12 Angry Hopefuls

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Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau.
I'm pride demon Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor.
On today's show, the Republican field grows to 12 as the RNC sets new criteria for the first debate. Donald Trump prepares to be indicted again.
Ron DeSantis tests out new lines of attack in Iowa. Nikki Haley does a CNN town hall that no one noticed.
And Joe Biden takes a debt ceiling victory lap with an Oval Office address, while his anti-vax Democratic challenger RFK Jr. does a Twitter spaces event with Elon Musk.
How's that for a sentence? You know. How's all those words together? It's so hard.
They all mean something. And you know what? Or nothing.
They mean nothing. Our children, use that paragraph to explain to our children what happened.
Why the waters rose and the internet stopped working. Then later, the Washington Post's Ben Terrace talks to Tommy about his new book, The Big Break, which is a riveting account of D.C.
in the post-Trump era. But first, if you can, please donate to Vote Save America's Fuck Bans, Leave Queer Kids Alone funds, which are supporting organizations on the ground in states that are banning care and targeting trans youth.
Our original goal is $50,000, but you guys already crushed that in just a few days. So we're going to try to make it $100,000.
Nice. I think we can do that, right? You can donate to either political impact organizations, tax-deductible nonprofits, or both.
Just go to votesaveamerica.com slash fuckbans to learn more and donate today. Also, Kirkett's go-to legal podcast, Strict Scrutiny, will be recording live at Howard University, and you can now join via live stream on June 9th at 1 p.m.
Eastern. Join hosts Leah Littman, Kate Shaw, and Melissa Murray with President and Director Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Janai Nelson, and Crooked's own Shaniqua McClendon as they talk all things Supreme Court.
Get your live stream tickets today by heading to cricket.com slash strict live and get a 25% discount if you're a friend of the pod subscriber. Exciting stuff.
All right, let's get to the news. The Republican presidential field will expand to a full dozen this week with official announcements from Mike Pence, Chris Christie, and someone named Doug Burgum, who was apparently the governor of North Dakota.
For two terms. Two terms? I had to Google him.
I did not know that. And I re-elected.
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu has decided against running, which is a blow to the tens of Sununu for president fans out there. The Republican National Committee is trying to put a tent on this circus.
They just announced that in order for candidates to qualify for the first debate, which we now know will be hosted by Fox and held in Milwaukee on August 23rd, candidates have to meet the following criteria. They have to poll consistently above 1% in a combination of state and national polls.
They have to have at least 40,000 donors across 20 states. And they have to pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee.
All right, let's start with the debate criteria. Who's already in? Who do you think's worried? And how might this whole thing affect the debates and the race? Tommy? So, I mean, I think Trump's in, DeSantis is in, you know, Pence is probably in, Haley, they're all in.
Also, Vivek Ramaswamy has already qualified. He says, right? The groundswell.
But based on polling or donors? All the polling has shown that he would qualify if nothing changes. And then they said that they've reached the donor.
People who've reached the donor threshold, at least what they've said, is DeSantis, Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy. So I think the criteria, it's understandable.
You don't want any person who just says, hey, I'm running for president. I want to build a brand for myself and sell a book to be able to be on that stage.
But I think they have the impact of nationalizing these campaigns and incentivizing these candidates to do a ton of appearances on Fox News or the Ben Shapiro show or other right-wing outlets rather than grinding it out in early states and talking to real voters. They also force candidates who don't have a big donor list to spend tons of money acquiring donors.

I was talking to a friend who you both know well who worked on the Democratic race in

2020 about these thresholds because the Republicans basically stole the Democratic version of

the debate thresholds.

And he said, polling and donor thresholds make me want to throw myself off a bridge and text

because the thresholds ratchet up and up and up over time.

And so that these candidates would learn

about some new donor threshold

and have to tear up their entire plan

to focus only on getting more small dollar donors

and not talking to voters,

spending 500 grand on Facebook ads

so that you can get up to like 65,000 donors or whatever the threshold is. Now I know who you're talking to.
So there's perverse incentives that are not really good. I mean, they don't like, you know, they're not educating voters.
You're just kind of meeting the RNC or DNC thresholds. Well, the idea is that, oh, you have enough support out there in the country that you deserve a place on the stage.
But in practice for a lot of them, they spend a ton of money per donor to acquire the donors to reach the threshold because the threshold exists. I'm not sure.
I think it might be, it doesn't seem like a great set of criteria, but I wonder if it's the best of a bunch of bad options. Like if you want to set some criteria, you don't want to just do polling because polls are polls and they're not always accurate, especially national polls in a primary.
So then where do you go after that? Donors, I guess, make sense, especially since there's a lot of grassroots donors these days. I don't know.
It's very imperfect. So we know that Trump, DeSantis, Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy are in as of now.
Tim Scott is fine on polling. He's built a big fundraising base.
So he's probable. My boy Tim's going to make it.
Your boy Tim's going to make it. My guy Tim's in it.
On the fence, maybes, are Pence, who is fine on polling, but very iffy on fundraising, and hasn't committed to supporting Trump. And you have to commit to not participating in non-RNC debates.
That's also true. Well, it's funny because has Trump taken the loyalty pledge? No.
And this was a giant fight last time. Trump's going to take it and lie like he did last time.
Right. So that's fine for him.
I think it's tougher for both Pence and Christie. Christie's also going to have the same problem on both the supporting Trump thing and the fundraising.
It's tough on Pence and Christie because part of their whole argument, especially Christie, is Trump is unfit to be president. So if they say they're going to commit to supporting

the nominee to get on the debate stage, but then

they lie, I wonder if it's harder for them

than Trump. It's also like it's a very fuzzy

like what is

it depends on what the language is, right? Of course I'm going to

support the nominee. I'm going to be the nominee.

And then I got this thing.

