glenn Youngkin is expected to pass new abortion restrictions in Virginia, bills discriminating against LGBTQ plus youth, rollbacks of voting rights, and more.

Speaker 3 So everyone's got to get involved in Virginia for this November. Head to votesaveamerica.com slash Virginia to help out today.

Speaker 3 All right, Dan, lots of news to catch up on.

Speaker 3 The Republican presidential frontrunner got himself a court date to stand trial for 37 felony counts of violating the Espionage Act and obstructing justice. It's August 14th.

Speaker 3 of this year, just a week before the first Republican primary debate that Donald Trump is threatening to skip, though we should note that most legal experts expect Judge Cannon to move the date back, due in part to complications that come with any case about highly classified secrets.

Speaker 3 CNN has the first post-indictment poll to show that Trump's support among Republican voters has declined in the last month.

Speaker 3 47% say he's their first choice for president, which is down from 53% in CNN's poll in May. His favorability rating among Republican voters voters has gone from 77% to 67%.

Speaker 3 And now about a quarter of Republican voters say they won't vote for him under any circumstances. That's up a few percentage points from their last poll.

Speaker 3 Trump is navigating these legal and political challenges like any careful criminal defendant would by going on television to confess his crimes.

Speaker 3 Here's a clip from Trump's two-part interview with Fox's Brett Baer.

Speaker 5 Because I had boxes. I want to go through the boxes and get all my personal things out.
I don't want to hand that over to Nari yet. And I was very busy, as you've sort of seen.

Speaker 6 Yeah, but according to the indictment, you then tell this aide to move to other locations after telling your lawyers to say you'd fully complied with the subpoena when you hadn't.

Speaker 5 But before I send boxes over, I have to take all of my things out. These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things.

Speaker 5 Golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes. There were many things.

Speaker 3 I would say much, much more.

Speaker 5 Not that I know of, but not that I know of.

Speaker 3 Iran war plans? Not that I know of. Not that I know of, but the golf shirts were in there.
You can't.

Speaker 3 Look, I realize the government sends out subpoenas sometimes, but you don't have to cooperate with law enforcement if you have a box with your golf shirt in there. Everyone knows that.

Speaker 4 It's a notable exception to the law, the golf shirt exception.

Speaker 3 Before we get to the political damage this interview may have caused Trump, let's talk about the legal damage.

Speaker 3 You think Jack Smith might want to show jurors this clip of Trump admitting that he personally went through the boxes and held on to classified secrets in defiance of a federal subpoena?

Speaker 4 Even judging this on the scale of abject Trumpian idiocy, this is an

Speaker 4 astounding clip. It's astounding.
He admits to the crime with the excuses you pointed out that his golf shirts.

Speaker 4 had not been sorted in time and therefore he refused to abide by the subpoena.

Speaker 4 And then when Brett Baer, and this part gets less attention, but then when Brett Baer says that according to the indictment, he told his aides to hide the boxes and then lie to the FBI about it.

Speaker 4 He does not deny it. He just asserts he had to do that because the golf shirts and the pants and the shoes were still with them.

Speaker 4 It's, it's wild. It is just, I love it.
It's great. It's great.
Do more. Do more.

Speaker 3 I mean, I mean, they were his favorite golf shirts.

Speaker 3 No, like, it's interesting because his defense is basically, I had every right to keep classified information as a private citizen, even though he's on tape admitting that he didn't declassify it when he was president.

Speaker 3 And by the way, I don't have to cooperate with law enforcement because I'm Donald Trump. That's it.
That's his defense. It's also interesting that he seems to be

Speaker 3 he basically seems to be trying to do his own defense

Speaker 3 and convince potential jurors

Speaker 3 in the court of public opinion.

Speaker 3 Like, it seems like his legal strategy is to just, you know, do as many interviews as possible and convince as many potential jurors in South Florida that this is all bullshit.

Speaker 3 And he's going to do his own, he's going to do his own defense and he's going to do it on TV. And honestly, like, who knows, it might work.

Speaker 4 I think the use of the word strategy there is a lot.

Speaker 3 Well, however, whether he stumbled into it or not.

Speaker 4 It is, I mean, if you really want to take like one serious takeaway from this is he truly does not believe the law applies to him. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's, yeah. I mean, he thinks that the law, politics, government, they're just, it's something to be gamed like everything else, like business, right?

Speaker 3 He can just kind of bullshit his way through it, con his way through it, and it doesn't apply to him, you know?

Speaker 4 And to date, that's been a very effective strategy.

Speaker 3 Because people who follow the law, people who think that the rules apply to them, they're suckers. You know,

Speaker 3 that's his whole deal. So Trump said plenty of politically damaging things as well in this interview.

Speaker 3 Here's a sample.

Speaker 6 Your vice president, Mike Pence, is running against you. Your ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, she's running against you.

Speaker 6 Your former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said he's not supporting you. You mentioned National Security Advisor John Bolton.
He's not supporting you either.

Speaker 6 You mentioned Attorney General Bill Barr says you shouldn't be president again.

Speaker 6 Calls you the consummate narcissist and troubled man. You recently called

Speaker 6 Barr a gutless pig. Your second Defense Secretary is not supporting you, called you irresponsible.

Speaker 6 This week you and your White House called your White House Chief of Staff John Kelly weak and ineffective and born with a very small brain.

Speaker 6 You called your acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney a born loser.

Speaker 6 You called your first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson dumb as a rock and your first Defense Secretary James Mattis the world's most overrated general.

Speaker 6 You called your White House Press Secretary Caitlin Haney milquetoast and multiple times you've referred to your Transportation Secretary Elaine Chow as Mitch McConnell's China-loving wife. So

Speaker 6 why did you hire all of them in the first place?

Speaker 5 Because I hired 10 to one that were fantastic.

Speaker 6 In your mind, did the COVID vaccine work?

Speaker 5 It's such an interesting question because not only that, I also did the Regenerons of the World, you know, the whole, we did a tremendous job on that.

Speaker 5 But we had a wet vaccine. Now, you have differences.
You have different COVIDs. You had COVID-19 and then you have different COVIDs.
But we had an original was COVID-19 which was the roughest one.

Speaker 5 I said I really don't want to talk about it because as a Republican it's not a great thing to talk about because for some reason it's just not. For some reason?

Speaker 5 Yeah for some reason because people love the vaccines and people hate the vaccines. I focused on nonviolent crime.
As an example, a woman who you know very well was in jail.

Speaker 5 She had 24 more years to serve. She served for 22 years.
She had 24 years.

Speaker 6 Alice Johnson.

Speaker 5 Alice. She was in the Super Bowl.
High quality. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 5 I said, how many years? And she was on a telephone call, and they were involved in selling marijuana, mostly marijuana.

Speaker 5 And she got like 50 years in jail.

Speaker 6 But she'd be killed under your plan.

Speaker 3 Huh?

Speaker 6 As a drug dealer?

Speaker 5 No, no, no. Under my plan.
Oh, under that?

Speaker 5 It would depend on the severity. It would depend on the seller.

Speaker 6 She's technically a former drug dealer.

Speaker 6 She had multi-million dollar cocaine rankings. Any drug dealer.

Speaker 6 Look, so even Alice Johnson and that ad.

Speaker 5 She can't do it, okay? By the way, if that was there, no, she wouldn't be killed. It would start as of now.

Speaker 3 It's just

Speaker 3 a lot. There's a lot to unpack there.

Speaker 4 We could honestly do it all day, every day for a month, just that interview alone.

Speaker 3 I mean, I guess my first question is, how do we get Trump to do as many interviews as possible between now and when people start voting? because

Speaker 3 this is it for me like i i don't i don't think people swing voters whoever else i i don't think they have voted against trump in 2016 or 2020

Speaker 3 mainly because of what they heard about him or what other people said about him they just listened to him they just listened to him or they read his tweets which are now truths and they made up their mind and this is why the more trump wants to talk the more he wants to do interviews the more people want to put him on TV, I am completely fine with that because,

Speaker 3 you know, all you have to do is ask him a few questions. Yeah, I mean, we can get into the Brett Bear of it all in a minute, but like,

Speaker 3 all you have to do is ask him a few questions. They don't even have to be that pointed.

Speaker 3 And he will just do that. Do what we just heard.

Speaker 4 No one does a better job of making a case against themselves than Donald Trump by opening his mouth.

Speaker 3 It's also just he says he's so, he's so honest about what a bullshit artist he is.

Speaker 3 Like when he was like about the COVID vaccines, he's like, yeah, you know, I can't really talk about it because the base is crazy and they're a bunch of anti-vaxxers and I want to piss them off.

Speaker 3 I don't know.

Speaker 4 It's not my problem. That's his most, I think, compelling political strength, I guess, is the, he just, he said, he, he doesn't sound like a politician.
Everything else in there is batshit insane.

Speaker 3 I don't say anything else.

Speaker 4 But when Donald Trump just says sort of the quiet part out loud, that actually

Speaker 4 is

Speaker 4 the least hurtful thing he says in these sort of interviews. Cause it's like, yeah, that sounds right.

Speaker 4 You know, or when he said, the other thing he said in that town hall about why he feels different now he felt about something else because he's not, he was president then, he's not now.

Speaker 4 Like, that's just how people think politicians are really thinking. And he just says it out loud.
And that's, and that is mildly helpful for him.

Speaker 4 But the rest of it, that is a small silver lining, a very dark cloud of idiocy surrounding all these interviews.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's like when he, when he's asked about the first debate and skipping it, and he's like, why would I participate? I'm ahead in the polls. Yeah.
You know, everyone's like, oh, yeah,

Speaker 3 that seems right. No, but I think that

Speaker 3 his proposal to give all drug dealers the death penalty seems like it wasn't that well thought out

Speaker 3 by Donald Trump

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 how it might work with the first act, which

Speaker 3 they were referencing there, which basically gave, I believe, clemency to certain nonviolent drug offenders.

Speaker 3 He didn't really think that through and how it would work with the with the death penalty for drug dealers policy that he is now pushing. And I do think that that is

Speaker 3 like him getting caught up in that,

Speaker 3 I think that's a little, that's problematic for him. Like, cause he's got to take one, taking both sides of a position in the same sentence, that's tricky for Trump.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he, um,

Speaker 4 there has been reporting.

Speaker 4 You know, it's like, whoever knows like what is real in Trump reporting, but there was a lot of very fanfic-y reporting after 2020 2020 that one of the reasons he blamed his loss was that Jared Kushner tricked him into doing the first step back, which I think the, and DeSantis has attacked him on it as being soft on crime.

Speaker 4 And so he's, without thinking it through, he went

Speaker 4 to the execute all drug dealers, including non-violent drug defeaters, including the ones that he gave clemency to, as a way to overcorrect for that.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah, because he saw authoritarians do that in other countries, right? And he's like, oh yeah, they did that.
And then there was no crime. It's great.
We should do that. Perfect.

Speaker 3 Base will love that. All right.
Second question about this.

Speaker 3 Will you admit that you have been wrong about Brett Baer and that America's greatest newsman didn't deserve your typical knee-jerk partisan attacks?

Speaker 4 Well, John. I will say that I was prepared to come on this podcast.

Speaker 4 And despite my long history of calling out Brett Baer as a partisan hack, as a, and just having a general well of rage at all the people in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 4 who hold him up as the one good worker in the propaganda factory at Fox, I was going to come on this podcast and say, job well done, Brett. And then you know what happened?

