DeSantis World Bore

At the University of Arizona, we believe that everyone is born with wonder.

That thing that says, I will not accept this world that is.

While it drives us to create what could be,

that world can't wait to see what you'll do.

Where will your wonder take you?

And what will it make you?

The University of Arizona.

Wonder makes you.

Start your journey at wonder.arisona.edu.

Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm John Favreau.

I'm John Lovitt.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

On today's show, Joe Biden gets pressure to negotiate with the debt-ceiling hostage takers.

Donald Trump says he might skip the Republican primary debates.

Ron DeSantis' gaffes overshadow his foreign trip.

Republican supermajorities continue their attack on democracy.

And I talked to Montana State Representative Zoe Zephyr about her Republican colleagues banning her from the House floor for speaking out against an anti-trans bill.

Then we break down President Biden's best jokes at the White House correspondence dinner.

But first, fashion's biggest night is here.

And just like every other year, John, Anawin Tor is sure to make this year's year's Met Gala unforgettable.

What is going on?

That's what I thought.

That's fun pivot.

What's happening?

But did you know that before she was an editor-in-chief of Vogue, Anna Wintor ran the fashion section for a little-known porn magazine called Viva in 1970?

Nice.

Nice tie-in.

We used a current event to pitch one of our shows, and we had a seamless segue.

It's a really good series.

Yeah, it is.

Great show.

Cricket's latest limited series podcast called Stift

is what we're talking about here.

It's about the rise and fall of Viva, the erotic magazine for women that rocked the publishing world in 1973, New York City.

With the team of feminist writers and editors behind it and porn king publisher at the helm, were they always destined for failure?

Usually I have a line here about full frontal male nudity, but it's not here today.

Sorry.

It's not here today.

Find out now by listening to Stift, available for free on your favorite podcast platform.

All right.

Let's get to the news.

We are barreling towards a catastrophic default that the U.S.

Treasury now says could come as early as June 1st.

House Republicans just passed a garbage bill that has zero chance of passing Congress, even if Republicans controlled both houses.

And now the president needs to figure out his next move.

Axios reports that there's a divide between Senate and House Democrats over whether Biden should negotiate with McCarthy, with over two dozen House members saying he should.

Those are Democrats.

Senate Democrats, on the other hand, will hold hearings this week to remind people that the House bill would force deep cuts to law enforcement, veterans, families, teachers, and kids, including taking health insurance away from 20 million Americans.

Just before we started recording, it's reported that Biden has just called McCarthy, who's in the middle of an official trip to Israel, and asked to meet with him and the big four.

So the leaders of the House, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and the Senate.

What do you guys think?

Should Biden negotiate?

Is this meeting, does it count as a negotiation?

Is it just a meeting about negotiation?

What's the best strategy for Biden over these next, I was going to say next few months, but now it basically could just be in the next month.

So first, it's funny.

He's in Israel.

It's like, but enough about this intractable dispute.

Let's talk about Israel and Palestine.

First of all, I find all this talk about will Biden negotiate?

Will Biden not negotiate?

I understand why that's the way it's described, because actually, in fairness, Everyone describes it that way, Democrats, Republicans, and the press.

The reason it is described that way is because it's one of the lessons when in the past, Democrats have agreed to negotiate negotiate over the debt ceiling.

We feel like we got burned rightly because you're negotiating with people holding a gun to the head of the economy.

So now Democrats take pride in saying we won't negotiate over this.

The press report it that way.

And then Republicans get to say, come on, negotiate with us, negotiate with us, come to the table, which if you're not paying attention is, I think, a more reasonable seeming position.

The reality is that everyone is negotiating.

Saying you won't negotiate over the debt ceiling is a form of negotiation.

You're just saying, in my negotiation over this issue, I will not move off of this line.

This is not a term I'm willing to debate with you.

And even Biden himself had said previously, correctly,

I'm happy to talk to Kevin McCarthy, but we're just not going to talk about the debt ceiling as

a pawn in this negotiation.

Yeah.

What do you think, Tally?

I mean, I think just first of all, I'm genuinely worried about a default.

I think it's a real risk.

I find it so odd that like financial markets aren't really pricing a day and everyone's just kind of bumping along and things going to be fine.

And I know Biden doesn't want a default.

I believe McCarthy when he says he doesn't want a default either, but I don't think McCarthy's steering the ship.

