Tucker’s War With Fox

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Speaker 2 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm Priya's Epic John Lovett.

Speaker 3 I'm Tommy Vitor.

Speaker 2 On today's show, Joe Biden gets some rough polling as he prepares for his debt ceiling showdown with Republicans.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump offers no defense as a jury decides the rape and defamation case against him.

Speaker 2 Tucker Carlson goes to war with Fox News, and Diane Feinstein is still MIAA as Clarence Thomas' scandals pile up. Then later, the host of Pod Save the UK, Nish Kumar, talks to Tommy about

Speaker 2 King Charles' coronation and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Speaker 3 We talked coronation, we talked about politics, they just had a bunch of elections. What does that mean for the Labor Party? There's a lot of

Speaker 3 shared challenges right now between the Labour Party and the UK. That's pundit hacking up a bone.
Between the Labour Party in the UK and the Democratic Party over here.

Speaker 3 And we, you know, Misery Lift Company, so we talked about it.

Speaker 2 So Tommy talks to Nish, and all of you should check out the very first episode of Pod Save the UK. It's up now.
The number one podcast in the UK. The number one podcast in the UK.
It is funny.

Speaker 2 It is insightful. It is a joy to listen to.
Please go subscribe wherever you get your podcast and check out the first episode. All right, let's get to the news.

Speaker 2 Joe Biden got a suboptimal poll from the Washington Post and ABC over the weekend that has him losing to Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis among all adults by seven points, 49 to 42 percent for Trump and 48 to 41 percent for DeSantis.

Speaker 2 That's if you push leaners, people who are leaning one way or the other. The president's approval is at a record low of 36 percent in the poll, which is down from 42 percent in February.

Speaker 2 And 63 percent say he doesn't have the mental sharpness to serve effectively as president. That's up from 43 percent in 2020.
Not great news in the poll for Trump either.

Speaker 2 A majority think he's a liar who should face multiple criminal charges.

Speaker 2 Though, about a quarter of all independents who support charging Trump say they would still vote for him over Biden.

Speaker 2 I'd like to talk to some of those people. Yeah, the people that he should be in jail and president.

Speaker 2 I'm really just dumbfounding.

Speaker 2 That's your independent swing voter for you, you know? And we love him. God love him.
God love him. God love him.
Make the world go wrong. You think they're listening?

Speaker 2 Anyway, great news. No, any evidence this is an outlier i feel like

Speaker 2 i've recited some does anyone want to unskew the poll yeah but first of all we should stipulate that we don't yell at polls here they're inanimate objects they did nothing wrong they did nothing to you they're just data sets yeah here look here's what i would also say um you know unskew so you can sleep at night but spend all day thinking that they're they're pretty real but if we were to yell at some polls uh it is weird that 56 say they would they that trump should face criminal charges but 49 say they'd vote for him that doesn't that seems challenging to make work Otherwise, other sort of, I don't know, I wouldn't say it unskews the poll, but gives you reason to believe

Speaker 2 that it's less,

Speaker 2 it's, it's, you can step a little bit, you can step back off a ledge a tiny bit is that it says he's 26, he has 26% approval among under 30, 42% among non-whites, 41% among urban residents, 46% amongst those with no religious affiliation.

Speaker 2 These would be people that may not approve of the job Joe Biden is doing right now, but these are: don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative types. That was my one sign for hope.

Speaker 2 What do you got? I'm looking for something here. It's a very bad poll.

Speaker 3 Trump's winning young people, Biden's winning old people. That doesn't make a lot of sense either.
It's all just sort of weird.

Speaker 2 It's confusing. Here's what to do: third in the average.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 538. 538.
538 it. Well, yeah, we were going to do that after the conversation,

Speaker 2 but we still got stuff to do before the mattress adds.

Speaker 2 So the average has Biden's approval

Speaker 2 steady around 42, 43%.

Speaker 2 So no sudden upticks or down ticks in the approval rating for Biden. So it's a little higher than the 36% in this poll.

Speaker 2 Though, you know, the Quinnipiac poll, in terms of like high quality polls, first of all, there haven't been many for 2024 yet. But the Quinnipiak has them at like 37.

Speaker 2 The Wall Street Journal, NBC one had them at 42. So it's in the range.
The difference is, is that Biden's horse race number is higher in those other polls than it is here. And Trump's is higher.

Speaker 2 Now they did push leaners at the regular poll was like, I think Trump only got 45 or 46% when they didn't push leaners. And 45, 46%

Speaker 2 is what Trump has received in the last two elections. Yeah, the other,

Speaker 2 you said that this doesn't have a lot of good news for Trump either, which is true, but it sort of fits with where Trump always is, which is just he always has very bad polling.

Speaker 2 That kind of fits with where this was at. The one thing that I pulled out that I did think was worth talking about is it said 30, 33% say Trump is honest, 63% say he's not.

Speaker 2 That is where Trump has always been on the honesty mark, but Biden is only at 41% saying that he's honest and trustworthy, while 54% say he's not.

Speaker 2 In the lead up to 2020, that was,

Speaker 2 if not flipped, close to it. And that has been dropping pretty steadily.
And to me, it's like a really

Speaker 2 like put it put aside the actual kind of horse race numbers, the comparisons, all the rest, the fact that there's been that drop in honesty and trustworthiness, when that is, I think, one of his big selling points and one of the ways he's sort of ridden sort of waves of disapproval is alarming to me.

Speaker 2 I got to check with Obama because I do think that for a lot of presidents, their honest and trustworthy numbers tend to go down over the course

Speaker 2 of the eight years.

Speaker 2 Do you have an AI thing ready?

Speaker 3 Oh, no, no.

Speaker 3 Imagine I just had a

Speaker 2 face that you have when you're ready to introduce a bit to us, which I was really excited.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, look, it has been steadily going down, and that is probably just a result of of people just being disappointed with the difference between what a candidate sounds like and what a president sounds like, which is, of course, true.

Speaker 2 But, like, you look at Obama over eight years, and even when his disapproval dropped, there were certain metrics of his sort of personal likability that kind of stayed buoyant, which was a protection against

Speaker 2 people like Mitt Romney, for example. And I don't know, that was just nerve-wracking to me.
So easily could be a bad sample, bad poll, or could be right. We don't know.

Speaker 2 The RCP average has Trump leading by one with this poll in it. So So either way, it's going to be a close fucking race.
That's a long time. Right? A lot of undecided race.

Speaker 2 Trump is once again around 45, 46, right? When you don't push leaners, which is always where he's been. And if it's just Trump and Biden, then, you know, probably a little better for Biden.

Speaker 2 But again, we get third parties in there, and suddenly it could be 2016 again, and Trump doesn't have to get much higher than 45 or 46. But that still went.

Speaker 3 That RFK Jr. magic.

Speaker 2 Or fucking no labels. And whether they're going to Joe Manchin or Kirsten Sinema or someone else.
And a lot of the drop in here is not just independents, but Democrats.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and that one's probably most easily fixable. I will say, it's hard to, you know, the 60% saying he doesn't have the acuity, viewing Trump as having being more kind of up to the job.

Speaker 2 You guys can say that that made me a little more nervous than the honest and trustworthy ones, even. I don't like either.
Yeah. Neither's great.
I mean,

Speaker 2 instead of just complaining about what we don't like about this poll, that's easy enough to do. Well, that part's over.
We got any advice?

Speaker 2 Any advice for the Biden campaign as they look at these numbers?

Speaker 3 I think that ultimately Joe Biden is going to have to to say, things are better, but they're not perfect. I know you don't love me, but these guys are crazy.

Speaker 3 Look over there.

Speaker 3 They're going to destroy the economy with the debt ceiling. They're going to do nothing to stop guns,

Speaker 3 gun violence. They're going to take your freedoms away.
The key is the choice. It's Joe versus the wackos.

Speaker 3 And when we don't have a Republican nominee yet, it's very hard to do that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think Trump, it's, you know,

Speaker 2 I think like the political press and a lot of people that are very engaged are paying attention to the ongoing legal machinations, but there's nothing compared to a campaign.

Speaker 2 And he really is out of the limelight in a lot of ways. And you see the kind of even in this poll, like just like places where his just approval rating has gone back up.

Speaker 2 Like he had this sort of immovable approval on the economy that basically stayed pretty high up until the pandemic and then started dropping. And now it's kind of back up to where it was pre-pandemic.

Speaker 2 And all of this is a really, and it's the, it's, I hate to say it, like absence makes the heart grow fonder and it sucks, but oh, you said with Trump. With Trump, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think, I can't tell. I mean, I think that I feel like opinions about Trump are pretty hardened, but that the campaign is going to hinge on reminding people how awful he is, right?

Speaker 2 Which is not hard to do. Sometimes he just opens his mouth and does it.