And then Asa Hutchinson

also on the bubble. Larry Elder

also on the bubble, though. Larry Elder

has a big fundraising base because he

ran in California. And then Asa Hutchinson also on the bubble.
Larry Elder also on the bubble. Though Larry Elder has a big fundraising base because he ran in California.
And then definitely in trouble, Doug Burgum. Doug.
Dougie B. Although it's just the first day.
Doug Burgumentum is not what it is yet. It hasn't formed yet.
We are speaking to you on the first day of the Doug Burgum. You know when before a tsunami, the water rushes out? Is that where we are right now? That's where we are in the Burgum wave.
The water is leaving. They're both sitting on fucking rocks as the Burgum wave comes to hit us.
The other famous Doug in politics. He got Emhoff and Burgum.
Did you guys watch his little three and a half minute bio video? Oh, you bet I did. I missed it.
It's kind of an interesting story. I read about his story, but I didn't see the video.
As one donor. Here we go.
Yeah, I'm not giving him five bucks to get on that stage. He was born in North Dakota.
He got really rich because he literally sold a family farm to invest in some software company, made hundreds of millions of dollars. This is word for word from the fucking video.
Yeah, elected twice. I mean, I don't think he made up his bio we are here to give people information yeah it's called prep yeah you should try it i've watched the video i know everything you're saying i know everything you're saying right now i know did you wiki him because i did that too okay good for you when i first heard about him and his whole pitch is like he's running he's a he's a conservative in north dakota who's running against polarization and partisanship and that's bullshit he's a software exec microsoft you know he wants to do a business first message focused on the economy and energy but then like i looked into it a little bit and it's like oh he also signed a six-week abortion ban and made gender affirming cares for minor a crime yeah so it's like and banned the teaching of critical race theory he in 2020 he seemed to push back on on the party for some of the more outrageous anti-LGBT things they were saying within the North Dakota GOP.
And then later on, he signed all these horrible bills. Yeah.
I was thinking about that, just looking at this wonderful field coming into view for us. And a big difference from 2016 to now is 2016, there really was underneath all the kind of aesthetic nonsense and bullshit.
There was actual policy shifts happening as the Republican Party moved from, you know, Paul Ryan conservatism to the kind of like, you know, right wing, anti-immigrant kind of making that more central, anti-trans, anti-gay, the kind of more fascistic version that Trump is doing. And all these people have fully embraced that platform.
They're just campaigning on aesthetics, right? They're just going to do it with a nicer touch, which is obviously not enough. Did you see Trump's quote on the race, the field expanding? What do you say? He said, people coming into the race, you know, they're pulling at 1%, 2%.
I don't know what they're doing. They must know something.
But I know actually some of them are pretty stupid. They're running for VP in cabinet.
Maybe they are, but some of them won't happen. I can tell you.
That's so funny. It's pretty spot on.
I asked Dan this on Thursday, but Pence and Christie, do you think it's possible that Vivek Ramaswamy finishes ahead of them? I think it's, well, it's just like, is it possible that Vivek gets more than 3%? Yes. It's like, they're so mismatched.
Here's what I can't figure out either. We haven't talked about the fact that, although we've mentioned it before, that Trump might skip the debates, skip the primary debates you're chris christie you get into this race because you're like i just need to get on that debate stage and i'm going to kick the shit out trump i don't care if republican voters don't like me i'm just on a kamikaze mission to fuck up trump and then trump doesn't appear in the debates then what's chris christie doing and then he doesn't appear in the debates he's got two problems here yeah chris christie is doing this kind of debate pugilist New Hampshire strategy, which I don't have a lot of faith in that.
Pence, at least, you know, Pence, I think the last poll had him at 5% in Iowa, and he's going to go after the kind of white Christian evangelical nationalists that make up a lot of the caucus goers in Iowa. So I think, look, I don't have a lot of money on Pence, but I think he has a better theory of the case than Chris Quincy.
I also feel like I'm in outer space. We've seen Chris Quincy debate.
He debated throughout the campaign and then he lost profoundly. He just lost completely.
We've seen him do this. He debated Trump several times.
The only time he ever got traction is when he stopped debating Trump and debated Marco Rubio for five seconds. And that was his big moment.
And then he was gone. I just think that, yeah, I agree with all that.
I think Pence's constituency is like non-existent, right? He does the right thing at the last possible moment that makes the whole Trump base so angry at him that some of them wanted to literally kill him. But for people who don't like Trump, Pence also stood by for four years and applauded everything that Trump did.
So like, where is the, where is the Pence supporter? I don't know. I don't know.
I guess the Pence supporter is someone who loved everything Donald Trump did up until he tried to overturn the election. And then they, then they got off the bus.
He's just banking on the of far-right evangelicals. And Chris Christie is just as full of shit.
I mean, he nearly died because Trump gave him COVID during debate prep for Donald Trump. Yeah, no, Trump almost killed both of them.
And they're both, now they're back. Yeah, it was also, it's like, it's a deeper, like none of them are willing to make a real case against Trump because they don't want to alienate the voters they know they need, which is the problem at the core of all this.
I think Christie may. I think Christie may make a real legitimate case against Donald Trump.
I just don't know that it will do anything. Or that he'll make the stage.
But the thing is, he can't... The case is predicated on a lie, right? Because he says this thing like, if I knew then what I knew now, I would never have gone so far along with it.
He was there the whole fucking time. He'd have to say, I have to say i fucked up right but he won't say he won't do that like so it's like it's not like he was in debate prep in 2016 he's in debate prep in 2020 so he's fully on board till the bitter fucking end then trump almost kills him he's still on board then he decides to run for president and that's when he discovers that trump is unfit this is that's the problem i think it was the uh the ab that pushed him after the overturn in the election.
Suddenly he's on panels. He's criticizing Trump.
He's like, oh, getting a little, oh, people like this. A little shot irrelevant.
A couple granola bars in my pocket on my way home, huh? People are liking me again from Boston to Washington. Grabbing an apple from this bowl.
All right, so all the other major Republican candidates were in Iowa this weekend at Senator Joni Ernst's annual Roast and Ride. Didn't realize the Roast and Ride was an annual event.
Oh, yeah. I'd never heard about it before.
It's a biggie. It's a blast.
With the exception of Donald Trump, he wasn't there. He was very busy posting.
He congratulated his friend Kim Jong-un for getting North Korea elected to the executive board of the World Health Organization. That's the weirdest thing.
Too many questions there. He also complained that he's about to get indicted again, this time for hoarding, possibly disseminating and refusing to return classified information.
And he also accused, he was in Iowa a week before, accusing too many people of overusing the term woke without defining it. Just hours before, he overused the term woke without defining it.
Let's listen. It's gone sick.
and i don't like the term woke because i hear woke woke woke you know it's like just a term that use half the people can't even define it they don't know what it is a lot of things going on with our military with the woke and all this nonsense and not they're not learning to fight and protect us from some very bad people they want to go woke they want to go woke that was 10 hours after the first comment. Very coherent.
Before we get to the woke-a-thon, let's start with the biggest Trump news. The grand jury in the classified documents investigation is set to reconvene this week.
Trump's lawyers just had a two-hour meeting today with special counsel Jack Smith and his team, which is often the last step before an indictment. So far, it doesn't seem like the hush money indictment has affected the race at all.
Do you guys think that being charged with hoarding classified information could be different? I mean, I think that I would be worried about this one because it seems to go have gone beyond just hoarding classified information into deep into obstruction of justice land because you have all these leaks about obstruction of justice charges lying to the FBI. There's allegations that Trump essentially told his staff to hide documents from the FBI before they serve the subpoena and that there might be videotape of these staffers doing it.
There's- There's the fire. Remember they had the fire drill too.
There's a dress rehearsal. A dress rehearsal, right, yeah.
Dress rehearsal. Crime dress rehearsal.
Everyone, back to one. DOJ pierced attorney-client privilege between Trump and one lawyer because Trump might have lied to his lawyer in furtherance of a crime.
There's apparently a tape. There's audio of Trump talking about a classified war plan with how to attack Iran with some guys doing a book about Mark Meadows, as one does.
And then that would be that's like a separate chart, like disseminating classified information is like a separate charge than just keeping it and obstructing the investigation. Yeah.
I mean, there's just a lot of threads here. There's the special counsel is looking at the Trump's dealings with seven foreign countries, including the Saudis and the UAE, which makes it seems like a suggestion that he's getting paid for this information.
So there's just a lot of smoke here. And then CNN reports today that sadly, there happened to have been a pool leak at Mar-a-Lago.
And wouldn't you know where the water from the pool went? To the server room with all of the video. Yeah, that's awesome.
Isn't that a shame? Don't you hate it when your pool- Drain the swamp. When your pool accidentally,

when your pool drains into your server room?

God, what are the odds?

That stinks because all the proof that he's innocent

is on those tapes.

That's worse than Hillary with the hammer and the bleach bit.

Yeah, with the wiping.

That's like a brain dead Nixon move.

Well, I'm curious what happens with that one.

I'm excited to hear more about that one.

I like that.

I realize it's tempting to believe one. I'm excited to hear more about that one.
I like that.

I realize it's tempting to believe that nothing matters with regards to Trump. There was a Navigator poll from a few weeks ago.
65% of all Americans now think Trump has committed a crime that is up a net 12 points from just the month before. And that is just about the Alvin Bragg hush money case.
The greatest shifts came from independents and Republicans, particularly Republicans who do not identify as very conservative. I also say, you know, look, we've been talking about Trump's various and sundry crimes for the better part of seven years now.
Something does change when he does the walk into the courtroom and they see the photo of him behind a desk. There's certain things that just look pretty bad.
And one of them is a courtroom photo. Like we can talk all we want about like how we think, you know, whether or not this is different for people than the hush money payments.
I don't know. But what will be different is all these different cases starting to lead to procedures and trials and Trump having to show up places.
And that being what the footage is like, nobody likes that. I also think the story is easier to understand as a crime and just that, like, there's, you know, it's not just Biden, Pence.
Oh, they had classified documents. Doesn't everyone have classified documents? No, this is like, if we're getting into security camera footage, disseminating.
Oh, no one looks good on security camera footage. Stealing war plans, sharing them, obstructing justice.
Like, this is, it's easier to understand. I will also say that you got to take care of the Mark Meadows biographers.
I also love it. Like also like the war plan.
This is like, oh my God, they're going to bomb us. The, um, uh, also in that Navigator poll, you guys remember the CNN town hall? Have you heard about that lately? It's been in the news recently.
66% in that poll said that Trump's claim during the CNN town hall that he was allowed to take classified docs raises doubts about him being the Republican nominee, including 72% of independents and 40% of Republicans. And that is about the same number who had doubts about his proposal to pardon January 6th rioters.
Doubts about that making him the GOP nominee as well. They were like, it was those two plus him bringing back child separation, family separation, that were the three biggest concerns for voters from the CNN town hall.
And we're up to like 66% say that gives them some concerns about Donald Trump. So, you know, the whole CNN town hall, oh no, there's a travesty of democracy.
Well, it had a bunch of people think, you know what, this guy maybe shouldn't be president.

Yeah. And we're going to talk about the Nikki Haley version of this.
But just, you know, it is amazing just how self-fulfilling all this is. Right.
Because there was like we've had a fucking national debate, not about the horrible things Trump said in that town hall, but about whether or not the town hall should have taken place. You watch five fucking paragraphs from Nikki Haley at her town hall, which none of us knew happened until after it was over.

And it's just as much. should have taken place.
You watch five fucking paragraphs from Nikki Haley at her town hall,

which none of us knew happened until after it was over.

And it's just as much misinformation.

It's just as much hate-filled bile

about trans people and immigrants

and lies about crime and all the rest.

No, not a peep from anybody.

Nobody minds.

It's a pathology.

There is a pathology around Trump.

We're really getting down to just,

well, also we're really getting down

to just like media stories about the media. Yeah.
That's all. Yeah.
That's all that breaks through these days. Everybody, take your nose.
Very upset about the media. Break it through the media, media, media, media.
Look up from your stomachs. Everybody look up.
Bunch of candidates just telling you what they'd do if they were elected to lead the country. Cover that a bit.
But also the classified information story. I mean, you can tell that story in one photo of all these documents lying on the floor at his country club slash house.
It's not a complicated one. And again, just keep an eye on this foreign money, foreign business dealings.
Part of this investigation. Jared Kushner got two billion from the Saudis for his investment company, even though he's never invested before in his life.
The Saudi owned live golf tour is dumping money into Trump properties. Like there's something weird going on.
I have a question for you.. I might have an answer.
If it turns out that Jared Kushner and the Saudi deal is involved, how many bonus episodes of Potsdam the World are we getting? He's got a bonus episode on the table right now. You got him going.
My case rests. Let my counsel speak for me.
Here comes a Rhodes rant. All right.
So speaking of worldos, multiple Republican candidates hit Trump for congratulating North Korea's murderous dictator. Barely made the news.
I only saw a few stories about it. Why not? Do reporters and Republican voters not care? Do we just expect this kind of behavior from Trump now? Or could it become an issue? It is such a weird story.
A horrible dictator was elected to the board of the World Health Organization. Yeah, that's my first question.
Why the fuck did that happen? Hey, I just want to tell everybody. I'm going to look into this for tomorrow's episode of So I'll get back to you guys.
Cool. I think that, yeah, I think, look, the Trump love affair with Kim Jong-un is kind of priced in.
I'm glad all these Republicans criticized him for it. I do think, look, Jake Tapper, to his credit, asked Nikki Haley about this at the town hall.
So I think where there was an opportunity to advance the story, they tried. But it is weird.
It's just Trump is obsessed with his love letters with Kim Jong-un, the summit he had with him, the meeting they had at the DMZ, even though literally nothing got accomplished. North Korea's nuclear weapons program is far further along today than when those meetings happened.
But he doesn't care. It's all about the optics.
I also think that they're not Republicans aren't quite making the best case against him on this. Like because what Trump likes to say about this is, yeah, I am friends with Kim Jong Un and I'm friendly with Putin.
And that keeps us safe because they know me and they don't want to fuck with me. And I'm friends with them.
I have good relationships. And what the Republican candidates, what his opponent should be saying is like, this murderous dictator who regularly threatens the United States of America with nuclear weapons has Donald Trump wrapped around his finger.
You know, make it about, you always have it, make it about like strength and weakness and turn it into a weakness for him. And instead they're just like, that's bad, he shouldn't do that.
Yeah, it's all very subtle.

