Ron’s Boulevard of Broken Streams

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Speaker 6 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, Ron DeSantis' campaign launch explodes on takeoff.

Speaker 6 And Tim Miller is here to break down what's next for Tiny D and the rest of the Republican field.

Speaker 6 Then, House Republicans are feeling so confident about the debt ceiling negotiations that they're bragging about holding the economy hostage.

Speaker 6 And finally, we dig into one of the week's weirdest stories. Why did Marjorie Taylor Green pay $100,000 for a used tube of Kevin McCarthy's chapstick?

Speaker 6 Just the big stories here for Pod Save America. Quick reminder before we start that Pod Save America will be live in New York City on June 12th at the Tribeca Film Festival.

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Speaker 6 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Dan, let's get to the news.
Here's a question. If a presidential campaign launches on Twitter and no one can hear it, did it really launch?

Speaker 6 Ron DeSantis. He could have announced his White House bid with a...
a big rally or a splashy primetime interview.

Speaker 6 Instead, he chose what was essentially a conference call with Elon Musk and and one of his VC fanboys that was meant to showcase the governor's dulcet tones and the billionaire media mogul's technological prowess.

Speaker 6 If you didn't get the chance to tune in, here's how the first 20 minutes or so went.

Speaker 7 But not those of us who've known and worked with Elon for nearly a quarter century. His commitment to freedom and to freedom and his ways to put his money mouth.

Speaker 7 I think we've got

Speaker 7 just a massive number of people online, so it's

Speaker 7 service-restraining are straining somewhat.

Speaker 7 Are you very excited to

Speaker 7 have

Speaker 7 Governor Standis

Speaker 7 make this stark announcement?

Speaker 7 We're just trying to

Speaker 6 get it going.

Speaker 6 An auspicious start for Mr. Trump Without the Baggage.
Trump Without the Drama. Dan, you have seen quite a few campaign launches in your day.
You've helped organize a couple yourself.

Speaker 6 Do you remember any announcements where you can't actually see the candidate or hear from them for a good half hour into the announcement?

Speaker 5 Well, John, I think we're all being a little bit unfair to Ron DeSantis because for

Speaker 5 about a century, all of the campaign announcements were audio only. That is true.
Then the TV was invented.

Speaker 5 But no, not since then.

Speaker 6 So it's really Make America Great Again kind of thing. Yeah.

Speaker 5 We thought that was just like pre-Civil Rights Act when they said it, but they actually mean pre-television.

Speaker 6 Worst presidential campaign launch of all time? I was trying to figure this out and like going back, at least in my poor memory, about what could have been, what was a worse launch than this.

Speaker 6 There were certainly worse campaigns that ended in disaster, but the actual announcement is a tough one to really fuck up.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I would say the AI chatbots were not helpful in trying to identify this question.

Speaker 6 USB AI chatbots.

Speaker 6 Like I'm thinking back to Wes Clark after he announced, but his actual speech was okay. And then he had that famous moment on the plane where he was asked about his Iraq war position.

Speaker 6 And he, in the middle of the question, turned around to his press person and asked what his position was.

Speaker 6 You mean Mary?

Speaker 5 He said, he said, help Mary.

Speaker 6 Help Mary. Yeah, help Mary.
That in my mind, so far, that was back in 2003. That was like the running, in the running for the worst launch of all time.

Speaker 6 I mean, Donald Trump did come come down an escalator and then start screaming about Mexico sending rapists and criminals, but that, by all accounts, was a stellar performance compared to this.

Speaker 5 Well, as it turns out, we were all a bit naive about the Republican Party base in 2016.

Speaker 6 That's true. That's true.
Now, it is probably true that most Republican voters won't hear about this. Literally.

Speaker 6 And that is the best possible news for Ron DeSantis because everyone who does hear about it will learn that it was an absolute disaster and a joke, including Republican voters who hear about it from right-wing media, which is a rarity because like Fox News was dunking on it.

Speaker 6 I mean,

Speaker 6 real problems, real problems. He even, Ron DeSantis even lost cat turd.

Speaker 6 Cat turd.

Speaker 5 Not the cat turd.

Speaker 6 The cat turd.

Speaker 5 That's Mr. Cat Turd to you, buddy.

Speaker 6 Mr. I say it's at cat turd too, Mr.
Cat Turd.

Speaker 6 He said that it was like watching paint dry and so that he left, he left.

Speaker 6 I mean, I guess he, I don't know if he voluntarily left or he was forced out like most of us were most of the time. There were about 500,000 listeners when Twitter Spaces crashed.

Speaker 6 Only about 200,000 came back once they finally turned it off and turned it on again. Average Fox primetime audience is about 1.5 million.

Speaker 6 What on earth was the DeSantis campaign thinking in choosing an audio-only platform with a well-known history of crashing

Speaker 5 earlier when you not so subtly called me old by pointing out all the campaign announcements that I have seen over time

Speaker 6 and were there at the at the Carter announcement I believe you were

Speaker 5 I wasn't born when Carter announced I would point that out I have to do the math of my head I'm not sure but look when you plan an announcement you and I have been a part of a couple you what you the way to do that is you pick the candidate's greatest strength, then you build the strategies around highlighting that strength for everyone.

Speaker 5 And for Ron DeSantis, that is clearly his voice.

Speaker 6 His voice.

Speaker 5 It annoys no one. It's not off-putting at all.
So you want to just center the voice in the announcement because that's what people are going to want to hear from.

Speaker 5 They're going to want to hear DeSantis. Just focus on that voice for years to come.
Look, this is an idiotic strategy. Campaign announcements.

Speaker 5 All things in politics can go wrong. They go wrong one of two ways.
One is a good idea that that is either executed poorly or just suffers from bad luck.

Speaker 5 Like take the example of Tim Scott's microphone going out.

Speaker 5 Like that's not, maybe that's some advanced person's fault or they hired the wrong vendor, but that's not a sign that it was not a bad idea of an announcement.

Speaker 5 And then they're just straight up fucking terrible ideas.

Speaker 5 And the idea of doing an audio announcement, being interviewed by two silicon billionaires on the fourth-tier feature of a third-tier social media platform, is this like even if it had gone perfectly, what was the upside?

Speaker 6 I know. That's what I keep saying.
Like it's, it's hard to put the glitches aside, but even if we try to put the glitches aside, the idea is fucking terrible.

Speaker 5 Yeah. So just think about like when you do this, we're going to focus on and we will make fun of them for the 300,000 people or the 150,000.

Speaker 5 That is sort of an a very, and I would say this to any person or politician I was advising. The numbers of people watching in real time is an anachronistic way of looking at it.

Speaker 5 What you want to look at is the tail effect of anything you do. How does it get picked up? So just, where do you care about? Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina.

Speaker 5 What are they going to play on the news to say that Ron DeSantis entered the race? Audio with a picture of Elon Musk and a picture of Ron DeSantis?

Speaker 5 Like,

Speaker 5 just you have to think about what the voter is going to consume. The regular voter who is not on Twitter, especially not on Twitter spaces, they're going to hear your voice.
It's so bizarre.

Speaker 5 And the audio thing is just so weird. And this is an example of how just old and dumb that is.
Since Reagan, for a long time, presidents got to give a weekly radio address every Saturday.

Speaker 5 And you would record it on Friday. You could pick whatever you want.
And radio stations all across the country would air it at a certain time.

Speaker 6 Know it all too well.

Speaker 5 Yes. In 2009.
So Reagan did it. Bush did it.
Clinton did it. Bush43 did it.
Obama comes in, sort of first internet president is like, this is dumb. Why would we just do this on radio?

Speaker 5 So we videotaped it and also put it on YouTube. So in 2009,

Speaker 5 well more than a decade ago, we were like, audio only is dead. And Ron DeSantis is bringing it back because David Sachs is probably going to give $50 million

Speaker 5 to his super PAC, maybe. And Elon Musk could do the same.
And so it's, you can't use your

Speaker 5 campaign announcement to raise money from super PAC billionaires. It's just a stupid, stupid, idiotic way of doing it.

Speaker 5 Last week, I talked about how terrible, how he should have fired his entire team. This is worse.
He did not fire them.

Speaker 5 He got an actual worse idea than that weird endorsing of Kelly Kraft minutes before she lost by 30 points.

Speaker 6 Yeah, the

Speaker 6 young generational change candidate decided to take us back to the days before television, something that everyone has in their homes.

