Trump’s CNN Clown Hall

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Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, Donald Trump paints a terrifying picture of a second term during a CNN town hall the day after a jury finds him liable for sexual assault and defamation.
President Biden weighs negotiations and the 14th Amendment to deal with the debt limit.

Tucker Carlson takes his racist variety hour to Twitter.

And Anthony Devalder, a.k.a. Katara Ravash, a.k.a.
George Santos,

is indicted on multiple criminal charges.

Then immigration expert Dara Lynn joins to talk about the end of Title 42

and what it means for the border. But first, exciting news.
We're back on the road. We got a live show in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 12th.
Tickets are available at cricket.com slash events. Fantastic lineup planned.
It's going to be great. Excited to go to New York.
June. Perfect.
Right? Yeah. I mean, a lot of, there's not a lot happening in the world these days.
So. Will we have breached the debt ceiling by then? Stay tuned.
Stay tuned. Hide some extra money under the mattress for those Pod Save America tickets.
It's possible that could be the night we default. Don't miss it.
Get your tickets now. All right.
Let's get to the news. Last night, Donald Trump participated in a 70-minute town hall with 400 Republican primary voters in New Hampshire, hosted by CNN, moderated by Caitlin Collins.
The twice-impeached criminal defendant frontrunner said that if elected, he'll pardon most of the January 6th rioters, consider a national abortion ban, and bring back family separation. He refused to say that Russia should lose the war they started in Ukraine and refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power here in 2024.
He told House Republicans to let the U.S. economy collapse if they don't get their way on the debt ceiling.
He defamed the woman he was just held liable for defaming and sexually assaulting. And he called the moderator a nasty person when she fact checked his many, many lies.
When you look at what happened during that election, unless you're a very stupid person, you see what happened. Most people understand what happened.
That was a rigged election. They are investigating their, your efforts to overturn the election results in the state of Georgia.
I did not think it was a perfect phone call. Let me finish my question.
At the center of that is that call that you had with the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger. If this call was bad, I questioned the election.
You asked him to find your votes. I didn't ask him to find anything.
We've heard the audio tape, Mr. President.
There's an audio of you asking him to find you 11,000 of the votes. I said, you owe me votes because the election was rigged.
That election was rigged. Are you ready? Can I talk? Yeah, what's the answer? Can you mind? I would like for you to answer the question.
Okay, it's very simple to answer. That's why I asked it.
It's very simple to, you're a nasty person, I'll tell you. So as you heard there throughout the town hall, lots of applause and laughter from the crowd.
Trump's team says they are very happy.

CNN says they did their job. A lot of people say CNN did not do their job, including many CNN reporters and employees who are going on background with all kinds of other reporters.

What was your reaction to Donald Trump's first time facing questions from an actual journalist

since 2020? That time is a flat circle. We have been doing this for eight years.
Or a week, I can't tell. I've lost all sense of time.
It has been eight years since he decided to start running for president. We have learned no lessons.
When we learn the lessons, we probably forget them and we're right back where we were. This could have been a 2015 town hall all over again.
Yeah. I mean, it's just like, there was a feeling watching it where it's, we know he's running for president again.
We've known it for some time. We know he's the Republican front runner.
We know that we're going to go through this again. But last night I I think, was the first time, because we haven't really seen him all that much on normal television, not MAGA television, where you're like, oh, yeah, we're really going to go through this again.
This is really happening. He's been looming in the shadows since January 6th, 2021.
And even you and I, who consume political content for a a living don't really hear him speak that often.

Every once in a while, we're forced to watch a rally on a Saturday night.

But for the vast majority of our listeners, the people who were on Twitter last night, this is the first time they've really seen him in a couple of years. And it's deeply alarming.
And for all we want to say, everything about last night, what Trump said, the fact how CNN covered him, the way the crowd cheered is just a reminder of the dramatic stakes in this election and why all that matters is that we do everything we possibly can to reelect Joe Biden, because that man cannot be anywhere near the White House. I mean, here's my thought on the whole CNN thing.
I really genuinely wish more than anything that half the electorate didn't vote for Donald Trump twice. I really wish that Republican voters didn't want him to be president again, but they do.
And it's very likely at this point that he's going to be the nominee. And every result from the last four national elections tells us that a rerun of Donald Trump and Joe Biden is going to be extremely close.
That is the reality of where we are today. It would be the reality if CNN never said the word Trump between now and Election Day 2024, particularly because each day CNN now averages about half the audience that an episode of this podcast gets.
Last night, they got 3 million viewers, which is still only about 2% of the last electorate. And it's an audience of mostly news junkies, mostly partisans who have already made up their mind.
So we can yell about CNN all we want. It's, you know, you can tweet about them.
You can send letters. You can boycott them, whatever we want to do.
I think, personally, a more productive use of our time would be to do what you just said

and convince the persuadable voters who will decide the next election that Joe Biden is a

better choice than Donald Trump. Those people, the persuadable voters, they know that Donald

Trump lies a lot. That Washington Post poll where Trump was beating Joe Biden by seven points,

70% of the people in that poll said that Donald Trump's a liar. Only a third of the people