Speaker 2 There's plenty of, like you said, legal issues that he's dealing with that will, again, shine shine a light on who he is as a person. I think for Biden,

Speaker 2 Tommy's right that it's all a choice. It's all about why Trump is crazy.
It's all about why the Republicans are extreme. But in terms of his own personal style,

Speaker 2 I think Biden's got to really flood the zone with.

Speaker 2 being in people's faces all the time.

Speaker 2 Like, I think that stepping back when you're the challenger to Donald Trump and Donald Trump's president and you don't really, Biden's just the alternative to what you don't like right now, I think that works.

Speaker 2 I think it's tougher when you're the incumbent, as Joe Biden is.

Speaker 2 And if there's a lot of people who they, when they only, they only hear from Joe Biden when there's some right-wing TikTok of him seeming old, then they're going to have a bad opinion of him, right?

Speaker 2 And I think the only way to combat that is...

Speaker 2 Joe Biden out there all the time, showing some energy, being loose, being with people, right?

Speaker 2 He's really good one-on-one with people, whether it's town halls, whether it's meeting people on rope lines.

Speaker 2 Like, I think all of this, if I was running a campaign, this is what I would, and I'm sure the Biden people are thinking about all this, like, this is what I would do.

Speaker 2 We were just talking about the correspondence in her speech last week, and his delivery was really good, and he was having fun.

Speaker 2 And also, when he's in fighting mode, too, when he's like talking about Donald Trump, talking about the threats of democracy, he tends to have a lot of energy there, too.

Speaker 2 I think that reminds people that he's got a fighting spirit, too. Like, I think there's ways to help combat the perception that he is, you know, too old.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'm sure they're very frustrated because I think the economy has added 13 million jobs or just shy of 13 million jobs since he took office.

Speaker 3 Unemployment is at record lows, like three and a half percent.

Speaker 3 You're reading all these announcements about companies literally opening manufacturing plants in Georgia and other places because of tax credits in the IRA, but he doesn't seem to be getting any credit for it.

Speaker 3 So I agree with you. He's got to be out more.

Speaker 3 I do think it's good advice, but I think there's limits to how many people are actually going to hear about these stories just because of the way the media works. So hard.

Speaker 2 So, you know, that's why it's just a volume.

Speaker 3 It'd be like big shoes.

Speaker 3 Big shoes.

Speaker 2 It's, it's, it is, it's quantity at some point, right? Because it is so

Speaker 2 getting attention, even when you're president of the United States in this media environment, it's just harder, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And doing a typical event where you're just going and touting some manufacturing jobs, like it's just, that won't get you the attention anymore.

Speaker 2 You got to keep, and I think, I think it's, it's not only what Joe Biden has done, but that he continues to show this like fighting spirit on behalf of working people. He did this today

Speaker 2 on Monday. He announced new regulations with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg that would require airlines to compensate customers beyond a ticket refund if there's a delay or canceled flight.

Speaker 3 Love this. Love this.
This is good stuff.

Speaker 2 They should do some fun stuff with us to, again, really get it some attention.

Speaker 2 I love the fee stuff. People aren't going to know that.
Now, the problem is it's not going to take effect for like months if

Speaker 2 it's going to be hard to rule. The rulemaking process.

Speaker 2 The rulemaking process. I love it.
It's a great idea.

Speaker 3 Integrated character IP life enhancement via airlines.

Speaker 3 Via community's infinite freedom.

Speaker 2 Don't just give me, don't just give me a voucher to join.

Speaker 2 I love that.

Speaker 2 Go to an airport. Why didn't we do more of this?

Speaker 3 Going after these terrible monopolistic companies is a great idea. Do it every day, Joe.

Speaker 2 We did a passenger bill of rights, but it didn't quite go as far as this.

Speaker 2 We did the if airlines overbook and that you get kicked off a plane because of the overbooking, then they have to pay you like double the money.

Speaker 3 And we said they couldn't leave you on the tarmac for more than eight eight hours or something. So, you know, if you're not going to be able to do that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's that jump. There was that jumper flight.
There's that jumper flight that went fully kind of lord of the flies.

Speaker 2 But Biden out there fighting against corporations on behalf of working people over and over again. That's, that's good stuff.
That's good stuff.

Speaker 2 And just, you know, let's get him out there meeting people between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
That's the sweet spot. Get him out there.
Sun shining, birds chirping, ice cream in his hand.

Speaker 2 And joke, and he should be joking about his age all the time. Yeah.

Speaker 2 He did it at the Correspondence Center. He should do it somewhere.

Speaker 2 I'm older than the trees. He said something about his 280-year career

Speaker 2 the other day, which is really fun. Do that.
That's great. All right.
Donald Trump still has a few bumps on his road back to the White House.

Speaker 2 New York Times reports that in the classified documents investigation, Special Counsel Jack Smith has obtained cooperation from a secret witness who worked at Mar-a-Lago, and he's also issued a new wave of subpoenas, including for records related to Trump's business dealings with Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 2 His name? Juan Jr.

Speaker 2 With a little mustache.

Speaker 2 John Jr.

Speaker 2 You get it. That's funny.

Speaker 2 Also, after the leader of the Proud Boys and three others were convicted of seditious conspiracy, Congressman Jamie Raskin told Gensaki over the weekend that Trump could absolutely face the same charges.

Speaker 2 And jurors have just heard closing arguments in the rape and defamation case brought by the writer Eugene Carroll against Trump, who not only turned down a second last-minute chance to testify, but presented no defense in the case whatsoever.

Speaker 2 None.

Speaker 2 Just so people understand.

Speaker 2 So the reason there was this second chance to testify is that when he was opening up a golf course in Scotland, he did the thing he always does, which is I could testify, happily testify, love to testify.

Speaker 2 And the judge was like, okay. And they said, I'm coming back home.
I got to go back home to testify.

Speaker 3 I have to leave the country early. I have to leave Ireland early or whatever.
I have to go testify.

Speaker 2 And the judge was just like, you weren't going to do that.

Speaker 2 And then the judge was like, okay, tell me by 5 p.m. if you're going to want to testify.
No, no, no. And they're like, oh, no, no, no, no.
Of course not. What are you, crazy? Very strange.

Speaker 2 So though jurors did get to watch video of Trump's deposition from October, which we have some clips from. Let's listen.

Speaker 4 And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.
Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.
That's what you said, Correct.

Speaker 5 Well, historically, that's true with stars.

Speaker 4 It's true with stars that they can grab women by the pussy?

Speaker 5 Well, that's what it's, if you look over the last million years, I guess that's been largely true. Not always, but largely true.

Speaker 5 Unfortunately or fortunately.

Speaker 4 When you said in that video that Ms. Leeds would not be your first choice, you were referring to her physical looks, correct?

Speaker 5 Just the overall.

Speaker 5 I look at her, I see her, I hear what she says, whatever. You wouldn't be a choice of mine either, to be honest with you.
I hope you're not insulted.

Speaker 5 I would not, under any circumstances, have any interest in you.

Speaker 5 I'm honest when I say it.

Speaker 2 It's just such an awful lot of people. So disgusting.
Unfortunately or fortunately.

Speaker 3 I mean, a lot of these are things he said before, but he just compounds it any way he can by just being the most disgusting human being in these depositions.

Speaker 2 You know, it's things he said before, but I will just say, I know that we're all inured to this now because we've had a lot of years of Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 But let's remember when the Access Hollywood tape comes out and Donald Trump actually gives the, remember the live on-air apology he does that is, you know,

Speaker 2 this is not what I meant, blah, blah, blah. Now, it's just like January 6th.
He's long gone past, oh, I didn't say that, or that was just a joke. Now he says, oh, no, what I said was true.

Speaker 2 What I said was true, and it was good. It was good.

Speaker 2 You do get to do that if you're a celebrity.

Speaker 3 Well, he makes it worse, and he insults the lawyer, and he's, yeah, it sounds awful.

Speaker 2 We'll leave the legal consequences of Trump's actions to juries of his peers.

Speaker 2 It does seem like the political consequences of all these cases could be a bit more damaging for Trump than the hush money case.

Speaker 2 But what do you guys think of all these developments that have popped up recently?

Speaker 3 There's a lot of, I mean, certainly this conversation we're having right now reminds you there's just a ton of legal uncertainty swirling around him as a person, around the campaign.

Speaker 3 And the fact that DeSantis and all the other opponents can't seem to get it together to leverage

Speaker 3 not just what he actually did, but the kind of political risk is, you know, another indictment of how bad they are running against him.

Speaker 2 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, I'd also just say that deposition interview footage always looks bad. Really? It always just has that just sort of feel to it.

Speaker 2 It has a feel to it, as does all kind of hidden camera footage, always kind of feels bad.