Speaker 6 He could have potentially reached lots of people on a piece of technology that they've had in their homes for quite some time, and that is the television.

Speaker 6 And actually, they have little televisions on their phones, too. I can see that.

Speaker 6 That's happened also. But, you know, audio only is fine too.
And again, when you're doing your presidential announcement, you don't want the stage to yourself.

Speaker 6 You want to share the stage with an erratic billionaire and his fucking flunky, David Sachs. I haven't said his name because no one who fucking knows who David Sachs is, right?

Speaker 6 He's just some random, you know, he's like the sixth guy at PayPal,

Speaker 6 and now he's rich and has some opinions. That's David Sachs.

Speaker 6 That's who Ron DeSantis wanted to moderate.

Speaker 6 his announcement. Also, you couldn't really tell the difference between when David Sachs was speaking and Ron DeSantis, because they both have terrible voices.

Speaker 6 And there were times when Ron DeSantis couldn't even get a word in edgewise because David and Elon were like hogging the whole thing and talking too much.

Speaker 6 I mean, I'm trying to get into the minds of the DeSantis campaign, of the people who, of the Yahoo who proposed this idea. And all I can think of is that they are all way too online.

Speaker 6 They seem to have actually bought into this idea that Elon Musk is the new Rupert Murdoch. This is where the media is going, the right-wing media is going.

Speaker 6 And maybe somehow they're going to take it to Trump by announcing on the platform that helped him become president. And Twitter used to be Trump's platform.
And now here comes DeSantis.

Speaker 6 And maybe that'd get a lot of elite media attention, which, you know, it certainly did. Certainly did get a lot of elite media attention.
But it all seems like real galaxy brain shit.

Speaker 6 Like, who was the audience? Was it donors? Was it Dogecoin fans?

Speaker 6 Was it Elon Musk fans, which at this point you could fit into a small building? Like,

Speaker 6 what was going on?

Speaker 5 I don't want to be cynical about this, John, but

Speaker 5 Ron DeSantis' campaign plans to raise, the other super PAC plans to raise and spend at least $200 million. And it's probably going to be more than that.

Speaker 5 And Ron DeSantis's like chief political guru is a guy named Jeff Rowe.

Speaker 5 He worked for Ted Cruz. He helped get Glenn Yunken elected.
He also owns the

Speaker 5 ad buying company that will be used to place the ads spent by the super PAC. And he will get a cut of every single dollar spent.

Speaker 5 And you know who can give a lot of money to that super PAC?

Speaker 5 Elon Musk. David Sachs and Elon Musk.

Speaker 5 And this is the same thing. We talked about this last week.
This is why he endorsed Kelly Kraft, who was also a Jeff Rowe client,

Speaker 6 who

Speaker 5 also is a billionaire who plans to give money to the DeSantis effort. And so DeSantis is being like, he is no great shakes as a candidate or politician.

Speaker 5 We're going to talk about that with Tim, but his campaign is pure idiocy right now. Absolute pure idiocy.

Speaker 6 I mean, it's just a bunch of like reactionary Republicans who have been red-pilled by being too online, just like Elon, just like Ron DeSantis. It's like the things they care about

Speaker 6 are all just like these very niche concerns that like you have to be way deep in the comment section to understand and right-wing media.

Speaker 6 And speaking of right-wing media, just before we just go off DeSantis for a second, there were some takes floating around that Elon Musk has displaced Rupert Murdoch as the king of right-wing media.

Speaker 6 You think the coronation might be delayed now?

Speaker 5 Yeah, it seems that way.

Speaker 5 And just the numbers here make it just very clear that Twitter, the scale of Twitter and what people who actually consume live political content on Twitter is quite small compared to Fox or frankly any cable channel.

Speaker 5 Like those are CNN numbers, not to be rude about it, but that we're talking about here. And that should probably give Tucker Carlson some pause on his plan to reinvent his empire on Twitter.

Speaker 5 Having said that, let's put aside who's the king of right-wing media and who isn't. It doesn't matter.
But I think there is a lesson here for progressives, which is

Speaker 5 I don't care about the Twitter space generally, but what Elon Musk has done is he has bought one of the major distribution mechanisms of content in the world.

Speaker 5 And he is now using that to tilt the content that's distributed. He owns the pipes, not the media.
Twitter's not a media company. It's a media distribution company.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 5 if you're on Twitter, it is because, you know, Charlie Borzel wrote this in The Atlantic. It's becoming a right-wing platform.

Speaker 5 The content choices being made by Elon Musk via their algorithm is pushing more right-wing content.

Speaker 5 He's using his ownership and his platform to highlight no Democratic candidate is going to go on there and do it, but there will be MAGA candidates all the time.

Speaker 5 And that is an argument, not that we should care that much about Twitter, but this is the

Speaker 5 future of media is media distribution, how you get content in front of people. And Elon Musk, as a, as a newly found red-pilled right-winger, now owns one of those, owns the pipes, and that matters.

Speaker 5 And as Democrats think about how we're going to compete against that going forward, it's not going to necessarily be by buying the Atlantic or even building media companies, but we also have to think about distribution, how you get content in in front of people's eyeballs.

Speaker 5 And that does matter. And that is important.
And we can make fun of it and laugh at the glitch, but, and that's all funny and the platform is dying.

Speaker 5 But between now and when it dies, it's going to have an impact. And it's going to have an impact on the terms that Elon Musk wants it to have.

Speaker 6 Yeah, no, I agree with all of that, except it may not have the impact that Elon wants it to have because he's got a pipe maintenance problem. Yeah, he's got to fix his pipes.
Yes.

Speaker 6 He's not running the thing all that well.

Speaker 6 I mean, like, look, I don't want to do the whole thing about Elon, but like, this is a guy who thought thought that his success at building rockets and cars would translate to success at building a media platform.

Speaker 6 But the guy has built robots with better people skills than he has.

Speaker 6 He's a shitty manager, shitty leader with shitty politics that came from being red-pilled, from spending too much time on the platform that he paid $44 billion

Speaker 6 for. And all of his engineering skills couldn't stop the thing from crashing constantly because he doesn't have enough people working for him because he sucks.

Speaker 5 Look, he's doing a shitty job. There is no question about that.
And

Speaker 5 it's a little bit Trump-esque. Like if a smarter, more focused

Speaker 5 right-wing billionaire owned Twitter, it would be much more damaging than as it is under Elon. I just think the point is that there is a lesson in this for Democrats that we should

Speaker 5 understand. And Elon is,

Speaker 5 I don't, I'm not here to judge his overall intelligence, but he knew what he was doing when he bought this platform.

Speaker 5 Because he understood that in an age where cable TV is going away, broadcast media is going away, newspapers are dead, the internet as we know it is dead.

Speaker 5 People don't go to websites anymore, owning content distribution matters a lot. And he bought it.
And that will have an impact. It will not be the same as Facebook or TikTok or something else, but.

Speaker 5 It is a thing and it's going to be yet another headwind that progressive messaging is going to push against in 2024.

Speaker 6 Yeah. And I just, I think there's lessons to be learned in his purchase of Twitter and what he was thinking, what he's trying to do.
And then there'll be lessons in the

Speaker 6 failure to actually make it

Speaker 6 a real bit, you know, just for progressives, I think. So some of you might be thinking, all right, glitches aside, once they got back on there, conversation must have gone pretty well, right?

Speaker 6 Well, so after DeSantis hops on the call, he reads a short version of his stump speech. Again, just reads a stump speech.

Speaker 6 Like, if you're going to have some fun, informal chat that's new and different than your typical stodgy campaign launch, don't just read the speech you would have read at the rally with applause.

Speaker 6 But that's what he did for a while. Then he took about an hour of questions on voters' top concerns from David Sachs, a MAGA congressman, Thomas Massey, a few MAGA pundits.
Here's how it went.

Speaker 8 I pledge to be an energetic executive that will take on the important issues. The whole book ban thing is a hoax, and I think it's part of a political agenda.

Speaker 8 When we're taking on things like DEI, you get blowback from legacy media and the far left. We believe jamming gender ideology in elementary school is wrong.
You have every right to do Bitcoin.

Speaker 8 The only reason these people in Washington don't like it is because they don't control it.

Speaker 8 I think this whole ESG movement is really trying to do through the financial sector what they could never achieve through the ballot box.