I'm going to go. beating Joe Biden by seven points, 70% of the people in that poll said that Donald Trump's a liar.
Only a third of the people polled say that he's honest, and yet he was still leading Joe Biden by seven, which means there's a huge chunk of people who know that he's a liar, who thinks that everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie, and they still want to vote for him. And the reason that Donald Trump was defeated in 2020 is because enough people thought that he was too extreme and brought too much chaos to the presidency and to their lives.
And so they voted for Joe Biden instead. And our job now is to make sure that everyone knows how extreme and chaotic a second Trump term would be.
And to that end, he gave us plenty of material last night, which is why I started off the show talking about all the things he promised to do in a second term. And focusing on that, I think, is going to be a lot more productive than having a whole conversation today about CNN.
Because the conversation about CNN, that doesn't hurt Donald Trump. That doesn't, like, prevent him from becoming president.
But having a conversation about the fact that he wants to, it sounds like he wants a national abortion ban, sounds like he wants to bring back family separation, would pardon insurrectionists that stormed the Capitol. I want people to have that information, right? And this is not to say that, oh, you know, he gave us so much material last night.
It's fine. He's not going to win.
No, no, it's quite the opposite. He very much could win.
And to say that, oh, you know, he gave us he gave us so much material last night. It's fine.

He's not going to win. No, no.
It's quite the opposite. He very much could win.
And because of that, we need to be focused on keeping the conversation around the bad things that Donald Trump will do in a second term. I think you are dramatically underselling the value of one more fact check.
We are. I get it.
at one point

it's just a camel carrying straw

and then one more piece of straw and the camel goes down and that's what you get that's what we're looking for here and i and i don't want to mock it too much because i get it you watch him and he's lying and and and caitlin collins by the way in in that short clip that we just heard, called him out on his lies and fact checked him constantly. That's not what does it.
Like the only way like you have to take it up such a to such a high level. If you're interviewing Trump, you have to be willing to be combative, not just like I'm going to fact check you and Mr.
President, let me finish and answer the question. You have to be willing to say, like, you're a liar.
We know you're a liar. Why are you lying right now? You know, you have to you just really have to take it up a notch.
And I think that most journalists just aren't going to do that. And again, we've said this a million times.
We are not going to be able to make them do that because they have different interests than us. We don't want Donald Trump to win again.
Journalists, that is not their job. And I want to make one point on the CNN thing, which I know you say is not constructive, but I think it can be, think of it as something to prevent a hundred million conversations about this over the next 17 months.
Sure. CNN is filled with very good journalists who do great journalism.
I think Caitlin Collins is, in my opinion, one of those people. And I think she did an admirable job last night in an impossible situation that her boss was putting us in.
But hearing all the people on Twitter saying CNN abdicated its journalistic responsibility, what they did was bad for democracy. Here's what you need to know about CNN and every other major media entity.
It is a line item in a major corporation's earning statement. It is part of a large corporation that made enough money to buy CNN by running 90-day fiancé seven days a week.
This is not fucking Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite.
These are corporations. We don't expect, corporations' job is to return value to its investors and to make money.
We don't expect drug companies and tobacco companies and oil companies to save democracy. And we shouldn't expect large media companies to do it.
At the end of the day, corporate media companies are going to do what's in their interest. And CNN had got more people to watch CNN last night than have watched CNN in a really, really long time.
They're always going to make that choice. Three million versus 400,000 a day is what they're averaging, which is just wow.
And the thing to remember is that history shows it. When fascism and authoritarianism come, the corporations are not the ones who try to stand in the way.
They accommodate the regime. And so just this idea that we just have to take the blinders off when it comes to how major media companies are going to cover this race.
It is not their job to save democracy. They don't think it's their job to save democracy.
It is their job to make money. Even if the journalists doing the reporting are trying to do the right thing, the people who call the shots, the people who tell Caitlin Collins to hold this town hall are the people trying to make money for investors.
And again, the reason this is that I keep harping on this is the positions he took last night, pardoning the rioters. I think you pointed this out in our discord chat that we were doing during the town hall.
That's popular with what, 20% of voters? All voters and a majority of Trump voters, 2020 Trump voters, oppose it.

Right. Extremely unpopular position.
We know a national abortion ban, very unpopular. We know

that family separation, extremely unpopular. Do you know where those positions were in all the

coverage today? In Playbook, it was like three-fourths of the way down. And most of the, because most of the coverage was about everyone yelling about CNN.
And so all the things he said that are extremely unpopular that would lead people to not vote for him were buried by the complaining about CNN. And again, I get it.
It was infuriating to watch, right? Like we can have a debate about whether they should or should not have done that. But like this, you know it's i know we're in election season again because i'm back to uh back to the serenity prayer you know it's like grant me the wisdom grant me the serenity accept the things i cannot change uh the change the things i can and the wisdom to know the difference i think it is and if the crooked merch store doesn't start selling that piece of embroidery straight off someone's grandmother's wall we're very we're very religious here.
CNN can't change it. What persuadable voters think about who they're going to elect president can definitely change that.
So we should get to work. Go to votesaveamerica.com, sign up.
Speaking of voters, do you think last night helped Trump with any wavering Republican voters who watched if there were any? And then how do you think this, we kind of talked about this, but how do you think it landed with persuadable voters? I don't think it landed too well, but what do you think about Republican voters? Yeah, I'm sure it was helpful. I mean, I think if there was one part of last night that was worthwhile, it was a reminder of who the Republican base is.
To hear what they cheered about, what they laughed about, what they yelled about, how much they love Trump. Even voters who, Republican voters who are open to supporting some other person like Tiny D love Trump.
And they believe what he says and they enjoy the spectacle. And that is a deeply scary thing for this country, but I think it reminds us in a very real way what Trump's real advantages are in this race and that he is much stronger as a front runner for that race than I think a lot of people assumed just a few months ago.
Yeah. The one thing I noticed, at least at the beginning with him too, is he clearly has advisors who workshopped answers with him on some of these trickier questions like, why'd you do a coup? And he was reciting some of the talking points and pivoting away at times that he did show some discipline at the beginning, discipline in a scary way, because he was probably on the message they wanted.
He, you know, Caitlyn kept pushing him and pushing him. And then when he sort of lost it towards the end and started saying she was nasty and yelling about other stuff, I think he became his old Trump self.