And that's why I think the negotiation about whether to have a meeting is so silly, because Kevin McCarthy is sort of papering over differences in his caucus with this proposal to cut $5 trillion in spending over 10 years or whatever it is.

But they're not even specifying what cuts they would make.

Biden's being asked to negotiate with a guy who's not really in charge of his caucus, who won't lay out what cuts he wants to make.

Like, what are we doing here?

I think that

it was smart of Biden.

I think the right move was what he just did, which is call McCarthy for a meeting.

I think what he'll probably say is,

I'm still not going to negotiate over the debt ceiling.

I will negotiate over the budget.

There is a budget process that's going to take place.

We have to fund the government by the fall.

I think the smart thing to do for everyone would be to punt the debt ceiling, do a temporary increase in the ceiling and punt it to past the government funding deadline.

And then if you want to argue over the budget and shut down the government, no one wants a government shutdown, but it would be a lot less damaging than a catastrophic default that would basically destroy the global economy.

Yeah, people, people should just, so yes, people should understand.

So there's two deadlines.

One is sometime in June, it keeps moving around.

Janet Yellen just doesn't know how much money she has in her checking.

But she's trying to,

and we've all been there.

So at some point in June, the government runs out of money, catastrophic default.

September 30th, the current government funding runs out.

And so by September 30th, they need to negotiate just a spending bill so that the government stays open so that there isn't a shutdown.

And because the two sides are at a very clear, you know, sort of, there's no Venn diagram overlap between clean debt limit won't negotiate and no clean debt limit must negotiate, the idea is you punt and you say, we will never negotiate over the debt limit, but we'll negotiate over government funding and the debt limit increase will be included as part of that.

The challenge is one is in June and one is in September.

These are not, these people are real deadline freaks.

So they'd have to either get this done by June or more likely in good faith agree to an extension.

But Kevin McCarthy, as you said, doesn't really have power over his caucus because the only reason he had trouble passing what would be a draconian and destructive spending bill is because for a lot of his caucus, even this didn't go far enough.

And I think McCarthy, if it was in private meetings with Biden, could probably throw out there, hey, how about a short-term extension or agree to a short-term extension and then make most of his caucus swallow it.

A lot of Republicans will vote against it.

But if he does, Republicans and Democrats, Democrats, I think that there's a good chance he doesn't lose his speakership just by going with a temporary extension to punt it past the government funding deadline.

And then Biden can say he didn't negotiate over the debt ceiling because he's doing it in the budget.

McCarthy can say they still have the leverage over Democrats to extract concessions and cuts around the budget process, and then everybody wins and we don't all default.

I just think for the White House's purposes, if you can get past this silly debate about whether or not to have a meeting or a negotiation and get to the substance of what these cuts would mean, which is what Chuck Schumer wants to do.

Let's talk about means testing Medicare and what that would do to people in this country.

Let's talk about the fact that McCarthy wants to repeal all the clean energy tax credits in the IRA, the big climate change bill that just passed.

And they want to take away funding for the IRS that actually will make the government money in the long term, right?

Which is why they've been very reluctant to include that.

to really spell that out because it hurts their deficit numbers because it actually would raise money by going to a business.

$200 million or $200 billion over 10 years or something.

Yeah, it takes it also just

government shutdowns are terrible things and they cause a lot of harm, but it is nothing compared to the harm of hitting the debt ceiling.

And so it does move it back into the realm of normal politics and a kind of normal debate.

It moves it back into the realm of normal crisis, normal fiscal crisis.

If I'm ranking them, it's like bad government shutdown, way worse, default, way, way, way worse, repealing all the climate change measures we just put in place and watching the planet burn over the next decade.

So not a lot of good options here.

Yeah, I do wonder.

Default might be even worse.

I mean, default is whew.

I'd rather have a default, I think, than IRA go away.

I don't know.

Well, you know what?

I don't want either.

And I think we can hopefully avoid either.

I do like, you know, we were talking about this a couple of weeks ago, whether or not McCarthy passed.

So McCarthy passing this dumb message bill.

And

it's like, it's a message bill, but twist, all the ideas are unpopular.

So we've passed a message bill that makes us look terrible.

But whether or not McCarthy passed this,

the fact that he did makes him a little stronger.

He'd have been much more weak if it hadn't passed.

He would have had to pass a clean extension.

I don't know that, but regardless, this was always ending in the same place.

Whatever is going to pass both the House and the Senate, it will probably pass the House with more Democratic votes than Republican votes.

So McCarthy has to be able to propose something on the House side that will not cost him his speakership, but will likely have a lot of...