Speaker 8 The legacy media, these corporate journals, they're in their little bubble. And look, I'm a blue-collar kid.
I grew up in the Tampa Bay area working minimum wage to get through school.

Speaker 8 My grandfather worked in the steel mill in West Virginia.

Speaker 8 I just know instinctively kind of what like normal people think about all this stuff.

Speaker 6 Here's the thing. Here's the thing.
Legacy media is in their bubble. Ron DeSantis knows what normal people care about.

Speaker 6 He knows that the Republican primary will ultimately be decided by Bitcoin enthusiasts who are angry with asset managers for investing in renewable energy.

Speaker 6 Right?

Speaker 6 That's what's going to determine the next president.

Speaker 5 Look, when you go to those New York Times diners all across the country,

Speaker 5 you know what you hear first?

Speaker 6 D-E-D-S-G. D-E-S-G.

Speaker 6 There's just so many letters coming out of their mouth. They're just chanting letters.

Speaker 5 They're just chanting D-E-I, D-I-E, S-G.

Speaker 6 Bitcoin, Dogecoin.

Speaker 5 Like, David Sachs is a huge crypto guy. He is, I'm sure, has a lot of Bitcoin, cares a lot about it.
He keeps asking about Bitcoin.

Speaker 5 And Elon Musk has some sort of trolly relationship with pumping and dumping Dogecoin. Did he keep he keeps bringing up Dogecoin awkwardly in that sense?

Speaker 5 And I know very little about crypto, but I don't think do Bitcoin is the right way it's described. We got a lot let people do Bitcoin

Speaker 6 They also like they spend a lot of time bitching about the media like Elon Musk is like yelling about the Charlie Warzell Atlantic piece that you brought up Then David Sackstarts yelling about Vanity Fair.

Speaker 6 I was also struck by like DeSantis He not only has like is is way too online He also sounded at times like someone who has spent too much time in Washington like the establishment figure that Trump is trying to frame him as like at one point, he went from doing his woke mad libs thing to

Speaker 6 talking about omnibus spending bills and the power, something, executive power under Article 2 of the Constitution and how he would do regulations. And I'm just like, this is so fucking boring.

Speaker 6 I mean, he's so boring.

Speaker 5 I think you are discounting the point when he announces support for the Reigns Act, which came out of committee yesterday. Right.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
A bill that came out of committee. What is going on? What are you doing?

Speaker 5 What I think, and we'll talk about this with Tim, but

Speaker 5 he is a typical politician. And that is the contrast.
It's not

Speaker 5 who has baggage, who doesn't, who can speak MAGA better. It's one's a typical politician, one is not.
And Ron DeSantis sounds exactly like a typical politician.

Speaker 5 One who speaks MAGA fluently, but a typical politician.

Speaker 6 Wasn't a single mention of Donald Trump until about an hour into the conversation when right-wing radio host from Iowa, Steve Deese, asked about Trump not finishing the wall.

Speaker 6 And the closest DeSantist got to criticizing the guy who's ahead of him by 30 points was, quote, our voters are sick of the empty promises. They want to see action.
What do you think?

Speaker 6 Is that never backed down enough for you?

Speaker 5 I think it is fitting that the candidate who announced his campaign on Twitter thinks his best strategy is sub-tweeting his way to the nomination.

Speaker 6 It's just

Speaker 6 like, maybe they're waiting for the first debate, for that first exchange between Trump Trump and DeSantis that people are going to see.

Speaker 6 Although I have to say, they might never get that moment at this point because Trump might just skip the debates.

Speaker 5 I mean, there's nothing that people like us want more than DeSantis and Trump to fight each other. Right.

Speaker 6 That is absolutely what we want.

Speaker 5 You know, Lovett always uses the alien versus predator battle and Ron DeSantis, clearly alien in that situation.

Speaker 5 But there's no point in his announcement, however stupid the format for which it was, to directly go after Trump. Like that's, this is not the moment for that.

Speaker 5 That moment is coming very, very quickly and it's coming faster.

Speaker 5 I don't think his argument is a sharp enough implicit contrast to achieve what he wants, but this is necessarily the day for explicit contrast.

Speaker 6 I think that's mostly right, though. If I was Ron DeSantis and I just realized that my campaign announcement fucking exploded because no one could hear me for the first 30 minutes.

Speaker 6 I might think to myself on the spot, maybe I should hit Trump because maybe that will get some coverage that kind of crowds out the no one could hear my campaign announcement speech because Elon Musk's platform broke his audio-only radio show,

Speaker 6 his conference call that he got on.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's not, he could have just done a podcast interview.

Speaker 6 He could have done a podcast interview.

Speaker 5 We would have put that shit on YouTube, right?

Speaker 6 Like you would have seen the video. Yeah.

Speaker 6 It would have looked nice. Okay, quick break, and then we are bringing out the big guns to talk more about DeSantis' announcement in the 2024 Republican primary.
Tim Miller will be joining us next.

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Speaker 6 Joining us on the pod today, our Never Never Trump pal, Bulwark Extraordinaire, author of Why We Did It, Tim Miller. Welcome back.

Speaker 31 Guys, I love to be called out of the bullpen on a day like today. You know,

Speaker 31 I'm excited.

Speaker 6 I know you had some takes. I know you had some takes.
You're bursting at the seam with some takes.

Speaker 6 You got to pull back.

Speaker 6 So I want to just trigger you to start with a tweet from, when I know you've seen this tweet, of course, because you're a Twitter addict like me, from National Review editor Rich Lowry about Meatball's announcement.

Speaker 6 Tech debacle aside, DeSantis is knowledgeable, a fluid speaker, and has command of details.

Speaker 6 Tim, is the woke mob just too blinded by Twitter Schaudenfraud to appreciate the rhetorical power of yesterday's performance?

Speaker 31 I don't think so, John. You know, people might have meatball derangement syndrome.
That's possible. But I got to say, the derangement syndrome might be coming from inside the house at National Review.

Speaker 31 Now, for listeners who aren't aware, National Review is basically like a DeSantis fanzine. And so what happened yesterday is pretty noteworthy, actually.
I was prepared for this question.

Speaker 31 I didn't know it was coming.

Speaker 31 It was kind of like, remember the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine when like on state TV, there were a couple of anchors who were like, I don't know how well this is going, you know, before they were silenced, right?

Speaker 31 This moment happened yesterday at National Review because Rich's own colleague, Jeff Blair. I pulled this out.
I figured I was going to bring it out later, but you started with National Review.

Speaker 31 So here I am. Here's what Jeff Blair said.
This isn't the bulwark. This isn't Never Trump TDS.
This is Jeff's take on the announcement.

Speaker 31 DeSantis would hit powerful points about his Florida record. Okay, you know it's the National Review with that throat clearing, but

Speaker 31 often only 10 to 20 minutes apart with gormless air in between devoted to discussions of esoteric technical issues of interest to absolutely nobody except cryptocurrency speculators.

Speaker 31 Twitter users checking in to hear from the newest Republican candidate about his plan for America. Instead, got to hear VC guy david balsacks blathering balsa

Speaker 31 blathering 10 times as much as his hosting duties called for and thomas massey calling in to rhapsodize about how much he enjoys his tesla uh that was that was published in the national review yesterday so i think that is a pretty clear sign that uh we are not blinded by our wokeness never trump you know resistance biases um and and i think that it was really just a total disaster show that that rich was was trying to you know he's just trying to polish the turd as best he could.

Speaker 6 Tim, but, you know, Dan and I were just talking about this. Do you not think that the Republican primary will be decided by Bitcoin enthusiasts and ESG opponents?

Speaker 6 Is that not the median Republican voter?

Speaker 31 When Doge, my favorite moment of the announcement was when David Sachs, meatballed David, brought up Doge and then under his breath was like, you know, for any Doge enthusiasts out there.

Speaker 31 Like, it was like, even Ian, even Ian realized like maybe a lot of listeners might not catch the reference, you know, about the Dogecoin.

Speaker 31 No, I don't think so.

Speaker 31 And these guys that run this, this all-in podcast that for some reason Ron DeSantis handed over his campaign announcement to, like, there is a, you know, in the concentric circles, there's some, there's some overlap.

Speaker 31 between the concerns of conservative contrarian billionaires who live in silicon valley and are annoyed by their liberal colleagues and the concerns of an average MAGA voter that lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina, who has never heard of what an RSU is, right?

Speaker 31 Like, they have a couple of overlapping concerns. Like, they both don't like woke capital, you know, like they both don't love the pronoun stuff, right?