I had the same reaction.

Even DeSantis is like,

I'm surprised that Trump would say something like that.

And then Trump spoke to her and was like,

Ron DeSantis is a tiny Italian fad

and you can eat dicks.

They're so subtle with this fucking guy.

That's what they did.

It's unbelievable.

No one is bringing anything to this fight.

Unbelievable. Okay.
I've checked off one of my notes for this episode. Speaking of anti-woke crusaders, why do you guys think Trump hit other Republicans for overusing the term woke, which is a term he uses all the time? Is there anything to that or is that just him? My sincere pet theory is that Trump saw some of the coverage after the DeSantis Elon debacle that talked about DeSantis being too online and that's how his brain translated it.
That's really what I think it is. I thought it was, I think that could be some of it.
There's also, there were, I forget who's been asked to define woke before, there were some other candidates who were asked to define or some other Republican politicians. Haley did with Jake Tapper.
Yeah. Haley did.

But then even like Republicans in Congress have been asked before.

None of them can.

And they none of them can.

And there's sort of like embarrassing clips about it.

And I wonder if he saw those viral clips.

And he's like, oh, that seems bad.

Was it Megan McArdle or someone like that that got asked by?

Oh, no, it's like Megan McArdle.

It's Bethany Mandel.

Oh, Bethany Mandel.

Right.

Sorry, sorry.

Was asked about it.

Had a trouble defining it. Well, she had in her defense.
sorry, sorry. Was asked about it.
Had trouble defining it.

Well, she had written

an entire book about it.

Yeah, right.

That's what I'm thinking of.

Why would she be able

to define it?

I think that Trump probably saw

that DeSantis is getting

some traction

just yelling about these things.

It's like his whole identity

is defined as being,

making Florida the place

where woke goes to die

to the point where

Ron DeSantis' wife

was wearing a black leather jacket.

Yeah, what? It had a photo of, a picture of Florida on the back of it and it said, where woke goes to die to the point where ron desantis's wife was wearing a black leather jacket yeah it had a photo of a picture of florida on the back of it and it said where woke goes to die despite the fact that it was 85 degrees at this uh this roast and ride or whatever by the way mike pence was was wearing like a sons of anarchy halloween costume did you see him it was really embarrassing on the bike it was very awful it was something so i i suspect trump saw desantis having some success in this lane and decided to whine about it and she'd be like i don't even care about that term anymore i mean de santa's is our is also like sounding like a fucking parody of himself when he's doing that he has that riff that everyone noticed again this weekend though he's been doing it for a couple weeks now which is like we will fight the woke in the streets we will fight the woke in the classrooms we will fight the woke in the amusement parks. So fucking embarrassing.
A like a reprise of a speech about fighting the literal Third Reich. Yeah.
About, you know, I don't know, kids wearing T-shirts he doesn't like. Well, fortunately, in response to this Trump riff about people saying woke too much, DeSantis was asked to try to define woke himself.
And he also tested out a new line about how Republicans need a president who can serve two terms in order to get done what they want to get done. Let's listen to both moments.
Look, we know what woke is. It's a form of cultural Marxism.
It's about putting merit and achievement behind identity politics. And it's basically a war on the truth.
And as that is in infected institutions, it it has corrupted a lot of institutions so you've got to be willing to fight the woke we've done it in florida and we proudly consider ourselves the state where woke goes to die you really need to ensure that we have a two-term president to be able to see this to a conclusion i mean you do one term and they reverse it when they come in you can't have it be reversed so trump's response of course is i only need six months to fix everything why does he need two terms and then desantis comes back then why didn't he do it his first term yeah you know they're mixing it up do you think any of these either of these desantis attacks has any potential to draw blood no the two-term thing is stupid to me i I don't understand that. What a waste of time.
It's also like, I was on the fence about it, actually, because my first reaction was Tommy's, which is to say, so your point is Trump would be amazing, but he can only do it for four years, so you need somebody else. It's kind of back to part of the case that a lot of these Republicans have been making, which is Trump is great, but we need to do something different.
And like, oh, so if it was if he was eligible for it. So that's the problem.
And the problem is just that he can't do it as long as you just you want someone that great to be there for longer, which is a little bit embarrassing, though. There is something about DeSantis calling him a lame duck that I think could catch on.
Like, we don't want to elect a lame duck. We don't want to elect a lame duck.
There was a way in which he was saying it. If you actually look at the longer DeSantis quote about wanting to have somebody new, it's like, we need somebody who's going to hit the ground running on day one, who's going to be focused and disciplined and attacking the bureaucratic state.
That's a multi-year process. And so he kind of put it into a larger argument around Trump's weaknesses that I thought could be something.
Yeah. I think that the whole, all of his arguments seem too cerebral for me and too cerebral for, I would argue, much of the Republican base.
First of all, defining woke, always tricky when you define a word by using the word multiple times. He's like, you know, woke is, we got to fight woke.
Woke is a war on the truth. And then you know how many people know, cultural Marxism.
Regular people are always talking about cultural Marxism. Yeah.
It's interesting. Like at least it's's clearly ready with that answer.
It's not an answer for normals. It's not an answer for us.
Patrick Graffini, a conservative pollster, pointed out that many of the top answers when we talk to Republican primary voters about things they're concerned about involve the word woke in some days. They're all channeling this same fear of people that are different times changing etc it's just like it's like it's not new politics it is cerebral and it is too sophisticated but i will say the way he described it is probably the closest thing to like um like i think a sincere explanation for how they would define it to each other you know what i mean like that i that's how i took i i don't know what cultural marxism is yeah i mean like wink but they sure you don't like right like it but it is like a wing towards this is a kind of far left collegiate academic ideology that is infecting our institutions that makes identity more important than these other qualities right like that's even said or other like i don't know know what putting merit and achievement behind identity politics.
I was like, what the fuck does that mean? Yeah, but I think it means something to them, right? But it means, because it's a way- It's a real dog whistle. Well, yeah, I mean, I think part of, it's a dog whistle about gay issues.
It's a dog whistle about affirmative action. It's a dog whistle around DEI.
But like that makes sense. That's like, it's coherent in their.
I just think for a lot of these voters, it's like much simpler. They're like,