Speaker 2 I don't know what the impact of

Speaker 2 this specific case will be

Speaker 2 a year and a half from now, but what are his two lowest moments as a candidate and president? I'd say one of them is around the Access Hollywood table. I'd say the three lowest moments.

Speaker 2 One is Access Hollywood, second is the healthcare vote, and the third is the insurrection. You'd probably say those are the three.

Speaker 2 They definitely include trying to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. 100%.

Speaker 2 I don't even mean, obviously, but I mean in terms of like the public, the public reaction to him, where, you know, like we just talked about how robust and how stable his polling always is.

Speaker 2 And like, what are the things that managed to kind of like pull that clothesline down a little to weigh it down? It was Access Hollywood, it was healthcare, and it was the insurrection.

Speaker 2 And this is as bad as that ever was, even though we are all fucking desensitized to it. I realize that this is incredibly hackish of me, but when I saw that deposition footage, my first thought was

Speaker 2 Democratic super PAC.

Speaker 2 If I was a Democratic super PAC out there, I would throw some of that deposition footage in an ad and test it first, you know, test it in front of voters, focus groups, see how it goes.

Speaker 2 But I would bet, particularly after talking to Celinda Lake on this show a couple of weeks ago, that this would break through.

Speaker 2 She said that this case is breaking through and a lot of her research, especially among women, especially among young women, says something about our society, of course, that it's not getting as much coverage as the Hushwinny case.

Speaker 2 I realize it's a civil lawsuit, not criminal. But it's pretty big deal if a jury decides that a former president is a rapist.

Speaker 3 for the first time. Yeah, I mean, I think it's getting less coverage because it's just different phases of the trial.

Speaker 3 I mean, similarly, the Mar-a-Lago case, I've always wondered whether people would really care whether or not he took classified documents.

Speaker 3 But when you start to read about how the FBI is looking, they're talking to his staff to see if they were directed to hide or move things after the subpoenas came through or if they deleted footage of what happened, that feels like a big deal.

Speaker 3 I mean, like, Jack Smith is flinging subpoenas like a blackjack dealer down there. Like, the whole staff has now been subpoenaed.

Speaker 2 Both of the calamaris, who can forget the calamaris.

Speaker 3 It's a double calamari. Matthew Calamari is a good idea.

Speaker 2 I think the plural calamari is calamari.

Speaker 2 I think you might correct. Here's my favorite anecdote.

Speaker 2 I think one of them is a calamaro.

Speaker 3 My favorite anecdote from this New York Times story about the Mar-a-Lago case was: among the information they have gathered in interviews concerned his habit of flushing material down toilets, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Speaker 3 And I just love the idea of some very serious FBI agent asking questions, be like, number one.

Speaker 2 So this goes down the shitter as well.

Speaker 3 If it's a yellow lettomelo, okay.

Speaker 2 Number two.

Speaker 2 Tell me. Can you apply? Tommy, can you give us your take on

Speaker 2 the potential Saudi connection here? It was just sort of slipped in as weird. Paragraph 20 of the New York Times story.

Speaker 2 It's like, oh, by the way, there's a subpoena for Trump's business dealings with the Saudis over their golf venture.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't know what to make of that. And I've never really believed.

Speaker 2 You want to red string it for us? Yep.

Speaker 3 They never really believed that Trump took a bunch of classified documents to sell them to some other country or anything like that.

Speaker 3 But if you were looking for a way to trade this information to, let's say, the Saudi government for cash, it does seem like having the Live golf tournament host a bunch of matches or whatever they're calling them.

Speaker 3 They call it something different at his clubs would be a great way to launder that money.

Speaker 2 Great way to get his beak wet.

Speaker 2 Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 We didn't even also talk about the fact that they've given immunity to a bunch of the fake electors. Oh, yeah.
Which

Speaker 2 Georgia. Yeah, those people.

Speaker 2 So what do they know? And why are we giving and

Speaker 2 where Finnie Willis isn't given out immunity for free?

Speaker 2 And what those people did was very serious, very illegal, and very wrong. And so, you know, who are the people you're going after?

Speaker 2 There's not very many above the electors that aren't named Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 As Tommy pointed out, one person who's still not taking advantage of any of this is Ron DeSantis, who's busy dealing with more of his own bad press.

Speaker 2 ABC obtained video of Tiny D's debate prep sessions from his 2018 race for governor, where an advisor suggested that when he gets to the podium, he should write the word likable in all caps at the top of his notepad.

Speaker 2 You can also see Matt Gates telling DeSantis to tone it down during prep and DeSantis struggling with how to avoid pissing off Trump's voters. Let's listen.

Speaker 6 Has the NRA donated to me? I don't think the NRA is quite the boogeyman the Democrats think it is. Do we hit him on guns or just everyone who cares about guns is going to vote for me?

Speaker 6 Is there any issue upon which you disagree with President Trump?

Speaker 6 Obviously there is because I've voted contrary to him in the con I have to frame it in a way that's not going to piss off all his voters. So what I do is I do what I think is right.

Speaker 6 I support his agenda in terms of what he's been able to do. If I have a disagreement, I talk to him in private.

Speaker 6 I think when you walk up there, if you have a pad, you have to write in all caps at the top of the pad, likable. And then look at it.
I do the same thing because I have the same personality.

Speaker 2 We're both aggressive.

Speaker 3 I see the same thing.

Speaker 2 Do you guys think it's a good sign for your political prospects when the person advising you on likability is Matt Gaetz?

Speaker 3 Matt Gaetz is dressed like he's going to go sell nitrous balloons at a Dave Matthews concert.

Speaker 2 He's wearing like Nirvana t-shirts, flip-flops, and a very short.

Speaker 2 Matt Gates would tell you to tone it down. Yeah, that's fucking guy.
Matt Gates is like, here's how to be likable. Can we just be honest with you?

Speaker 3 Take it from me, Matt Gates. It's not bad advice.

Speaker 2 It's not such pretty good advice from Matt Gates.

Speaker 3 The whole thing seems kind of normal and more reasonable. And I don't know.
Even DeSantis kind of seems smarter about politics, but he comes off as very angry about every voice of his.

Speaker 2 Man, you almost might say he comes off as a little sanctimonious. He comes off like the Mars Atex aliens.

Speaker 2 Eck, eck, egg.

Speaker 2 The other, it reminded me of something, which is

Speaker 2 the way in which they're trying to corral this fucking humorless,

Speaker 2 stale-voiced, whiny, awful personality

Speaker 2 candidate to being a likable politician.

Speaker 2 When I was first working on the Hill, I worked for a senator named John Corzine, much more likable than Ron DeSantis, but he was just, he was like a finance guy. Public speaking was not his forte.

Speaker 2 And they like, very early on, they wanted him to come up with jokes or have like be funny.

Speaker 2 And they brought me into a kind of speech prep and I just remember realizing how far we were from jokes because one of the pieces of advice was it would be helpful if you stopped rolling up the speech and using that to scratch your beard while you're talking

Speaker 2 write that one at the top of the notepad

Speaker 2 that's what that's scratching up yeah but like saying write likable on your notepad is so goddamn funny it's terrible advice well you can't just be like you can remind yourself to be likable you are or you are not when george h.W.

Speaker 2 Bush was running against Bill Clinton Bill Clinton was obviously more likable and seemed more compassionate and more able to relate to people. And so there's a famous moment where George H.W.

Speaker 2 Bush says something about grocery prices and he goes, message, I care.

Speaker 2 And that was the, that was not the part, that was subtext. He was supposed to stay true.
That was like showing me

Speaker 2 saying your name here. Yeah.
I think that there was something revealing. When Gates is telling him, oh, you were too aggressive.

Speaker 2 in in what you just said, what he was referring to is during debate prep, remember back in the 2018 race,

Speaker 2 at one point,

Speaker 2 DeSantis says, all right, Florida, don't monkey this up by voting for Andrew Gillum. And everyone took it as a racist statement.
And so in debate prep, they hit him with that.

Speaker 2 They hit DeSantis with that. And he basically was like, yeah, I was pretty hot in response to that.

Speaker 2 But what I learned from Kavanaugh is you can never even show a hint of weakness on these things or even seem apologetic at all. You've just got to just go hard and seem angry.

Speaker 2 And that's the only way to do it because otherwise our base will think that we're weak. And that is the lesson that all of them have learned.

Speaker 2 That is the whole lesson of the Trump era. Never apologize, act like an asshole, and you can get through it.
It's just, but he sounds so whiny.

Speaker 3 So he's a big whiner, and he's resting dumbface. And the whole thing, I mean,

Speaker 2 yeah, it's a weird debate staff.