Speaker 3 And then I sent you the puck piece.

Speaker 4 Yes, then I read an article from Puck by Dylan Byers with the headline, Brett Hot Summer, filled with a bunch of Democrats talking about how amazing Brett Baer is, holding him up as the paragon of journalism.

Speaker 4 And that was a bridge too far for me.

Speaker 3 I just can't, I can't do it.

Speaker 4 He did a good job. He did one good interview, which I would state is his job.
He is a journalist.

Speaker 3 That's what he is supposed to do.

Speaker 4 And I will just say, every Democrat so excited about this, talking about how this is how journalism recovers, this is how we bring down Trump. Go take a cold shower.

Speaker 4 We do not need a Republican savior. Like, that's what every, I don't know why some Democrats want that.
It's like the Lincoln Project. We got Brett Baer now.

Speaker 4 We're probably going to start selling Chris Christie merch in the crooked store. Like, just slow down, people.
He did, he did a good job. I will give him credit for that.

Speaker 4 That does not erase 30 years of being a propaganda beard for the racism for profit industry at Fox News.

Speaker 3 You know, it's just, look, I know that you are just a partisan lib. You're just a resistance.
Straight shooter. A resistance warrior here.
No, I like,

Speaker 3 you know how I feel about this. I think the debate over whether we are praising or looking skeptically at Republicans,

Speaker 3 conservative pundits, whoever, who come around

Speaker 3 and decide that Trump is, in fact, unfit for office.

Speaker 3 I just don't think it's like necessary. The debate is like, why did Brett Baer do one good interview? I don't know.
Maybe

Speaker 3 he felt some some level of shame after all the Dominion shit came out. Maybe he just wanted to get back in the good graces of his DC establishment Republican friends.
Who knows? Who cares?

Speaker 3 He did the interview. That's great.
Chris Christie, did he do a bunch of horrible things up until 2020? Yeah, of course. Now he's kicking the shit out of Donald Trump.
That's awesome. Great.

Speaker 3 We don't need to give these people profile and courage awards or even debate whether they should get them.

Speaker 3 They're just tools to help us defeat Donald Trump, which is what we're trying to do here. That's how we do it.

Speaker 3 I don't disagree with that.

Speaker 4 And I also can't stand the debates about Bill Crystal did these terrible things and now

Speaker 4 you have a brief

Speaker 4 lukewarm alliance with him to defeat Donald Trump over a temporary basis. That I don't care about.
Let's see Brett Baer.

Speaker 4 do something. Let's see if he really is going to try to pretend to be a real journalist for the next period of next several years.
We'll see. Maybe he changed.
Maybe he hasn't. Let's see.

Speaker 3 I'm not electing Brett Baer to anything. I'm not giving a Brett Baer a podcast

Speaker 3 on the Crooked Network.

Speaker 3 I'm not casting a vote for Chris Christie, you know, but like, great. They're out there kicking the shit out of dogs.

Speaker 4 Didn't you just volunteer to give Chris Christie $10 the other day to get him basically?

Speaker 3 Well, that's different than voting for him. I'm going to put him on the debate stage.
All right, that's fair.

Speaker 3 I haven't done that yet, but I do think people should get Chris Christie on the debate stage. That is fucking, first of all, let's talk about the political value in that.
Yeah, maybe it's limited.

Speaker 3 Maybe he takes turned down, maybe he doesn't. Think about the fucking content value.

Speaker 3 I should just be saying, I should just be having this conversation directly with Elijah.

Speaker 3 Last question about Trump.

Speaker 3 I don't want to make too much of a single poll, but do you see anything in the overall trend that makes you think Trump's political baggage might be catching up to him after you read that CNN poll?

Speaker 4 I think there is very little evidence to date that the indictment has dramatically impacted Trump's chances of winning the nomination.

Speaker 4 That CNN poll shows maybe there's a possible opening, but it still shows him beating Ron DeSantis by 21 points, which is a lot of points.

Speaker 3 A lot of points.

Speaker 4 And there's a Yahoo News poll out today, which shows that Trump's approval rating is 79% among Republicans, which is unchanged from January, continues to hold a big lead in all polls.

Speaker 4 If you want to look for some possible signs of weakening, there's also a Quinnipiek poll out today, real poll polluta out here, but that that shows that 79% of Republicans think that it would be a serious problem if someone showed classified information to someone who did not have a top secret clearance.

Speaker 3 Boy, do we get news for them?

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 4 wait till they read the indictment.

Speaker 4 And so it could be if that becomes something that is proven in court, then yes. The big thing about Trump and

Speaker 4 these polls and the indictment is I don't think we should expect that the mere fact of the indictment is going to hurt Trump. He is framed on his terms.

Speaker 4 It's something like less than 20% of Republicans in the Yahoo poll thinks he should be prosecuted for these crimes. Most people think he didn't do very much wrong.

Speaker 4 It will be if the full weight of all of the indictments and all of the images of him getting arrested, getting arraigned, sitting at a defense table add up to change the electability equation for Republicans, maybe that will change.

Speaker 4 But right now, he's still, he's sitting pretty strong in the Republican primary for a man just charged with 37 felony counts related to violations of the Espionage Act.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I don't like this, but I would wager that voters hearing his interview with Brett Baer would judge him more harshly for that than they would hearing that Biden's DOJ is prosecuting Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 Republican voters?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Like, I'm talking about Republican voters who have an open mind about who they're supporting in the primary.

Speaker 3 There's obviously the MAGA fan base, which which is like locked down at 35, 40% of the Republican Party.

Speaker 3 But then we know there's a bunch of voters who, you know, might end up with Trump, but they're looking around. And I think for those voters, again, just more Trump, the better.

Speaker 3 Let's hear straight from Trump. I also think what's notable in that CNN poll is what Trump lost in favorability and support did not go to DeSantis.
DeSantis did not gain in that CNN poll.

Speaker 3 It sort of went to, you know,

Speaker 3 the support kind of spread around to different candidates in the field, which might tell you that, you know, there's a bunch of candidates out there now, voters, and I'd love to see some Iowa and New Hampshire polls, but voter, Republican voters are now being exposed to other candidates and campaigns and they're hearing from them.

Speaker 3 So, you know, it also might be a function of just the field is pretty full and people are looking around and, you know, that's that. But I think we're still in status quo territory right now.

Speaker 3 One more thing before we move on. Just this morning, former Texas Representative Will Hurd announced he's running for president.

Speaker 3 He's now probably the most moderate Republican running, and he criticized Trump in his announcement video, called him a lawless, selfish, failed politician. What do you make of a Will Hurd candidacy?

Speaker 3 I think there's a wide

Speaker 4 lane within the Republican Party for people who find Asa Hutchinson too exciting.

Speaker 3 I will just, I'll tell you, you, like Will Hurd,

Speaker 3 I wish we lived in a country where Will Hurd was like the center of the Republican Party, right?

Speaker 3 Like, that's, I don't agree with Will Hurd and a bunch of issues, but like, that would be, that would be a good country, you know? But like, that video, whew, man, was that boring?

Speaker 3 That's the problem is, like, all of these other candidates that who are not Donald Trump and to a lesser extent, not Ron DeSantis, they need a theory of attention.

Speaker 3 Like, how are you going to get attention for your candidacy?

Speaker 3 And, you know, the other, one of the other anti-Trump candidates in the primary, Chris Christie, he's got a theory, which is he's going to go out there and kick the shit out of Trump.

Speaker 3 Even Will Hurd's attack on Trump, which is like just him calling him, you know, a lawless, selfish, failed politician, even the way he said it was just boring.

Speaker 3 You know, and it'll do this like quiet, boring video. I'm like, dude, no one's, who's going to, who's going to pay attention to you? You got to get some attention.

Speaker 4 I hope I don't get this wrong, but if Will Hurt is a Republican nominee facing Biden, it will be a contest between two candidates who have been on crooked media podcasts.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 maybe the same number of times.

Speaker 4 Yes, one each. Yes.
No, that's not true. Joe Biden has been on Potts America twice.

Speaker 3 Twice. Okay.

Speaker 3 Will Hurt just once. Yeah, no, I mean, look, I wish him all the best.
Again, I want

Speaker 3 people to take down Donald Trump. Good for him for doing it.

Speaker 3 I think it's going to be, like I said, I think it's hard to get attention in that Republican primary if you're not going after Donald Trump or if you're not Donald Trump. You know, like,

Speaker 3 have you seen that Nikki Haley and Tim Scott have basically been spending a week attacking our old boss, Barack Obama, for

Speaker 3 something he said on Axe's podcast,

Speaker 3 which is on Axe's podcast, he was asked about

Speaker 3 Tim Scott's candidacy and

Speaker 3 also just basically how Obama reconciles his own hopeful rhetoric about this country and racial progress

Speaker 3 with

Speaker 3 the realities of what we're living through.

Speaker 3 And basically, Obama said, like, people like, not only people like Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, but even his own rhetoric about this has to be undergirded with like an honest accounting of our past and present.

Speaker 3 So if there's a Republican who doesn't have a plan to address crippling intergenerational poverty, then, you know, people may not believe that rhetoric. And that's all Barack Obama says.

Speaker 3 And it has caused a furor on the right.

Speaker 3 Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, they're going around saying like, Barack Obama, he doesn't, he used to believe in racial progress in America. Now he thinks the country's racist and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 3 And they're doing this because this is like the only way they can get any sort of attention for their candidacies.

Speaker 4 Well, I have bad news for them because this is the first I'm hearing of this.

Speaker 3 Really?

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 This is my terminally online moment.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I knew that Obama said that, and I knew

Speaker 4 there was like a blow-up on the right. The fact that Tim Scott and Nikki Haley have been

Speaker 3 making it like their whole campaign for a full week. It's wild.
That's how desperate they are for attention.

Speaker 4 Like, I follow the news for a living. News to me.

Speaker 3 This is what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 Will Hurd's going to have the same problem. Doug Bergam, my boy Doug Bergum, he's going to have that problem.

Speaker 4 Doug Bergum, at least, has untold amount of money to spend on ads. He is one of the leading spenders to date in early state primary ads.
I don't think Will Hurd's going to have that opportunity.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 3 What's poppin' listeners?

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Speaker 3 All right, in other news, Donald Trump and his MAGA pals are furious that one of the U.S.

Speaker 3 attorneys he appointed struck a deal with Hunter Biden where the president's son will plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges for failing to pay his taxes on time and avoid prosecution on his illegal handgun purchase by agreeing to remain drug-free for two years and never own a firearm again.

Speaker 3 The five-year investigation by the Trump-appointed prosecutor will result in no jail time for Hunter, which of course led to this reaction from the party that thinks stealing nuclear secrets isn't a crime.

Speaker 11 When you look outside the Capitol, you see the Supreme Court and you see a statue of Lady Justice. She has a skin that's supposed to be equal, but she's wearing a blindfold.

Speaker 11 I wonder if there was a blindfold on to the prosecutor when it came to Hunter Biden.

Speaker 12 He's Hunter Smith. He's doing hard time.
It is only because daddy is president that he gets this sweetheart deal with no jail time whatsoever.

Speaker 13 So I don't care if they're Trump appointed. I don't care if they were part of his former administration.

Speaker 13 Those people that have known about these Biden crimes and sold our country out, they should be held accountable too.

Speaker 15 The scary thing for me is it's not just about the president going after President Trump. It's going after parents at school board meetings.
If you're a pro-life Catholic, you're an extremist.