Trump doesn't sound, Trump seems like he's an honest liar, doesn't sound like a typical politician. Ron DeSantis sounds like a typical politician.
That's it. The cultural Marxism is an attempt to reach the voters who think that Christian values are being removed from schools and academia and everything else.
And I think Trump doesn't know how to blow that dog whistle or play that note because he's not religious at all and doesn't understand those people. And that was Pence's job.
I also think to the two terms thing, I'm trying to figure out the Trump supporter who's having second thoughts because Trump can only serve four years, because I think what they look at both Trump and DeSantis, they'll look at both of them and think, I like Trump better than DeSantis. So I'll vote for Trump for the next four years.
And then I'll vote for DeSantis for the four years after that. Well, there was a long time.
He's young. There was a.
Right. This is why DeSantis has such a high approval rating in many polls higher than Donald Trump.
They like DeSantis just fine. They just like Donald Trump better.
There was a line in one of the stories about the one term argument that I thought gave away the game a little bit, which is for people who I think it was actually Mick Mulvaney who said this. It was for people that want to move on from Trump, but want to be able to say it to their pro-Trump friends in a way that doesn't get them in trouble.
They can say they're worried about the terms, which tells you structure. Yeah, which just tells you how weak this anti-Trump coalition really is.
So there's also an open question as to whether DeSantis' electability argument is getting a bit tripped up by his culture war extremism. We talked about the six-week abortion ban a couple weeks ago.
He recently signed a ban on gender-affirming care for young people that is also affecting trans adults because it prohibits you from getting care from physician's assistants, which at least in Florida, approximately 80% of trans people do. So now Florida has the most extreme trans ban in the country.
Missouri was going to do something like this. I think you brought that up a couple of weeks ago and that fell apart.
So now Florida is the most extreme. Do you think that that helps DeSantis with Republican primary voters or is this like the six week abortion ban, which he is avoiding talking about? Well, so first of all, these things are like each other more than just politically.
Like these laws around restricting care, even for adults, take a page from the anti-abortion laws, right? Because they don't put in place an outright ban, but they put in place onerous, scientifically unjustifiable restrictions on care. So you need to have a doctor sign off.
You have to do it in person. All these things are just supposed to make it more difficult, including raising the stakes for doctors by making it easier to sue doctors.
Like a lot of steps like that that have been used in the anti-abortion movement, they're applying here. The Times, I believe, talked to a bunch of voters at this Iowa Roast and Ride event.
And it was interesting, even there, you start to see people saying, hey, I'm like frustrated. No one said healthcare.
Like they're only talking about these issues. You have Nikki Haley saying that trans athletes in sports is the most pressing women's issue of our time.
And the fact that even amongst these far right loons that are showing up for this fucking event where Mike Pence wears a costume and gets on a motorcycle, even for them, they're like, can we talk about something else besides fucking trans people for five seconds? I think tells you that these people are a bit out of touch. And because the campaign is so about aesthetics and they can't make actual policy distinctions and they're afraid to go after Trump on the merits, they all end up trying to outdo one another on these fucking issues and pushing themselves further and further away.
Forget the median voter, even the median Republican vote. Well, that's because they're in this echo chamber of like the most partisan online voices.
You know, to an extent it can happen. It happened in 2020 on the Democratic side and certain issues, right, a certain time.
But it's really bad on the Republican side now where all these Republican candidates, all they're listening to is like, what's happening on the Daily Wire? What's happening in Steve Bannon's podcast? What's happening on Fox News? What's happening in primetime, right? And they think that the people who are talking about these issues there represent all the voters. And by the way, it does represent some of the most committed activists, some of the most committed grassroots donors.
But like you said, it's not even the median Republican vote. Right.
Even Republican voters that are consuming a lot of this content and are maybe angry about woke stuff or have been made fearful of the cities because of reports on crime. They still have car payments.
They still have credit cards. They still have health care issues.
Those issues continue to exist because those issues continue to exist. I think this is a trend for DeSantis now because initially, they said critics of the don't say gay law were being hysterical.
This is focused on third and to kindergartners, right? And then they expanded that law and now they are restricting reproductive health education for six through 12 year olds. They claim that the Florida book bans, what about these extreme examples that no young kid should ever be reading? And then we read about Amanda Gorman's book being banned, like a poem she read at the inauguration.
There are these restrictions on transgender kids are making it possible for to get treatment. I mean, the six week abortion ban, the fight with Disney, like it is painting a picture of an incredibly extreme governor in Ron DeSantis and like deep, big government overreach into people's lives in ways that I think will sound bizarre to most people, even most Republicans.
And I think that the way Trump is handling it and probably will handle it is not necessarily by saying what Democrats would, which is like, this is extreme and dangerous, these positions. But he's going to try to be like, this guy's a weirdo.
You all thought before I came along, the Republican Party at its worst was a little weird, a little extreme, a little too religious. Then I came along, divorced all the time, probably paid for a bunch of abortions myself.
Don't give a shit about any of this culture stuff, right? Don't like immigrants, for sure. But on the culture stuff, Trump was sort of like, eh, you know, governed horribly, governed horribly, but at least his rhetoric, right, wasn't as extreme as some of these.
And I think he's going to do that with DeSantis. I think he's going to try to paint him as an extreme weirdo.
Actually weirdo. And also just there is a pretty strong libertarian streak in the Republican Party.
And all of a sudden, the Florida government is reaching into all these different parts of people's lives, whether you're a child or an adult. And it's just weird.
It's totally unnecessary. And I don't think this helps DeSantis with the anti-Trump or beyond Trump Republicans that he absolutely needs.
That also includes a lot of donors. These people think about electability a lot, and they hear this stuff about DeSantis, just like they heard about the abortion ban.
They're not going to like that. And then the question is, does it peel away any of the MAGA diehards from Trump, which remains to be seen.
Maybe it does on the margins. But for DeSantis to pull this off, he needs, like, all all the or at least most of the anti-Trump people, most of the people concerned about electability.
And he needs a big chunk of the MAGA vote, right? He needs everything to go well. And this is just like pissing too many people off.
Yeah, right. You have to start like, forget the MAGA diehard, right? Let's say Trump takes the MAGA diehard, right? They're just with him, right? Let's say that's a third of these primary voters.
He needs to build a coalition that brings together all the people that have never liked Trump and never wanted Trump to be in with. And then a bunch of people that have liked Trump all along, continue to like Trump, don't agree with a lot of the criticisms of him, think it's all overblown, just want basically Trump without a lot of the chaos.
And I don't know. I think the hardest coalition to assemble, which someone needs to if they're going to be Trump, is the evangelical Christians who have never been too high on Trump, but went along, you know, voted for him and the anti-Trump college educated crew.
Like getting both of those groups of voters, I think is hard for a Republican politician. I also do think, too, a lot of the polling around evangelicals has gotten pretty muddled because as that's become basically an identity or a brand, like more people have chosen it and it kind of expands it to mean kind of I'm a good Republican in a lot of different ways.
Yeah. And so you end up with like, so it's a very like a curious group of people.
First of all, like, why wouldn't they stick with Trump, the most successful anti-choice president? Right. Yeah.
I read this great book. It's called The Flag on the Cross.
And it was

about white Christian nationalism and the strains of religion and anti-democratic movements in this

country and the way they come together to tell people how to live their lives. And I think that's

like a powerful chunk of the Republican base that Trump has captured, but that Pence and DeSantis

are both competing for now. Yeah.
And another sign that DeSantis is having some trouble is

Thank you. chunk of the Republican base that Trump has captured, but that Pence and DeSantis are both competing for now.
Yeah. And another sign that DeSantis is having some trouble is his issues with grassroots enthusiasm.
So he had 40,000 donors last quarter who gave an average of more than $200 per donor. That's pretty high.
For comparison, Bernie Sanders' average donation was around $26. How much do you think this matters for DeSantis? I mean, I think it's an indication of potentially less broad-based enthusiasm for his candidacy.
The other thing we don't know is you can give $3,300 in the primary and then $3,300 in the general election. DeSantis' team is accepting money for both the primary and the general.
So we don't know how much of that 8.2 million is actually locked up for the general election. And he'll have to return it, literally, if he doesn't win the nomination.
So 8.2 million, it's a good chunk of change. But you would much rather have many, many more donors the way Bernie Sanders had, who gave you a lower amount of money so you can go back to them again.
because that is the lowest hanging fruit for fundraising, is hitting up someone who already wanted to give you money. Yeah.
I mean, it is early and it's the first quarter for him, but usually challengers to frontrunners who are going to have a shot tend to have a lot of grassroots energy behind them. Obama versus Hillary, Sanders versus Clinton, Sanders and even Warren in 2020.
And most of those folks still didn't win, right? Obama was the only one in that group that did win. So if you don't have at least the grassroots support and you're a challenger who's a long shot against the establishment favorite, which Trump is, I think it's even harder.
Now, we'll see what happens next quarter, but not great. Just in terms of raw cash, though, like DeSantis is going to have $200 million sitting in the super PAC, they say.
They say they're budgeting to a $200 million spend. Super PAC spends are less efficient when you're talking about media buys for boring reasons that we don't have to get into.
So, you know, look at Jeb Bush and the way it all sort of worked out for him. He had most of his money in his super PAC and his campaign did a lot less spending.
So DeSantis will have a lot of money, but yeah, the enthusiasm piece is sort of notable. I just think it doesn't matter.

It's not the money issue, it's the enthusiasm issue.

Yeah, because by the way, what, 8.2 million, like that's a massive amount to get right out

of the gate. I do think it's just, will there be enthusiasm behind it over time or does it

represent like a fatal flaw of his campaign?

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Let's get them over with. As for the rest of the GOP field,

again, apparently Nikki Haley

participated in a CNN town hall

moderated by Jake Tapper

on Sunday night.

They should have televised it.

So stupid.

Here are some of the highlights.

If a six-week ban

theoretically came to your desk,

would you sign it?

But why, why,

I will answer that

when you answer,

when you ask Kamala and Biden if they would agree to 37 weeks, 38 weeks, 39 weeks. Then I'll answer your question.
I know that Trump and DeSantis have both said we're not going to deal with entitlement reform. Well, all you're doing is leaving it for the next president, and that's leaving a lot of Americans in trouble.
I think it's important to be honest with the American people. We are in this situation.
Don't lie to them and say, oh, we don't have to deal with entitlement reform. Yes, we do.
Yes, we do. It's the reality.
I'm always going to tell the truth. Is it going to hurt? Yes.
But for our kids, they know they're not going to get it anyway. I mean, the idea that we have biological boys playing in girls' sports, it is the women's issue of our time.
How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms? And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year? So it seems like Nikki Haley is trying to combine pre-2016 conservatism with a pretty lame MAGA impression. You guys think that's a winning strategy? I found that one of the most sort of pathetic displays I've seen like from a major candidate.
It's unbelievable being fucking refusing to have an answer on abortion, but having an answer on cutting Social Security and Medicare, then having the fucking audacity to claim, which is, by the way, like the mental health crisis for teens and teen girls is a huge and important and like serious fucking issue. And the idea that you're going to lay that at the feet of like trans fucking teens is so disgusting.
It is disgusting. It's disgusting.
It's also just silly and nonsensical. The idea that like teenagers are committing suicide because they are seeing trans women in a locker room.

Even people who are anti-trans probably don't believe that.

Yeah, I mean, she sort of got the what does woke me question.

And she said basically it's like communities like the trans community pushing their views on everyone else.

So she tried to have more of a simple answer.

She also tried to straddle this tone of being compassionate and trying to listen to the other side while having her own position. Abortion was like the number one example.
Like she said, she refused to answer whether she should support a six week abortion ban. She refused to comment on a 15 week abortion ban.
But she also said, I don't want to demonize people who are pro-choice. I want come together and agree on stuff so it was a weird effort to try to straddle these issues i mean yeah she gave a speech about abortion a couple weeks ago and and the whole point of the speech was i think simply to say like to highlight the fact that she is the lone woman in the field and that is sort of the like she's trying to have a brand around being pro-life about being anti-abortion without actually taking a position on the issue because the whole speech on the subject does not come out in favor of any particular policy continues to avoid having a position any particular policy it's just like to what end i wanted to pick those clips because i really think she hit the trifecta there on abortion she sounds like a typical politician by dodging the question she doesn't answer the question which voters don don't like.
She manages to take the Paul Ryan position on entitlements that is not only unpopular with the general electorate, but now unpopular with the Republican base. And then her trans answer is guaranteed to push away the anti-Trump Republicans that she absolutely needs if she has any prayer of competing in this.
So

she just like three things just just fucked it all up. Well, the good news for her is this was on opposite an NBA finals game.
So I saw that I heard that I will say I'm not going to Tim Scott this shit, but I do say I watch I watch I watch with very low expectations. And I did think by the end of it, like the last questioner