Speaker 3 I mean, Matt Gates is running your debate prep. That's just a strange decision.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And now he's for Trump.
So. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, that must worry them. I mean, these kinds of tapes leaking, I don't know if I've ever heard of that happening before.
That's a pretty big breach.

Speaker 2 Like, Debate Prep is a kind of like

Speaker 2 an inner, an inner circle, kind of sacred space that doesn't leak.

Speaker 3 So, and Gates goes from DeSantis guy to Trump supporter, sycophant. DeSantis had a big split with Susie Wiles, who was running his campaign at the time.
She's now working for Trump.

Speaker 3 I would be sitting there thinking, oh my God, what else are they sitting on?

Speaker 2 That's cool. Yeah.

Speaker 8 Hey, weirdos, I'm Elena and I'm Ash.

Speaker 9 And we are the hosts of Morbid Podcast.

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Speaker 2 Big week in DC. Joe Biden has his first debt ceiling meeting with the four top leaders in Congress at the White House today, just in time.

Speaker 2 a couple weeks away from default. Yeah,

Speaker 2 Janet Yellen is just

Speaker 2 white-knuckling on a toilet somewhere, just smoking anxiety for fucking days. She's not

Speaker 2 Janet Yellen hasn't had a solid shit in two weeks. Oh my god, just saying she's anxious.

Speaker 2 You can't hear that on any other podcast. No other media.
You're not getting that on MSNBC. Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 This comes after 43 Republican senators signed a letter over the weekend saying they will not support a debt ceiling increase without substantial cuts of the kind the House passed.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy and leadership aides are trying to tamp down expectations within their caucus about what would constitute a win for Republicans, since his most extreme members are saying they won't vote for anything less than the House bill.

Speaker 2 Are we just headed for a either default or a less crazy version of the House bill? Is it still possible at this point for Biden to get a clean increase? Is any kind of deal possible?

Speaker 2 What do you guys think? I would say, first of all, I think to get 43 Senate Republicans together to say anything close to this, it had to be vague and purposefully vague.

Speaker 2 So what they say is they're united behind the House Republican Conference in support of spending cuts and structural budget reforms as a starting point for negotiations on the debt ceiling.

Speaker 2 That leaves a lot of room to maneuver. And they won't vote for Cloach on any bill that raises the debt ceiling without substantive spending and budget reforms, which also gives you a lot of space.

Speaker 2 50 Shades of Gray, the starting point was fan fiction about Twilight. You can go very far from your starting point.

Speaker 2 It's just something to think about. Though it was vague, but still,

Speaker 2 they didn't get Romney Collins or Murkowski to sign on to that letter.

Speaker 2 They didn't, you're right.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 I feel like

Speaker 2 they got above 40 and they patted themselves on the back. I think what the Republicans have done, which is smart here in the Senate, is they're like, we cannot leave,

Speaker 2 at least at this point, we can't leave McCarthy out to dry. He got this passed through the House.
We've got to lock arms with McCarthy.

Speaker 2 We can't have any daylight between the Senate and the House Republicans. Otherwise, we're not going to get anything out of Biden.
To me, that seems what that letter is about.

Speaker 2 I would say it's getting this off. This says where the Senate Republicans are.

Speaker 2 I don't know that this is something that puts any more pressure on Biden than what he already was facing, but I think publicly it answers the mail on what McConnell's been getting asked over and over again.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm just so caught up on that previous comment about the Secretary of the Treasury.

Speaker 3 I mean, I guess good news, bad news, good news, you can't really get much worse than a $1.5 trillion debt limit extension for less than a year for $5 trillion in cuts. So

Speaker 3 baby steps the better.

Speaker 2 Who knows? Well, I know.

Speaker 3 I still don't see a path forward, though.

Speaker 2 The reason I mentioned

Speaker 2 on the McCarthy side, what we saw in Playbook today, that he's tamping down expectations, is there were some senior Republican aides in the House who were like, if we just get, if we just get the unspent COVID funds and permitting reform, that's a win.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, really? Oh, no, don't get that.

Speaker 2 That'd be horrible. We can't get that out.

Speaker 2 It's a reminder that

Speaker 2 with the House Republicans, some of them play crazy, some of them aren't crazy.

Speaker 2 And some of the ones that play crazy are just a little bit nervous with some of the ones that are, hey, like, I'm visiting this asylum.

Speaker 2 I don't fucking live here with you people.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 yeah. I do think, though, like, I don't see a clean increase happening at this point.
Because forget about the 43 Republican. You also got Joe Manchin, you're dealing with the Senate.

Speaker 2 Forget about the House at this point.

Speaker 2 Getting a clean increase through the Senate seems like it's very difficult at this point. I also think a lot of this is

Speaker 2 semantics.

Speaker 2 Like, I don't know what, like, if let, like, for example, we don't know what's going to come out of a conversation with McCarthy and Biden tomorrow, but one thing potentially is some sort of a framework that is a short-term debt ceiling extension with some kind of cap on spending that kicks you to a negotiation over government shutdown plus that.

Speaker 2 Biden gets to call that a clean raise to get you to the fill to the negotiation. Two-track strategies.
Right. And so, but like, did Biden get a clean debt limit increase in that case? Yes, no.

Speaker 2 I think the semantics fall apart when you tie it to another negotiation.

Speaker 3 We need a bipartisan coalition of reporters, TV broadcasters, podcasters to come together and say, we're sick of talking about this. It is so boring.
It makes us want to die.

Speaker 3 Please just fix it so we don't have to talk about it.

Speaker 2 You know who's going to help us with that? Our audiences.

Speaker 2 People keep saying it's boring. I'm interested.

Speaker 2 I think the gamesmanship is kind of interesting. I think it's fascinating.
It's really. It's a lot of game theory.
Yeah, it's game theory. It's real negotiations.
It's real snakes.

Speaker 2 What happened to my friend? I think

Speaker 2 what's also exciting to me about a two-treck strategy is you get to do something.

Speaker 2 You get to do something that's, I think, classically American, which is you kick the can down the road and raise the stakes, which is a classic American. Kick the can, raise the crisis.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but we're like make it worse. But we're at season six and everyone's lost the plot.

Speaker 3 It's Westworld all over again.

Speaker 2 It's Westworld. It's Westworld all over again.
It's Westworld all over again. It's all again.

Speaker 2 Anyway, your mind is the scene of the crime. Speaking of entertainment.
Different thing.

Speaker 2 Axios reports that Tucker Carlson is about to go to war with Fox News in order to get out of his contract, which is basically paying him $20 million to not work for any competitor or himself until 2025.

Speaker 2 Tucker's apparently thinking about starting his own media venture. He's approached Elon Musk about working together.
Of course he did.

Speaker 2 And a friend said that when it comes to Fox, Tucker, quote, knows where a lot of bodies are buried and is ready to start drawing a map.

Speaker 2 I don't, they keep saying this thing that, like, what, what fucking bodies over there? What do we not know about this heinous right-wing fascist or something like that? Is it actual bodies?

Speaker 2 Like, is it actual corpses?

Speaker 2 Because it actually, what it feels like, what Fox News feels like right now. Do they bury Roger Ailes under the

Speaker 2 newsroom? Like,

Speaker 2 how it's felt watching this over the last six months is like

Speaker 2 a graveyard after a hurricane and all the bodies have kind of come fully up already. Like, what bodies are left? I'm crushing it today.

Speaker 2 I'm crushing it today.

Speaker 3 Here's what I know.

Speaker 2 What do you know? Every generation's a hero.

Speaker 3 You're Ellsberg's Daniel. Oh, my God.
You're Brockovich's Aaron.

Speaker 2 All right. You could be that, Tucker.

Speaker 3 Serpico in a bow tie. Tell the truth.

Speaker 2 The way in which Aaron Brockovich, Serpico, and Ellsberg are so different and just different analogies.

Speaker 3 Tell the truth. Tell your truth, Tucker.

Speaker 2 Tommy,

Speaker 2 I have a different take. Oh, wow.
I want Fox News to win this. I'm with you.

Speaker 3 You've always been a Fox fan.

Speaker 2 Because to Lovett's point,

Speaker 2 what else is Tucker really going to do to Fox that they haven't already done to themselves through various depositions and discovery processes over the last several months?

Speaker 2 But if Fox can somehow stop Tucker from having a platform for the next two years, I think that's a win for all of us. I think that's great.
Yeah, that's where I'm at, too.

Speaker 2 I want Fox to just hold the line on

Speaker 2 non-compete. Joke with you, Murdoch.

Speaker 3 Keep the faith. Jokes aside, I think what I'm most interested in in all of this is which mainstream media outlets are willing to uncritically print everything Tucker's lawyer says.
Bodies are buried.

Speaker 3 I got bare-knuckle brawlers standing by to fight.