Speaker 31 But, but there's also a whole nother bale of concerns that these like rich white bros have that, like, regular people have no idea what they're talking about.

Speaker 31 And they seem to have completely infected Ron DeSantis's entire announcement. And, you know, I think that the campaign required somebody who

Speaker 31 didn't go to college and maybe one time attended a Trump rally as a fan to be in their meetings, you know, to just vet like whether this stuff was going to land. Because I just, I just,

Speaker 31 multiple times over the course of the announcement, he was mentioning things that regular people, MAGA folks, we listened to in Bulwark focus groups, things that they never mentioned.

Speaker 31 ESG is never volunteered by an actual voter. Like it was like the digital currency mandate is never something that is brought up voluntarily by a voter.

Speaker 31 It's weird.

Speaker 31 It's a niche concern of these losers.

Speaker 31 And Ron decided that that's what he was going to center his campaign announcement on, which seems like a miss to me.

Speaker 6 Dan and I were trying to get inside the minds of the people on the DeSantis campaign who decided that doing this would be a good idea. Like, what's your thinking about what led them to this idea?

Speaker 31 Well, I think there are two things at play. One One is you have to, the DeSantis team is really kind of new and

Speaker 31 I think not aligned, right?

Speaker 31 He had a very small Tallahassee group, the people that had never done a national campaign.

Speaker 31 There's some people that he've flown in, a lot of whom, people I know that are like not big Trump people or not MAGA people are old establishment Republican consultants that he's brought in.

Speaker 31 And so I think there's lack of trust there, right?

Speaker 31 So I think that they're just for starters like this campaign doesn't have a clear North Star with a candidate and and staff that are like all working towards it so that's one one problem that that i think is pretty obvious at this point like the other the the the thing i was also trying to put myself in their shoes like you know as a pundit we're all you you want to like not overreact right you know you got to think to yourself i'm like i'm the comms person for ron de santa shiver like what i'm in the room someone proposes the elon musk thing initially i'm like this is stupid but then how do i talk myself into it right and i think the answer is you get this lift right that like, if the other idea is, oh, we're going to have a weekday announcement in Tallahassee, the turnout is not going to be anything like a Trump rally.

Speaker 31 It's not going to look like Springfield when you guys did your announcement 20 years ago, however long that was now.

Speaker 31 Like, it's, it's going to look, you know, it'll be a nice crowd. And Jeb's announcement was really nice.
It was the best day of our campaign.

Speaker 31 So having a good announcement doesn't mean it's going to be a good campaign. And the inverse is true.
That's worth marking. But, you know, we had 4,000 people in a small basketball gym.
It was full.

Speaker 31 It was nice.

Speaker 31 the the news cycle lasted six hours you know yeah uh i had donald trump announced the next day and it was over right so so i think that they were they were considering well we could just do this sort of average florida thing not make a lot of buzz or elon musk is like one of the most famous people in the world we can kind of get some residual glow and and boost off of this and make it seem bigger And I think that was their,

Speaker 31 I assume that was their thinking. And that just utterly backfired in every possible way because the opposite happened, right? He looked smaller.

Speaker 31 It felt like the Elon show, not the Ron DeSantis show, right? And he didn't get any boost in coverage, I guess, unless you count people making fun of him, right?

Speaker 31 Like the numbers didn't look any, it was smaller than it would have been had he just announced on Laura Ingram's show.

Speaker 6 Dan, could you imagine a scenario that was like something in between what they went with and the traditional stodgy announcement speech that's typical?

Speaker 6 Like what would have shown that he was like a younger, new generational candidate reaching new people in new places?

Speaker 5 Don't overcomplicate the simple. The campaign announcement is supposed to be the best day of your campaign.
It's the easiest day. The press, it's the day you'll get the most press coverage.

Speaker 5 It is the day the press will cover your message. They will give you the headline you want.
Even if you're a loser candidate, the press will treat you somewhat seriously.

Speaker 5 I mean, just listening to the conversation you, Tommy, and Lovett had on Tuesday about Tim Scott. I was like, you treated him as if he was like a front runner for the race.

Speaker 5 He was like such a stealthy. It was

Speaker 6 a little

Speaker 6 bit. That was very establishment media.
That was an eye on Tim Scott.

Speaker 6 Love it and Mike Murphy are just and so if he had just done the Jet Books.

Speaker 31 I just tuned in for that and was intrigued

Speaker 31 with bullish takes about Tim Scott. I don't know if there was like a triple bank shot thing happening.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, Dave.

Speaker 5 So just do the simple, get the 30 seconds on the local news with your message, get the headlines you want. And no one's going to remember that he fucked this up.

Speaker 5 That's not, I don't think it's going to count some post, but there's an opportunity cost to screen up your announcement because that's the day you should have your best coverage, the day you should be your best fundraising day for probably almost a year, should be the day that you're on the phone with all the folks in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina trying to get them to endorse you.

Speaker 5 And when you fuck it up, you it has an opportunity cost in it, and that part matters. And so, there's no logic of this.

Speaker 5 Do the normal announcement and then do the quote-unquote, and I know this word triggers Favreau, the buzzy thing with Elon Musk the next day, right?

Speaker 5 Do your announcement, get your on-message coverage, and then later on do the thing that'll get you additional attention, the Fox Primetime interview, the morning show interview, the Elon Musk Twitter space or whatever.

Speaker 31 Just one small follow-up on that

Speaker 31 proves this point, right, is in addition to the announcement, right? Not a lot of people are going to tune into the actual announcement speeches, right? You'll get super fans.

Speaker 31 So, but what else do you get out of your announcement?

Speaker 31 What does every candidate get, right? The images, right? You have the visuals. You take the three best delivered lines.

Speaker 31 You package them you can put them in an ad people see them on their instagrams on their web you know where they are engaging with stuff desantis didn't have that it was just his voice and like this man has a voice for newspaper that's not his strength you know

Speaker 31 um

Speaker 31 and and so it was just his voice and so they put out did you see the i know john did but dan did you see the video they put out like with from the it was a yes clipped with a bust picture yes yeah they put what they thought were desantis's best lines from the Twitter space and compiled it into like a clip art show of Ron and Elon

Speaker 6 doing weird. I thought it was a parody account.
I couldn't believe it. I was like, why do they have, it was like old pictures of Elon Musk that would

Speaker 6 pop up in the video when he was ball. Yeah, what was going on there?

Speaker 5 They photoshopped F-16s into the photo of Ron DeSantis overlooking the governor's mansion.

Speaker 5 Which reporters knew because they used that exact image in an ad before without the F-16s.

Speaker 31 And they could have just had the announcement with the sign behind him, Florida's where Woke goes to die, or whatever their message is, you know, and had a nicely packaged thing, but they couldn't do that because they didn't have any video.

Speaker 31 It was an audio only.

Speaker 31 It's just, it was, again, you can overstate how important an announcement is. There have been people with, I don't, I don't remember what Joe Biden's announcement was.
He became president.

Speaker 31 So, you know, I'm sure it wasn't a 10 out of 10, whatever it was, but

Speaker 31 it is, it's noteworthy that it was this bad, especially when you're controlling when purportedly the DeSantis contrast with Trump is like, he's normal, he's competent, you know, he can get the MAGA stuff done.

Speaker 6 Yeah, Trump without the Trump without the baggage, except now he's got some, he started with some baggage.

Speaker 6 Announcement aside, Tim, like you've heard longer versions of DeSantis' stump speech many times before.

Speaker 6 Is there a compelling message in there for Republican voters once you get past the Bitcoin ESG bullshit that sort of Sachs and Elon foisted upon him?

Speaker 31 Yeah, there's uh great job, by the way, David Sachs. Just wanted to shout you out one more time.
Um, really, you're crushing it. Um, you should become a full-time political strategist.

Speaker 6 These guys, I'm sorry, he's a donor, he's one more. He's a new brand of uh, of political figure, I heard.
Uh, he's the donor influencer, the donor influencer.

Speaker 31 These guys, this is why I left the Bay Area is guys like this. We need like a Nepo baby term for people who are the fifth employee at a company that made a, that made that did well.

Speaker 31 And so they made a billion dollars.