complimented her for taking a more positive tone. And she went with a couple contrasts that I don't think were like maybe electorally beneficial, but were interesting.
She criticized Trump on the Kim Jong-un comments. She was pretty critical.
She was strongly in support of giving Ukraine weapons, which is a strong contrast from Trump and DeSantis. And she sort of overtly hit DeSantis.
And then the Social Security Medicare part was weird. She came out for raising the retirement age for future Social Security recipients, which I don't know.
What is the polling on that? Terrible? She talked about like raising their, she talked about like her own kids should know now that they're not going to get social security at 65. That should be what? 67, 68.
No, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the pre 2016 tea party version of the world. Because you can't raise the cap and tax rich people more.
And so that's, and she's a hawk, right? And so she's, she's basically the, like the Paul Ryan, George W.. Bush party, right? She's still got that.
That's who she is. And yet she knows that to compete, she needs to do a MAGA impersonation.
So that's where the trans thing comes from. And that's where the non-answer on the abortion ban comes from.
What is so silly about the whole thing is even Kevin McCarthy, one of those cynical fucking people, has figured out not to talk about Social Security and Medicare. Like, dumber politicians than Nikki Haley have cracked this fucking code.
And the idea that she's going to be mendacious on all these subjects, but for whatever reason, she feels like she needs to speak to a teller on... Truth teller on Medicare, but I won't tell you what I think on abortion.
It's not actually... On the abortion ban in my state.
Of course it's not true. It's actually not true.
Right. We don't need to make these draconian cuts.
We can obviously afford to keep paying people Social Security and Medicare. So it's like I'm going to like every piece of it is is misinformation.
She's pretty critical of DeSantis on the Disney fight, too. She said he took 50 grand from them and appointed a bunch of Disney people to board positions.
Now he's using the state to go after them. Like we shouldn't do that.
That was sort of interesting. She also told the full story about taking down the Confederate flag after the AME church shooting, which I just thought was an interesting choice because most Republicans like to pretend that racial divisions don't exist in this country anymore.
I mean, you're not allowed to talk about it, but she kind of led with it. Did she do the whole, like, I remember in her bio video, in her announcement video, she sort of like glided over it.
Like she mentioned the flag, but that she didn't, she didn't want to say racism. No, she got into it pretty deep and she led her whole thing with like a rant about earmarks.
So back to your pre-2016 Yeah, this is what I'm saying. This is who she is.
She talked about being an accountant and I was like, what? She took out the DeSantis hit on Disney. She got out for a spin a couple of weeks ago.
I always just like when they're too afraid to do a similar hit on Trump directly. So they just kind of go after each other, kind of try to seem tough with each other.
Best way to make him the nominee. The thing that I think connected her with the audience is they talked about how her husband is about to deploy for a year overseas to Africa.
He's in the military and there's a military family's message and a veteran's message that I just, it seemed to endear with the people listening, as did some of the nastier. So we got one for Tim Scott, one for Nikki Haley.
And I'm a Doug Burnham guy. Burgum? Burgum.
Burgum. Can we do a version of Haley Train? Could that work? Haley Train, yeah.
Let's talk about Joe Biden, who took a victory lap after carefully. Who took a victory lap after signing the bipartisan budget deal that saved us from default.
The president delivered an Oval Office address on Friday night. One of his super PACs is running a new ad about the deal.
and his advisors told reporters at the Associated Press and the Washington Post that the way Biden handled the debt ceiling negotiations

affirms their reelection strategy of marginalizing MAGA Republicans while cutting bipartisan deals with non-MAGA Republicans. Here's a clip from Biden's Oval Office speech.
My fellow Americans, when I ran for president, I was told the days of bipartisanship were over and the Democrats and Republicans can no longer work together.

But I refuse to believe that because America can never give in to that way of thinking.

Passing this budget agreement was critical. The stakes could not have been higher.
If we had

failed to reach an agreement on the budget, there were extreme voices threatening to take America

for the first time in our 247 year history into default.

So it was critical to reach an agreement.

And it's very good news for the American people.

No one got everything they wanted, but the American people got what they needed.

Why do you guys think the White House wanted to do an oval on this address,

knowing that they are few and far between and you don't get an oval anytime you want?

And what did you guys think of the speech?

I mean, I think... to do an oval on this address knowing that they are few and far between and you don't get a oval anytime you want and what did you guys think of the speech i mean i think look getting this debt ceiling agreement or the budget agreement sorted out was a real accomplishment that required bipartisan work and there's probably a lot of people in the country who just want republicans and democrats to work together they hate what they usually hear out of washington so you're sort of speaking to them.
And I think that's why the speech led with infrastructure, the CHIPS Act. He sort of did like a greatest hits of all the bipartisan work I've done, which I think is effective.
350 laws he signed, bipartisan laws. He mentioned that at the beginning.
The fundamental challenge to a speech like this is it's hard to take a victory lap on a bill that you passed and made it less

bad in the process. You know what I mean? Like they talked about all the things he protected

from Republican cuts in the process. He talked about all the things he's going to keep fighting

for, like, you know, taxing billionaires more, talked about unity at the end. But I do think

like they put so much time and work into this. There are a lot of people who are legitimately

scared, myself included, that we could default. So, I mean, I think it makes sense to go out and take a victory lap.
It sucks that it was on Friday night, but I'm glad the networks took it. Yeah.
Yeah. First of all, I just think it seems like Joe Biden is just genuinely proud to have made this deal and the way that the deal was made.
I think he feels, it seems like he personally views it as a success for him and his sort of theory of politics. I think he's proud of the relationship he has with Kevin McCarthy.
And look, we talked about this, that like, look, like, you know, you can, you can, you can argue like, oh, giving into having a negotiation or, or not having dealt with this in the past. There's a hundred paths that could have been taken to maybe avoid this altogether.
But once we were in this mess, it's hard to imagine coming out of it with something much better than what we did. And I think that's another place where he seems to be genuinely sort of proud and then has an opportunity to walk through all the ways in which his sort of theory of how to govern has been pretty well fucking vindicated given the number of things he's been able to pass.
I think that the presidential bully pulpit is not as powerful. It's never been as powerful as people think it is.
It's certainly not as powerful now in an age of very fractured media, but he still has a bigger megaphone than Kevin McCarthy if he wants to use it. And I think they wanted to use it to make sure that McCarthy didn't get all the credit, which a lot of Hill reporters were were oh god i don't know if you guys lavishing praise on it dan pfeiffer's a little upset about this was him mad there was one there was i was feeling there was some pieces like kevin mccarthy went into that room with no leverage no no the debt the debt yeah fucking remember the fucking ticking clock with the bomb on it attached to the all of our chests that was the leverage you know it's interesting, Tommy, to your point? It's hard to sell people on something bad that didn't happen and just what he protected.
It's like all our financial crisis speeches. Yeah, and so there was a lot of that in the speech.
Then there was one section that I thought was a little different, and I really hope he sort of uses that going forward in the reelect. He said, Republicans may not like it, but I'm going to make sure the wealthy pay their fair share.
I proposed closing special interest tax loopholes for big oil, crypto hedge fund billionaires as part of these negotiations. Republicans defended every single one of those loopholes, but I'm going to be coming back.
And with your help, I'm going to win. I think that's a great way to frame it.
So because then you're out of the here's what I accomplished. Here's what I prevented from happening.
It's I'm going to fight with these guys. It's not over yet.
I'm going to come back and I'm going to go after those loopholes. They don't, they want to protect them.
Right. And I think you do that.
They're going to go after Medicare. I want to protect it.
They're going to do this. I'm going to protect it.
And you make it an ongoing battle that you're engaged in and, and it's on behalf of the American people. And that's why you need the other next four years.
Yeah, I do think it was a political success for the Republicans that even the idea of tax increases being part of this negotiation was just it was barely part of the conversation. It was just always understood from the jump that that was a nonstarter.
So frustrating. It was really frustrating.
And so, you know, it became a conversation about what the what the percentage of cut would be as opposed to how we could raise funds, especially on some of the most ridiculous fucking loopholes, carried interest, real estate, whatever. What's your take on the reelection strategy that Biden's team was laying out to reporters? Basically, that he is distinguishing once again, between MAGA Republicans, who he is warning are extreme, and regular Republicans, who he keeps saying he can work with and is proving it with a lot of these deals and bipartisan legislation.
My feeling on it is that I feel like it describes maybe a theory of governing, but doesn't actually describe the way Joe Biden talks about Republicans on the campaign trail, because for the most part, he doesn't say, oh, well, there are some good ones, but oh, but we've got to stop these ones. He makes the case that this is not your father's Republican Party says that all the time.
We've got to stop these MAGA Republicans, these MAGA extremisms. I suppose there are like.
Oh, but then he talks about how he likes Mitch McConnell and everyone flips the fuck out. Right.
He does definitely say. Well, you know, he comes.
But I'm just saying the larger case is about we are fighting Republican extremism.

I agree that he does make

his sort of pay-ons to the Republicans that he can work with. But for the most part, it's a case that's trying to make the Republican Party the MAGA.
We made the whole fucking news cycle about trick, what was it? Mega, MAGA. Mega, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, trickle down.
Yeah, I've had a similar reaction.