Speaker 2 Allies, friends, sources close to Tucker. Everyone is offering Tucker money.

Speaker 3 I mean, the amount of posturing going on in these news stories that are just going unquestioned is notable.

Speaker 2 of the one of the reports that was said that daily wire is like i'm i've been waiting for the fucking tucker carlson uh tucker carlson caravan and the bench apiro caravan those places those people should meet in the middle i mean there is look tucker carlson will wind up on a rumble or a daily wire type outlet i think the question really is whether his non-committee prevents him from going to

Speaker 2 60 minutes

Speaker 2 washing new york times calm

Speaker 2 cancel culture run amok this week of the new york times pamela paul and tucker carlson have an author conversation They're doing one of those chats.

Speaker 3 I was watching CBS Sunday morning because I'm 75 years old this week.

Speaker 2 I didn't even get that thing. Do you have rabbit ears? And

Speaker 2 they had George Will doing a puff piece on Henry Kissinger. And I was like, what era am I living in?

Speaker 2 Do you saw that too?

Speaker 2 I did not see it. No, I saw Tommy tweet it on it again.
Sorry to do that to you.

Speaker 2 Anyway. Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 2 Anything that keeps Tucker Carlson quiet for a while, I'm for it. But you know what? Go at each other.
Burn the whole conservative ecosystem.

Speaker 3 My point is just like quiet is kind of a, is going to be a range because I do think he's going to have a podcast on Rumble or something like that. He's going to do something.

Speaker 3 It's a question of whether he's on Newsmax or the non-compete.

Speaker 2 Tweet a video and Elon will just like, you know, juice it. Juice it, promote it.
All right. Finally, the list of Clarence Thomas scandals just keeps getting longer.

Speaker 2 Harlan Crowe didn't just secretly pay for private jet rides, luxury yacht trips in the home of Clarence Thomas's mother.

Speaker 2 The latest ProPublica bombshell says that Crowe also paid the private school tuition for Thomas's grandnephew.

Speaker 2 And the Washington Post reports that Federalist Society goon Leonard Leo paid $25,000 to Ginny Thomas through Kellyanne Conway's polling company and asked that the paperwork have, quote, no mention of Ginny, of course.

Speaker 2 Can the Senate Judiciary Committee do anything about these scandals or any of the judicial nominations that are stuck in committee? Of course not, because Diane Feinstein is still absent.

Speaker 2 Jake Tapper made a point about this to Dick Durbin over the weekend. Let's listen.
All due respect, sir.

Speaker 2 You and your fellow Democrats were very ginger and very polite when it came to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and not pushing her to retire when you had a Democratic majority in the Senate.

Speaker 2 How'd that work out for you? How'd that work out for Roe v. Wade?

Speaker 14 Well, I can tell you that you can play these out and try to guess what the Supreme Court opinions resulting from it will be.

Speaker 14 The bottom line is, though,

Speaker 14 we have in the past

Speaker 14 had members of the Senate, I can think of a handful as I'm sitting here, Democrats and Republicans, who've been absent because of medical conditions for lengthy periods of time.

Speaker 14 I want to treat Dianne Feinstein fairly. I want to be sensitive to her family situation and her personal situation.

Speaker 14 And I don't want to say that she's going to be put under more pressure than others have been in the past.

Speaker 2 What is going on? I will say this. So, first of all,

Speaker 2 Dick Durbin is the person that has set off this.

Speaker 2 It was Dick Durbin's comments to CNN that set off the calls for Dianne Feinstein to

Speaker 2 retire. It was him telling a reporter, hey, I'm not going to be able to move judges through this committee.
We're deadlocked in a bunch of shit.

Speaker 2 This is creating a real problem that set off the firestorm of people calling for her to retire.

Speaker 2 So he's, there's a, I'm, I'm sensitive to the fact that clearly he is reacting to what the Feinstein people have been saying, which is she's not going to be forced out. He's trying to be delicate.

Speaker 2 But that being said,

Speaker 2 yikes.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, yeah, I agree with all that.

Speaker 2 Probably people would have noticed. That's why the nominations were held up.
They can count the votes on the committee at some point. Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 He went out there, but I'm saying he went out there and kicked it up. Well, he did in a very, in a very dick-durban way.

Speaker 2 Look, all of this is in a very dick-durban way.

Speaker 2 The velvetiest of velvet gloves is that he is approaching all of this. I mean, this went viral because of Jake's question, not because of Durban's answer.

Speaker 2 I get that these people are all collegial and they're all friends in the Senate. I get it.
I get it.

Speaker 2 You don't want to be nasty to someone who you've served with forever many years, but like, fucking, there's a lot at stake here. There's a lot at stake.

Speaker 2 Well, he goes on to say in that interview that when Feinstein put out in her statement that nothing is being held up, that he just doesn't agree with that, that her absence is being felt on the committee.

Speaker 2 They can't do these subpoenas for Harlan Crowe or for Clarence Thomas. It is slowing down the nomination process.
So he is saying that. I mean, look, I don't know why I'm defending Dick Durbin.

Speaker 2 Nobody's been like.

Speaker 2 Biggest Dick Durbin.

Speaker 2 I'm surprised by myself. Nobody knows.
Diane Feinstein should fucking retire.

Speaker 3 The reason, like, Durbin's answers, Durbin's sort of letter to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court about ethics, inviting him to come to the committee, was very frustrating and seemed incredibly feckless because it was

Speaker 2 RSVP, no.

Speaker 2 Not only not RSVP, no. Will not attend.

Speaker 3 He sent a scathing response. It was basically like, how dare you even ask me? Strict Scrutiny did a great episode on all the sort of ethics issues that you should listen.

Speaker 3 But the biggest challenge is because Feinstein isn't there, they can't issue a subpoena.

Speaker 2 They can't do anything.

Speaker 3 And so listen, setting aside the whole Diane Feinstein of it all, no one individual lawmaker's hurt feelings should take precedent over the work that we all send them there to do.

Speaker 3 And like the suggestion otherwise, this silly forced collegiality.

Speaker 2 She's 89 years old.

Speaker 3 Several years ago, there was a round of stories about her asking the same question at a hearing verbatim twice in a row.

Speaker 2 That's when people really started talking about this.

Speaker 2 I think the saddest part of this also is now we are now in, we have been in weeks and weeks of stories about a lot of people calling for her to retire, a lot of people questioning whether she's mentally fit and certainly whether or not she has the sort of physical stamina to ever return to the Senate.

Speaker 2 Through that entire period of time, she said, I will return, but will not give a date.

Speaker 2 That is really sad because it tells you that her health condition is very serious, that she cannot return to the Senate.

Speaker 2 So it is all very like, it is obviously human and it is somebody who is afraid to have their final moments in public life be defined by their illness and calls to resign. That is obviously sad.

Speaker 2 But but one person's ego and the staff's desire to protect that person's ego is not more important than confirming justices, getting these subpoenas out the door, and having full representation for California in the Senate.

Speaker 2 It's ridiculous.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 this isn't even potentially the worst of it. Like, you know, Diane Feinstein's making an argument that, oh, look at how many judges they confirmed.
And I, you know, this argument is like,

Speaker 2 we're getting through all the judges that can be confirmed right now.

Speaker 2 And, but

Speaker 2 down the road, there's going to be a roadblock. Of course, there's going to be a roadblock without her on the committee.
And then, of course, there's the Supreme Court stuff.

Speaker 2 But as Amy Klobuchar mentioned when she first talked about this, we need it for the debt ceiling too, potentially, right?

Speaker 2 If we get either Joe Manchin or Kirsten Sinema, one of them, to not be an asshole, and we required like, you know, 51 Democrats to be there or 50 Democrats to be there plus Kamala Harris, and we don't have Diane Feinstein, that could be a real fucking problem.

Speaker 2 Or

Speaker 2 it sets one card against us even further of having to need every vote.

Speaker 3 RoConna tweeted about how, because Senator Feinstein was absent, the Senate overturned a Biden rule that would cut pollution from heavy-duty trucks and cause all of us to breathe in worse air.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's a real, that has happened in the past. And yeah,

Speaker 3 it's not just about confirming judges. I mean, they can spin this all they want, but that's not the extent of the problem.

Speaker 3 More broadly on these Clarence Thomas revelations, it's now like multiple stories about Clarence Thomas in ethics. There was a story about Justice Neil Gorsick's selling a law firm to a big,

Speaker 3 selling real estate to a law firm that had a bunch of issues before the court. There's questions about Roberts' wife placing lawyers at big firms and maybe earning $10 million.

Speaker 3 I think what we're learning is that maybe decades and decades of really chummy coverage of Supreme Court that, you know, ends up in book deals and people being friends has not really served us very well.

Speaker 3 And maybe we need a little more adversarial work here.