But he did show a little bit of discipline at the beginning that makes me think just it only strengthens him in the Republican primary.

Yeah, that was the – and this is – I do not want to ever say that.

This is the lowest bar humanly possible.

It's a bar so low it is underground.

But that is the most prepared he's been for an immediate appearance since he started running for president. He brought notes.
He had a timeline. He was definitely avoiding going to jail on January 6th for what he did on January 6th.
He lost it when we got to the Carroll verdict. But being strategic and being more strategic than he was in the past are not the exact same thing.
But there is a plan and there listening to, but at least right now, which is, did not happen through either of his two races. DeSantis' super PAC hit Trump on Twitter after the town hall on January 6th, pardons, the big lie investigations he's involved in the E.
Jean Carroll case. They, they just, you know, backed up the truck, dumped it out, all the research.
But do you think putting fingers will take the hint? No, I think he would watch what happened last night and reconsider his decision to run i mean serious you look at all like we sit here and we say all the time like if they make this case call him a loser show the chaos and people fucking lapped it up they lapped it up every bit of it the eugene carroll thing in the in the in the the conception of that within the republican base trump is not not the perpetrator, he's the victim. Yeah.
Well, that was what, it's funny you said he should reconsider because my thought was, I'm like, this guy's about to go through an entire presidential campaign, potentially just torch his reputation among Republican voters forever, and he's not even going to try to win. Either try to win and just start going after him, or don't fucking do it, man.
What are you doing? I mean, if he runs, he seems to be making the same mistake that every previous Republican makes, is to get in the race and hope Trump falls under his own weight. And maybe he will.
Maybe he'll get killed. I think literally, unless he dies.
I guess they're dies. I guess they're just hoping he dies.
I mean. Maybe between now and then, that's it.
That's the only hope they have. I mean, he could legitimately go to prison.
And it's a coin flip as to whether he is still the Republican nominee. I mean, yeah, I would say it's still pretty likely.
And not even a coin flip. All right, let's talk more about the verdict in the E.
Jean Carroll case, where a jury ordered Trump to pay the famous advice columnist $5 million in damages for sexually assaulting, then defaming her. Here's what Trump said when he was asked about it at the town hall.
This woman, I don't know her. I never met her.
I have no idea who she is. I had a picture taken years ago with her and her husband, nice guy John Johnson.
He was a newscaster, a very nice man. What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up? And within minutes, you're playing hanky-panky in a dressing room, OK? I have no idea who the hell.
She's a whack job. Let's put aside for a moment whether this verdict will damage Trump politically.
It sure seems like a big deal that the Republican frontrunner for president will finally face some measure of accountability after being accused of sexual misconduct by 26 women. No? The entire episode last night was just so disgusting, right? The way he talked about it, the way the crowd reacted to it, just the amount of like cruelty and misogyny, like running through the entire event through him.
And it is when you watch it, it's like, this is why so many victims do not come forward, because that is a huge part of society. That audience represents a significant swath of Americans.
And the embodiment of that cruelty and misogyny is their chosen leader, the man who was president of the United States and could very well be president again. And that, I mean, it was a truly, one of the more horrifying things I've ever seen in a political media event like that.
Just absolutely disturbing and offensive and horrifying, and I'm sure triggering for so many people. We were watching it with a bunch of people online.
I mean, horrifying, absolutely horrifying, disgusting experience from a disgusting human being. Yeah.
And look, after the verdict came, one of my thoughts was like, it's so difficult for so many survivors to come forward. Perhaps E.
Jean Carroll finding some measure of justice and some measure of accountability for Donald Trump, small as it may be. This will help other people come forward.
Then you see the spectacle of the town hall and exactly what you said. You realize, oh, this is why people don't come forward.
I think about the verdict, like the facts and the testimony were incredibly damning. but I think none more so than Trump's videotaped deposition, where the jury, six men, three women, could see for themselves that Trump, and this was back to our earlier conversation, Trump wasn't just a liar, but a monster.
He said under oath that when you're a star, women let you sexually assault them, unfortunately or fortunately, which he then said again at the, he stood by those remarks at the town hall. He said that he wouldn't rape the victim or the victim's lawyer because they're not his type.
He said he didn't recognize a picture of his own ex-wife and the jury heard all this and they were like, yeah, that guy's an asshole. It's bullshit.
And he's liable. So, you know, even back to the, oh, Trump lies.
He gets away with it. He didn't really get away with it.
There was a jury, a jury of his peers. They heard him.
They heard his deposition. And they were like, you know what? That's bullshit.
So he doesn't, you know, the idea that Trump's words are magic and he says them and everyone's under a spell and then believes him like it's not you know it's not always true it wasn't true in 2020 so none of the Republicans trying to beat Donald Trump in the primary have criticized him for the verdict except for Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson what is wrong with these people I mean they are appealing to a Republican Party base that is fine with it.

Yeah. I mean, most of them have been in the women are usually liars camp since Kavanaugh.
So that's one reason. There's an additional reason than just loyalty to Donald Trump on this one.
It was interesting that some Republican senators, when asked, said that this was a problem.