I mean, I don't think you can argue that the

MAGA portion of the Republican Party

is isolated or marginalized. Please refer back to our primary conversation we had 30 minutes ago.
But I do think big picture. This isn't a novel argument that Biden is making.
He's saying, look how extreme they are. I'm someone who's reasonable.
I can work with them. Look what I did with Kevin McCarthy.
Like, you know, that's good. You're trying to find a sliver of Republicans or independents or moderate Republicans to vote for you or stay home.
I think that's a smart strategy. I think that's what it's all about.
I mean, it's partisan news junkies like us don't necessarily see the difference between MAGA Republicans and the rest of the party. And I think we have a point.
Most Republican politicians supported Donald Trump, supported him after he tried to overturn an election and cite an insurrection, right? But I think Biden wants to give Republicans, Republican-leaning independents a place to go. And you give them a place to go by saying, hey, there's some Republicans that I'll still work with.
If they want to work with me, I can do it. Look, I have this record of bipartisan accomplishment, but I'm going to fight like hell to beat the extreme Republicans.
And here's what they're planning on doing. So I do think it's a very fine line to walk, because I think as we saw in 2020, one of the reasons I think the Republicans did so well in the House races, even as Donald Trump lost, is because Biden in that campaign really said Trump is very different than the Republican Party.
And he made Trump very different. I think in 22, he was more adept at saying that it's actually MAGA Republicans.
It's not just Donald Trump. It's a lot of the party and tried to separate MAGA Republicans from regular Republicans.
Now, there is a risk that if you're a Republican who voted for the budget deal, you can go say, well, I'm not one of the extreme ones he's talking about, and it might help them, right? So there's a risk in that. But I do think giving Republicans and Republican-leaning independents a place to go is why he won in 20 and why Democrats did well in 2022.
There's another sort of, I think, risk on the nuance of it, which is similar to what he had to do in 2020, but it's slightly different now, which is he has to basically say, these Republicans are dangerous, they are extreme. And together, we got a lot done, you know, and there is that like, he has to be able to, I think part of his appeal was that he was going to bring the country back together, that he was someone stable and reliable and not a partisan bomb thrower.
But he has to also make this case against the far right without losing access to those voters. Yeah.
And I think ultimately he's going to be, I'm the only thing standing between extreme Republicans and them taking over the whole country and having their agenda forced on the whole country. So you want me in there.
And some competition for the Democratic nomination, anti-vax conspiracy theorist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who just did a Twitter Spaces event hosted by Elon Musk, where he said COVID wasn't a real disease, proposed completely sealing the U.S.
border with Mexico, called mainstream media organizations propaganda vessels and said that Elon Musk is, quote, a key instrument for rescuing American democracy. Kennedy was also endorsed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey over the weekend.
And in a recent CNN poll received support from 20% of Democratic primary voters, with an additional 44% saying they would consider supporting him. So what the hell's going on with this guy? And how big of a problem do you think rfk jr's candidacy is for biden and by

extension america first of all man that kennedy name what a fucking shadow on like jesus christ it's just a name it's just the name kennedy why do people like it so much i don't get it i don't get you fucking northeasterners you never see a kennedy you won't vote for. It's called, it's called.
Mid-Atlantic.

It's called People Who Don't Consume a Lot of News.

Name ID.

Name ID.

And it's, it's most American voters.

And they, what do they know about politics?

They know about Trump.

They know about Biden.

They know about Obama.

They know about Bush.

Who knows about. They know about the Kennedys.

The Kennedys.

I'm in on a Kennedy.

I just don't.

Biden's old and a Kennedy I've never heard of.

If you ask people to name five presidents, I bet 90% of them would put John F. Kennedy in there.
Yeah. That's a bad reason to vote for somebody.
It's my fault. Welcome to America.
It's my fault. We're talking about this.
Yeah, this is your fault. This sucks.
If it makes you feel any better, I listened to most of this Twitter space. It also included that schmuck, David Sachs.
That guy. You love David Sachs.
Tulsi Gabbard was on for a while. It was just like a who's who of annoying people.
And so what I'm worried about with Robert Kennedy Jr. is not that he's going to beat Biden in a primary, is that he might run as a third party candidate and maybe be able to get on the ballot in places.
I don't know what the path would be there, but he could siphon away votes from Biden if he does. And it seems like that's why people like Steve Bannon are propping him up.
It might not just be to have him attack Biden in the primary, although that is helpful too. And obviously he gets an audience because he is named Kennedy.
But if you listen to him speak, he sprinkles in comments about like what his dad or his father did or said with sort of these interesting bits of history, along with totally made up lies, conspiracy theories, anti-vax sentiment. He says that the CIA killed JFK and his father.
He compared COVID lockdowns to Hitler's Germany. And it sounds like authoritative enough and anti-establishment enough that I think it works and plays well with the kind of Bernie or busts like Bitcoin to take down the banks, Joe Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard crowd that love to think that there's a grand conspiracy that's making their life worse.
And some of the things he says, you're like, yes, he's like, he criticizes Washington. It's overrun by lobbyists, right? Like there's some things you're like, okay, this guy's got a point here.
But then he talks about how he says Zelensky is responsible for the Russian invasion. COVID was a bioweapon.
So I don't know. It's not, it's worrisome.
It's worrisome that he's pulling at 20%. I don't know what to do with these bad feelings I have, but I feel like we have to take this guy seriously because I don't know.
I don't want to be a spoiler in some way. Well, I will say there's, there's people that I know, people that we know who I'm afraid to ask about RFK Jr.

Because I think they might say, oh, he has a point.

So if you're listening and you have people like this in your life, we should give people what he said.

It's not just anti-vax.

He thinks that a pandemic preparation plan from 2019 was part of a secret CIA plan to enrich drug companies.

That tabletop exercise on YouTube, by the way.

That's right. It has been for years.
Secret plan on YouTube. He thinks COVID vaccines killed more people than they saved.
He has thought long before COVID that vaccines cause autism. He called Tucker Carlson breathtakingly courageous.
Was friends with Roger Ailes. How about this one? Thinks John Kerry actually won the 2004 race.
Yeah, that's a real twist. Let's hear him out.
And again, Jack Dorsey is an idiot. He's part of the two-headed Hydra that kind of, I guess he's sort of helping run Twitter now, but he's a billionaire, so he could cut a big check to a Super PAC that helps RFK Jr.
and causes a bunch of trouble. So it's scary.
And there is one. A Super PAC has already raised 5.7 million for him, so anyone can contribute to that.
20% of the 44% who are considering voting for him said that it was because of his name and his family. So you hope the more information that gets out there, the better he did.
Did you guys know he tried to run in Alabama in 2017 for the Doug Jones seat? I remember that. I remember that popping up for a second.
And he lost by 38 points. That's Alabama.
And then here's the, I think it's, Bannon and all those people, I think what they really want is just him embarrassing Biden, right? That's probably right. And Kennedy is, he's making his big play New Hampshire, where of course his family is even more well-known and has done well in the past.
The problem. And New Hampshire is dead set on still going first, even though the DNC and Biden have decided that South Carolina is going to go first.
So they're going to penalize, the DNC will penalize candidates who run in New Hampshire. They won't give them the delegates.
So there's a chance that Biden doesn't file to run in New Hampshire primary because it's against the DNC rules. But if New Hampshire holds the contest anyway, and RFK competes and Biden's not competing, and you could have a whole bunch of headlines about RFK Jr.
winning the New Hampshire primary. Yeah.
And I just think you got to remember, we're talking about Arizona. Joe Biden wins by about 10,000 votes.
Georgia, he won by about 12,000 votes. We could go down a long list here of how close this race will be in key swing states.
And if RFK Jr. is

able to get a lot of press attention attacking

Joe Biden in all these different ways

or somehow siphon votes away from him in a

general, it's a real problem.

And Republicans love that. Yeah, I just

don't, I really don't know about the ballot access

questions for the general because

he is going to have to contend with no

labels candidate Joe Manchin.

My guy. Who, by the way, was asked

over the weekend if he

was going to run as a third party and just once

Thank you. He is going to have to contend with no labels candidate Joe Manchin.
My guy. Who, by the way, was asked over the weekend if he was going to run as a third party.
And just once again, all he said was no labels is trying to make sure that they have a bipartisan ticket. And that's important.
And like this debt ceiling deal showed that it's not about the extremes. It's about the center, which, by the way, might have been another reason that the Biden people wanted to really stake out that ground in the Oval Address because Manchin's hanging out out there.
But in the RFK thing, it's about the center which by the way might have been another reason that the biden people wanted to really stake out that ground in the oval address because mansion's hanging out out there but in the rfk thing it's um it's also just like there have always been kooks they've always been rich linden larouche you know rich out of touch wackadoo people for whom politics is a joke and a game and they they've always been around but man that we have these people like jack dorsey and elon who have just so much power just over the conversation and are so fucking cavalier about politics just so uh um glib about the consequences for actual people that like jack dorsey can say that he actually thinks this is a good idea just for i suppose the fun of it just for the outrage of it it really it rfk jr in the conspiratorial mindset towards government and politics does align with the fucking tech bro view of the universe you talk to these fucking people and they have such disdain for government and politics and they think that they we should innovate our way out of every problem. And the government is out to get everyone.
Like it does fit that Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk genuinely believe this shit. Yeah, it does.
But also, you know, Robert Kennedy Jr. spoke at a Bitcoin conference in Miami and name checked Jack's company.
So, you know, like that. But I like there is there is a conspiratorial worldview that is very closely tied to like the joe rogan tulsa gabbard world that i think this guy speaks right to i think you'll get on all those shows and get a big audience it just but it just goes to the for so many of these people rogan types the the dorsey's like politics isn't a means of coming together to figure out how we use our limited resources to solve problems.
It isn't about budget numbers and Medicare outlays and who gets relief and who doesn't and how much people pay in taxes. It's an aesthetic fucking game show that they watch from home and they buzz in and they get to play and they like certain competitors and they don't like others.
It's a game show to them. Yeah.
And by the way, Jack, the tipping point for him seems to be Joe Biden tripping over a sandbag on stage. Therefore, he comes out and endorses this crazy anti-vax conspiracy theorist.
And I also think a big point of contention here is going to be that the Democratic National Committee is not holding Democratic primary debates because RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson aren't serious candidates.
And so then you're gonna have a bunch of people saying, just hold the debates. Why are you so afraid of debating? Which is, you know, fucking James Van Der Beek.
Dawson's Creek fame was out there with a viral video that went all over Fox, that was played all over Fox News, like yelling at the DNC for not holding debates. Is he anti-vax now? Yes.
And the point is- He doesn't want to wait for his life to be over. And again, it's like, we vanderbeek and we think i don't want to wait i already did like there's a whole conservative infrastructure he was working on his sentence there's a whole conservative infrastructure out there to lift up those comments and mainline them to people who might want to hear them anyway we got all the way from uh donald trump to joe biden to james vanderbeek my guy uh when we come back team pacey.
Tommy. John.
Uh oh. Before we go.
Yes. Can we do a quickie? Ugh.
Can we phrase it differently? You're disgusting. Can we phrase it any other way than that? The segment is called quickie.
Can we do, can we have a quickie? I don't even know what the right phrase is. We're in a workshop.
Get to your point. All right.
Well, I just want to first thank the subscribers who sent me this wonderful piece of content on our community discord go subscribe at crooked.com slash friends please say crooked.com slash friends crooked.com slash friends thank you last week republican congresswoman i'm doing this because it's a dead-sailing thing it's one more piece of news republican congresswoman lauren bober did not show up for the vote on the budget bill. Nice.
I want to play you two quick clips. So good.
It's a shot in a chaser. Here's the shot.
It's Lauren Boebert explaining that she did not show up because she was protesting the bill. They served us up a crap sandwich.
Call it a no show protest. But I certainly let every one of my colleagues and the country know I was against this garbage of a bill.
All right. And here is the chaser.
What you're about to see is Lauren Boebert sprinting up the steps of the Capitol trying to get the vote in on the night that it happened. And I'm telling her that they closed the vote.
They just closed it. They closed it? Yeah.
What we were watching for everyone at home is her sprinting, literally sprinting up the steps of the Capitol trying to make the vote that she said that she was protesting. Well, but it's funny to say it's a no-show protest vote.
The way you protest, you vote no. You get to vote on it.
Keep in mind, you know, she tried to be technically accurate there by saying, call it a no-protest vote. It wasn't.
Yeah. But you can call it that.
If you want to call it a no protest vote, I'm fine with that. I actually missed it.
She said this garbage of a bill, which means that was at their best take. I love it.
I love just not getting your homework in in time and then saying it's because of climate change. Yeah.
I love it. Oh, brutal.
What do you guys make of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boeber both you know dropping at the same time and they kind of different well you know trajectories that they've taken Marge is Kevin's bud they're going separate ways she's now establishment but did you see that Steve Bannon is trying to lead an effort to get a primary candidate against her against Marjorie Taylor Taylor Greene? That's so... Yeah, and she was like texting Matt Gaetz about it.
Yeah, she texted Matt Gaetz or rejoined her and somehow that ended up in the news. Tell Steve if he picks this fight, I'll take the house and the kids.
But for a while... You can send this text to him.
Marjorie was like... She was basically a co-host on the War Room podcast with Steve Bannon for a long time.
You hate to see it. You hate to see it.
Big break. It's too bad.
Anyway, I don't know how we get to