Democrats behind it.

And to me, like whether or not you may get a clean extension, but there also might be some other fig leaf or some other thing he gets, something along the lines of what like the freedom, not the freedom caucus, the problem solvers caucus is looking, some commission, some commission or control on spending or some reduction during the interim or some concession that just gets you out of this impasse.

He took government funding.

He took the biggest victory lap for passing one bill that I've ever seen, one of the most unpopular bills he could have passed.

I will say, too, I think that if Joe Biden is going to go down the path of I'm definitely not negotiating over the debt ceiling, which I think is the right option, he should have in his back pocket a unilateral option, whether it's mint the coin, whether it's the 14th Amendment, whatever it is.

Because I think we will get closer.

We're going to get much closer to defaults that I think than we were in 2011 because

I don't think that

Democrats were actually willing to allow.

Barack Obama to offer some concessions around the debt ceiling in 2011 before we were all burned by it.

I think the Democratic caucus at this point will not let Biden do this.

Anyway, we'll see what happens.

Everyone, put your money in your mattresses.

One person who's been uncharacteristically quiet about the dead ceiling drama is Donald Trump, who made some news at a rally in New Hampshire when he announced that he's officially swapping Sleepy Joe for Crooked Joe.

Big news, no.

The real news was when he said he might skip the Republican primary debates altogether.

Let's listen.

But so these debates, you know,

Nixon and Reagan and

Bush, Bush number one,

others.

No, they didn't debate in the primaries.

They didn't debate.

I mean, seriously, you look at the boards and you see these things, 1%, 1%, 2%, 1%, 3%.

And you're looking at these numbers,

and we're at 60% and 70%.

Why would you do that?

You want intelligent people, don't you, to be running your country.

So,

obviously, if Trump skipped the debates, it would be terrible for the content business.

But would it be smart for Trump?

Do you guys think he's really threatening to skip debates or is he just using this for leverage to get the venue, the hosts, the time and place he wants?

Because normally, I mean, you do often see frontrunners either want to not debate or want to debate less, but Trump is not your standard frontrunner.

He is an attention seeker above all else.

Like he's a frontrunner who's currently wailing on Ron DeSantis, his distant, distant opponent, all day, every day.

So I wonder if he's really going to would skip these events if they occurred, because I don't remember 2016 primary debates that well, but I remember him kind of dominating the conversation and dominating most of the events.

Yeah, I,

first of all, so he's doing a CNN town hall.

It's in like this week.

Next week.

Yeah, next week.

Or next week.

But that's just him.

But that's just him.

A network he spends all day railing against or saying is terrible, but they come to him with a good opportunity.

He's going to take it.

I think it depends on where the polling is.

If he's still, if he's looking at polling where he's way up ahead, he might consider not going.

But he also might see them do one that he's not a part of and worry that it's good for these guys, that he's not there.

He also believes he won every debate he's ever been a part of.

So I think it'll be, I think he is using it as leverage, right?

Saying you won't go puts you in a pretty good position.

But I don't know that whether he's bluffing or not,

I think he gets to make the decision as to whether or not to debate if he just, if it, if he thinks it's good for him five days before.

If he was doing this with Joe Biden about general election debates, I would say, yeah, he's bluffing.

He's trying to extract some concessions here.

I just wonder, like, I think there's very little risk for him in actually skipping these Republican primary debates because, like, a couple things.

Who in the Republican Party and Republican media is actually going to criticize him for skipping the debates, except for the candidates, the other candidates running?

And to the extent they do criticize him, How many Republican voters will actually hear it?

Like, this guy now has, he is an attention seeker, but he gets more attention than any of them.

They're having trouble breaking through anyway.

If Fox does a debate and he doesn't show up, he's obviously going to do some big rally

and everyone's going to cover that just as much as they cover the debate.

I just think we don't know.

Well, it's funny, it's like part of the reason it seems possible for him to skip the debate is the same reason none of them has been able to mount a serious challenge yet, which is that if there was somebody with the power and charisma and

the political skill to really dominate a debate in a way that we get a bunch of good news cycles.

Yeah, you probably should be worried.

But John DeSantis, I mean, this guy

has the cadence of a phone book.

I mean, he's just not very good.

The risk is like

Chris Christie actually runs and he does what he did to Marco Rubio, which is throw a few hard punches and kind of get Trump in a tough spot.

Now, yeah, like, right, he has to get in.