Not Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio said that the jury is a joke.

So Marco Rubio thinks that the jury is a joke.

So Marco Rubio thinks that our justice system in which a jury of your peers hears a case,

he doesn't know who the jury is. The jury is anonymous.
They have to be anonymous because

they could get death threats for rendering justice. But you know, Marco Rubio, he just

thinks they're a joke. Thinks juries are a joke.
Doesn't matter who they are. He doesn't know who

they are. He's just going to say they're a joke.

I mean, you just have to say, he's a fucking joke.

Like, just.

It's just. It's unbelievable.
It's unbelievable. So anyway, so that's what we got for the next 500 and something days.
Donald Trump. Donald Trump right back.
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Restrictions apply. USAA! Let's talk about the debt ceiling.
A cheerier subject. Yeah, let's pivot to something positive.
Yeah, which Donald Trump thinks we should forget about the debt ceiling, trigger default, economic catastrophe, who cares? Big White House meeting on Tuesday between Biden and congressional leaders, still no deal, doesn't seem like there was too much progress. Few somewhat positive signs.
Mitch McConnell joined Biden and the Democrats in saying that default is not an option. Aides in both parties are starting to meet and negotiate over the budget.
And Biden said he's willing to look at Republican priorities like cutting unspent covid funds and permitting reform. The Democrats are making it clear that these are budget negotiations, not debt ceiling negotiations.
Semantics. Who knows? And the president said for the first time, he's considering declaring the debt ceiling unconstitutional under the 14th amendment that we also talked about all the legal challenges involved.
And the White House later said that this path is still unlikely. What do you think, Dan? How are you feeling after this week of debt ceiling negotiations? Not great, John.
I wrote about this a little bit in MessageBox earlier this week, but I think all the participants, the media, the markets are dramatically underappreciating how likelihood default might be. Because you worked in the White House for one of these.
I worked in the White House for both of these debt ceiling fights. And the conditions that prevented default in 2011, 2013 are not the same now.
Kevin McCarthy is not John Boehner, and John Boehner is not Nancy Pelosi. So that's saying a lot.
The Mitch McConnell, who was integral to having last minute solutions both times, is much weaker than he was before. And caucus is much more unruly.
Back in those days, it was really only Ted Cruz and Rand Paul who were sort of the trolls who would try to upend everything. But now he's got those guys.
He's got Tommy Tuberville, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, J.D. Vance.
There's a whole bunch of people who make it much harder for him to cut a last minute deal that's acceptable to all sides. A lot of goobers.
A lot of goobers. And so this is worrisome.
And I think what Donald Trump said last night makes it much, much more dangerous because he has now given permission to the House Republicans to default. It certainly feels like we are headed for the two-track strategy where Democrats negotiate a budget deal in exchange for Republicans lifting the debt ceiling, which lets Democrats say they negotiated over the budget, not the debt ceiling.

And Republicans say that they use the debt ceiling to extract policy concessions. I think the challenge is what concessions, unspent COVID funds and permitting reform aren't going to be enough for Republicans.

Big cuts are off the table for Democrats. So where does that leave us in the negotiation? Again, negotiating with McCarthy, you could get a plan or you could get a deal that maybe does some cuts.
And then he goes back to his caucus and they're like, well, that's not enough. And then we're fucked.
Back in the Obama years, the Venn diagram of things that could pass the Republican House and were acceptable to a Democratic president and a largely Democratic Senate, there was very narrow area of overlap there. I'm not sure those circles touch anymore, that there is something that would be acceptable, especially for McCarthy, who has made it his strategy to empower the far right.
Boehner had the opposite strategy. Now, he had more margin of error, but he would appeal to the middle.
And the middle is a, that's a term of art in this case, because they weren't really moderates. They're all relative.
But not everyone to the closer to the middle than the Freedom Caucus. And McCarthy knows that he's one angry Freedom Caucus member away from losing his job.
And so unless you can jam a deal down their throats, I find it really hard to imagine. I can see a world in which McConnell and Biden cut some deal with Schumer that then they force onto McCarthy and McCarthy's going to have to either have to do it, either they use a discharge petition or it goes through with some sort of overwhelming majority of Democrats.
That happened in non-debt ceiling fiscal negotiations in the past. But I found it hard to imagine that there's a real deal there between Biden and McCarthy if McCarthy is the chief negotiator for the Republicans.
Yeah. The only thing I can see is if there's some kind of deal that gets most Republicans on board in the House, which again, like you said,

with this caucus is still a pretty bad deal, or they're going to want pretty steep cuts. And that somehow the Freedom Caucus is like, we're not going to vote for it, but we're not going to fire you from your job, Kevin McCarthy, if you bring this to the floor.
And then he gets some Democrats on board. That's the only thing I can think of.
And like you said, the Venn diagram of what would be acceptable in that deal is I don't fucking know. Why? Why do you think Biden floated the 14th Amendment as a real if unlikely possibility? I think he was it's been reported that they were doing it.
People in the administration are clearly telling reporters that they're looking at it, right? Of course, they're looking at you have to look at it. You would be insane not to look at it, because you very well could default.
And then you might have to invoke it. And so I think he does answer the question truthfully.
I don't just because it seems weird to to what else was he going to say? I'm not going to tell you what I'm thinking or I think I have a lot of questions about the merits of floating it right now, because on one side, you can see the Republicans saying at the end of this,

well, Biden says he has the power. Let's see if he can do it, right? It gives them an out.