Marjorie Taylor Greene, but you know, Lauren Boebert.

What's as they're going in there?

They don't like each other.

It's the narcissism of small differences.

They got a fight in the bathroom that everyone wrote about.

Yeah, they did. They fought each other.

Those are the days.

Just like arguments with their words.

Anyway, thank you, Elijah.

Thank you for that quickie. Anytime.

When we come back, Tommy talks to Washington Post reporter reporter ben terrace about his new book the big break spring is here and so are the deals at dds discounts from trendy outfits to home makeovers dds has all the deals you need i'm talking everything from sandals and sundresses to spring throw pillows and scented candles. You love a good deal? Get in your bag and get to Didi's discounts.
Tax Act knows you probably don't need help filing taxes. But if you get stuck, we have live experts you can talk to.
And who knows, you could hit it off and become long-term tax friends.

Staying up late at night, talking about deductions, refunds, personal exemptions. Heck, you could even fall in love and create a little dependent of your own one day.
Or they could just answer your filing questions. Tax Act.
Let's get them over with. Let's face it, after a night with drinks, even just a couple, it can be hard.
Textning Stina Hedin first order at zbiotics.com slash pod 15 and use pod 15 at checkout. Ben Terrace is a reporter for the Washington Post.
He is the author of the new book, The Big Break, which is available today. I've already read it.
Spoiler alert, it's great. Ben, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

thanks so much for doing this and thanks for sending me a pdf of the book although i also paid for one so we'll be arriving in my kindle shortly it's a great book it's a very fun uh

page turning quick read so i highly recommend folks read it if you want to learn about some of

the more interesting characters in Washington. Is that a fair sort of summary of who you like to focus on? Yeah, I'd say so.
I tried to find the most interesting people who actually were also either important or influential or, you know, said something more about kind of the current state of politics. Yeah, I mean, I think that sort of characterizes a lot of your reporting in the post too.
It's like coverage of these entertaining characters in politics and then using them to tell a bigger story about the city, the industry around politics, which I think is a great way to do it. So I was hoping we could start with one of the folks in the book that really interested me, a guy named Robert Strick.
Can you tell us who he is and what his job was? Sure. Robert Strick is definitely one of the more interesting people in this book, which I have to say is full of interesting people.
I honestly believe that, but he is truly a unique character. He's a longtime lobbyist who was never really successful until Donald Trump came around and then was just one of the most wildly successful, uh, you know, financially, um, one of the most wildly successful lobbyists in all of Washington, uh, this kind of cowboy swaggery, um, libertarian Trump loving, but also Trump skeptical in some ways, guy who lived out on a farm in Middleburg, Virginia, that he called Alibi Farm.
And he was this guy who just really could not make it work until Donald Trump came around. And he just found a way to take advantage of the chaos and become a power player in Washington.
And I was interested in him, not just because he made it work in Washington. When Trump was around, I wanted to know what happened to this guy after Trump was gone, right? It's one thing for a guy to come in when the door is open to him to take advantage of this really chaotic moment.
But what happens when Washington reverts a little bit back to normal once Joe Biden comes in, once the kind of usual suspects return, what happens to a, uh, you know, a chaotic character like him? And he seemed sort of seemed like the ultimate example of fake it till you make it, right? I mean, he didn't seem like an individual who was particularly that well connected within the Trump orbit. But basically, he bluffed his way into some of the biggest lobbying contracts you could imagine with foreign countries, right? So his story, his origin story in the Trump years is fascinating.
He was a very low level kind of guy out in Oregon helping out for Donald Trump, got connected to some people who ended up being big players in the Trump world. But he got big.
He had his big break, which is the name of the book. The book is called The Big Break because the country went through a big break, but also because all these new people have the opportunity to kind of seek out big breaks of their own.
And his came in a really strange fashion. He came to Washington right after Trump won.
Well, he's around for the election night. He was there and continued to be there after he won, kind of partied for four nights, drinking an endless amount of whiskey with his friends and smoking cigars.
And one night he was out at the Four Seasons in Georgetown outside on the patio smoking cigars and drinking when a dog came and sniffed his crotch. And he kind of pushes this dog away.
He's like, what the heck's going on here? And a woman comes and she apologizes. And he notices that she has an accent, but can't quite place it.
Turns out she works for the New Zealand embassy. And she's having a tough time connecting her country with Donald Trump.
I mean, when Trump became president, all these countries had to scramble to figure out what to do. They were all kind of expecting it would be Hillary Clinton.
He's sitting there and he says, oh, you want to get connected to Donald Trump? I can do that. He did not know in that moment if he could really do it or not.
But he had enough of a chance and decided he was going to take a gamble on this. And he was able to do it.
He helped connect New Zealand to Donald Trump and uses that as a jumping off point to just work for all these countries, many of which were kind of controversial countries looking for a leg up in Trump's Washington. And so, yeah, I mean, and these are like massive contracts, right? And you're talking like $100,000 a month as sort of a starter, if you're lobbying for, I don't know, name some of these unsavory characters that were in the book.
Well, one place that he got a huge contract for was for like $5 million for Saudi Arabia, and he didn't even end up doing anything for them. He just, you know, they saw an opportunity that there were not a lot of people who could say, look, we're connected to Donald Trump.
He was saying it. They got this, they gave him this huge contract and ultimately didn't even ask anything from him.
I mean, there's so much money out there in foreign contracts because to a country, $5 million is nothing, right? But if you can use it to, I don't know, get yourself off of potential sanctions lists, or if you can use it to, you know, bend the ear of someone in the State Department, just the chance of that is worth so much more than a few million dollars. It could be worth billions of dollars.
And so, you know, people could throw around money and he could collect. $5 million to do nothing.
Must be nice. Another person you spend a lot of time with in the book is a guy named Matt Schlapp.
I find him to be one of the more craven, disgusting, phony people in Washington. Just a quick summary for listeners who don't know Mr.
Schlapp. He's a lobbyist who is the chairman of the American Conservative Union, which organizes the CPAC conference.
CPAC used to be this kind of fringe political circus. It is now basically kind of like the heart of the MAGA movement, and it's spreading that brand of politics to other right-wing populist countries and leaders.
Matt was also accused of sexual assaulting someone on Herschel Walker's campaign. Can you talk about why you wanted to include Matt in the book and like a little bit about his evolution from sort of a, I know, a Bush guy who, you know, worked in the Bush White House and was kind of a standard Republican to, I don't know, the leader of the MAGA movement? Yeah.
I mean, so I set out to write this book because a lot of people, pretty much everyone can tell that Washington is broken, right? But it's hard to know exactly how it got that way. I have this kind of great job, sometimes a terrible job, but a great job in that I can spend my days trying to figure out answers to that question.
I can talk to people, I can get inside rooms that most people can't get into. I can, you know, spend tons of time researching them and talking to everyone who knows them.
And I wanted to know kind of how the Republican Party became what it is today, how it went from, you know, the GOP of, you know, 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, and, you know, how it turned into a party that just cares about Donald Trump and loyalty to him. And I felt like it's hard to write about an entire party.
But as a profile writer, I could spend time with Matt Schlapp, who is a very good example of this, maybe the best example of a Washington Republican who went from the establishment to Donald Trump. And I felt like if I could kind of get to know him, his motivations, the way that he spun his story, the way that he explained how he could be a compassionate conservative one day under George Bush and be a fighter, a loyalist for Donald Trump talking about stolen elections and, you know, going to bat for Trump from everything from defending him when he was accused of sexual assault to, you know, you name the thing that Donald Trump has done, Matt Schlapp has defended it.
And spending time with him was a very, it was difficult to do, right, to spend time with any political person for that much time and to be writing about them and thinking about them. But it did give me kind of a good insight to how the party could move from one place to another.
Did you ever get a sense of why he would agree to talk with you? Did he just think that getting more coverage would help his business? I mean, this is obviously someone who had a lot to hide, we've come to learn. Yeah.
I don't know exactly why people talk to me sometimes. I'm glad they do.
I think the reason is because I am fair. I spend a lot of time trying to get to know people and understand their motivations and give their worldview at least some time to breathe, right? But I'm also fair in that I'm going to write what's true.
And so if Matt Schlapp comes across as somebody who gave up a lot of his values for Donald Trump, if I write about the fact that he has been accused of groping a male staffer and did that while also kind of disparaging gay people and making jokes about gay people to me, like, I will put that in the book because I'm trying to tell the full picture of somebody. And so he might not like the, you know, the way that he's portrayed in the book, but at the, at the beginning of it, you know, I told him I would be fair.
And at the end of it, I do think I'm fair. It just doesn't necessarily mean that, um, everybody I write about loves the story at the end of the, of the, of the process.
Yeah. So I lived on and off in DC from 2002 to about 2015.
I think that I'm fairly cynical and pretty hard on the city when I talk about it. I came away from reading your book with an even darker, more cynical take on Washington.
and I'm wondering, you know, if, if that takeaway is accurate, if you really do have an incredibly