Speaker 15 If you're a journalist, for goodness sake, they went after Matt Tybee.

Speaker 3 I just learned a lot just now that, like, if I'm going to commit crime, I should do some crack first, right?

Speaker 3 Because then if I do the crack, then I could say I have a problem, and then they do this diversion thing. So always have crack with you when you're committing a crime.

Speaker 3 Well, then,

Speaker 3 Wannabe dictator Joe Biden let a prosecutor appointed by his political opponent charge his own son. Should we impeach this lawless thug? What do you think?

Speaker 4 I've been thinking about how Trump is going to respond to this.

Speaker 4 And I think he's going to pivot seamlessly from Joe Biden wannabe dictator to Joe Biden so weak that he let his own attorney general arrest his son.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I was going to say, like, Trump would say, I wouldn't have let that happen, but Trump's kids, he probably would have let that happen.

Speaker 4 Like, he would have protected Ivanka and maybe Donald Trump Jr., but Eric and Tiffany, he would have let Merrick Garland haul them off a long time. They'd be in gitmo right now if he thought of it.

Speaker 3 You want to explain the truth of what happened here for people?

Speaker 4 Yeah, we should be very clear. Five years ago, a Trump-appointed U.S.

Speaker 4 attorney began a wide-ranging investigation into everything having to do with Hunter Biden, including his international business dealings, how he made money.

Speaker 4 And at the end of that process, and even after Joe Biden was elected,

Speaker 4 the Trump-appointed U.S.

Speaker 4 attorney stayed on the job to continue on this investigation to ensure there was no political interference now that the father of the subject of that investigation was now the president of the United States.

Speaker 4 And at the end of that, they didn't find any of all the conspiracy theories, all the things that

Speaker 4 Jim Jordan and Jim Comer and Donald Trump and Fox News have been talking about. What they found out was that he failed to report some of his income.

Speaker 4 and therefore underpaid on his taxes and there was a gun crime involved from the time in which he was dealing with problems with addiction.

Speaker 3 So after all of that, the trouble.

Speaker 3 Even that, though, what he did was he went to go buy a gun.

Speaker 3 And when you buy a gun, it says on a form, are you addicted to drugs? Or

Speaker 3 have you done drugs in the last two months? And he said no. And that was a lie.
And so they gave him the gun. And that was it.

Speaker 4 Also, what a system we have, people.

Speaker 3 I know. Yeah.
You could do a whole other thing on gun laws and whatever.

Speaker 3 Was that right on your honor?

Speaker 4 I I don't intend to commit a crime with this gun.

Speaker 3 On your honor. Yeah, you just got to, that's it.
That's all we need. We just need you to fill out this form.
And you know what? I'm sure the NRA is trying to get rid of that form altogether. Yes.

Speaker 3 Wow. We should not make people go through the process of having to fill out this cumbersome form.

Speaker 3 Give them the gun when they walk in. Anyway.

Speaker 4 And so at the end of that process, he pled guilty of those crimes. He agreed to pay us back taxes and he's entered a diversion program and agreed to never purchase a gun again.

Speaker 4 That is a completely normal, standard outcome for a process like this. There is no evidence of favoritism.
There is no evidence of involvement from Joe Biden.

Speaker 4 If there was, do you think the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney would say something about it to someone?

Speaker 3 Perhaps. Yeah.

Speaker 3 The only thing truly unusual about the way this case was handled is the fact that the Trump-appointed attorney stayed on in the Biden administration. And Merrick Garland, the attorney general, said

Speaker 3 in a public letter at the beginning of this whole process,

Speaker 3 this Trump-appointed U.S.

Speaker 3 attorney has the full authority to investigate this case, to make charging decisions, to decide when he's going to bring charges, what kind of charges, which is extremely unusual because Merrick Garland is the guy's boss.

Speaker 3 But because of the potential conflict of interest, Merrick Garland said, this guy is in charge.

Speaker 3 He gets to make all the decisions, appointed by Trump, started the investigation under the Trump administration.

Speaker 3 I'm sorry, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kevin McCarthy, that he didn't charge Hunter with a bunch of crimes that comport with the conspiracies you've come to believe because your heads are stuck in the fucking MAGA media echo chamber with a whole bunch of conspiracies about how Hunter did all these international crimes with China and Burisma and everything else.

Speaker 3 Like, I know that's what you think he did, but we had actual actual investigators who were not Democrats, in fact, our Trump-appointed Republicans, look into it and they didn't find anything.

Speaker 3 So, like, someone should ask them, like, what would you have done? Would you have just made up charges for Hunter Biden? Yes. Would you have done that? That's what I would have done.

Speaker 3 The question is that.

Speaker 3 But, like, someone should ask, that's a good question from a reporter.

Speaker 4 All right, we'll see if Brett Baird does it.

Speaker 3 Our only hope. Our only hope.

Speaker 3 Also,

Speaker 3 guess who would have gotten a a similar deal to Hunter Biden

Speaker 3 had he just pled guilty or made a deal with prosecutors? Donald fucking Trump, who is

Speaker 3 being tried for crimes that are a bit more severe than Hunter's, stealing nuclear secrets.

Speaker 3 And a lot of legal experts were saying that if Donald Trump struck a deal with the prosecutor, he could have avoided what's about to happen to him as well.

Speaker 3 But he doesn't want to because he doesn't listen to his fucking lawyers. He listens listens to, you know, Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton.

Speaker 3 That's who Donald Trump listens to.

Speaker 3 Also, IRS lawyers have said

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 this is typical of what happens to people who don't pay their taxes on time. One IRS lawyer told Politico, like, if we prosecuted for failure to pay taxes, the jails would be full.

Speaker 3 Oftentimes, they don't even prosecute cases like Hunters. So that's why there was a deal.
And a lot of people say, oh, weapons charge.

Speaker 3 People do time for weapons charges. A first-time weapons charge like this that doesn't involve any violence, which is just lying to buy the handgun, this is what you usually get.

Speaker 3 And by the way, if the judge really thinks this is some sweetheart deal, like Kevin McCarthy says, like all these Republicans are accusing him of, the judge doesn't have to approve the plea deal.

Speaker 3 The judge can say, oh, no, this was a sweetheart deal. I don't want to do this.
So we'll see. We'll see what the judge does.
But I'm sure whoever the judge is, even if it was a Trump appointed judge,

Speaker 3 they'll get attacked attacked as just some Biden stooge. Because that's their deal.
That's what they're doing. Where does the story go next politically and legally? Is this the end of this or what?

Speaker 4 Well, it's certainly not the end of it politically. The Republicans, as evidenced by the Clipley played, are in a lather about it.
There's going to be investigations into the investigation.

Speaker 4 There are going to be hearings.

Speaker 4 Jim Comer, the famously incompetent chair of the Government Oversight Committee, has promised to dig deep into this. There's this FBI whistleblower who seems to be a complete fraud involved.

Speaker 4 Like, this is going to continue. Like, there is no chance that the Republicans are going to let go of their conspiracy theories and just say, I was wrong.
Good for justice.

Speaker 4 And so this will continue to be part of it. We'll see it all the way through the election.

Speaker 4 But for the vast majority of people who live outside of the MAGA bubble, this is probably resolved, which is politically what Democrats want. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Okay, so another awful story that's been clogging up our feeds this week is Joe Rogan's three-hour conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's running for president in the Democratic primary.

Speaker 3 Kennedy has accused the U.S. government of, quote, knowingly poisoning kids because of a debunked conspiracy that vaccines cause autism.
He accused Dr.

Speaker 3 Fauci of launching a, quote, coup against Western democracy because he promoted COVID vaccines.

Speaker 3 He claimed school shootings happen not because of access to guns, but because of access to antidepressants. He said chemicals in the water are turning boys trans,

Speaker 3 that AIDS might not be a virus, and that gay men in the 80s actually died from poppers. And here's what he told Joe Rogan last week about the dangers of Wi-Fi.
Cancer's not the worst thing.

Speaker 3 They also, you know, it opens up

Speaker 3 Wi-Fi radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier. And so all these toxics that are in your body can now go into your brain.
Well, how does Wi-Fi radiation open up your blood-brain barrier?

Speaker 3 Yeah, now you're going beyond my

Speaker 3 expertise.

Speaker 3 But up to that point, up to that point, the expertise was vast and deep on

Speaker 3 the effects of Wi-Fi on our blood-brain barrier.

Speaker 3 He went on to call it leaky brain. Look it up, leaky brain.
And then Joe Rogan has like one of his producers Google, and then he got some Google. Oh, yeah, I'm seeing right here on the Google.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you get leaky brain. It's a real problem.
And then Joe Rogan's like, we should get the Wi-Fi out of this studio.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, that's a very important point.

Speaker 3 What the fuck is happening?

Speaker 4 Do you know what?

Speaker 3 That's an important point.

Speaker 4 You know, there was a lot of Wi-Fi? Podcast studios.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's tough. I don't even know why RFK Jr.
was in there.

Speaker 4 He's putting his blood-brain barrier on the line for this race.

Speaker 3 All right. So the interview was bad enough.

Speaker 3 But afterwards, when vaccine scientist and pediatrician Peter Hotez tried to fact-check Kennedy on Twitter, Rogan, then Elon Musk, and then his fucking VC fanboys demanded, demanded that Hotez debate Kennedy on Rogan's pod, which led to, among other things, a right-wing anti-vax nut stalking Hotez at his home.

Speaker 3 Polls, of course, show that an astounding 20% of Democratic voters are considering voting for Kennedy. And the New York Times just ran a long piece about why he's a real headache for Biden.

Speaker 3 Real blood-brain barrier headache for Biden.

Speaker 3 Good. Great work.

Speaker 3 Do you agree? And what, if anything, should the Biden campaign and other Democrats do about it?

Speaker 4 I mean, once the New York Times is writing a story about how something is a headache for you, it's become a headache.

Speaker 3 It may be a self-appointing prophecy.

Speaker 3 The story's a fucking headache.

Speaker 4 I mean, of course, it's going to be annoying. It's going to be quite annoying.
There's no Democratic primary. The press is bored with it.
They're going to cover it.

Speaker 4 Biden's political adversaries are going to use Robert Kennedy as a cudgel to try to make Biden look weak.

Speaker 4 It is important to note that one of the people that Robert Kennedy talked to before he got in the race was Steve Bannon.

Speaker 4 And Steve Bannon encouraged him to run because Steve Bannon reportedly thought that RFK Jr. would be a chaos agent in the Democratic primary.

Speaker 4 The reason the, I mean, it's wild these anti-Biden VC Yahoos supporting Robert Kennedy are, these guys make all their money in tech.

Speaker 4 And they are pretending to elect a guy who thinks that Wi-Fi should be banned.

Speaker 4 should be president of the United States. Think about that for a second.

Speaker 4 So it is going to be a pain in Joe Biden's, like like the year before the presidential election start is always a huge pain in the ass for a largely unopposed president like Biden because there's just mischief to be had, right?

Speaker 4 The press needs something to cover. Kennedy's got a famous name.

Speaker 4 He becomes someone who became this manifestation of whatever struggles Biden may have among Democratic voters as a way to cover that story. What should Biden do?

Speaker 4 Do the work he was going to do, whether Robert Kennedy was running or not, which is he has to spend this year strengthening his standing among Democratic voters.

Speaker 4 We know from polls there's a percentage of Democratic voters who are concerned, a high, shockingly high percentage, who think he shouldn't run, who are concerned about age, who don't know enough about what he has done or what he plans to do.