On the other hand, particularly in 2011, we avoided default, but we did significant damage,

the Republicans did significant damage to the economy in the run-up to that near default where

zero jobs were created the month of the fiscal, of the debt ceiling fight. The market

I'm going to go ahead and get it. In the run-up to that near default where zero jobs were created the month of the fiscal, of the debt ceiling fight.

The market lost trillions or billions of, I don't know, a ton of money, right?

Like a lot of bad stuff happened.

And so having the out of the 14th Amendment out there could theoretically prevent, give people, the market some reason to not panic, at least until the last minute here, and maybe do less economic damage. I don't know.
I think he probably just answered the question because that's what was happening. It was being truthful.
How that plays, I don't know. We talked about the real challenges of getting people to buy bonds of questionable legal authority in that situation.
And I think, and Biden basically said this, is that that it's I was wondering if you could do it now somehow and have the courts decide on the issue by the time we're about to hit default.

Biden basically said, oh, I'll look at it for next time.

Like we're looking at it down the road kind of thing when pressed on it.

And the White House sort of backed that up as well.

So it doesn't seem it's if he if he wanted to try to invoke the 14th Amendment, it doesn't seem like you can do it once we default, because then the like we've said, the markets will go crazy anyway, and the cost of borrowing will skyrocket. So what's his next move? What's Biden's next move? I mean, there are I think there's a meeting with with leadership staff and White House staff either later this week or early next week.
I mean, I think what they're going to try to do, as you said, is try to cut the deal they were going to have to cut in September anyway around government funding and then claim to add a clean debt ceiling to it. And that could work as long as you get it.
You're not at, you know, you're not the clock ticking to the X date, which is the date when you run out of cash, uh, as you're cutting that deal, because you just, that's not a situation in which a good faith negotiation can happen when the Republicans hold the trigger to blow up the economy and you're, and you're trying to fight for education funding. Like that's not, that's not a real negotiation.
And so that we'll see what happens. We'll know soon how much time they have because the May tax receipts could buy us a little more time or give us less time.
And that could get us to the June 15th quarterly tax payments, which could get us back closer to that September deadline. So this is either a few weeks or a few months, know, uh, in the not too distant future.
So here's a match made in hell, uh, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk, uh, the fired talk show host who was even too racist and sexist for Fox news announced that he's taking his talents to Twitter where he will host a version of the Tucker Carlson show on the buggy platform that users and advertisers are fleeing in droves. So Tucker's lawyers also accused Fox of fraud so that he can get out of his $25 million contract and do this new show.
Do you think that was a wise move? Is there any way you see this show working as well as his last one? Can you imagine being so narcissistic, so desperate to have people hear your voice that you would spend $20 million for the opportunity to do so? That's essentially what he's doing. My also thought is like, he's got to be pretty fucking rich.
Yeah, I don't care how rich he is. You're at the stage, you're giving up $25 million.
You got enough money to throw around. I think he's got plenty of money, but I still think $20 million is a lot of money, even Tucker Carlson.
And it's wild, you know, whether this will have any influence, there is a test case here. Glenn Beck left Fox News and went and did a bunch of digital stuff for the blaze.
And we didn't really hear that much of Glenn Beck for a very long time. Certainly, I think Tucker Carlson will continue to have a real influence on the MAGA base because Steve B, you know, Steve Bannon is not on Fox news and he's got real influence of the MAGA base through his media stuff.
But in terms of affecting the larger culture to the way that people were, were bumping into Tucker Carlson's content because they were someplace where Fox news is on or they're flipping channels, that's not going to happen. You're going to have to really seek him out.

And I can't remember where I read this, but Ben Smith, who was the editor of BuzzFeed News and at Semaphore, has been on the –

Offline guest this week.

Oh, exciting.

I'm just listening to that on Sunday.

Tune in Sunday.

Tune in Sunday.