dark and cynical view of Washington, and if you think DC was always that way, or if you think it

has gotten worse over the last few years. And I should mention that like, you didn't just profile Republicans in the Trump era.
There are a bunch of Democrats in here too. You know, I think, you know, you started off by talking about how you thought this book was, you know, a fun read.
And I thank you for that. And I And I agree.
hope that's true. And so, I think when people read this book, it can be a romp, it can be funny, it can be an adventure.
But yeah, there is a real darkness to it, right? These are dark times. The country is not in a great place and Washington is not necessarily up for the challenge in a lot of ways.
And so, there are characters this book, and there's lots of different characters who are all trying to make this kind of new frontier work, sometimes just for them, sometimes just for their own benefit, sometimes though, to try to make the world a better place. And so while I do not have like the most positive view of Washington as a whole, there are lots of parts of it that do give me a lot of hope.
And I think that's in the book as well. And sometimes you find that in dark places, right? I spend a lot of time in this book with Hill staffers, some underappreciated, underpaid, undercovered staffers who are often voiceless in Washington, the people who kind of really make the city work.
Some of them are going through terrible times. I spend time with a former Dianne Feinstein staffer who makes a splash in this book by taking a bunch of mushrooms after he's fired, breaking into his boss's office, smoking a joint at her desk and filming a protest video to try to get attention for the things that he's seen, right? Like that's not a happy story.
It's interesting, but it's not happy. Definitely interesting.
But underneath that, it helped me kind of get to know a whole world of people who are desperately trying to do good work. People talk about Washington as just filled with cynics and people who are desperate for power.
And there are a lot of those, but more people come to Washington to try to do good stuff. And that hasn't changed even after Trump.
In some ways, I feel like more and more people are coming because it feels more important than ever. And so I think even if you read this book and see a lot of darkness, there are glimmers of hope in there too.
Yeah. I mean, look, I worked on Capitol Hill for a while.
I don't want to dissuade anyone from working in government or working in politics generally, but they can be really tough jobs. You are underpaid, you are overworked.
The work itself doesn't always feel all that gratifying, especially when you're younger at a lower level. But like my overall take on Washington having worked in the White House, or sort of the duration of my time there was most of the city was kind of really well-meaning, earnest people that are a little nerdy in a good way and focused on making the world a better place.
Do you think the Trump era changed that makeup to include more people like Robert Strick, the first guy we talked about who sort of used his little bit of access into administration to make a ton of money by lobbying for unsavory people? I mean, more, I do think more people come to Washington because they're idealistic than come to make money. I just think, look, if you really want to be rich, you go to Wall Street.
If you really want to be famous, you can go to Hollywood. I don't think it's the number one place to come for that.
I do think more people than usual have come to Washington since Donald Trump and during the Trump eras because of that, because all of a sudden the door is open to more people. The way I think about this is I've always liked to write about kind of sideshow characters because I find them interesting.
I often think sideshow characters do a very good job of kind of explaining the world that you can read a profile of somebody who seems kind of strange and weird. And at the end of it, you understand the world better.
But now these sideshow characters realize they can be on the center stage. I mean, that's what happens in the Donald Trump years.
Like you can all of a sudden become a power player, even if in any other era you could not. But I still think there are more people that come here to just do good work.
And it can be, you know, that doesn't mean that everybody stays in Washington as an idealist. Washington can change people.
You can come here idealistic and leave cynical. You can come to try to change the world and then realize it's actually easier to just make money.
So, you know, again, there's a lot of cynicism in Washington and I'm as jaded as the next guy. But, you know, I do think that when people saw what Donald Trump was doing to politics, a lot of idealistic people said, well, I'm needed more than ever to go and, you know, fight the good fight.
Yeah. I mean, I do think that maybe the difference is between when I started and what the Trump era is there, like there's obviously been lots of people that went to Washington and did brand building and left.
I mean, I'm, I am one of them. Let's just be clear about that.
But it was more like George Stephanopoulos worked at the white house. He was the communications director.
And then he left and got a job at ABC News or whatever. Now there is like a brand building on steroids with social media.
And you have a guy like Boris Epstein, who is, you know, some like tier D surrogate in the Trump campaign. I think he did like surrogate scheduling in the White House, got pushed out.
And now he's like Trump's legal consigliere seemingly running point on all the cases defending him against the very special counsel investigation. So maybe that's the thing that has changed over time.
It's this ability to like, have your star turn, do it very quickly on your own terms on social media, and then leverage that into something financially. Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you know, institutions in Washington have changed and a lot of them have crumbled. It used to be you'd have to work your way up through institutions, but now people are making their own.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe Brookings isn't the shortcut it used to be.
One thing you didn't talk about a lot in the book is the mainstream media and how mainstream media institutions and organizations are doing it this time. You do talk about the role of social media, especially on Capitol Hill, and some sort of new media outlets that are trying to tell the stories of communities that have been marginalized in those jobs or on Capitol Hill generally.
But how do you feel like the mainstream media is doing to kind of, I don't know, keep tabs on some of the self-dealing that we were just talking about at the top? Look, I mean, I think some of the best journalism in the world is still being done today. You know, if you look at, you know, the best work that's out there, it's amazing.
People are just doing incredible work and, you know, they're speaking truth to power. I'll also admit that it's a struggling industry right now, both financially, but also with how to do the job as a whole.
And so I think while some places are knocking it out of the park, it's just hard to keep up. And the book is about a Washington that is not fully prepared for the possible return of Donald Trump, right? It's not like once Trump was gone, all these guardrails went up and everybody prepared for the second coming of Trump or someone like him.
And I think the same is true in the media. I think a lot of television media, a lot of places that are struggling financially are making the same mistakes that they made the first time around and need to learn some lessons.
Yeah, I agreed with that. So let me speak of learning lessons.
So this is not in the book, but this is part of your Washington Post profile writing. You wrote this piece a few weeks ago about a guy named Morgan Murphy, who was Senator Tommy Taberville's military aide.
He ended up resigning or getting pushed out after your story ran. Can you tell us a little bit about Morgan Murphy and what got him into trouble? Sure.
Morgan is the kind of person that would have fit very well into this book, honestly. He's a kind of character who in another era would not have been at the center of American policy making necessarily, but was up until last week in that role.
He was Tommy Tuberville's national security advisor. But he had this kind of crazy backstory.
And he worked for Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair, he became an adventure writer for Forbes magazine, he wrote books about eating his way through the south. You know, if you looked him up on Wikipedia, it didn't say Morgan Murphy,

national security advisor. It said Morgan Murphy, food critic.
And this food critic was at the center of a big kerfuffle happening in Washington right now. Tommy Tuberville is pretty much single-handedly holding up nominations for Pentagon positions that are crucial to you know, American safety.
He's doing so because he's trying to fight against a Department of Defense abortion policy. And Morgan Murphy was a key advisor helping Tuberville kind of figure this out.
I wrote about him because, you know, it felt to me like, here's an example of a guy who wouldn't be in Washington if not for Trump. The only reason he got here was because he's a captain in the naval reserves.
And during the Trump years, he ended up working at the Pentagon. And because there was kind of a void in communication leadership, he rose very quickly to become a traveling press secretary, the traveling press secretary for the Pentagon.
So all of a sudden, this guy who is a food critic is now speaking on behalf of the American military and then ends up working for a former football coach who's now a senator who is single-handedly blocking Pentagon from doing its job. That to me is like, oh, things are different in Washington.
And here's a character that represents that. Yeah, things are different in Washington.
And just to sort of like double stamp what what Tuberville is doing, he's got a hold on all U.S. Department of Defense general and flag officer promotions because the Department of Defense will give paid time off and travel funding for service members and dependents seeking abortion services if they live in states where those services are now illegal.
So Tuberville is holding up hundreds of promotions. The Department of Defense says there are about 650 officers covered by this blanket hold, sort of like a one to four star general.
It's so aggressive that Mitch McConnell opposes this idea. But what do we make of the fact that holding up hundreds of promotions for members of the military who have no part of this policy that Tuberville says he opposes, that doesn't get you in trouble.
But Morgan Murphy taking credit for the policy and taking some of that credit away from Tavi Tuberville, that gets you fired. Yeah.
I mean, it's one of those things where Washington has changed in a lot of ways since Donald Trump, but in some ways it remains the same. And, you know, one way that it remains the same is if you're a principal, if you're a member of Congress, if you are an elected official, you like to be the person that gets all the credit or all the blame for, you know, for policies that come out of your office.

And if somebody steps out in front of you

and makes it look like they're maybe pulling the strings,

it's not a good look.

Yeah, don't get it in the boss's way.

Ben, thank you for doing the show.

The book, again, is The Big Break.

It is available now.

It's a great read.

Buy it, take it to the beach with you.

You'll learn a lot about Washington,

but don't let it make you too cynical

because there's some good stuff too that you can do

if you want to work there.

But I really appreciate you doing the show. Thanks so much for having me.
Thanks to Ben Terrace for joining us today. And we'll talk to you again on Thursday.
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