Speaker 4 And the advantage of being an incumbent is you spend that off-year strengthening your base.

Speaker 4 You do that through ads, you do that through campaigning, you do that through using the bully poll, but he's going to have to do all of those things.

Speaker 4 I think he would do those things, whether Robert Kennedy was a subject of New York Times stories or not.

Speaker 3 How does President Biden strengthen his standing with the segment of the Democratic primary electorate who is concerned that chemicals on the water are turning young boys trans?

Speaker 3 Is that a key segment that he's going to have to have to do some events with those folks? Or

Speaker 3 what about the folks who think that the poppers are killing gay people and not AIDS? That AIDS is just sort of a conspiracy.

Speaker 4 He's got to go on Rogan's podcast.

Speaker 3 He's got to go on Rogan's. He's got a debate.
He's got a debate. I will say,

Speaker 3 unfortunately, I listened to about half of the Kennedy Rogan podcast, which is still an hour and a half because it's a three-hour, three-hour podcast.

Speaker 3 I realize I'm saying this on a day where we have a long tapper interview, and this podcast is probably heading to two hours today.

Speaker 3 But three hours.

Speaker 4 Don't give yourself too much credit. You told me you listened to it at 1.8 speed.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I did. I did listen to it.

Speaker 3 I could still hear everything.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'm just saying that half of three hours, 1.8 speed, is not an hour and a half. Look,

Speaker 3 any amount of time I devoted to this was a problem. But

Speaker 3 I hadn't really heard RFK Jr. talk a lot, and I wanted to get what the deal was.
I can see why he's both,

Speaker 3 he can be appealing to people and thus dangerous, because his whole shtick is

Speaker 3 he has a whole bunch of scientific studies memorized. He's got the authors, he's got the papers, and he does this whole like, look, don't take my word for it.

Speaker 3 I think it's bad when you just take experts' word for it or politicians or whatever else. Just look at the science.

Speaker 3 I'm for science and I think you should look at the science and this is what it's saying.

Speaker 3 And by the way, corporations are out to get everyone and this is a conspiracy because, you know, he started as an environmental lawyer and he, you know, he went after a lot of corporations that were poisoning people.

Speaker 3 And that's what, you know, corporations do are irresponsible, right? They are out for profit.

Speaker 3 And so he's sort of using people's skepticism with corporations and corporations' bad behavior in the past to then make people think, well, then also pharma would do this to vaccines and all this other kind of conspiracy.

Speaker 3 And, you know, these companies would do this with Wi-Fi and all this shit. And then everything's dangerous and everything's a scam and everything's sort of a conspiracy.

Speaker 3 And he doesn't sound, except for the clips we played, he doesn't sound crazy all the time, right? And so I get why people are, some people could be like, oh yeah, maybe he's making some sense.

Speaker 3 Maybe I should start Googling some of this stuff. So I do think it's something to

Speaker 3 i do think it's something for democrats to take seriously i also think that if we act freaked out or worried or uh about his views or or start freak you know freaking out about it that will sort of play into people feeling like well i should be able to make my own decisions and form my own opinions i think the most effective way to deal with this is to just make sure people understand what his views are what he has said and what he is saying now and what he will do.

Speaker 3 Like, I think that's important, just information to get out to people.

Speaker 4 I think he is a greater danger to public health than to publicly.

Speaker 3 That's a setting. Yeah, no, I mean, look, I do think it will get,

Speaker 3 we've talked about this a bit, but, you know, if Joe Biden is not on the ballot in Iowa and New Hampshire, because Iowa and New Hampshire will continue to put their primaries first, even though Joe Biden and the DNC have decided that South Carolina is going first, if New Hampshire and Iowa decide to hold their primaries anyway and Joe Biden does not participate because that's the rules, but RFK Jr.

Speaker 3 does and Marion Williamson does. So you could have RFK Jr.
winning the first two primaries. Now, again, is that an actual threat to Joe Biden's candidacy?

Speaker 3 No, but will that suck for a couple weeks for the Biden campaign? Maybe.

Speaker 4 I don't know.

Speaker 3 Let's put a pin in that. We'll come back to it later.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we'll put a pin in that. So one concern is that RFK Jr.
could run as a third-party candidate once he loses the Democratic primary. He's not the only one.

Speaker 3 Political activist Cornell West, who's been a prominent Bernie Sanders supporter in the last few elections, has said he's running for the Green Party nomination.

Speaker 3 The Green Party is on the ballot in 16 states, including swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin.

Speaker 3 The Grifters at No Labels have raised tens of millions of dollars to run a bipartisan ticket that Joe Manchin is flirting with.

Speaker 3 They are on the ballot so far in four states, including the swing state of Arizona. How much of a threat are these potential third-party candidates to Joe Biden's reelection?

Speaker 3 And what, if anything, can be done there?

Speaker 4 They're a huge threat. They're absolutely a huge threat.
Donald Trump has never received more than 47% in either of his two elections.

Speaker 4 And the more people are on the ballot getting votes, it lowers his win number from 50.1 to something closer to 47. He won in 2016, largely because...

Speaker 4 In the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the combined third-party vote from Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, who was running on the Libertarian ticket, exceeded the margin by which he beat Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 4 So it is a big problem. And, you know, I made this point in a message box.
Nate Silver really decided to take that on and say I was wrong about that.

Speaker 4 And say he said that if Joe Biden loses, it will not be because of a third party, it will be because of age problems, health problems, or the economy sucking.

Speaker 4 And sure, that's all true if everything's going to be swimming good.

Speaker 3 It's going to be silvered, huh?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's just like,

Speaker 4 is that a verb now?

Speaker 3 I haven't just decided it was.

Speaker 4 I guess you could get coned too, I guess. That's another option.

Speaker 4 But in, of course, if everything is going swimmingly and Joe Biden has really high approval ratings and the economy's roaring, then a third party won't matter. But in a close election, it matters.

Speaker 4 And we know this because Data for Progress released a poll yesterday, which showed that in a head-to-head race between Biden and Trump, Biden wins 47.45. In a race between Biden, Trump, and a...

Speaker 4 generic, moderate third-party challenger, the race becomes 44.44 immediately.

Speaker 4 And if it's 44, 44 nationally, that probably means in the battleground states, states, Donald Trump, which skew a little more Republican than the country, Donald Trump wins Electoral College.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, all people need to know is if the people who voted for Jill Stein, just Jill Stein in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had voted for Hillary instead, Donald Trump would have never become president.

Speaker 3 That's it, right? And so, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of Cornell West fans out there. You live in a swing state.
You vote for Cornell West. You're helping Trump become president.
That's it.

Speaker 3 And you can say, oh, oh, well, it's Joe Biden's fault. He did this or that.
No, no, no.

Speaker 3 It's your decision. You get to decide whether you want to help Donald Trump become president or you don't.

Speaker 3 And if you want to help him, then you should vote for Cornell West or you should vote for Joe Manchin and his no labels ticket, or you can vote for, you know, RFK Jr. if he decides to run third party.

Speaker 3 But if you don't want to help Trump become president, you got to vote for Joe Biden. That's it.
Very simple. Now, I think messaging

Speaker 3 to voters who might actually make this decision is probably a little different, I would say, because I...

Speaker 4 No, chastising works.

Speaker 3 Like, I do think you need to explain why these candidates would not be good candidates for president. I really do.

Speaker 3 And I think we could get tripped up in that because I think if you are one of these voters and you hear a bunch of people yelling at you to vote for Joe Biden because you have to, I don't think it's going to be very effective.

Speaker 3 And I think you have to say why RFK Jr. is not a good choice, why Cornell West is not a good choice, why Joe Manchin or whoever it may be is not a good choice.

Speaker 3 So that is something that I think Democrats are going to have to figure out in the next year. Finally, another week, another corruption scandal for the Supreme Court.

Speaker 3 Here is the ProPublica headline. Justice Samuel Alito took luxury fishing vacation with GOP billionaire who later had cases before the court.
Yikes. Here's what happened.

Speaker 3 In 2008, hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer flew Alito on his private plane to Alaska, which the justice did not pay for nor disclose, as he is required to do by law.

Speaker 3 In 2014, Alito cast a vote in a case that awarded Singer's hedge fund $2.4 billion.

Speaker 3 Alito refused to respond to ProPublica.

Speaker 3 Instead, he ran to the Wall Street Journal before the story was even published and got them to run a whiny pre-buttle op-ed where he argued that he wasn't actually required to disclose the private jet ride, that he never discussed business with Singer, and besides, the seat on the plane would have otherwise been unoccupied.

Speaker 3 So, no big deal. Look, the guy is just trying to fill empty seats on private planes.
This is a public service.

Speaker 4 It's good for the environment. He cares about climate.
That's why he wanted to do that.

Speaker 3 What is your reaction to this left-wing assault on one of our greatest public servants?

Speaker 3 I mean, what is the world coming to that a Supreme Court justice isn't allowed to take secret trips on a billionaire's private jet without getting harassed by the liberal media just because he later sided with that billionaire's hedge fund in a case that made him even richer?

Speaker 4 Look, who among us hasn't flown on a private jet owned by people with business before the court?

Speaker 3 It's just a commonplace thing.

Speaker 4 Alito's reaction to this just speaks to the absolute arrogance of Alito. Thomas.
How dare you question me?

Speaker 4 How dare you question the idea that I can't fly on private jets as a public servant?

Speaker 3 Oh, you can. You just have to tell people.
No one, you can fly on your fucking private jets. Go for it.
Disclose it.

Speaker 4 And recuse when it comes.

Speaker 3 Recuse. Unbelievable.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's also, it's just, it is exceedingly rare for Supreme Court justices to write op-eds at all, let alone what is basically a glorified letter to the editor bitching about a story in another publication.

Speaker 4 It's just a temper tantrum.

Speaker 3 It's about you.

Speaker 4 It's a temper tantrum. He threw a temper tantrum in the Wall Street Journal, which then today ran an editorial defending Alito.

Speaker 3 Paul Singer's hedge fund appeared 10 times before the Supreme Court after that trip. 10 times.
And then, of course, there was the one in 2014 where he got $2 billion from the ruling.

Speaker 3 So the Quinnipiac poll you mentioned earlier, Supreme Court approval is down to 30%,

Speaker 3 the lowest on record. 63% of all voters favor term limits for Supreme Court justices.
29% oppose. What do you think? Sound good to run on?

Speaker 4 Absolutely. I think the corruption in the court is a real problem, and Democrats should look like they're addressing it.

Speaker 4 And they have the open door to do so because of the conduct of Velito and Thomas and the way in which the Republicans rigged the court over recent years.

Speaker 4 When then you add to that, the decisions like Dobbs that have dramatically affected people's lives. So you have a corrupt, rigged court that is operating from politics, not law.

Speaker 4 Therefore, if we have an agenda to address the corruption in that court, we should take it on immediately. It should be a central part of our campaign.

Speaker 4 I think court reform, obviously, I support expansion.

Speaker 4 The country is not there yet, but the broader court reform agenda, including term limits and ethics reform, should be a big part of what we talk about.

Speaker 3 Well, so Democratic leaders are now saying they will force a vote this summer on ethics legislation for the Supreme Court.

Speaker 3 Obviously, not going to pass the Republican House, but what do you think of that move and what they're proposing?

Speaker 4 I think it's the absolute right thing to do politically. It's also the right thing to do substantively.
It's fucking bananas that the Supreme Court is this completely unaccountable body.