Speaker 31 Like, it wasn't, I kind of, I don't begrudge begrudge elon and t peter t like at least these guys had ideas like david sacks was just like you know their butt boy and he got a billion dollars out of it now like okay anyway i'm sorry that's the end of my david sacks all right back to desantis i i did i went to see him at the villages actually so i saw it in 3d in the republican you know in the core republican uh uh you know where the where the base voters you know are uh these older uh kind of mixed between rich folks that moved down to florida that are sunbirds and floridians who moved to the villages.

Speaker 31 And

Speaker 31 his speech was really long. It was like 80 minutes, but there were 20 really good minutes.
And this is the thing.

Speaker 31 When I said earlier about how it doesn't, they seem confused, like they don't have a North Star, they aren't aligned.

Speaker 31 Like DeSantis's line about having the same enemies as the Republican-based voters, right? Like the media hates me. Fauci hates me.

Speaker 31 You know, like I fought them and won. Like we were in a state that used to be a swing state and we won by 20 points.
And that's why these guys are lying and complaining about me all the time, right?

Speaker 31 There's some material there that I think really does resonate with the base. And there's a reason why DeSantis and Trump were tied around Christmas in these polls, right?

Speaker 6 That

Speaker 31 there were people who are like, I like Trump, but this guy won. Like he showed that you can do it.
And, you know, he didn't shut down schools like these woke libs did. And right.

Speaker 31 There are a few areas in the macro where DeSantis can really resonate with these base voters. Like the problem is when he gets down down into the micro,

Speaker 31 it has been off. And also, his personality has been off.
And he seemed to be a bit of a beta, right?

Speaker 31 And so it's like, if I was on his campaign team, I'd be thinking, how can we put him in a position to just maximize this sense that he's a winner, he took on the big fights and to kind of avoid all of all this other, you know, all the other stuff that have weakened his candidacy.

Speaker 31 And they have done the opposite. They've like leaned into all of his, you know, weird piccadillos.

Speaker 6 Dan, how do you think his message, DeSantis' message at its, let's say at its best,

Speaker 6 compares to Trump and what Trump's trying to do?

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 5 there's two elements to this. The first is on the culture war stuff, their messages are sort of the same.

Speaker 5 DeSantis is actually, I think, a little smoother in it, like I agree with Tim, in that sort of 20-minute core of the message.

Speaker 5 When you put aside all the other sort of Fox News marginalia around woke capitalism, he has a culture war message that is, he is the person who has done the best job of that other than Trump in the party since 2016.

Speaker 5 The problem, DeSantis has two problems. The first is Trump marries culture war stuff with economic populism.

Speaker 5 And DeSantis marries culture war with either no economic message or Paul Ryan economic messaging, which is an anathema to everyone, but particularly the Republican base.

Speaker 5 And the message is only as good as the messenger delivering it. And DeSantis, as of right now, is a shitty messenger.
He's got a weird personality. He has no charisma.

Speaker 5 He has no ability to deliver it dynamically.

Speaker 5 He is not good at actually getting his message heard in the way that Trump is.

Speaker 5 And Trump is out there just kicking his ass because Trump is a weirdly compelling, bizarrely charismatic messenger, particularly among the Republican base.

Speaker 5 And Trump has one more advantage that DeSantis does not have is that Trump has an absolute thirst for the jugular.

Speaker 5 And when he finds a candidate's weakness, and Tim knows this, unfortunately, all too well, he hammers it and hammers it and hammers hammers it.

Speaker 5 And he's been doing it to DeSantis for months now, and DeSantis has not shown enough inclination to fight back.

Speaker 5 So, regardless of what his message is, it's not getting heard because Donald Trump is dominating the space.

Speaker 6 You like, as much as we, um,

Speaker 6 you know, we talked a lot about the CNN Town Hall, but think about like Trump's performance at the CNN Town Hall

Speaker 6 and him just sort of like steamrolling Caitlin Collins, you know, whenever he wanted it, and sort of owning that and doing what he wanted to do, versus DeSantis like struggling to get a word in in edgewise with Elon Musk and David Sachs.

Speaker 6 That's just, that sort of tells, tells you everything right there.

Speaker 31 Yeah. No, that kind of is exactly right.
The Trump people put himself in this position in that CNN town hall to be the alpha, right?

Speaker 31 And Caitlin, I think, did the best she could and was fact checking him, right? But if you're watching this, you're like, oh man, look at this. Trump went into the lion's den.

Speaker 31 People are cheering for him, right? Like Trump, you know, and the other thing is Trump is so weird.

Speaker 31 And we can, you know, you've spent seven years on this podcast talking about how dangerous and awful he is. So you can, you know, kind of sometimes

Speaker 31 ignore that when you're like getting down into analyzing the campaigns. But like the Trump attacks feel like Trump.

Speaker 31 Like they might be lies, you know, they might be exaggerations, but you kind of are like, this is what this guy really, really believes, right?

Speaker 31 And did you see his insane attacks on DeSantis on truth yesterday? Like they put up this video that no real campaign would ever put up.

Speaker 31 It's like a fake Twitter space and Hitler's in there and the devil's in there and George Soros is in there and

Speaker 31 DeSantis is in there, and Trump comes in, and he's like, You guys are all terrible, and like, Trump is great, Trump should win.

Speaker 31 I mean, any, if this thing, if any staffer had ever, you know, pitched it in any other campaign, Republican or Democrat, like they would be like, never walked into the office again.

Speaker 31 Like, whoever pitched it.

Speaker 6 What about his first truth? His first truth was, Rob, my red button is bigger, better, stronger, and is working in parentheses, truth.

Speaker 6 Yours does not. And then in parentheses, per my conversation with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, soon to become my friend.
I mean, that is like, I saw that and I laughed.

Speaker 6 And then I'm like, that is fucking deranged. I didn't know what it meant.
And then I was like, one, how is this guy the frontrunner again? How is this the guy the frontrunner again?

Speaker 6 And two, like, I wanted to ask you guys this. Do you guys feel at all guilty about how much you're enjoying the Trump DeSantis content?

Speaker 31 Yes, I'm covering my laugh up while you're reading the tweet right now. I don't want to laugh.
And this is like some of my friends did this to me in 2016.

Speaker 31 Like, they laughed at trump's hits on jeb and i was like it's not funny i was like he's an asshole okay like and i so i keep trying to put myself in that mental space like he is he's dangerous he's an asshole don't laugh at him that said it's like real and it's it is he's funny in his weird way sometimes you're laughing at him and and sometimes he does a good neg you know i remember one time i did laugh un

Speaker 31 just unwillingly during a debate when he like made fun of rand paul's size in the middle of a debate and i was like in the war room and i just couldn't help myself and i laughed i was like oh don't do that bad Tim.

Speaker 31 Don't laugh. So, but it's real.
Then you have the DeSantis, like the flip side of that is it's just like, it's so like these,

Speaker 31 it's poorly packaged campaign stuff. Like the vibe is, oh, this is a traditional campaign done poorly, like, is what DeSantis is putting out.

Speaker 31 And like, what Trump is putting out is like, this is weird and crazy, but it's real. It's Trump, right? And that is what the Republican voters like about Trump.

Speaker 31 He doesn't seem like that he's running a real campaign. And so every time DeSantis puts out one of these limp pushback attacks,

Speaker 31 it only helps Trump more. It ricochets back.
It's like, oh, yeah, this guy is just another Jeb. You know, this guy's just another Marco, right? It's the same old, same old.

Speaker 31 I want the guy doing the weird, you know, going for the jugular, as Dan said, with the weird devil George Soros video memes.

Speaker 6 Dan, do you think

Speaker 6 it's any bit of a political problem for Trump that he may get charged with a few more crimes between now and Iowa?

Speaker 6 Wall Street Journal reported this week that Jack Smith is wrapping up his investigation into the classified documents. This January 6th, there's Georgia.

Speaker 6 Stormy Daniels' hush money trial was just the date was set for March 24th, which is right in the middle of the Republican primary.

Speaker 6 You think it's possible for Trump's opponents to persuade voters that maybe multiple criminal charges make the guy less than an ideal candidate to send on to the general?

Speaker 5 It's actually likely not to be in the middle of the primary, but the very first week of the general election.

Speaker 6 Because

Speaker 5 the Florida primary is March 19th.

Speaker 5 If this, contra to Tuesday's pod about the strength of Tim Scott, if this comes down to,

Speaker 5 if this comes down to Trump DeSantis, if Trump beats DeSantis in Florida, it's over.

Speaker 5 And his next move is going to be to show up in New York for a criminal trial where one of the outcomes is he goes to prison.