But he talked a little bit about – in some interview he had done recently about – at BuzzFeed, they had a Twitter-only show, only show morning show called AM to DM I was a guest on it once in fact he talked about this on offline did he I sat down with Ben 10 minutes after the Tucker Carlson news broke yeah they had a show called AMDM on Twitter and it did not work and tell them why it didn't work because uh people on Twitter they just keep scrolling they don't stop and watch a video for a long time. The whole thing is built for scrolling fast.
So I think that that's going to have an impact on its influence. I mean, a good chunk of Tucker's audience has clearly left Fox, according to the ratings.
His hour is now third behind MSNBC and CNN, which takes some doing when you know cnn's rating seriously uh the question is where did they go are are these mostly old people are they going to newsmax or oan or for their fix to their you know racist authoritarian fix or are they going to sign up for uh something called a twitter account yeah and stream tucker show there i I mean, it's about who his audience is, too. Like, does he really think that his audience was, like, in the demo? Like, I know he was winning in the key demo, but I don't think that was the bulk of his audience.
I don't think that a Fox News host was getting a bunch of Twitter users in his audience. I mean, we'll find out.
But, like, I mean, and then how do you, how do they make money from this? A bunch of old people going to give Elon Musk their credit card information to get Tucker's show? Like, how does this work? Well, I mean, that's the problem is that you would use advertising. That's how you would do it.
And Tucker was struggling to get advertising on Fox News. You know who else is struggling for advertisers? Twitter.
Yeah, exactly. And now they thought that advertisers were uncomfortable before.
just wait until their ads are shown next to the guy that fox fired because he was uh he said he was rooting for a mob to kill a kid because that's not how white men should fight that's that's that's where you get to put your ad right next to that guy cool good stuff here uh you know what i hope the two of them are very happy together. Every shoe finds a match.
Last but not least, in the least shocking news of the year, Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist George Santos was finally charged with a host of federal crimes this week, including seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of lying to the House of Representatives on financial forms. If convicted, he could face up to 20 years in prison.
But for now, he's out on $500,000 bail, serving in Congress, still telling reporters he plans to run for re-election. Republicans aren't yet doing a thing about it.
What a country. What a country.
Thoughts on what's next for George Santos and the people he represents? I would imagine one of two paths. Jail or another 15 months in Congress.
Because George Santos- You don't think he's going to win re-election? I don't think he's going to win re-election. I don't think he's going anywhere because George Santos sits in a district that Joe Biden won by four points.
And given how Democrats have performed in special elections during the Trump era, there is not a chance Kevin McCarthy is forcing him out to have him be replaced by a Democrat, which is what would be any Democrat would be a favorite, if not a heavy favorite in that special election. So he is going to stay in Congress.
Kevin McCarthy is going to be totally fine with it. A bunch of Republicans can be totally fine with it.
And the job of Democrats is to make the other Republicans, particularly the New York Republicans who represent the largest concentration of vulnerable Republican incumbents in the 2024 election, pay a price for it. But it's a witch hunt.
The whole thing's a witch hunt, just like all Donald Trump's investigations. No? Yeah.
McCarthy said, if the ethics committee determined Santos broke the law, he would call for him to resign. The ethics committee.
There's also a legal system. Yeah.
That would perk up with that. No.
No. That's George.
That's George Santos. A fitting end.
A fitting end. And it's not even the end yet.
Yeah. And I think we should thank George Santos for in what was really an eventful, pretty scary week of politics.
He allowed us to make the Nobel Prize winning astrophysicists joked one more time. Also, the fact that George Santos was indicted was the sixth story on the list today.
It's been a real week, Dan. It's been a real week.
Between the Trump Town Hall and the gusher of news this week, we are right back at the we are yeah no i can feel it i can feel it

well another big news from today uh the end of title 42 and when we come back daryl lind will

be here talking to dan about what that means for immigration going forward

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More than 10,000 migrants have crossed the border each day this week. Here to break down the latest in Biden's immigration policies is American Immigration Council fellow and former longtime immigration reporter, Dara Lind.
Dara, thanks so much for joining us and welcome back to the pod. Thank you.
It's great to be back. This is a very complicated issue with a lot of very strong opinions.
I just want to start with the very basics. Can you tell us what Title 42 is and why it's expiring today? Yes.
So Title 42 is an extremely, previously super obscure provision of a very old public health law that, as written, allows the government to prevent the introduction of people or things that could introduce infectious disease to the U.S. The Donald Trump administration, very quickly after the introduction of the COVID-19 virus, decided to use it as a way as a de facto immigration ban, right, to quote unquote prevent the introduction of COVID-19, which was already circulating in the United States by making by by, you know, officially prohibiting the introduction of unauthorized migrants.
Now, in practice, what that means is that instead of border agents apprehending somebody, putting them in deportation proceedings, and then if they requested asylum, being legally obligated to give them the chance to present an asylum case, or at least be screened for asylum by an asylum officer, border agents simply expelled people. There was, if you asked for asylum, they said, sorry, can't get it.
There were some very, very limited, and we don't even know how often they were used, exemptions for extreme trafficking cases. But on the flip side, they also weren't deported.
They were simply, in many cases, pushed back to Mexico, even if they weren't Mexican. In other cases, expelled back to their home countries, but in a way that didn't have the lasting legal consequences that deportation carries in statutory immigration law.
So what we've seen is, you know, at first, an increase in people just making repeat crossings, attempting to get through without being detected. And now, as it is, you know, because in theory, this was always supposed to be a temporary measure tied to the COVID-19 pandemic.
And the Biden administration's first effort to end it a year ago was held up in court by Republicans saying you can't say there's still a public health emergency and not have this measure in place. It's become tied to the official HHS declaration of the end of the emergency, which happens at midnight tonight.
So the administration has announced a host of new policies that will go into effect once Title 42 expires. I know this is very complicated.
I know there's a lot of different policies here. Can you give us a quick summary of what those new immigration restrictions are and what they would mean for the 10,000 or so migrants who are coming to the border every day? Yes.
So there's kind of the substance that's changing and then a whole lot of ways to implement that, right? The substance is that they just introduced a regulation or they just finalized a regulation yesterday that says, if you A, are crossing between ports of entry and B, haven't already asked for asylum in another country and gotten denied then you're you have a really really high bar to clear like tantamount to impossible to actually get asylum in the united states um it sets up a like a bunch of like if then procedures and extra steps but it's tantamount to saying we are holding you to a higher standard and we are forcing you to meet it, you know, at the beginning of the process. Now, the things they're doing to implement this include these, they're bringing back a Trump era policy of keeping people in Border Patrol custody for, you know, a little bit extra and having them screened for asylum and deported from Border Patrol custody, which essentially means they've built phone booths

in Border Patrol facilities to use for asylum interviews. And that's being used for some

single adults, as many as they can hold, presumably. And for families, a policy of

ankle bracelets for members of the family with curfew and very rapid asylum interviews