He has to be serious about running.

Actually, he has to try hard for that to happen.

Yeah, and then I think it's like, and Trump's probably thinking to himself, if Christie's going to come after me, do I want to be on the debate stage when he comes after me?

Or do I want to just be at another rally?

And then I heard that he went after me.

These guys, though, they're now all right.

It's like Nikki Haley going after Vasantis.

Like, these guys think that they punch each other hard enough, it'll hurt Trump.

They are the worst.

I can't believe it.

Once again, we just have the worst place.

That's so embarrassing.

Both

of you are the best place, though, to get your opponent sick with the deadly disease.

Yeah.

It's a great venue for contagion.

Yeah, maybe if he gets

a new strain of COVID, he'll show up.

Yeah, maybe that'll be a good thing.

Catches the Zeta strain.

Trump also just got a notable endorsement.

Montana Senator Steve Daines, a close ally of Mitch McConnell, who's also in charge of winning back the Senate for Republicans in 24.

Why do you guys think Daines is backing the guy who lost the Senate for Republicans in 2022?

There's a really funny interview where somebody asked Jon Thun about why they would do that when this guy always attacks you and probably costs you the Senate.

And he's like, boy, I don't know.

You'd have to ask somebody else.

He did make the point that Daines is looking for allies anywhere and get it.

I mean,

you know, Trump in your tent pissing out or outside your tent pissing in.

I don't know what else you're supposed to do.

Trump pisses wherever he pleases.

He's got to go.

He's got to go.

He's going to piss in the tent, outside of the tent, everywhere.

He's going to piss everywhere.

He's not famous.

It's why he wears a diaper.

It's funny.

He's got a pee all the time, and he's not really good at holding it in.

It's funny.

Like, listen, first of all, let's just be clear that no one gives a shit about Steve Daines in this room or outside of this room.

But there are all these reports in Washington that are like, how could he do this to Mitch McConnell?

It's like, guys, if there's anything Mitch McCoddle understands, it's entirely cynical political maneuvering.

And if Steve Daines thinks this is going to help him in Montana or helps him sort of keep Trump from, you know, running Herschel Walker again, sure, he'll give it a whirl.

Right.

Yeah, he can try.

It's not going to work.

And I guess, and reportedly, McConnell told Danes it was fine to go to do it.

So, of course, he was being cynical.

But I do think now that, like, Democrats, it's going to make it easier for Democrats to label Republican Senate candidates as Trump approved MAGA candidates because now Daines and Trump are working together.

I'm sure the DSEC was so happy to hear this.

Yeah.

I'd say, yeah, the biggest.

The gift of Steve Daines.

I would say that, you know, the new Rick Scott.

The new Rick Scott.

Yeah.

There we go.

Yeah.

Donald Trump and staircases are the worst things to happen to McConnell this year.

Oh, boy, Jesus.

What else we got?

I wish you well.

Trump's main competition for the nomination just got back from a foreign trip that generated what I'm sure the exact headlines his team wanted.

Here's one.

Ron DeTetius.

DeSantis underwhelms Britain's business chiefs.

And DeSantis' overseas trip overshadowed by fight with Disney, which, of course, reminded me of our all-time favorite clip from a candidate's foreign trip.

Governor Rodney, do you have a statement for the Palestinians?

What about your gas?

Governor Rodney, do you feel that your gas have overshadowed your foreign trip?

It's the best.

What about your gifts?

I'll never not laugh at that.

I can't.

I think we should say that's Ashley Parker.

Congratulations.

She's a new mom.

Baby girl, I believe.

Yeah.

Congratulations.

Great stuff.

Still, it's just, Ashley has gone on to do outstanding reporting.

Excellent reporting.

One of my favorite Ashley clips of all time.

Tommy, did Ron DeSantis' gaffes overshadow his foreign trips?

It's so, yes, they did.

It's the readout, like the nicest thing someone said about him in the meeting of British leaders was like, he came across well.

But the second nicest was he was fine.

The other, the other, here are some of the other, here's the other quotes about him.

Looked bored, stared at his feet.

He looked spent.

Message wasn't presidential.

He was horrendous.

There wasn't any stardust.

There wasn't any stardust is such a funny thing.

I was trying to think about this.

Like, there are definitely similar culture war fights that happen in British politics and U.S.

politics.

And like Boris Johnson was more than happy to push racism and go after the trans community and do all the things that we hear from a lot.

But imagine explaining to someone in a foreign country why a politician is picking a fight with Disney.