Speaker 5 I mean, DeSantis, if you were trying to, like, what is the possible case for DeSantis to bounce back from this?

Speaker 5 It is simply to be the other person standing when Trump collapses under the combination of his own crimes, his own looming electability promise because of those crimes, and possibly a billion dollars in ads spent against him by anti-Trump forces on both sides of the aisle.

Speaker 5 Now, that's the same strategy that everyone put in place in 2016 that resulted in Trump ending up in the White House, but it's a Trump is now lost, right? And there's a different world.

Speaker 5 So maybe that's what happens.

Speaker 5 And it's going to be incredibly weird that there are going to be all these pretrial motions happening, dominating the news as Trump is trying to lock up the nomination in a battle for all the marbles with Ron DeSantis in Florida on March 19th.

Speaker 6 Isn't it over if Trump beats DeSantis in Iowa?

Speaker 5 No, the Iowa is a terrible predictor of the GOP nominee.

Speaker 6 Oh, yeah. I guess my thought on this is.
Where is the comeback? Well, yeah, where does DeSantis? Yeah, where does this?

Speaker 6 If DeSantis wins Iowa, it's clearly not over, right? Like, I think then Trump has plenty of time.

Speaker 5 Yeah, he could also lock this up

Speaker 5 in South Carolina. He could lock it up in South Carolina.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I mean, he absolutely could lock it up in South Carolina. So the order here is you have those three Super Championships.

Speaker 31 Unless Tim Scott emerges.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and then I have another chance. Yes.

Speaker 31 Dan doing Aaron Gordon Tomahawk Dunk on a Tuesday pod is my favorite piece of content in a while.

Speaker 6 Well, now, Tim, I want your take on the Tim Scott announcement.

Speaker 6 And not just first do Tim Scott's announcement, and then do you think that any of these other candidates can emerge as a legitimate challenger to Trump if DeSantis keeps doing Twitter spaces with David Balsaks?

Speaker 31 I think that Tim Scott's announcement was like would have been really a nice, serviceable B-plus announcement in 1999. You know, I think that he would have

Speaker 31 really on track to be George W's VP after that announcement. Um, you know, I think that he would have been one of the leading contenders.
Uh, it's just it's nice.

Speaker 31 I mean, some of the themes appeal to me, obviously, even though they, they feel un

Speaker 31 inauthentic, right? It's like when you're talking about personal responsibility, it's like, well. I mean, don't you ever, doesn't Donald Trump have to, don't I have to have responsibility for Trump?

Speaker 31 Don't you have to be responsible for your enabling of him? The Capitol was stormed and you did nothing. You said it wasn't Trump's fault.

Speaker 31 So, you know, these traditional conservative themes start to ring a little bit hollow in the context of the Donald Trump presidency. But on paper, I liked it.
It's obvious he's running for VP.

Speaker 31 And how do you get inside Donald Trump's deranged mind and to think about what kind of VP he might want and march, right? Like some days he's probably like, I want Carrie Lake. I want a loyalist.

Speaker 31 And then other days you might have someone in his ear that's like, oh, you need a black person might help you do better than you did last time in the suburbs.

Speaker 31 And so maybe Tim Scott is in the mix Why Tim Scott would want to be Donald Trump's VP and why Pod Save America would praise him for his good and skilled effort to do that?

Speaker 31 Those are two open questions for another day.

Speaker 31 To me, like Sarah Longwell wrote for the bulwark a really good thing about how everything, like Trump's going down the escalator is like 0-0

Speaker 31 BC.

Speaker 31 AD in the Republican Party, right? And anything that feels like it's from the Old Testament is not going to happen, right?

Speaker 31 And so if someone else could emerge that could beat ron desantis it would have to be somebody that feels like they're from the mega era and that's nobody else in the field except for i guess this vivek man which he doesn't seem legit right so could a tucker you know what i mean now we're getting into fantasy politics right could someone else come off the sidelines who's more from the last eight years doesn't have the stench of you know the pre-trump party on them could somebody like that emerge maybe but like the clock the clock is ticking on that and i do think that i agree with dan that in theory this thing could just fall into desantis lap, like against all odds, if the Trump thing totally implodes.

Speaker 31 But it's just the longer we go, the less and less likely that seems. It's not as if he hasn't already been indicted once.
One other just really quick thing, if you don't mind me taking over the show.

Speaker 5 I'm mentally prepared for what's coming next.

Speaker 31 And I'm you don't, yeah, I don't think you are. Did you see what DeSantis did make some news today? So he didn't make any news on the first day of his

Speaker 31 campaign, but did you see what he said on the Clay Travis podcast?

Speaker 6 I missed that. Missed that.

Speaker 31 Yeah, it just happened. He said that he's he's open to pardoning January 6th participants who were politically targeted all the way up to President Trump.
So,

Speaker 31 you know, so now we have day two of the campaign, I think, is the clear newsmaker is that DeSantis would be open to pardoning Donald Trump for the insurrection, which I get

Speaker 31 more of an alpha way that was like, when I'm president, I might consider pardoning Donald Trump if he asks me for it.

Speaker 31 Okay, then maybe now you're sort of good but but that um that doesn't seem to be uh the path that he decided to take so you know again i how do you contrast right yourself if it's like hey trump has all these all this legal baggage And so like, we should go to me, who's going to carry vicariously all of Trump's legal baggage with me into the general election, but not have the charisma that he does.

Speaker 31 You know, it just, he's really like, he's putting himself in a pretty small box as far as where his laying is.

Speaker 6 Yeah, you always want your campaign to start by genuflecting to Elon Musk, David Sachs, and then ultimately Donald Trump, the person you are trying to beat for the nomination for president.

Speaker 6 Dan, I noticed that even terminally offline, Joe Biden weighed in last night with a few DeSantis dunks. He tweeted a fundraising pitch that just said, this link works.

Speaker 6 Then he tweeted, no matter what happens, you can hear Ron DeSantis' agenda loud and clear. Included a video of DeSantis bragging about his most unpopular positions and laughing like a fucking weirdo.

Speaker 6 Do you like the idea of Joe Biden becoming a bit of a Twitter troll for this re-elect?

Speaker 5 I don't know that Twitter troll is the persona that I would suggest, but I do think his digital team has been very nimble and aggressive, and that's what you want, right?

Speaker 5 That is, particularly in this period here where Republicans are going to be offering him all kinds of points of data points about his argument about Republican extremism. So have fun with it.

Speaker 5 Make it compelling. Do it quickly and use it to raise money and recruit volunteers.
And so that's great. I was impressed by what they did yesterday.

Speaker 6 What about you, Tim?

Speaker 31 Yeah, I think going back to the DeSantis contrast, right? It's a typical political campaign response, right? But it's well executed. It's like, here are my opponents' weaknesses.

Speaker 31 I'm going to make fun of them a little bit. I'm going to try to raise money off of this.
Nobody thinks it's really Joe Biden behind the, you know, pressing click on the tweet, right?

Speaker 31 It's like, here's our campaign's message to this, and we're going to use Joe Biden's platforms to do that.

Speaker 31 That's like the best DeSantis could do, right? You would want DeSantis to have that type of rollout, right? Like not, you know, he's never going to be Donald Trump.

Speaker 31 He's not going to do a weird, I'm coming down the escalator and saying strange things, right?

Speaker 31 It's like, okay, this is a competent person that can execute an announcement well, deliver a contrast against his opponent, deliver a clear message. And he totally failed to do that.
And Biden.

Speaker 31 did it, you know, just perfectly adequately yesterday. And I think that that's, you know, how they should continue to position him, you know, for the next year and a half.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I hadn't thought about the advantage of Biden being able to sort of use all the Republican primary candidates' attacks on each other, like to benefit himself in this.

Speaker 6 Partly because like last time this happened in 2016, Hillary really couldn't do that because she was embroiled in the Bernie Sanders fight.

Speaker 6 So you didn't have like one Democratic incumbent or Democratic candidate who was able to just sort of like take advantage of all the fighting on the Republican side. And now Biden can do that.

Speaker 6 And it it was good to see him taking that opportunity.

Speaker 5 You look a lot like a guy who was on the 2012 campaign with me

Speaker 6 when we did it.

Speaker 6 I mean, I'm well, that was before 2016. Again,

Speaker 6 this is BC.

Speaker 6 This is when politics was normal.