Speaker 4 There are no repercussions. And we have not just we should.
vote on it. We should try to get it done.
We should make the Republicans vote against it. We should attack them for voting against it.

Speaker 4 There's also another benefit here, which is we need to put more pressure on John Roberts to do his fucking job because he is the administrator of the court.

Speaker 4 He is the person in charge of how the Supreme Court runs. He has allowed the reputation and trust in the court to be absolutely damaged by the conduct of his justices.

Speaker 4 And he's refused to speak about it, he's refused to do anything about it.

Speaker 4 He could get involved here in some way, shape, or form. And

Speaker 4 we have seen before how efforts at court reform dating back to the days of FDR have influence in how the how the Supreme Court runs itself. And so I think this is 100% the right thing to do.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think that

Speaker 3 you know, if they could somehow pass ethics legislation, which I imagine they could if we win back the House, if Biden wins re-election, if we keep the Senate, you know, maybe we could pass some Supreme Court ethics legislation.

Speaker 3 And I think that would be a good thing. I think substantively, it's crazy that they don't hold themselves to the same standards every other public servant does.
And there's no reason for that.

Speaker 3 It's not the Constitution says about the Supreme Court that those judges and all judges should keep their jobs barring bad behavior, basically. That's it.
That's all it says.

Speaker 3 And so this is bad behavior.

Speaker 3 And it doesn't say anything about how, you know, I think Roberts and some of these justices are like, oh, Congress has no role in regulating the court or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 3 It's like, well, it doesn't say that in the fucking Constitution.

Speaker 3 It does not say that Congress cannot pass laws affecting the court. And in fact, in, like you said, in the New Deal era, they did.
And many other times, they've changed the makeup of the court.

Speaker 4 They fund the court. They pass laws to fund the court.
Checks and balance is not a one-way street.

Speaker 3 That's the whole point of the system. Yeah, and in the Constitution, it basically gives Congress the full authority to create courts that are not the Supreme Court when they want to.
But

Speaker 3 of course, Congress can regulate the court.

Speaker 4 Yeah, they can address this to the court. That's not in the Constitution either.

Speaker 3 But so anyway, I'm all for the ethics legislation, but now I'm really eyeing the term limit thing now because I think that, and look, of course, do I want to expand the court?

Speaker 3 Do I want to change the, yeah, I'm all for that too.

Speaker 3 But I think like in the, in the short, not the short term, but maybe the medium term, the most doable reform that I think would actually have the biggest impact is term limits because, you know, we are going to be fucking stuck with Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh for most of our lifetime.

Speaker 4 This is another thing we should put a pin in because I spent a lot of, there's a real, like we should, this is a, it's a, I spent a lot of time researching this for when I wrote Untrumping America, which talked about court expansion and court reform.

Speaker 4 And the term limits thing is gets fascinating. The constitutional questions around it, we should do this with strict scrutiny one day.
The constitutional questions around it are fascinating.

Speaker 3 They are. They are.

Speaker 3 And yeah, just the short answer there is there is a belief that the Constitution does grant justices lifetime tenure unless they have, you know, engaged in bad behavior, which is, you know, in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

Speaker 3 But one way around that would be to say,

Speaker 3 Once you've hit your term limit, you go on senior status and either you go to an appellate court or a federal court if you're a Supreme Court justice, or you just do what a lot of senior judges on senior status do now, which is just sort of sit back.

Speaker 3 You're still a judge, you just don't, you're just not involved in cases.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you sit back and you wait until a case comes up in which one of the justices flew on a private jet on a luxurious vacation with one of the people before the court, and then that person steps down, you step in.

Speaker 3 That's how that works. That's it.
That's the way it works. All right.

Speaker 3 When we come back, we will talk to CNN's Jake Tapper about his new novel, about CNN, Donald Trump, Fox News, a whole bunch of good stuff. Right after this.

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Speaker 3 Here to talk about his new political thriller, All the Demons Are Here, which is out in July. CNN's Jake Tapper.
Hey, guys. Good to see you.
Welcome back. Good to see you.

Speaker 17 A fellow straight shooter, respected on both sides. Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 Oh, my God. He's an old original.
That's the original.

Speaker 17 You were the original straight shooter. I don't think I was.

Speaker 3 Is that where it came from?

Speaker 17 That's where it came from. That came from.
I asked because I said that Jake and I were both just two straight shooters respected on both sides.

Speaker 3 That's not true. That's true.

Speaker 3 Really? I was the actual... Well,

Speaker 17 that's where we began referring to you and then me as that.

Speaker 3 You sold a lot of t-shirts, Jake. Yeah, you used a lot of it.
You used a lot of merch. Thank you for your help.
I didn't know know it was me. I didn't know I was the original inspiration.

Speaker 3 Was it from when he was on the pod last?

Speaker 17 It was from when he was on Keepin' at 1600, I believe.

Speaker 3 Wow. Oh, my gosh.
Keeping at 1600. That was the original Pod Save America.
Holy smokes. I know.
It's been a long time. Hillary's going to win.
Right?

Speaker 17 She's got this. Everybody cool it.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 speaking of that, so last few weeks have made it pretty clear that the Trump show is back. It sure is.
I don't know if it ever went on hiatus. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's different in this season. Yeah, I was going to ask, like, this is now your third presidential campaign you've covered where the former president is a candidate.

Speaker 3 The difference now is he's been indicted twice, possibly more on the way, related to his role in trying to overturn the last election and incite a violent riot.

Speaker 3 How are you feeling about going through all this again?

Speaker 3 It's weird, right? It's very weird. And

Speaker 3 it's strange to see

Speaker 3 who is deciding to be honest about what's going on and who isn't, right? I mean,

Speaker 3 the Bill Barr

Speaker 3 activism

Speaker 3 talking about how serious this is. The Mark Espers,

Speaker 3 and then on occasion you have

Speaker 3 Nikki Haley or Mike Pence, I mean, talking about these charges. And then, of course, Donald Trump giving these interviews and talking in front of audiences in which he admits everything.

Speaker 4 Everything. Strange legal strategy.

Speaker 3 Not to mention Chris Christie, I should say. I mean, but that's, that's, I guess, not as much of a surprise.
But,

Speaker 3 yeah. And, I mean, it was always throughout so much of this, it was always like, well, who is going to speak? Who in the Republican Party is going to speak against this? And it would be in 2016.

Speaker 3 Well, early on, everybody spoke against it. And then he started winning, and then they all shut up.
And then, you know, it's just odd seeing the cat, because it's like once.

Speaker 3 you criticize him, it's almost like you then get put in a category as a Republican and a category of, oh, well, you're just a Trump hater. Yeah, right.

Speaker 3 I'm I'm not saying it's fair, but like by Trump and by the base. So like they stop listening to Liz Cheney as if she's like some flaming liberal.

Speaker 3 Same thing with Mitt Romney, same thing with Adam Kinzinger and on and on and on. But so it's always like now we see who are the people who are

Speaker 3 now going to try to say something. And boy, I saw, I don't know if it was.

Speaker 3 The bulwark. Somebody did a list of like everybody who had served with Donald Trump in his administration who had come out against him one way or another.

Speaker 19 Brett Baer read it to him live on TV, I believe, on Fox News.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah, it's quite a list.
It's quite a long list. It's a long list.

Speaker 3 I mean, like, if

Speaker 3 one of those equivalent people in the Obama administration or the Bush administration or the Clinton, it would be

Speaker 3 a story of the interruption. Yeah, like, oh, can you believe that? I mean, Al Gore did tepid criticism of Bill Clinton after the Lewinsky scandal, tepid.
And it was like big news.

Speaker 3 Same thing with Joe Lieberman. But this is, but this is like, this is not that, obviously.
This is,

Speaker 3 he's a narcissist. I mean, calling psychological names,

Speaker 3 Bill Bart just said he's a narcissist. Yeah.
I mean, I'm not disagreeing with the assessment, but like

Speaker 3 he's a threat. Right.

Speaker 3 He shouldn't be elected because he can't be trusted. Oh, and when I did the interview with Esper on Sunday, this was really surprising to me.

Speaker 3 I said, well, in the last few days, I've asked Stephanie Grisham, the former

Speaker 3 comms director,

Speaker 3 the question is always why? Why did he take these documents? Stephanie Grisham said, oh, it's just, you know, he's like a little boy and he has his toys. Mine, mine, mine.

Speaker 3 And then Michael Cohen had a much more

Speaker 3 conspiratorial

Speaker 3 way of looking at it. Like, no, he wanted to do something with these, whether it was money or this, but he was going to ⁇ I don't mean conspiratorial.
in a pejorative sense.

Speaker 3 I just mean like he thought there was actually a conspiracy of some sort. And I asked Esper what he thought, And he said both were legitimate possibilities.
Like, think about that.

Speaker 3 Because the Michael Cohen thing, you know, he's a little,

Speaker 3 he's a little aggressive, even on, even when it comes to the spectrum of people who used to work with Donald Trump and have now disassociated themselves.

Speaker 3 He's like, he's even on the more aggressive side of that. But like, even Esper was like, oh, it seems like

Speaker 3 that's a credible possibility. I think.

Speaker 17 Michael Cohen was a bad lawyer for Trump, and he's a bad lawyer against Trump.

Speaker 3 Yeah. But he also has the best window into his business dealings.

Speaker 19 And I guess, I don't know, it's hard to tell now what if he's playing. He was playing a role for Trump as this attack dog.
He called himself a fixer. I don't know that he fixed much.

Speaker 19 Now he's like a resistance hero, but he does know how the guy operates.

Speaker 19 And if he thinks sincerely that Trump might be selling secrets to somebody or leveraging them for some sort of economic gain, I mean, it's interesting. It's worth listening to.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Nothing would surprise me at this point.
Right. That's the

Speaker 17 what do you think about

Speaker 3 Bill Barr is someone who went through a cycle of this covering for Trump around the Mueller probe

Speaker 17 and now has done a full reversal. You know, you've been you've interviewed all of these people, many of whom have been on both sides of being defenders of Trump and then antagonists to Trump.

Speaker 17 What do you find describes the moment that some of them have shifted? Is there anything that that any connection you make between who has a line and where they draw it?

Speaker 3 I think

Speaker 3 I can't really explain it. I mean, obviously, personal experience plays a big role.
A lot of these people

Speaker 3 think, and I understand why they think or thought, well, this is the situation. He is the president, so I'm going to try to steer the ship so the country doesn't go to war or whatever.

Speaker 3 And I understand that.

Speaker 3 I can't explain Bill Barr's position because

Speaker 3 what is it about the national secrets that is so beyond the pale that so many other things were not beyond the pale? Like he, he, he didn't,

Speaker 3 like, January 6th, I would think, would just be like, okay. Yeah, that would do it for me.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, like, even if you're like with him on the policies or like trying to steer the ship, and so many people broke with him on January 6th.

Speaker 3 And then some, and then some of them kind of like crept back secretly. Yeah.
I don't know. I can't really, I can't really explain it.

Speaker 3 I mean, I do, I do see the, I was inside trying to make it work and like now I just can't be silent or whatever, but there's still people, plenty of people who are still relatively silent.

Speaker 3 So there was this moment on your show last Tuesday where you told your colleagues in the control room to stop looping the B-roll of the. It was before, yeah, it was before they looped it.
That's it.

Speaker 3 They showed it once and I'm like, okay. We've seen it, but you guys know how cable works.
It's like, we have these live new pictures. Let's show that.
Let's just keep showing them.