I'm sorry. a policy of ankle bracelets for members of the family with curfew and very rapid asylum interviews that if they fail them under this new standard, they're then promising to deport them.
So they have a bunch of kind of extra resources, extra mechanisms in place to create what they call the consequences for people who are failing to meet this new elevated standard. And why a curfew? I understand, theoretically, at least the logic behind ankle bracelets or things like that to track people who you have not yet granted asylum to, but why a curfew? Think about it the other way in terms of why they're doing this.
They don't want to detain families, there are limits on how long you can detain families. And they while in there were reports that they were considering reopening some of the family detention centers, they have they that seems to be one policy that they have at least for the moment taken off the table.
So if you if you if the alternative was to detain people 24 hours a day, then at least having a place that they can check in, you know, that you know that they will be for, you know, five or six hours a day is, you know, is in theory preferable. Now, the question is going to be, there have been shifts over the last few years in how many people even have a home waiting for them, you know, after they cross, how many of them know people in the US, how many of them have support networks or even know what city they want to go to.
So it's so this this pilot program is being rolled out in only a few cities. But it's going to be interesting to see how, you know, how many people would even be in stable enough conditions that a that guaranteeing they will be in the same place overnight and that they know exactly where that is and can tell ICE before they're released from custody is even feasible.
A lot of people have said that these new Biden policies are actually harsher than the ones that Trump was using under Title 42. Is that an accurate assessment? Insofar as deportation is harsher than expulsion, yes.
insofar as uh deportation is harsher than expulsion yes uh it insofar as there is any access to asylum then it gets then then the question becomes how like how how accessible is humanitarian protection for people right now really and the other argument that the Biden administration brings is that they're, you know, unlike the Trump administration, they've tried to expand access to legal pathways for people. They've created this parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans that allows 30,000 people a month to come into the U.S., who have support networks in the U.S.
and can afford airfare to come into the U.S., work legally for two years and then leave? They are attempting to expand refugee resettlement from the Western Hemisphere, which frankly is something that state has never really invested in, in the same way that it's invested in resettling refugees from other parts of the world. And it's opening these new regional processing centers, the details of which are still pretty unclear, but that in theory are going to connect people who have some access to illegals, who have some theory of the case about that they could get a legal immigrant or non-immigrant visa to the United States or to Canada or Spain to allow to be able to figure that out before they leave their

home. that they could get a legal immigrant or non-immigrant visa to the United States or to Canada or Spain to allow to be able to figure that out before they leave their home country.
So the the argument is we're doing so much before you even get to the border that you shouldn't try to come to the border and cross illegally. That's just going to create more problems for us.
And therefore, it's going to create more problems for you. Now, you know, always how many people are, like, how are the alternatives you're proposing really accessible to people, especially people who are already waiting across the border in Mexico, people who are already on their way through the Darien Gap, and to people who find themselves needing to flee without necessarily having the luxury of months to wait.
I mean, assuming, as I do, that the vast majority of these people, they are fleeing violence, right? They are coming here for a reason. They don't feel like they can be safe at home.
The Biden administration should make it very clear that the numbers that are coming drastically exceed our capacity to handle them. What is the way to, historically at least, to find the balance between the people who have what is potentially a legitimate claim for asylum and our capacity to house them here in the United States or to allow to have them come here? Because there seems to be – the Biden administration wants to both say, we are going to take legitimate claims seriously, but also all the messaging both in the policies policies and the rhetoric is don't come, right? Stay, you know, that you can't just show up here.
And they're trying to stem the flow because they can't handle 10,000 migrants a day, correct? Yeah. I mean, you mentioned like, what is the capacity been historically? And I think it's worth underlining that we are in unprecedented times in terms of how many people are displaced around the world, how many of those displaced people are displaced in the Western Hemisphere, and how easy it is to travel.