Like it must be so confusing.

Which is popular not just in the United States, but all over the world.

Globally.

It might be one of the most popular companies in the entire world.

Well-known and beloved brands, yeah.

It's like, what?

Yeah.

Also, there's just something about the way DeSantis is going about this.

Like, I must establish my foreign policy bona fides, and so I'm going to go on a foreign trip and I'm going to talk to all the important people in other countries.

Like, what planet are you on?

Also, Ron DeTidious was just sitting right there for Donald Trump.

It's better than DeSanctimonious.

I'm going to DeSanctus now.

I don't know.

I don't think we've landed it yet.

None of them are great.

None of them are great.

I still like Pudding Fingers.

I like Pudding Fingers.

I'm a bummed Pudding Fingers guy.

Sure.

DeSantis also also went to Israel when they're in this sort of massive fight over the future of their democracy, too.

And he just sort of walked right into it.

What was he doing in Japan?

Dan and I were trying to figure that out thirty seven years ago.

He went to Japan, South Korea, the UK, and Israel.

And I think in Japan, at least he got a head of state meeting.

Like it's historically, I think the Conservative Party there and the U.S.

Conservatives have gotten along.

I think the Asia swing is like, hey, look how tough I can be on China and talk about defense spending.

And then you go to the UK to, I don't don't know, stand in front of Big Ben and take a pretty picture.

And then you go to Israel to make the evangelicals like you.

None of it went perfectly.

No,

I would say not.

His super PAC is also running a new 60-second quasi-announcement ad called Winner in the early states and nationally.

Here's a clip.

When the world lost its mind, when common sense suddenly became an uncommon virtue, Florida was a citadel of freedom for our fellow Americans.

Our rights are not granted by the courtesy of the state, state, but are endowed by the hand of the Almighty.

Florida is where woe goes to die.

We insist on the restoration of time-tested constitutional principles so that government of, by, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.

We will stand firm in the faith.

We will be courageous.

Here I stand.

I'm not backing down.

His voice is so annoying.

So annoying.

I went to Disney World and they didn't clap.

He's so shrill.

Tommy, you just returned from the free state of Florida.

I did.

I did.

Did you find any woke there or was it all dead?

While you guys were...

Just corpses of woke along the side of the road.

Just Goofy's dead body.

While you guys were palling around with elites in Washington, I was with the Salt of the Earth.

That ad.

So, like, it's a bunch of cuts of

kind of a mediocre Ron Ron DeSantis speech.

And then they cut images of people watching Ron DeSantis speak.

So my takeaway was, like, Ron DeSantis really likes to watch himself speak.

And then it's 100%

assumed knowledge.

They were also, they were watching, again, this is an audio medium, so you're not seeing it, but they were watching Ron DeSantis speak with frames on the wall of headlines that just say, DeSantis is a big winner.

And then one guy's just watching on his phone.

Like, that's the best image.

It is.

It is really interesting, right?

Like, I don't know who this ad is for.

It's not for, it is a very specific where woke goes to die.

Like, you don't know what that means if you're not really paying close attention.

So, this is an ad for like really, really

good.

Trump voters, super engaged, super engaged voters.

DeSantis curious.

But even like, even some of those voters, like when you say, uh, when common sense suddenly became an uncommon virtue, Florida was a citadel of freedom.

How, Ron?

You never tell us.

It was a, you're talking about COVID, I assume.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, we, we, where our brains are broken by politics.

So we know.

I only know.

Uh, yeah.

All the voters.

So just one thing else.

At the end of the ad, someone someone puts a DeSantis sticker over a Trump sticker.

Yeah.

But as I was looking at it, though, it's like, big man, the only time you're willing to take on Trump is when someone in your super PAC does it with a sticker.

Yeah.

And so they can't hear it.

There's not any words that say it.

It's just an image in the ad.

It is just like, man.

Putting a sticker over another sticker is not tough.

It's embarrassing.

If you're not actually going to say those words out loud, you have to put the sticker over Trump in the actual world, day to day.

Yeah, listen, I'm a little closer to this than you guys are because I did have a Uber.

You were in Florida.

You were on the ground, Florida, of course.

I did have an Uber driver who had recently driven one of Tucker Carlson's relatives while I was in Florida.

Tom Friedman Vitor over there.

Look at this.

What's the word on the street, Tommy?

The word was Lily Polter.

Anybody hear anybody talking about politics on your jet ski?