Speaker 3 And before they started looping, I'm like, okay, we got the news value out of that. Done.
And this is for people who don't know about B-roll of Trump at the Cuban bakery he went to Versailles.

Speaker 3 Versailles, very famous Cuban bakery in

Speaker 3 Miami. And he went to it after his arraignment.
And your point was that he's just trying to make a campaign ad out of it, right?

Speaker 3 How do you decide

Speaker 3 when it's worth showing your viewers what Trump is saying and doing and when it's not? It's such a good question. I mean, I think

Speaker 3 as a general note, I am wary of showing any campaign event live for anyone. I just don't really necessarily see the news value of it.

Speaker 3 And if you're going to do it for this candidate, then you should be doing it for every candidate, like just out of fairness. This was something I didn't know about.

Speaker 3 And like all of a sudden it was happening.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I was kind of surprised and not really sure what he was doing. And I was like watching it in real time and figuring it out.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I just think as a general rule, there's obviously there's a difference if somebody is the president of the United States, whether it's Joe Biden or Donald Trump or whomever, because they're the president.

Speaker 3 And, you know, inherently it's important what they do, which is not to say that we cover every single public thing that anybody does, including President Biden.

Speaker 3 I just think that our bar has to be pretty high. And if they say something that, like, we did cover his speech that night, but we had discussed it and we were not going to cover it live.

Speaker 3 And when he said something,

Speaker 3 we were going to like find a chunk, bring it to people, you know,

Speaker 3 put it in context before, show the, show the clip, put it in context again, and then discuss it. But I just think like we're in an era now where,

Speaker 3 A, there are a lot of candidates running and we have to think about fairness and B,

Speaker 3 you know, he's incited violence. And it's not just theoretical.
It's, it's, we saw it on January 6th, and the death threats have always been going on. But we've seen actual violence and bloodshed.
So

Speaker 3 I just think it's something we all have to, all of us in the media, have to think about.

Speaker 3 So now that we are a few weeks out from the infamous Trump CNN Town Hall, do you think it was a useful exercise?

Speaker 3 I guess

Speaker 3 the questions

Speaker 3 I would ask you this.

Speaker 3 Do you think that town halls,

Speaker 3 having a candidate take questions from voters,

Speaker 3 are worthwhile? Just as a general? Absolutely. Okay.

Speaker 3 Do you think that the person who is the number, you know, number one in the polls by far for the Republican presidential nomination, forget Donald Trump for one second, just whoever that person is, should be included in that?

Speaker 3 I do, yeah. Yeah.
So then. Look at us.

Speaker 17 He's got us in the ropes.

Speaker 3 No, I mean, because I've thought a lot about this because I didn't play any role in it other than

Speaker 3 which was the fucking problem.

Speaker 3 I didn't play any role. I disassociate myself from that comment.
I didn't play any role in it except for like covering it afterwards. But like,

Speaker 3 so what would you have done differently at all? Would you not have done it live?

Speaker 3 The friendly crowd, really.

Speaker 19 I mean, I agree with you, though. Like, as a general matter, so much time has been spent talking about this.
I feel like there are a few formatting problems.

Speaker 19 Like, everyone cheering and then jeering, Caitlin Collins was not great.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 The live part, I don't have a strong feeling.

Speaker 3 Yeah, my view on this was the Democratic operative in me was happy to have it up there because he said a bunch of stuff that is extremely unpopular that's just going to come back to haunt him probably in a general election.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 the strategist in me didn't really care. Thinking about the journalistic value, I actually do think

Speaker 3 if there was an audience of

Speaker 3 undecided Republican voters, maybe throw a few independents in there. Maybe someone had warned them ahead of time, don't be hooting and hollering during the whole thing.

Speaker 3 Maybe that would have been better. Other than that, I don't know that there was anything else you guys could have done.

Speaker 3 So, the audience is the same audience we have for all these town halls and always have, which is

Speaker 3 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents for a Democratic town hall, and Republicans and Republican-leaning independents for a Republican town hall.

Speaker 3 And it wasn't stacked with Trump supporters, it was New Hampshire Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

Speaker 3 And, you know, I did a Nikki Haley town hall a few days later, a few weeks later, in Iowa, and it was the same definition of the audience. And, you know, by the end of it, she had really charmed them.

Speaker 3 She had really done a good job with them, and they were cheering for her. But, you know, they were cheering for what she was saying, which was not, you know,

Speaker 3 belittling somebody who had accused her of sexual assault and, you know, won in court and not.

Speaker 3 You know, I mean, it was just,

Speaker 3 I think what people reacted to was the fact that

Speaker 3 a lot of Republicans are still enthralled by this guy. Yeah.
And I think that's really what, honestly, what people were bothered by.

Speaker 3 And my view on that is like, hey, everyone, this is what we're dealing with. This is like the reality of the situation.
That is the reality of the situation.

Speaker 3 And, you know, he has a 67% approval rating with Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, according to a CNN poll today.

Speaker 3 Now, that's down in a month from 77, but 67% approval rating is still pretty damn good. Yeah,

Speaker 4 there's also just, I think, a kind of

Speaker 17 a viewer who's like engaged on social media, paying a lot of attention, who watches what happens on CNN like a sociologist and

Speaker 17 can't separate Trump saying things that are deeply unpopular with a lot of people, basically open to a national abortion ban, wanting to overturn the next election,

Speaker 17 a bunch of heinous things about the sexual assault claims against him, and are unable to separate that from people cheering for it.

Speaker 17 As if someone at home who might find that heinous, who, like, well, people applauded. I guess it must be pretty good.

Speaker 17 And I do think that, like, Nikki Haley in your town hall, she said a lot of similarly unpopular things. She also said, I think, some, she said

Speaker 17 she had some outlandish things to say about LGBT issues and what have you.

Speaker 17 And there was not nearly the same level of outcry or attention or concern, which I think speaks to an obsession with Trump that isn't particularly healthy on like sort of the media watchers either, right?

Speaker 17 Like, I mean, there is just sort of a

Speaker 17 focus and concern about the way he's covered that doesn't apply to the other candidates.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think one of the things that people were reacting to was

Speaker 3 people who don't like Trump were,

Speaker 3 oh, did have we really, are we really going to do this all over again? Yeah, PTSD feeling.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 also, you know, frankly, you know, the way he

Speaker 3 talked to Caitlin and the way he talked about Eugene Carroll, like, you know,

Speaker 3 it's rude and it's not pleasant for people who don't like him to watch him be rude. If you like him, then you like who he's being rude to.

Speaker 3 I don't know.

Speaker 3 Look, I don't think there's any easy answers to any of this, but I don't think pretending he's not the Republican, the leading Republican candidate for president and that he has a

Speaker 3 decent chance of being the next president again,

Speaker 3 I don't think that solves anything. I think Caitlin fact-checked him, you know, a ton.
She knew a ton about the classified documents investigation.

Speaker 3 Like, she was way, I feel like she was like way ahead of the country because like all of a sudden now we're all experts on classified documents, right?

Speaker 3 But Caitlin was there fact-checking him, knowing all the details, and he said a bunch of stuff that wasn't true then.

Speaker 3 I don't know. I mean, like, I'm not going to pretend any of this is easy.
It's, it's, it's, it's a, it's.

Speaker 3 bewitching. I mean, it's, it's troubling, but he is the leading, you know, the fact that he'll go up and tell all those lies.

Speaker 3 I would rather he go up and be calm and normal and talk about his policies,

Speaker 3 you know, that would be much more pleasant as a viewer and as a journalist.

Speaker 19 So you guys have done Trump, Haley, and Chris Christie.

Speaker 3 I assume

Speaker 3 Pence.

Speaker 3 Everyone forgets about Pence. Poor Pence.

Speaker 3 So I assume they'll try to get Joe Biden to do one. Do you think

Speaker 3 everybody, Tim Scott, Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 19 Do you think on the Democratic side, you would do a town hall with someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?

Speaker 3 I would not. Okay.
Why?

Speaker 3 Because he spreads dangerous misinformation about childhood vaccines. And

Speaker 3 I had a personal experience with him in 2005 when he became, well,

Speaker 3 a professional experience personally with him. In 2005 was when he began in earnest his anti-childhood vaccine campaign.

Speaker 3 He wrote a story for salon.com that was jointly published with Rolling Stone, both of which have since

Speaker 3 retracted the articles and Rolling Stone just completely disappeared it. It was like it never happened.

Speaker 3 Salon has a page where they acknowledge what happened and et cetera, et cetera, but Rolling Stone is just like, you know, it's like Hoffa. I don't know where he knows it's

Speaker 3 under the J. It might be.
It might be.

Speaker 3 So the

Speaker 3 depth reference, Metal Answer.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 anyway, I just dealt with him and he was so dishonest in that experience. And since then, he lies about the experience frequently as an example of how the media is co-opted by big pharma.

Speaker 3 I did a story about the piece that he did for Rolling Stone. This is in 2005 when all this vaccine stuff was still kind of new.

Speaker 3 All this, these lies about vaccines causing autism in kids. And it's completely discredited and it's not true at all.
But anyway, we did a story about it.

Speaker 3 I called him and told him, like, we were going to hold it a day. We were going to hold the story a day and we were going to like just do some more due diligence on his claims.

Speaker 3 And then we ran the piece the next day. In his retelling of this story, he and I were working closely for three weeks on a terrific documentary about his

Speaker 3 discovery

Speaker 3 and corporate America killed it. And I called him up and I said, it's never happened to me before that I've had a piece killed.
I can't believe this.

Speaker 3 None of that's true. And like, like he's out.
He literally just said this the other day on a podcast. It was, it was like a minute 45 piece.
It ran on World News tonight with Peter Jennings.

Speaker 3 The next night,

Speaker 3 I had had a million pieces killed.

Speaker 3 I was a new ABC, I had been at ABC News for two years. I had had a thousand pieces killed by ABC News.
Like, I mean, and it's just like, he's so dishonest. And like,

Speaker 3 so no, I wouldn't.

Speaker 19 This is such a, this is such a media story, though, right? Because like, that's an example of the system working.

Speaker 19 You had, you had editors, you had gatekeepers, you had fact-checkers doing the right thing, doing due diligence, killing stories, retracting them if needed to be. Now we're in 2023.

Speaker 4 There's this RFK boomlet.

Speaker 19 20% of the country of Democrats apparently like him because of his last name, but you have Jack Dorsey, a billionaire, founder of Twitter, propping up RFK.

Speaker 3 You've got Aaron Rodgers.

Speaker 19 Yes, a bunch of Republicans are propping him up because they view him as a valuable foil to attack Biden.

Speaker 17 But you've got Aaron Rodgers propping this guy up.

Speaker 19 You've got Elon Musk and David Sachs doing these spaces with him. And

Speaker 19 there's no filter or layer in between these sort of credible sounding lies and anecdotes and stories that Robert F.

Speaker 3 Kennedy Jr.

Speaker 19 riffs off and an audience of people who are believing they're true.

Speaker 17 And I'm just like wondering what you as a journalist, how you feel about that, what you think people can do about it.

Speaker 19 Because to your point, I mean, like there have been resurgences of measles, you know, like diseases that

Speaker 3 Google Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and Samoa and measles. Exactly.
He, I mean, there was a horrible incident in Samoa where some nurses screwed up and

Speaker 3 the anti-vax people turned that into this vaccine kills kids or this vaccine. And he went to the island and he propped them up and then there was an epidemic of measles.
I mean, kids died. Yeah.
And

Speaker 3 I mean, I don't know what there is to do about it other than do what I do as effectively as possible, which is just fact check and make sure people understand what he's saying isn't true.