Speaker 5 I was sure it was this Jon Favreau who was the one on the campaign, not the other one.

Speaker 6 So talking about Romnesha?

Speaker 6 Anyways, we're really rude to Metz.

Speaker 31 It's just in retrospect. In retrospect.
In retrospect. In retrospect.

Speaker 6 It's like we're cutting it here.

Speaker 31 We're cutting this part of the podcast.

Speaker 6 We all know.

Speaker 31 Only politician with dignity left on the Republican side. You guys had to smear.

Speaker 6 We all know that the Big Bird attack and the binders full of women is what that's what swung that election at the end of the day.

Speaker 6 Those are the attacks.

Speaker 6 Tim, thank you for joining.

Speaker 6 This was fun as always. And when we come back, Dan and I will finally get to the fun stuff: debt ceiling negotiations.

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Speaker 6 All right, we all had a few laughs at Rob DeSantis' expense, but now it's time to turn those smiles upside down and talk about the debt ceiling.

Speaker 6 With just seven days to go until Treasury thinks the U.S.

Speaker 6 will default on its debt, Democrats are sounding anxious, and Republicans are sounding cocky, so cocky that they're openly admitting to holding the economy hostage.

Speaker 6 Here's Kevin McCarthy and then Matt Gates.

Speaker 32 You've been asking for the right house to make a number of concessions. A number of concessions that you have to make, and what are those concessions? We're going to raise to this.

Speaker 32 That's your concession.

Speaker 33 How would you characterize the mood among your conservative colleagues right now?

Speaker 33 I think my conservative colleagues, for the most part, support limit safe growth, and they don't feel like we should negotiate with our hostage.

Speaker 6 So there you go. Kevin McCarthy says the concession that Republicans are giving in the negotiations is raising the debt ceiling, which is also known as preventing a catastrophic default.

Speaker 6 That's their concession. And Matt Gates is saying we don't want to negotiate with the hostage.
Those comments certainly didn't seem like accidental gaffes.

Speaker 6 Why do you think Republicans are so confident right now and just openly bragging about this shit?

Speaker 5 Can I just yell about this for one second?

Speaker 6 Yes, you can. That's why you're here on this podcast, fucking there.

Speaker 5 Kevin McCarthy, put aside Matt Gates. He's a fucking clown.
I'm going to cut.

Speaker 5 Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House, admits in front of the entire Capitol Hill Press Corps that he is engaging in extortion.

Speaker 5 by threatening the default of the United States and a potential global financial collapse, and almost no one covers it.

Speaker 5 We just go, well,

Speaker 5 let's get back to our discussion of the very serious negotiation. It's not a negotiation.

Speaker 5 When a bank robber puts a gun in the face of a bank teller and asks for them to empty the safe, that is not a negotiation about how much money they give. It is armed robbery and it's fucking insane.

Speaker 5 And I do think the press has done an absolutely miserable fucking job covering this. They have normalized a deeply dangerous behavior.

Speaker 5 Because the question with Kevin McCarthy is not what is your concession or what deal are you going to get? It's what happens if there is no deal on the X state.

Speaker 5 Are you going to let the country default or are you going to pass a short-term extension?

Speaker 6 That's only he can do that.

Speaker 5 Joe Biden can't do that. Only Kevin McCarthy can decide whether we default or not.
And the press is putting all of the pressure and responsibility on Joe Biden.

Speaker 5 And that is a huge failure on behalf of the vast majority of the reporters covering this. Okay, Rantover.
Sorry.

Speaker 6 But do you, yeah, no, I, of course, of course.

Speaker 6 I wonder, though, if Biden getting into negotiations is what has allowed them, the press, to cover it as your typical negotiation with just this, you know, threat of default looming.

Speaker 5 That is definitely true, but that is a poor fucking excuse on the press's behalf. Your job is to report what's happening.

Speaker 5 You can say Joe Biden is engaging in negotiations, but at the end of the day, the dynamic driving the negotiations is the Republicans threatening default.

Speaker 5 This is not the negotiations over the shape of the budget. It's not a budget negotiation if.
It is a budget negotiation if everyone has truly agreed they're not going to let the country default.

Speaker 5 But Kevin McCarthy's statement is implying that they are going to let the country default if they don't get the deal they want. And that should change it.

Speaker 5 And did the Bidens, that first meeting between Biden and McCarthy and the negotiators and all of that give them permission to do that?

Speaker 5 Yes, but that does not excuse your jobs to portray what is happening accurately, not portray what you wish was happening.

Speaker 6 I mean, it seems like they're confident and cocky because they're willing to shoot the hostage and that they are betting that they won't get blamed for it.

Speaker 6 And the reason they're betting they won't get blamed for it is because most Americans aren't paying attention to this. And if they do pay attention, it's probably because we defaulted.

Speaker 6 And then the Americans who aren't paying close attention will just know that Joe Biden's president when we defaulted. And so it seems like that's the bet they're making.

Speaker 6 And if even the Americans who are paying attention to it, you look at some of this polling, they think that, yeah, it's reasonable to ask for spending cuts, right?

Speaker 6 They think that's a reasonable thing because people are predisposed to believe that the government spends too much money.

Speaker 6 And then, of course, when you ask them whether they favor cutting specific programs, then they take the Democrat side and say, no, I don't want to cut that program, that program, or that program.

Speaker 6 We've talked about this before. But it certainly seems like that's why Republicans

Speaker 6 have the upper hand or appear to have the upper hand in these negotiations because they're willing to shoot the hostage and Joe Biden isn't.

Speaker 5 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 5 And it, the question of who the public blames in the immediate aftermath of a default is a largely irrelevant question.

Speaker 5 It does not matter.

Speaker 5 It certainly doesn't matter to the millions of people who lose their jobs and the people who can't afford things because interest rates skyrocket because of it, or the people whose 401ks and retirement plans are nuked.

Speaker 5 It doesn't matter to them. But even if you just want to focus on the politics of it, even let's say we default.

Speaker 5 Joe Biden and every Democrat uses every available outlet to hammer the Republicans and you convince them that it's the Republicans' fault.

Speaker 5 When people actually vote again in November of 2024, who do you think they're going to blame?

Speaker 5 The largely anonymous groups of fucking weirdos who made this happen in the summer of 2023 or the guys sitting in the White House while unemployment has doubled and we're in a recession and the stock market's at half of what it is, whatever.

Speaker 5 They're going to blame Joe Biden. And Republicans know that.

Speaker 6 And Donald Trump's out there saying, elect me and I'll fix it all because the economy was great when I was president until COVID happened.

Speaker 5 And Ron DeSantis is saying how he's going to use Dogecoin to bring the economy back.

Speaker 6 But no one heard it because it just, it was only five seconds and then that was it. And then it crackled.

Speaker 6 Yeah. So there's obviously Democrats are voicing frustration on the record, off the record, on background about how the White House is handling these negotiations.

Speaker 6 They think they're losing the message war. They're worried they'll have to vote for a shitty deal.
Let's start with just the message.

Speaker 6 Republicans have been talking a lot to reporters about the negotiations. They've been available to any reporter who asked them a question about these negotiations.

Speaker 6 The White House has not said much at all about the negotiations. Why do you think that is? And should the White House and Biden be out there more? I mean, at this point, we're a couple of days away.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think the ship has sailed on that. And the White House clearly made a decision that the most important thing here was to avoid default on the best possible terms.

Speaker 5 And understand those possible terms were not going to be good. And so they were going to take any amount of shit.

Speaker 5 in the short and the medium term to avoid the fate I just talked about for the country and for their politics. And this is going to be rough for them.

Speaker 5 If we default, it's obviously a disaster for everyone involved. And if they get a deal, it's going to be a deal that most Democrats are not happy about.

Speaker 5 Some of them are going to be forced to vote for it who don't want to vote for it.

Speaker 5 It is going to, the Republican, and Biden's going to be limited in what he can say about it, because if he says it's a victory for himself, that he's going to need to deliver more Democratic votes because more Republicans will peel off.

Speaker 5 It is, this is a shitty situation. They made a decision, and I can't say whether that's the right decision or the wrong decision.

Speaker 5 We won't know until until we see a deal that the best way to get the best possible deal was to stay quiet and try to avoid poisoning the well.

Speaker 6 Right. Because again, Biden doesn't want the hostage to get shot, and he's worried that if he goes out there and says something that pisses off Republicans, they'll shoot the hostage.