Speaker 2 Sub-tweeting Nina Totenberg. I'm not sub-tweeting.
Take that, Nina Totenberg. I'm with you.
Everybody.

Speaker 3 We got to go a little harder with these folks.

Speaker 2 These people,

Speaker 2 got to reform the court. That's the only way out.

Speaker 2 They're not going to make ethics rules for themselves. They're not going to be, they're clearly not embarrassed by any of the reporting.
They don't feel shame on this stuff.

Speaker 2 They feel like they're above the law because the way that we've set up the system right now, they really are, unless we have, you know, 60 votes in the Senate to pass some reforms or to expand the court or to put in place term limits.

Speaker 2 Or

Speaker 2 we have enough senators to get rid of the filibuster. We can do it with a few more.

Speaker 2 Yeah, or if we have enough senators to get rid of the filibuster and like, you know, I mean, again, I would love it if Diane Feinstein could come back and we actually could subpoena Justice Roberts or Thomas and have them and then have them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and then have them be, you know, answer for themselves on national television. Great.
But real change, we got to fucking change the court.

Speaker 2 The Clarence Diamond story about the tuition is, I thought, thought, pretty funny because the only defense that it's not a gift for Clarence Thomas is that it was actually a gift to the child.

Speaker 2 It's just really funny to think about a billionaire giving a suitcase full of cash to some kids who didn't go to school. Like, as we all know, it's the child who pays tuition at school.

Speaker 2 Well, I think that was, and then, and Crowe's statement in response to the story was like, how could you turn like his love of education into something political?

Speaker 2 And I believe there's also his love of education.

Speaker 2 It's all education and Nazi memorabilia. And I believe that Thomas did disclose when someone else paid for part of this kid's tuition.

Speaker 2 So this is just the most amazing thing about the Thomas revelations is it's even forcing reporters from the New York Times to be like, yeah, I looked at it.

Speaker 2 No if, answer, but it's pretty illegal.

Speaker 2 They have no way to, they can't spin it into a they said, he said they said.

Speaker 3 Every defense of. He said they said.

Speaker 2 They said they said? Sure.

Speaker 3 Sure. Every defense of Crowe.
giving all this money to Clarence Thomas in a variety of ways has fallen apart.

Speaker 3 For example, Crowe gave an interview with the Dallas Morning News where he recounted how he first met Clarence Thomas, and it was Crowe offering Clarence Thomas a ride home on his private jet.

Speaker 3 That's how they met.

Speaker 2 They're just on a private jet. They're PJ buddies.
They're PJ buddies. They're PJ buddies.

Speaker 3 During that flight, we found out we were kind of simpatico.

Speaker 2 I bet you did.

Speaker 2 I bet you did. That's a direct quote.
I bet you did.

Speaker 2 You know, the other thing, too. I saw my copy of Mein Kampf fall out of my bag.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 He's a collector. He's a collector.

Speaker 2 It was a statue of Hitler.

Speaker 2 L.A. dad defying over there.
There's a little like, you know, those Statue of Liberty ones they sell at like the airport in New York? It was a Hitler. It was a

Speaker 2 little Hitler. Still out of his pocket.
It's a paperweight for his statue.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I got this at an auction. The funny thing, too,

Speaker 2 he's like, oh, so you caught a ride on a billionaire's private jet and then you had a great discussion with him, paying for the privilege of being on that private jet with your conversation, you know, like earning your keep as an interesting guest aboard this private jet.

Speaker 2 It's

Speaker 2 gross. I say it's gross.
RBG should have retired. And you know what? I'll tell you something else.
I'll tell you something else. We got all shit.
We got shit for that. I called them.

Speaker 2 I wasn't one of these ginger people. No, I'm just saying.
I'm sexist for calling Feinstein to resign. I'm sexist for calling for RBG to resign.
Listen, I have a position here.

Speaker 3 I'm not a tired to make it a trend.

Speaker 2 I'll call on old people to resign all the time. Can you find some old dude? Yeah, I got it.
Chuck Grassley. Chuck Grassley.

Speaker 3 You gotta get out of there. Strom Thurmond.

Speaker 2 Let me just say, I'm just saying, I was, I remember whenever you even hinted at the idea that RBG should retire, you were

Speaker 2 properly

Speaker 2 for notorious RBG, you were castigated at the time. I'm just saying, you look back at it.

Speaker 2 Okay, well, hopefully, our producers can find some clips of you

Speaker 2 calling for the RBG retirement. You can find it.
Olivia, you can find it.

Speaker 2 Go into the archives.

Speaker 2 To the archives.

Speaker 2 When we come back, Podse of the UK host Nish Kumar talks to Tommy about his new podcast and King Charles' coronation.

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Speaker 3 All right, it has been a wild week in the United Kingdom, which is why I am so excited to welcome the co-host of Pod Save the UK to the show. Nish, it is so great to see you.

Speaker 3 You are number one in the UK on Apple Podcast charts. Are you drunk with power right now?

Speaker 7 I'm drunk with power and I'm drunk with alcohol, Tommy. I don't know how much you know about British culture, but when things go well, we get incredibly drunk.

Speaker 7 And when things go badly, we get incredibly drunk.

Speaker 3 I love that. Let's all get pissed.
Also, I want to clarify to all listeners in the UK that I'm wearing this hat with Pat the Patriot on it, not to be a troll, but because I need a haircut.

Speaker 2 So just

Speaker 3 get that on the table. Okay.
King Charles had his coronation bash over the weekend. A lot of the stories I saw in the run-up to Saturday basically argued that nobody cared.

Speaker 3 First coronation since Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, there's a poll that said 64% of adults had no real interest in the ceremony.

Speaker 3 Did you end up watching, and do you think 64% of the country really just tuned this thing out?

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 7 I think that there is, there remains like a section of the public for whom the royal family are an incredibly important part of their of their lives. And

Speaker 7 I don't know if I can speak to 64%. I mean, I think in terms of who watched it, it would probably be more than that, just sort of out of sheer curiosity.

Speaker 7 I think whether you

Speaker 7 care or not, there are a lot of people that just tuned in. I mean, literally because they sort of took over all the TV channels, you know, like a supervillain does in a movie when they're throwing.

Speaker 3 I have images of like BBC broadcasters kicking down your door and shoving a TV in your face to make you watch. Like, I love the BBC, but God, they love these royal events.

Speaker 7 I couldn't agree with you more strongly on both of those things. Absolutely love the BBC, but yeah,

Speaker 7 they go hard. They've got a perma bona for

Speaker 2 the royal family and for coverage of the royal family. It's relentless.

Speaker 3 This is why I love your show so much because you guys had this really thoughtful academic on, and you were talking about federalism versus the monarchy.

Speaker 3 And I want to ask you more about that in a second, but you teed it up, I think, saying, but it's more difficult than just getting rid of these cousin fuckers, right? Which, you know,

Speaker 3 that kind of candor is the show for me.

Speaker 2 But before we get to that, there were a bunch of arrests of peaceful protesters.

Speaker 2 What happened there?

Speaker 3 When did London decide to outlaw peaceful protest on the streets?

Speaker 7 This government has kind of

Speaker 7 the sort of larger background to this is the... The government has passed a bill that specifically makes it more difficult to protest in this country.

Speaker 7 And some of that protest bill was on the back of some of the kind of climate protests that have been happening all over the world, but specifically in Britain, some of the climate protests that have been happening.

Speaker 7 The government have passed a bill,

Speaker 7 some of the terms of which allow police to set an appropriate level for protest, which I mean, I don't think anybody thinks is a good idea.

Speaker 7 But some of the new powers given to them in this protest bill seem to have been used on protesters. It's weirdly not actually just protesters that have been arrested.

Speaker 7 There were three people were were arrested in Soho on Saturday on a conspiracy to commit public nuisance and it transpires that those people were volunteers for a program run by Westminster City Council to distribute rape alarms to women who might be vulnerable traveling on their way home.

Speaker 7 And the reports that have come out today

Speaker 7 suggest that arresting officers claimed that they were acting on some intelligence, that those people were planning to

Speaker 7 set rape alarms off and throw them at the horses to make the horses go crazy and the this could not come at a worse time for the met police whose reputation in terms of uh handling particularly female members of public is

Speaker 7 you know is at an absolute all-time low uh and yeah with huge amounts of justification um so yeah it was a it was a very very

Speaker 7 it's that's a very specific thing that's worth keeping an eye on um as the days develop as to whether any charges are going to be brought. They've arrested

Speaker 7 some protesters. They even arrested a journalist who was filming the protest and who sort of filmed himself being arrested in a kind of weird sort of Blair witch found footage, horror nightmare of

Speaker 7 being arrested simply for that.