Speaker 3 He's still out there claiming that

Speaker 3 themerisol was his preservative that was in some of these vaccines. And there was

Speaker 3 false accusations that this had some, but it's been out of vaccines since like 1999. And the rate of autism continues to climb.
A lot of this is just people being

Speaker 3 more aware of diagnosis. Exactly.
But there might be some chemical. I don't know

Speaker 3 all the reasons, but it's not themerisol in vaccines.

Speaker 3 But anyway, I think he's dangerous. And I think, and when I say he's dangerous, I don't mean like his ideas make me afraid.

Speaker 3 No, I think he's dangerous because he tells parents not to get their kids vaccinated and the kids get sick and die.

Speaker 17 We should also tell people, though, that Jake did, he is wearing an Eli Lilly hat and he gave everybody a Zempik,

Speaker 3 which I think was like a weird move. Well, take the hint.

Speaker 19 The good news is he just, he just says this shit on podcasts, you know, and nobody takes that seriously.

Speaker 3 But he said, no, but he said,

Speaker 3 I'm now a big pharma's shield. That's his argument.
That's crazy. Like, and it's just like, I don't even know what you mean.
I'm a big pharma.

Speaker 3 what does that even mean but i i sort of got it so i finally i'm halfway through the joe rogan interview i don't know why i did this to myself why would you because i have not i've never listened to him so i like wanted to see what what was going on here and i get why he's both dangerous and why some people find him like because he looks exactly like his dad well but also he sounds exactly like his mom he goes on and on and on about like this scientific study and this and this and he does this whole thing like don't don't take my word for it i think experts are bad i don't want to be one of those experts just read the science, read the science.

Speaker 3 He's wrong about all this shit. I know, but like, how many people are going to, you know, and then Joe Rogan's like, hey, can you Google what he just said there about 5G causing leaky brains?

Speaker 3 And then someone's like, what popped up on Google?

Speaker 17 That's my problem. I got 5G leaky brains.
But see, like, this is a small, this is one example of a larger problem. You know,

Speaker 17 there's been so much attention on CNN in just the past couple of weeks. A lot of just

Speaker 17 there has been like navel-gazing around CNN and its management and and and the ideology uh uh being represented on its shows but that is a tiny conversation taking place as this vast change as this massive shifts take place and it feels as though the power of an institution like cnn msnbc major news outlets that that power itself is all collectively shrinking yeah as the gate like with so there are fewer gatekeepers around information and and everyone in those sort of those legacy outlets are kind of chasing the lies and misinformation that are being spread all the time by people like RFK Jr., by Trump, by any of a number of figures.

Speaker 17 And you just said, I don't know what I can do except go on television and try to correct it and be accurate.

Speaker 3 Or just bring the right information to people.

Speaker 17 Bring the right information to people.

Speaker 4 But how do you see your role?

Speaker 17 when you are one

Speaker 17 little star in a firmament of information, most of which is now not fact-checked at all.

Speaker 3 I mean, I can only do what I can do. I mean, like,

Speaker 3 I mean, it bothers me a lot, the state of

Speaker 3 the media. It bothers me a lot, you know,

Speaker 3 what Fox, you know, the $787.5 million settlement that they had to pay Dominion.

Speaker 3 And that's just one of many such settlements. There was the whole secret settlement to the family of Seth Rich.

Speaker 3 I mean, there's just, and there's there's more stuff coming with SmartManic and other, it's just, and they're just other than the financial penalty, there seems to be actually no punishment.

Speaker 3 There's no disincentive for

Speaker 3 these networks that just like openly lie to their viewers for ratings. I mean, that's what we had here in the Dominion texts and emails was an open admission.

Speaker 3 that Fox was lying, not just giving a conservative spin on something, but lying.

Speaker 3 We are lying because we don't want to lose these viewers because they're going to Newsmax because they want to be lied to. And like there was a $787.5 million disincentive structure, I guess.

Speaker 3 But like,

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 who lost their job? I mean, I don't know if Tucker losing his job was part of that or not. There's like whispers that it was, but I don't know.

Speaker 3 It just, I don't know what the I don't know where the disincentive is for these people who have just openly decided to exploit, you know, the freedom of the press and the freedom of speech that we have.

Speaker 3 It's depressing.

Speaker 3 This is not me trying to make an awkward turn to my book, but it is one of the reasons why one of the subtexts or one of the plots of the book is about the rise, because the book takes place in 77, and one of the points of it is the rise of tabloids and the rise of the Murdochs of the world in the 70s, because that's when it happened.

Speaker 17 Do you feel at all hypocritical, given that much of what happens in the book is not real?

Speaker 3 No, because it is fiction. Oh, it's fiction.

Speaker 3 It is fiction. It's a good, it's an excellent question, though.
I appreciate it.

Speaker 17 Sorry, that's stupid.

Speaker 3 It's fiction. So in the book, and All the Demons Are Here, I have a similar type of Murdoch character moving to DC, starting a tabloid called the DC Sentinel.

Speaker 3 But one of the things that when I researched Murdoch for the character of Max Lyon, who was based on Murdoch, it was just amazing the stuff he would say,

Speaker 3 just openly admit about what he thought sold and why it was important to do that and what he had been doing in Australia and the UK. And it's rage and fear.

Speaker 3 Do you think Fox should be treated as a legitimate news organization after all this?

Speaker 3 I know you're saying this because in 2009, a week after my son was born,

Speaker 3 why putting on him? What did he do?

Speaker 3 He wasn't insane. That was my follow-up.

Speaker 3 In the haze of seven sleepless nights.

Speaker 3 you guys, the Obama White House had launched a campaign saying the Fox was not a legitimate news organization. And I asked Robert Gibbs in a gaggle, why was it appropriate for the White House to label

Speaker 3 this organization, which I, in my, I was looking for the world, looking for the fellow credentialed member of the White House Press Corps, but what I said was sister organization, which I regret very much.

Speaker 3 Why was it legitimate? Why was it

Speaker 3 responsible or appropriate for a White House to say that about a credentialed news organization? That was the question.

Speaker 3 Which I've been...

Speaker 19 Did Bobby Gibbs take it well? What did he say?

Speaker 3 He basically asked me to turn, he said you should turn on,

Speaker 3 and then he alluded to when Glenn Beck's show was on.

Speaker 3 You turn on whatever. And I'm like, I'm not saying why.

Speaker 3 And this transcript's out there for anybody wants to read it, but I'm not saying why would you not say say that show, I'm saying you labeled the whole thing, and also the other context is

Speaker 3 who was the White House, who were the Major Garrett, who's a legitimate journalist with CBS News Now, was the White House correspondent for Fox at the time.

Speaker 19 They always have a beard that they kind of hang out there to look at all the time.

Speaker 3 I do remember that incident. I just asked the question because I was interested in what you think now.
Yeah,

Speaker 3 I should have

Speaker 3 known that you would remember, that I would remember that.

Speaker 3 I think that the Fox of 2009

Speaker 3 is not the Fox of 2023.

Speaker 3 I understand why Obama and the White House were going on the campaign. I still think it is a fine question for a reporter to say, why is it appropriate to do this?

Speaker 3 If I were in the White House press corps now and you guys were doing it and whatever, I don't think I would ask that question. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, even reading through all the Dominion stuff,

Speaker 3 I was like, what?

Speaker 3 Like some of the opinion stuff you get, but just like the coordination, sort of the like, you know, just admitting that it's for money and ratings. And I mean, it's just, it was wild.

Speaker 3 And no journalistic standards at all. Like Maria Bartaroma's, the source for all that stuff was some crazy woman who talked to ghosts or something.

Speaker 19 Yeah, it was a forwarded email, essentially.

Speaker 3 And it bled into the news side. Like, you know, 100%.
No, the, so I think the most shocking thing to me was reading,

Speaker 3 you know, know, quote unquote straight news anchors talking to the opinion people and saying, like, I told the decision desk to put Arizona back in the Trump column.

Speaker 3 And it's like, first of all, Arizona was never in the Trump column. So what do you mean back in the Trump column? Second of all,

Speaker 3 what are you even talking to the decision desk? It would never even occur to me to think it was appropriate for me to reach out to the decision desk.

Speaker 3 But in that wild world where like, let's just say that I want to reach out to the decision desk, I wouldn't even know how to do it like there is such a firewall I wouldn't even know the big first way to do it I would never want to do it it's crazy to me and then that same anchor uh said that he told them to slow slow roll the Nevada call

Speaker 17 I just like this is crazy stuff to me well it does it you know this idea though and I and I do agree that this you know something has shifted but like this idea that you can have

Speaker 17 serious news people on one half of your channel and then fomenting like rage and nonsense and fear and misinformation on the other half of your channel as if that that's sustainable seems to have been like a larger problem for Republicans this idea that they can have their serious policy Paul Ryan types while winning elections on the backs of Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene and the kind of the racialized and sort of

Speaker 17 you know the fear-mongering that has sort of become the the the the main way in which they draw people out come November. Like the idea that these two things could exist in parallel forever.

Speaker 17 It just seems like it wasn't true. It wasn't true for Fox.
It's not true for Republicans.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, like I said, I wouldn't ask that question today. I mean,

Speaker 3 I think that they are different, which is not to say that they were great in 2009, but

Speaker 3 I think that it is a different situation now.

Speaker 3 And again,

Speaker 3 I really felt like I was kind of standing up for Major Garrett, who I thought was a really good reporter and a friend and was a colleague.

Speaker 3 And the other reporter, the other White House reporter was Wendell Gohler, who had

Speaker 3 who passed away in the last year. I mean, rest in peace.
Also, just like

Speaker 3 both good. I can't say straight shooter without looking at you and laughing, but like, but like, just a, just a solid reporter.
There were a lot of people who weren't.

Speaker 17 Yeah, no, but I wasn't even coming at it from the perspective of that 2008.

Speaker 3 No, you're saying, right, you're saying that.

Speaker 17 I'm saying that there's a larger bit of, there's a, there's a self-deception that seems to go on on the right that tries to separate their kind of whatever, their intellectual, serious

Speaker 17 policy operation that has sort of conservative values from

Speaker 17 some bygone era and then this sort of foe, this sort of like, this sort of rage machine. And that the idea that he kept them separate was never true.
It was never possible.

Speaker 3 I'm open to the argument that

Speaker 3 the Wall Street Journal news organization and the Wall Street Journal opinion pages can coexist.

Speaker 3 And I'm open to the argument that you can have like a serious news division or news shows and then like opinion shows at night.

Speaker 3 I'm open to that argument.

Speaker 3 What has changed, or maybe I'm just,

Speaker 3 I don't know,

Speaker 3 maybe I'm just more aware of it,

Speaker 3 but it seems worse, is just the degree to which it's just based on lies. Just lies, not

Speaker 3 conservative opinion. This is how I view the world because I'm a conservative, but just lies.
And I like, for instance,

Speaker 3 MSNBC is opinion at night. It is.
I mean, Chris and either Rachel or Alex and then Lawrence, I mean, and then Stephanie, like, it's opinion generally.

Speaker 3 And,

Speaker 3 you know, I don't, you could argue, like, I don't know that it's the healthiest thing in the world to

Speaker 3 have preaching to the choir television, but it is based in fact.