Speaker 6 This is, I mean, we dealt with this in the Obama White House many times, which is this is the price you pay for being the responsible leader who doesn't want to see people hurt and the economy tanked.

Speaker 6 And it is not necessarily a fair fight when you're up against hostage takers who don't give a shit. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And there's an asymmetry here because Republicans aren't worried about poisoning the negotiations because they do not care about the outcome on people. And Biden does.
He is responsible.

Speaker 5 So he has to take on political baggage to try to avoid an absolutely disastrous fate, not just for the United States, but for the entire world.

Speaker 6 Did you see? I think Punch Bowl had this this morning that there's an emerging potential deal where debt ceiling gets lifted through 2024.

Speaker 6 And basically, they all pledge to figure out all the spending bills and the budget by the end of the year. And if they don't pass all the spending bills and pass a budget, then there'll be like an

Speaker 6 automatic budget caps, which means like a cut, a big spending cut, and like a CR continuing resolution that would just basically fund the government for another year with just one big cut on a whole bunch of programs.

Speaker 5 So as I understood that reporting, it was the following is that they're going to agree on budget caps as part of this negotiation.

Speaker 5 And those caps at that exact top line number will go in place one of two ways.

Speaker 5 Either the appropriations process works and then this Congress, with the influence of the White House, gets to decide how the money under that cap is spent.

Speaker 5 Do you put a little more in education, a little more into this, under each of the however many appropriation bills are 13 or 14 or something like that?

Speaker 5 and if that fails and a cr will go into place automatically and they won't have to vote on it i'm not sure how that fits with house and senate procedure but that's what would happen anyway when you don't have

Speaker 5 a when you don't have appropriations bills you have two choices shut the government down or pass a cr so this is basically i think just taking one step out of it and what matters here is what those caps are not the fact there are going to be caps under all scenarios any sort of budget agreement would have caps and so i think this is the republicans want to keep putting putting out information that suggests a deal is imminent because what they want is for the markets to not react yet.

Speaker 5 Because if the markets start reacting, then pressure will be put on them by their donors, by the Chamber of Commerce and others to move more quickly and it erodes some of their leverage.

Speaker 5 The White House would also like that because What really hurts the economy is not just default, it's all the turbulence and the run-up to potential default.

Speaker 5 And even when you avert default, you still pay a price. In 2011, we set the economy back a while because we came so close to default.

Speaker 5 And so it's also in the White House interest to make it seem like a deal is right around the corner because it keeps the economy moving apace as opposed to getting hit.

Speaker 6 And, you know, one of the ratings agencies just put U.S. credit rating on watch, on negative watch, meaning like we could downgrade you.
Careful.

Speaker 6 So I think that and the fact that

Speaker 6 even if a deal is reached today, Thursday, probably one is going to be reached in the middle of this podcast because that's always what happens.

Speaker 5 Not while we're recording because that would be too easy. It will be.

Speaker 6 Right, 10 minutes after. Yeah.
But even if they reach a deal today, it probably couldn't become law at the earliest until June 3rd or 4th.

Speaker 6 And, you know, they think the X date is June 1, but like, whatever, we could have a couple days here and there. So it does feel like there is a lot of

Speaker 6 external pressure on both sides to just get something done like today or tomorrow. And I do wonder if in that scenario where

Speaker 6 you're agreeing on caps, the actual details of what gets cut do get punted yeah exactly exactly then i feel like both republicans and democrats and the white house at that point are like we're gonna figure it out later let's just you know and and and and the bet there is that it's not going to have a huge political impact either way but we will you will know that which

Speaker 6 um

Speaker 5 areas, right, which agencies are going to take a hit because you'll know the delta between 2023 and 2024 or 2022, 23 plus 23, 24, because of how the fiscal year lays out.

Speaker 5 The Republicans want to get this done by Friday because they have a 72-hour rule as part of their House procedures.

Speaker 5 And they would really like that 72 hours to be Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Memorial Day weekend, or Saturday, Sunday, Monday, as opposed to everyone running around the Capitol ginning each other up about it.

Speaker 5 And if they have a deal, two things will happen. One, there are ways to figure out how to extend things for 24 hours or whatever to get there.
That happened a little bit in 2011.

Speaker 5 And Jake Sherman responded to a somewhat trolly tweet of mine and with great earnestness to say that his understanding from the Republican House is that if a deal is being drafted or they're very, very close, the Republican House would agree to a short-term extension just to get to pass the X date and not have any speed bumps.

Speaker 6 Well, everyone's working really hard on Capitol Hill. They're really focused on getting a deal.
Before we go, there is

Speaker 6 one other thing that the Republicans have been focused focused on. On Tuesday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy's partially used chapstick was auctioned off

Speaker 6 as part of a Republican fundraising event. The winning bid was from none other than Marjorie Taylor Greene, who paid $100,000 from her campaign account to get a taste of Kevin's cherry chapstick.

Speaker 6 So she's donating $100,000 to the NRCC that elects House Republicans.

Speaker 6 I don't know where the chapstick came in uh she got interviewed about this here's a clip can i ask you about the chapstick what about it

Speaker 34 i guess

Speaker 34 is it worth 100k i donated to have kevin mccarthy come to do she come to my district to see my constituents so

Speaker 6 dan can you figure out why the any of this happened like i get the I get the donating from your campaign account to the NRCC. I get that, right?

Speaker 6 They ask people, politicians who've raised a lot of of money for themselves that might not need it all, please donate it to other Republican candidates, whatever. Where's the chapstick come in?

Speaker 6 Why the chapstick? Who used chapstick?

Speaker 5 Look, I think Republicans looked at the landscape and thought voters thought they weren't weird and disgusting enough.

Speaker 5 And so they decided to lean into it.

Speaker 6 I mean, it just shows days from default. Days from default.
We're auctioning off chapstick.

Speaker 5 It shows just how weird it is that Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, was defensive about it. To be like, I didn't pay for chapstick.

Speaker 5 I paid to bring Kevin McCarthy to my district to meet with my constituents because I'm a serious person who didn't just buy chapstick that may be one degree removed from Trump's ass.

Speaker 6 Like, it's like.

Speaker 6 And now he's going to show up in her district with cracked lips.

Speaker 6 It's just.

Speaker 6 It's really weird. These people are really weird, Dan.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's a weird thing. Remember the last time we had a debt ceiling?

Speaker 6 Destructive, dangerous, and weird. Remember

Speaker 5 two debt ceiling crises ago,

Speaker 5 the way Kevin McCarthy rallied the troops was to show them the scene in the town where Ben Affleck gets Jeremy Renner.

Speaker 6 The good old days. Yeah,

Speaker 5 real Joe Missoula move there, if you understand that reference.

Speaker 6 All right, Dan.

Speaker 6 I think that's all. I think that's all.

Speaker 6 We are out.

Speaker 5 We've done it all today.

Speaker 6 We did it. Thank you to Tim Miller for joining us.
Everyone, have a great weekend.

Speaker 6 There will be no pod on Tuesday because Monday is Memorial Day, but we will be dropping in the PSA feed a best of episode of our subscription-only show, Terminally Online, which is the most fun show we record here at Crooked Media, where we all bring items that show how terminally online we all are.

Speaker 6 I am the host of Offline as well, but I wear two hats for this show. And if you want to get the show every week, which you should, go subscribe at crooked.com slash friends.

Speaker 6 Come join our friend of the pod community so uh everyone check that out and then uh dan and i will be back next thursday have a good weekend bye everyone

Speaker 6 pod save america is a crooked media production the executive producer is michael martinez our producers are andy gardner bernstein and olivia martinez it's mixed and edited by andrew chadwick jordan canter is our sound engineer with audio support from kyle seglund and charlotte landis thanks to hallie kefer madeline herringer ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support.

Speaker 6 And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Mia Kelman, Ben Hefcoat, and David Toles.

Speaker 6 Subscribe to Pod Save America on YouTube to catch full episodes, exclusive content, and other community events. Find us at youtube.com slash at PodSave America.

Speaker 6 This week's episode of On the Media from WNYC Studios tells the story of how On the Media reporter Michael Lowinger's expose of the role of the Oath Keepers on January 6, 2021 led to a subpoena to testify in the federal trial of the group's leader, Stuart Rhodes.

Speaker 6 And they hear from someone who had a front-row seat for the creation of the Oath Keepers, Rhodes' estranged wife. Listen to on the media wherever you get your podcasts.

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