Speaker 7 Where he's trying to tell, you can see on the footage, he's sort of saying to people, well, I'm a journalist, and the police are just sort of going, no, we'll crack on with this.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we'll arrest you anyway. Yeah, every time we talk, I realize how similar our nation's problems are.

Speaker 3 Getting that balance right of allowing protesters to do their thing has been a real challenge for us the last couple of years, too. So

Speaker 3 the monarchy has existed for a very long time. That doesn't mean it's going to be around forever.

Speaker 3 On last week's Pod Save the UK, you and Coco had this great conversation with a scholar, and you talked to this labor MP about what it would take to get rid of the monarchy.

Speaker 3 Now, the only kings we have here in the U.S. are Elvis, LeBron, and Berger.
So help us understand how do we get rid of this family that just like won't go away.

Speaker 7 And let me say, as a representative of the United Kingdom, we would like to thank His Majesty the Burger King. Several of his embassies have opened throughout our country.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 we remain grateful.

Speaker 7 The interesting thing about having a conversation with someone like Amelia Hadfield, who's a politics professor that we talk to on the show, is that the mechanism for removing the royal family and moving to a republic is very complicated and would require almost certainly a referendum, which is, I think at this point, if you told the British people that they could either have a referendum or repeatedly be smashed with a cricket bat in the genitals, they would say, well, bring on the bat.

Speaker 7 Cricket's the most English of games, let's crack on with this. Just because I think we may be referendumed out.

Speaker 7 But for people like Clive Lewis, who was the Labour MP that we spoke to, I think one of the most important things in the short term is actually a reform of the royal family

Speaker 7 because The Guardian has done a lot of really amazing reporting in the last couple of weeks to show the extent to which the Windsor family has essentially, I mean, they've sort of basically

Speaker 7 actively been fighting to prevent scrutiny into their financial affairs.

Speaker 7 And Prince Charles's net worth is sort of estimated to be in the £1.8 billion region. But the truth is...

Speaker 2 Yeah, but the truth is,

Speaker 7 but Toby, that's also an estimate because they have fought any attempts to kind of really get full clarity on how much they earn.

Speaker 7 Just to set this in context, we know every single thing that every one of our MPs, who, like the royal family, are public servants, earns. We have the right to know that.

Speaker 7 We know, for instance, that our former health secretary, as we discussed when we had the chat on the bonus episode of the show, our former health secretary was paid £320,000

Speaker 7 to go on a reality TV show where he ate bugs for a while.

Speaker 7 But we have the right to know that.

Speaker 7 We have the right to know how much, say, Gary Lineker is being paid, who's a kind of presenter of football highlights on the BBC and who found himself kind of mired in a political row after he criticised the

Speaker 7 borders and migration bill.

Speaker 7 And we have, because he works for the BBC, we know how much the BBC pays him because the idea is we pay that money.

Speaker 7 And so the idea that the royal family is able to be opaque about its finances when they take money from the public purse is something that I think in the short term, I think a lot of people, regardless of how they feel about the ongoing institution, feel should happen pretty urgently.

Speaker 3 Yeah, sounds like our Supreme Court seems like there's some transparency needed here. Before we move on, have you seen this Twitter theory that

Speaker 3 people who believe that Megan Markle actually did attend the coronation, despite saying she was sticking around in California? There was a 79-year-old man named Sir Carl Jenkins.

Speaker 3 Apparently, he's a composer. He's got long white hair.
He's got a mustache. He's got glasses.
Your classic disguise get up.

Speaker 3 And many people are saying that Megan Markle just snuck in, dressed like this 79-year-old white dude. Care to comment?

Speaker 7 Yes, look, I'm afraid to say Sir Carl Jenkins is an extremely talented composer.

Speaker 7 Unfortunately, he has chosen a moustache and haircut and glasses combination that makes it look like Sasha Baron Cohen is doing some sort of bar-out-style prank movie. It is deeply unfortunate.

Speaker 7 And he did, he was pictured at the coronation.

Speaker 7 And yeah, I understand that there is a theory that Meghan Markle, that that people are saying Meghan Markle disguised if anything it would be fitting that the most high-profile member of the royal family who is a person of colour had to disguise themselves as a white man to get into the coronation.

Speaker 2 If anything, there'd be something like deeply apt about that.

Speaker 7 But I'm pretty sure even if Meghan Markle tried to get in

Speaker 7 heavily disguised, there'd be some sort of alarm that would have been set off. I think they might have put a chip in her.

Speaker 7 And if she'd set foot anywhere near the crowd, a bunch of alarms would have gone off and the Metropolitan Police would have thrown her in jail with the other, you know, criminal elements, such as people trying to give women rape alarms.

Speaker 3 I love this because, you know, the absurdity of this theory did not stop the New York Post from writing it up. So that's how I read all about it.

Speaker 7 So, well, I understand the New York Post is, I believe, at least philosophically, the bastard child of the sun newspaper in the United Kingdom.

Speaker 7 And I guess both of those newspapers have had a tenuous relationship with the truth of of the past.

Speaker 3 Oh, oh, tenuous at best. Okay, so back to a little more serious stuff.
So England just had some local elections. Yes.

Speaker 3 In the U.S., I think it'd be the equivalent of kind of like a city council or mayoral type position, but they're always looked at as a bellwether

Speaker 3 ahead of the next national elections. The Conservatives did quite poorly.
I think they lost around a thousand local council seats. The Labour Party gained about 500.

Speaker 3 The more centrists, Lib Dems and the Greens, Independents, they won two.

Speaker 3 A lot of analysts are wondering, given how bad a run the Tory Party, the Conservatives have had, from Theresa May to Boris Johnson's party scandals and handling of COVID to Liz Truss nearly sinking the economy with a budget,

Speaker 3 should Labor have done better? What do you think? How are you analyzing this kind of what we just saw?

Speaker 7 Well, the first thing I want to say is

Speaker 7 just briefly on Liz Truss, and it is good to be brief on her, as befits her time in office.

Speaker 7 She was at the coronation, and it's this weird spectacle that I guess an equivalent is you guys having one term presidents at the inauguration, and I guess it's the equivalent of this, but she's going to be at all of these events.

Speaker 7 And she was at the fucking coronation for longer than she was Prime Minister. Like, it was absolutely obscene that

Speaker 7 she got a ticket. But yeah, the

Speaker 7 Conservative Party lost 1,061 seats.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 there have been a lot of reports that they have encountered on the doorstep a lot of hostility to the legacies left by Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and that Rishi Zunak hasn't been able to detoxify the immediate legacy of his two predecessors.

Speaker 7 And you're like, yeah, of course he hasn't because it was like six months ago. Like amazingly, people in the United Kingdom are able to remember things that happened less than a year ago.

Speaker 7 And less than a year ago, a lady who, from what I can tell, huffed a bunch of crystal meth, read Margaret Thatcher's Wikipedia page and then built a policy platform off of it, nearly tanked the British economy and wiped £30 billion off the public purse.

Speaker 7 So that

Speaker 7 still continues to damage the Conservative Party.

Speaker 7 I mean, as to whether Labour should have done better, I mean, there was some sort of hasty expectation management from the Labour Party in the immediate lead-up to the local elections.

Speaker 7 And they were sort of trying to say, well you know if the conservatives lose sort of 600 to 700 seats that's a good night for us obviously the figure is a thousand which were some of the harshest predictions that people were saying would happen i think for labour the mood at the moment coming out of the labor party is beyond euphoric um and kirstarmer has said that these local election results are evidence that the party is ready for power but

Speaker 7 people who understand these things more than i do have been warning that the results are not completely clear-cut. They've got a way to go before they can be confident about that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I've seen a lot of comparisons to 1997 when Tony Blair had this massive victory and that was preceded by doing even better in local elections.

Speaker 3 But boy, my big takeaway from your answer there is, my God, am I jealous that you have an electorate that remembers things that happened six months ago?

Speaker 3 We're working on 30 days, man. Like, you know, like a couple of years ago, Trump was like, yo, storm that Capitol and kill some people.

Speaker 2 And we're like, people are like, oh, he seems like a decent guy.

Speaker 3 But I mean, to your broader point of like, okay, what will the Tories do to blunt whatever momentum labor has?

Speaker 3 It does seem like, like in the United States, immigration is a big emotional issue for conservatives.

Speaker 3 As we speak, people in Washington are very concerned about and preparing for a potential surge of migrants to our southern border because Joe Biden has to get rid of the sort of pandemic era rule that would essentially force everyone to be expelled.

Speaker 3 But for you guys, I mean, look, the last time I checked, and correct me if this has changed, the UK is an island.

Speaker 3 You can't just kind of like stroll up to London from another country.

Speaker 7 I genuinely, I would love for you to come and explain that to some of the people that live here, Tommy.