Speaker 3 And what they, you know, and what I, you know, I mean, I hear the way Hannity, like Hannity attacks me or goes after me.

Speaker 3 And I, I don't, you know, I'll hear about it like a day or two later or whatever. And like,

Speaker 3 he says things that just aren't true. It's just insane.
And I don't, like, you can't even combat it. There's no even attempt to try to get anything in the realm of real.

Speaker 3 Can I ask you about a moment of radical candor on the air with you?

Speaker 19 We were thinking back on your storied career, and it is storied. You were interviewing a gentleman named John Bolton.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 19 And you made a coup. You made a comment that you don't have to be a genius to stage a coup in a foreign country.
And he got offended by that.

Speaker 3 No, I said you don't have to be a genius to stage a coup. I was talking about in America.
Sure, okay, sorry.

Speaker 19 And he took offense to the idea that you don't have to be a genius and said, I've staged coups in many places. What was that like for you to have someone just admit to staging a coup on air?

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, he kind of retracted a little bit, but it was a kind of, I didn't really know what to say.

Speaker 3 yeah

Speaker 3 you want to be more specific like where let me tell you someone who's staged a few coups yeah it takes some serious preparation yeah that was that was an odd moment that's just like the the perils of not or the perils of the the opportunities and perils of live tv where people just say things and like what

Speaker 3 roll that back yeah i and sometimes you don't necessarily catch it or even know how to react to it because it's so bizarre and like you might like come back to it like 30 seconds or a minute later because your brain is still kind of like did he just just, I don't think I followed up immediately.

Speaker 3 I think I followed up like a minute or two later. I think I had to be like, can we go back to something you said like a minute ago? Because my brain in real time was like, of course.

Speaker 3 Wait a second. I think he just admitted that he did a coup.

Speaker 3 It was odd. I will say that if the,

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 if you look at the way that Donald Trump attempted to undo the election,

Speaker 3 it wasn't for lack of planning. It was like there was a lot of different avenues he went, right? I mean, he did the

Speaker 3 challenges and the election boards, then the courtroom cases, then the state legislatures.

Speaker 3 I mean, there was a whole bunch. Before they got to the violin overthrow, there was a whole bunch of.
So, I mean, like, I don't think there was a lack of brain power there.

Speaker 3 They were trying all sorts of ways. They were.
They were. Just the guardrails held.
But you know something? We did a documentary

Speaker 3 called American Coup after in 2000,

Speaker 3 either 2021 or 2022. And something Adam Kinzinger said was really interesting.
And I don't know if he made it up or what, but it was the first time I ever heard it was from him.

Speaker 3 It's like you see a guardrail that a car has hit, and it's like all mangled, but it's there. And you're like, okay, so

Speaker 3 it held, it held. But that doesn't mean it's going to hold the next time.
Yeah. When a car hits it the next time, it's been battered so badly, it might actually break.
I think about it.

Speaker 4 It's like a very tight pickle jar.

Speaker 3 What?

Speaker 3 Elaborate on that.

Speaker 3 You know, you open the pickle jar? Well, it's like, oh, I can't get it.

Speaker 17 Someone else gets it.

Speaker 3 I lose it.

Speaker 17 I lose that up for it. Is that helpful? Do you need a second metaphor?

Speaker 3 You think is that I like the guardrail one better?

Speaker 4 No, I think, you know what? Let's, hey, let's just fix this.

Speaker 17 Make mine the guardrail one.

Speaker 4 Give Jake the pickle one.

Speaker 3 You're fixing it in post? Yeah.

Speaker 3 I feel like you take, first of all, I don't know how many pickles you're consuming at your home, but it does seem like you're arguing a lot to your certain other person.

Speaker 3 You seem stuck on this for some reason.

Speaker 3 You loosened it. I think we should move on.

Speaker 3 I feel like you are one of the few reporters who, when you've interviewed Trump, has really like held him to account, really elicited some interesting stuff from him. Well, I haven't.

Speaker 3 He hasn't let me interview him since the summer of 2016. I thought you interviewed him in.
No,

Speaker 3 Judge Curiel.

Speaker 3 It was like June 2016. He was going off on how there was the Trump University case, and Judge Curiel couldn't be fair because Judge Curial is a Mexican.
Right. I remember.
And

Speaker 3 I basically said to myself before the interview,

Speaker 3 that's just like the definition of racism to say somebody can't do their job because of their heritage or race.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I just kept on going until I finally got the question out. And that was the last time he let me interview him.
Is that

Speaker 3 like, talk a little bit about your strategy with someone like Trump?

Speaker 3 Is it I've got to just keep asking follow-ups And even if I sort of go off my plan and don't get enough questions in, I've got to get him on this one thing or like that.

Speaker 3 I think he's not somebody that you'd like, you come with, like, I have to cover all these 15 different topics.

Speaker 3 You know, I have a question on energy, and I have a question on like foreign policy, and a question on trade.

Speaker 3 No, you just have to come and ask questions, and then when there's something that you think is important, just drill down until you get there.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think that's that's been that's the most effective way, not just him, but like anybody who is a difficult interview, anybody who is not,

Speaker 3 who doesn't come to like actually answer questions and like is, does a lot of, I mean, he, there are other people I've interviewed who are like this, but he's definitely, you know,

Speaker 3 a quality into himself. But just like the filibuster, the change the subject, the insult, the, the, the interruption, the, I mean, he, he does it all.
And it's, it's a challenge.

Speaker 3 It's a real challenge. It's tough to do.
Yeah. I mean, you saw, you saw the Bear interview.
He interrupts Bear the whole time, over and over and over. And, you know,

Speaker 3 it's just

Speaker 3 part of what you get.

Speaker 19 Jake, you're doing the lead five days a week. Yeah.
You're doing Sunday shows.

Speaker 3 Every other way of doing it.

Speaker 3 Dana does half of them.

Speaker 19 Dana does half of them. You're doing the town halls.

Speaker 4 You're writing three fiction, three novels.

Speaker 3 Well, since 2000. You're fucked down.
16.

Speaker 3 Why did you decide to become a writer? Why are you writing books or a novelist?

Speaker 3 I always

Speaker 3 was interested in fiction. I went to film school after college, and then I wrote a novel in my 20s, and it got me an agent, but it didn't get published.

Speaker 3 And then I kind of just took a break and focused on reporting. And then after The Outpost, I wrote this book about Afghanistan called The Outpost, which was so nonfiction.
It was so meaningful to me.

Speaker 3 And then people, the publisher wanted me to write another nonfiction. I said,

Speaker 3 that book was so intense, and it meant so much to me to tell the story of these soldiers. If I find something I care that much about, I will, but I, it really, it took so much out of me emotionally.

Speaker 3 And then this was just, honestly, it was just like, I had been thinking about a plot for the Hellfire Club, the first book in the series, and it was just fun. It was just an escape.

Speaker 3 And after, and I think I started writing in 2015, 2016, and it was just, it was really nice to get out of it.

Speaker 3 And also, like, the first book takes place in the McCarthy era, and Joe McCarthy's a character in it. And I felt like I could say something about the era we were in by looking at Joe McCarthy.

Speaker 3 Just like in this one, All the Demons Are Here, I felt like I could say something about charismatic demagogues and mobs and yellow journalism and tabloid journalism today by looking by like making something up fun about the about the past.

Speaker 17 And you go into a room and you start writing and you stay there for hours.

Speaker 3 Do you guys

Speaker 3 escape? I mean, my God.

Speaker 17 I don't understand it.

Speaker 3 That's not what I do.

Speaker 3 What do you do? How do you do it? So I do an outline first. Uh-huh.
And then I.

Speaker 17 What time of day is this? Seriously, I'm not like, when are you fucking writing a book?

Speaker 4 You're on television every goddamn day. I do two podcasts a week.
I'm exhausted.

Speaker 3 I don't have a computer in front of me. I didn't even prepare this.

Speaker 3 I can't really explain it. I know that I'm very driven and it's kind of crazy.

Speaker 3 I can't really explain it. I know.
My staff gives me shit about it. Like, how do you have time to do this? How do you have time to do that? All I can tell you is I find it enjoyable.
I find it fun.

Speaker 4 What kind of coffee is that right there?

Speaker 3 Just an iced coffee, black. Wow, okay.
Black, nothing in it. I thought you were going to ask a question about the book, Palm.

Speaker 19 Speaking of driven, Trump called you fake tapper.

Speaker 8 Do you feel like he mailed that one in?

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's kind of lazy, right? Yeah. Can you give us one final pitch for all the demons that are here? All right, are we done?

Speaker 3 Okay, so I think that you guys would like it because it takes place in 1977 and it is in addition to having these plots that have to do with resident things today, like tabloid journalism and mobs and the like.

Speaker 3 I think you'd like it because it's a wild year and 1977 was just crazy. Like, there were so many insane things that happened.
Evil Knievel is like a big character in the book.

Speaker 3 Elvis dies, Summer of Sams. Tom and I were talking about this.
We're like, do we think people who listen to this podcast will even know who Evil Knievel was? Because I remember being as a kid.

Speaker 3 Is that right? You do? So I was not a fan of Evil Knievel.

Speaker 3 It didn't do anything for me, but I had friends who were fans of his, but he's just a great, very American character. He's a horrible motorcycle rider, just not talented.

Speaker 17 Like that pilot who crashed into the, like the, the, they hit the swans thing, crashed into the Hudson. Like, that was cool.

Speaker 3 Sully? Yeah. Sully Sullenberger? No.
I'm just saying.

Speaker 17 Even Knievel is famous for crashing that thing. It's a weird thing to be famous for as a pilot.

Speaker 3 No, he's more.

Speaker 3 Sorry. You know what I mean? It was more that he was willing to.

Speaker 4 Think about all the pilots that didn't hit ducks that day.

Speaker 3 Okay. Okay.
So

Speaker 3 he was willing to do these insane stunts.

Speaker 3 Right, that's and so that's what that and he was and he was like he lived in Butte, Montana, and he stayed in Butte, Montana, and he was just like this completely self-made creature.

Speaker 3 Like that he would only, this would only happen in the United States and maybe only in the 70s. Yeah.
And I just think it's a wild era that's fun to explore. That's nice.

Speaker 17 See that Tom Cruise rides a motorcycle and then uses a parachute in the new Mission Impossible movie?

Speaker 3 I've seen that little skit, the little clip. That wouldn't call it a skit.

Speaker 17 The man did it. Man, he really, really did it.

Speaker 3 He's nuts.

Speaker 17 Hey, that's cool. He did die for us.

Speaker 3 He does his.

Speaker 17 He would die for us?

Speaker 3 I think so.

Speaker 3 The themes will keep him.

Speaker 19 The Scientology guys will protect him.

Speaker 3 Anyway, the book is All the Demons Are Here. It is out July 11th, but you can pre-order it now.
Yes, absolutely. Go get the book.
Jake Tapper. Thanks, guys.
Come back again soon. I appreciate it.

Speaker 3 All right. Thanks to Jake Tapper for joining us today.
Everyone have a fantastic weekend and we will talk to you next week. Bye, everyone.

Speaker 3 Had 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 3 Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis.

Speaker 3 Thanks to Hallie Kiefer, Madeline Herringer, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support.

Speaker 3 And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Mia Kelman, Ben Hefcoat, and David Toles.

Speaker 3 Subscribe to Pod Save America on YouTube to catch full episodes, exclusive content, and other community events. Find us at youtube.com/slash at PodSave America.

Speaker 3 What is the secret to making great toast?

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