The phenomenon of people being able to fly from Africa to South America and then take an overland journey up, like the American dual continent is really, that is a new phenomenon. And it means that people who are desperate, who are fleeing, and this is where it gets really tricky under existing law, not just violence, but say, you know, when the, when consecutive Guatemalan coffee harvests failed and people in the highlands found themselves absolutely unable to feed their families.
When you have situations like the one in Venezuela where they're not fleeing immediate violence, but the state has been failed for a decade. And they're not finding that the other countries in the hemisphere that have more displaced people that they're housing than the U.S.
does because they're closer are not doing enough to give them solid footing, to give them a way to make a living, to integrate them into society. You know, these are all these are all very hard problems that mean that, frankly, the U.S.
is isn't dealing with them as acutely as Colombia is, for example, and is instead finding itself, you know, in the position where it has to deal with more than it would like. But as far as like what the, as far as not having the capacity, I've increasingly become convinced that thinking about border management as something that, you know, we should be building capacity towards is the right way to go forward.
That like, we can't solve, we can't stop 10,000 people from coming. We can acknowledge that this is neither the first nor the last time that more people, it's like, there have been so many times over the last decade that there have been more people, many of whom are claiming, are trying to claim asylum coming than the government can have the capacity to process.
Why hasn't there been sustained investment in actually increasing that processing capacity so that you don't have to choose between keeping people in Border Patrol custody for several days and just releasing them onto the streets hoping that they'll get a bus ticket out of town? The more effort you put into ever stricter solutions for some people, the more you allow other people to fall through the cracks. And that doesn't doesn't accomplish a deterrent method.
It doesn't provide a support network for for asylum seekers who don't already have them, even if they do have legitimate even and especially if they have legitimate asylum claims. And it means that we end up spending tremendous amounts of money every few years in congressional border supplementals, instead of actually building the infrastructure that we can use the next time something comes around.
The attempts to build infrastructure, are they falling victim to the same reason that a lot of very popular common sense, larger immigration reform initiatives fall victim to, which is politics? Is it just getting, it's hard to find a bipartisan consensus around these things because they're so polarizing. Or has there been some sort of failure of leadership from administrations of both parties here? I mean, I think it's the the logic of deterrence is so compelling, right? It's so seductive.
It really it's so like it's so much easier to believe that if you just hit the right, like ABAB combo of policies and messages, that people will suddenly want, people will suddenly get the message that they shouldn't come to the US. And like, the fact that, you know, the argument will always be that true deterrence has never been tried, because we haven't been harsh enough.
The reason we haven't been harsh enough is because we have like legal commitments, humanitarian commitments, things that put a pretty solid floor on what you can do. And so the effort to try to creep ever closer to that line is it's it's really it is tempting.
And it means that you will also like see some kind of the the logic of of the four countries for the parole program is that those were the four countries where apprehensions were going up in the fall so you know you can you can do some things to engineer particular populations but you can't then prevent the next wave of people from being you know people of different nationalities uh who now have the opportunity because smuggling capacity has been built there because they have the because conditions have deteriorated enough in their home countries so the it just it requires a certain amount of like put on your big boy pants not just from politicians but from the public because if incumbent politicians say oh we don't have a silver bullet solution they're extremely vulnerable to challengers saying why don't you have a silver bullet solution from my couch have a silver bullet solution. So I don't really, I don't know how, you know, I don't, I don't know how to accept the, how to, how to get the public to accept that if we keep insisting that the problem gets solved tomorrow, we're creating a situation where the problem won't be solved a decade from now.
But that's really where I am personally. It also just seems somewhat naive or far-fetched to think that messaging from the U.S.
federal government officials at the DHS or wherever else is going to reach the people most likely to seek asylum in our states, especially when you have an entire industry that is making, you know, an underground industry making money to try to get them north, right, or from wherever. It seems it Ali Mourakis, God bless him, he wants everything he wants, but you can't even get people in the United States to hear that, let alone people in Honduras or somewhere else.
Right, exactly. I mean, the question of the information ecosystem surrounding would-be migrants is like, it's a really, really, really complicated question that, you know, in a, in a, in, in like my perfect world, there would be a, an embedded sociologist asking people who got released, like what they knew.
But, but it's also something that, you know, because smugglers can take advantage of, for example, like opposition politicians saying the border is open, they can take advantage of hawkish policies to say, you'd better come fast. Like this happened under Trump all the time, right? The smugglers message was you'd better come fast.
Donald Trump says he's about to close the border. So because of all of that, it's very, very hard to, you know, to actually to ensure any kind of messaging gets through.
There is an argument that word of mouth through actual success or failure does work. And this is the argument the immigration hawks will use, that you have to have a system where people say, I tried and it didn't work.
I mean, I'm in detention. I got deported.
I wasn't able to get a work permit. I, you know, I couldn't work in the United States.
It didn't it didn't work. The problem is that that has to be a consistent message.
The minute that anybody gets through, we saw a lot of this with like Cubans in 2019. The minute that any Cuban managed to get through to get an exception to remain in Mexico, every other every Cuban stuck on the Mexican side of the border was pinging their lawyers like, why can't you get that for me? um so you know it's it there and that's just because there is a really well established like

cross diaspora social network there. So, you know, you see similar things, similar kind of network effects with other groups as well.
So unless you're going to actually, you know, just not not just repeal federal asylum law, but like prevent literally everyone from getting through undetected, then your word of mouth is going to be somewhat muddied. And the more exemptions you build in, the more you treat families differently, the more you treat unaccompanied children differently, the more you in other words, accede to common sense and humanitarian needs that some people should be treated differently from others, the more complicated that word of mouth situation gets.
So last question, as Title 42 expires and things take place over the next few days, what are you going to be watching for to see how this is going? It's a great question. The way I think about it is there are problems that are going to be very, very, very visible, such as large group releases of people in cities that haven't been briefed or prepared, don't have the funding, don't have the shelter capacity.
That's going to be if that happens and when that happens, you're going to know about it because there's going to be cable B-roll. What I'm concerned about that is not that is a failure that's not going to be visible is are people's due process rights being respected and if they have asylum claims are they getting the opportunity to you know to make them what standard are they being held to the difference between border patrol custody and ice custody well among other things is that lawyers can't get into border patrol custody the public can't get get into Border Patrol custody.
Electeds can't. So it's a total black box.
And I am personally hoping that what we don't see is what happened under the Trump iteration of this policy and also under Remain in Mexico, where because it was hard to find people who had experienced this because they were getting deported quickly, they weren't in the U.S., they certainly weren't in government custody anymore, or they certainly weren't in the U.S. out of government custody, rather, that we just don't know.
The combination of the size of the policy change and the fact that they're just surging people to kind of, they're detailing a bunch of people to do border asylum screenings who have been trained in this but aren't full-time asylum officers and the opacity all of that says to me that it like it's it's to me a recipe for like you get a really scathing inspector general report three years from now saying actually this was a disaster and a bunch of people got deported who shouldn't been and that's what i i'm i'm really hoping that we get information soon enough that we can prevent that from being the case.

Dara, thank you so much for joining us.

It's always great to talk to you.

Thank you.

Thanks to Daryl Lynn for joining us today.

Everyone have a great weekend.

Hopefully we'll have some happier news next week.

Bye, everyone.

Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez.
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