Speaker 2 Help me understand this. How the Tories made this such an issue?

Speaker 7 As far as I can tell, there is a section of people in the United Kingdom who believe that the country is connected via airport-style travelators that just bring a ceaseless stream of job-stealing immigrants into the country.

Speaker 7 It's become, but

Speaker 7 the key thing with it is that, like the US Republicans, the sort of

Speaker 7 the tail is kind of wagging the dog here. The Conservative Party is being led by a small section of its electorate.

Speaker 7 Conservative voters actually said that

Speaker 7 a poll of conservative voters found that stopping the votes was actually the kind of second most important issue to conservative voters, uh, ahead of cutting NHS waiting times. And that is

Speaker 3 stop the boats are the migrants who are coming from a polling. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 7 People are making crossings of the English Channel from France, and they're sort of

Speaker 7 they've turned stop the boats into our caravan of migrants. It's it's the bogeyman, and the phrase stop the boats,

Speaker 7 you know, sort of fits into this kind of

Speaker 7 campaigning pattern of the Tory Party and the Brexit campaign. You can boil everything down to three words: take back control, stop the boats, get Brexit done.

Speaker 7 These are the sort of key slogans.

Speaker 7 And I think Sunak is sort of hoping that stop the boats is his version of that, that he can sort of animate the Conservative vote.

Speaker 7 But I'm not sure how it's going to play in terms of winning over swing voters, because ultimately,

Speaker 7 you know, every element of the country is struggling you know you can't see a doctor there's going to be more train strikes over the weekend this the threat of more strikes from the nurses threat of more strikes than the doctors because public sector pay is still in real terms to recover from 2008 really that's how long standing a lot of these problems are and those problems are kind of

Speaker 7 as prevalent in the private sector.

Speaker 7 So with the whole country grinding to a whole, I think I just feel like there's a lot of people that are going to think, why the hell are you talking to me about boats when I can't see a doctor?

Speaker 3 Yeah, that seems right. I mean, it is remarkable how much scar tissue there is in both countries, the US and the UK, from 2008 and the financial crisis

Speaker 3 and everything that kind of came after. So there's this new book out called Johnson at 10.
It's about Boris Johnson's time as prime minister. Some of the excerpts are unbelievable.

Speaker 3 It says he referred to himself as the Führer. It's probably not something I'd call myself.
He called himself the king. I think you already have one of those.

Speaker 3 It describes him as having no vision for how to govern, talks about fights with his wife, his top advisor, Dominic Cummings, this like Karl Rove, Steve Bannon, creep.

Speaker 3 Are these revelations seen as explosive? And do you think there's any chance it will change opinions about Boris Johnson?

Speaker 3 Because over here, there's a book a minute about Donald Trump with some new revelation, and his approval rating is at 42% in perpetuity.

Speaker 7 I don't think this is going to change anybody's minds. I think it is a really valuable.

Speaker 7 Look, I think ultimately all of these things are really valuable historical documents.

Speaker 7 So the book's written by a guy called Sir Anthony Seldon, who's been writing about British prime ministers for 40 years. And

Speaker 7 he's actually a head teacher as well. So the whole thing,

Speaker 7 it plays like this kind of report card you get

Speaker 7 when you leave office. And the thing with Boris Johnson is so much

Speaker 2 of

Speaker 7 his kind of incompetence is kind of priced in

Speaker 7 I get a lot of stick here from various people including a lot of journalists for

Speaker 7 drawing parallels between Johnson and Trump

Speaker 7 but there is a huge amount of common ground between the two men you know not just the like repeated uses of racist language not just the

Speaker 7 building of their brands through the media and kind of the use of celebrity cultivated by entertainment television that they've then leveraged into political power.

Speaker 3 Our countries are both stuck in this weird place where we threw our leaders overboard, you know, Trump and Boris Johnson, but they won't go away.

Speaker 3 It's like you threw a party, that drunk guy is still there, he keeps turning up the music, he's hitting on your girlfriend.

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 3 what do we do here? How do we get them to take the hint?

Speaker 2 Do you have any ideas that we could borrow?

Speaker 3 Because I think you guys have done a little bit better job, but Richie Sunak, the current Tory prime minister, hasn't, for example, thrown Johnson out of the party itself.

Speaker 7 No, I mean, he's

Speaker 7 where possible, he's sort of trying to distance himself from Johnson, which is very difficult to do because he was Boris Johnson's chancellor.

Speaker 7 So notionally, he was the second most powerful person in that government. So it is extremely difficult for him to distance himself from that.
But I think the similarities between the two

Speaker 7 projects, I mean, which doesn't, it doesn't feel like you should even call it a project.

Speaker 7 But between the two shit shows, one of the key similarities, I think, is both of them kind of approached a scorched earth policy to their own parties.

Speaker 7 So either you got in line or you were bounced out. And what that means is they've created sort of power vacuums in the Republican Party and the Conservative Party.

Speaker 7 And so you've got this situation where, you know, potentially dissenting voices were purged.

Speaker 7 And so you're now left in a situation where everybody involved in the party was very much signed up and part of it. And so it's very difficult to distance themselves from those leaders.

Speaker 7 I mean, the only thing that's going to help

Speaker 7 here, I think, is getting them out of office. But as we've seen in America, you know, you did vote him out.
You got rid of him, you survived an attempted coup d'etat.

Speaker 7 It is weird how often I think, do you remember that time when like some Nazis tried to steal America? Like it's it

Speaker 2 comes to me in waves. It was a really strange thing.

Speaker 2 Late at night, lots of waves.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it was a terrible thing. And it's just deeply frustrating that a big chunk of the country doesn't look at that memory or think about that history and think, that was really bad.

Speaker 3 Let's not do that again. That's all I'm asking.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 But if you have the kind of apparatus of a media machine you know that regardless of you know all of those revelations in the Vanity Fair article about Rupert Murdoch and his contempt for Trump didn't stop him from eventually completely signing up to to it wholesale and Trump was this kind of careering freight train that Murdoch forgot he was responsible for setting off from the station you know it's it's the same thing in this country you know the the daily mail the sun newspaper which is a murdoch paper they all have done such an aggressive PR job.

Speaker 7 And even the day Boris actually officially left office, the Sun and the Mail both had headlines to the effect of, how could the Conservative Party do this?

Speaker 7 So they were trying to take root that sort of betrayal narrative as he was leaving office in an absolute cloud of disgrace because it's not just the parties that caused Johnson to go.

Speaker 7 There was also a conservative called Chris Pincher who'd been accused of sexually sexually harassing various people who worked for the Conservative Party and Johnson was warned about this and when he was warned about it he he said pincher by name pincher by nature and then gave him a fucking job so it wasn't even just the parties it was a total kind of cloud of disgrace he was removed from office in but if you then have newspapers essentially telling the country that this person was turfed out for no good reason, you end up in a situation that you guys are in as a country where you have this like like lunatic who mismanaged covid

Speaker 7 caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people then tried to kind of lead a fascist coup and people are still thinking well maybe 2024 yeah exactly exactly well uh nishkumar that is why podse of the uk is so critical because you are the leading edge of the spear that is going to take down the murdoch empire

Speaker 3 We heard it here first.

Speaker 7 I don't believe he could be killed, Tommy. I don't believe he could be killed.

Speaker 3 He's very old. Well, the guy in succession died.
Spoiler alert.

Speaker 2 Spoiler alert.

Speaker 7 That's, I think, because Jesse Armstrong is not just a great writer, but a deeply moral man.

Speaker 7 And I think he's hoping Logan Roy, some sort of voodoo doll, that if he gives a heart attack to it, it might take down Murdoch.

Speaker 3 Oh, I'm just going to not comment on that.

Speaker 3 Mish, thank you so much. It was great talking with you.
And everyone, subscribe to Pod Save the UK. It is a fantastic show.
We have so many shared problems. I think there are shared solutions.

Speaker 3 We'll hear about both, but also you're just going to laugh a lot. So I think we all need to laugh so we don't cry.

Speaker 7 Thanks, Toby. You're the best.

Speaker 2 Thanks to Nish Kumar for joining us today. And we'll talk to you guys later.

Speaker 3 Thanks to the Calamaris, too.

Speaker 2 Thanks to the Calamaris as well.

Speaker 2 Pod Save America is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez.
Our producers are Andy Gardner-Bernstein and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Speaker 2 Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis.

Speaker 2 Thanks to Hallie Kiefer, Madeline Herringer, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support.

Speaker 2 And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Mia Kelman, Ben Hefcoat, and David Toles.

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Speaker 9 Hey, weirdos, I'm Elena, and I'm Ash, and we are the host of Morbid Podcast.

Speaker 10 Each week, we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 9 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

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