Well, I was just going to say that Ron DeSantis, the Calvary is coming, though, because in the Wall Street Journal today, there's an op-ed by one Mark Penn headline, don't count Ron DeSantis out.

And the advice that Mark Penn gives to Ron DeSantis is basically become 1990s-era Bill Clinton.

Sure.

He says, the governor needs to shift from being the king of anti-woke pro-lifers to being a responsible leader of character and competence who can fix the budget and write the economy.

Like, this is why Mark Penn is such a fucking idiot.

What about the Republican primary electorate makes Mark Penn think that that's what they want?

A responsible leader of character and competence who can fix the budget.

Who's clamoring for that?

Nobody.

No labels.

Bring me the head of Elsa.

That's what they're saying.

So Florida and other red states are apparently also places where democracy goes to die.

In Missouri and Ohio, Republican supermajorities are trying to make it harder for voters to pass their own ballot measures and constitutional amendments to do things like protect abortion access, allow workers to unionize, undo gerrymandering, raise the minimum wage.

In Iowa, Republicans are trying to take away the power of the only statewide Democrat left in office, Auditor Rob Sand, also known as Tommy Vitor's doppelganger.

And in Montana, Republicans voted to block Representative Zoe Zephyr, the state's first openly transgender legislator, from entering the House chamber because she criticized a bill that would restrict gender-affirming health care.

I'll be talking to Representative Zephyr in just a bit.

Obviously, these are very red states, but do you guys think these moves could backfire for Republicans?

Yeah.

Yes.

I think in the Ohio case, the question is, can you educate people enough about the fact that this is a measure to make it harder to pass a measure in the fall to protect abortion access in the state?

Yeah.

So just so people, so people know, because we should help out if you can, especially if you're listening in Ohio, grassroots activists in Ohio are trying to put a ballot measure on the ballot for 24 that would protect abortion access in Ohio.

Republicans in the legislature are like, we're going to change the law so that the only way for a ballot measure to pass is instead of having a majority pass it, you need 60% of voters to pass it, thinking that there's not 60% who want to protect abortion access, but there's probably somewhere between 50 and 60%.

So they're doing that in Ohio.

In Missouri, they're saying that you can't put a constitutional amendment on the ballot unless five of eight congressional districts approve.

And the congressional districts are all so gerrymandered that that would require all deep red congressional districts to approve.

Right.

So basically, what that means in Missouri is it's 50-50 if you're Republican, but whatever, 57 if you're a Democrat, because you won't win all those districts.

I will say, I do think it's a little bit of be careful what you wish for, because

if they don't think abortion is 60-40 in Ohio, they should probably figure out why they think they're so much more Republican than Kansas.

Because in Kansas, abortion was a 60-40 issue.

And if it's a 60-40 issue in Kansas, it's a 60-40 issue in Ohio.

So like, so, you know, we need to fight this thing, but also like they want to raise the threshold.

That's fine.

But I don't think that would mean that Democrats are out.

But also,

in order to raise the threshold, I should have said, that has to be a ballot measure.

And so that has to pass.

And that's going to, if Republicans pass it through the legislature, that will be on the ballot in August of 2023.

So the challenge will be getting people to come out to vote for what seems like a technocratic ballot measure that's about raising a threshold to 60% when in reality, it's about about telling people in Ohio, if you want to protect abortion access, if you want to make sure that this isn't a right-to-work state and let people unionize, if you want to raise the minimum wage in the future, Medicaid protection, anything that might come in the future, you have to go out and defeat this.

And so that's going to take a lot of organizing.

Yeah, it's going to have to become a,

very similar to the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, a campaign to educate the majority in Ohio that would surely want to protect their ability to pass those those measures by 50.

Hopefully, you can convince more people or more easily convince them that changing the rules in the middle of the game is unfair and a ridiculous thing to do.

But there is this broader extremism narrative that's happening in states.

I mean, you mentioned some of these things.

We talked about the six-week abortion ban in Florida that's wildly unpopular.

I barely understand what's happening in Missouri because the way it's sort of been reported, but Missouri is now telling adults that they have to go through 18 months of therapy before they can receive gender-affirming health care.

Not kids, not teenagers, grown adults.

The state is telling you you can't get health care you want.

Now, I'm sure a lot of women listening are like, yeah, that's what they've been doing about abortion rights for many years.

This is not new to us.

But in that instance, I think the Republicans would make a political argument that they are talking about the viability of a fetus and not the individual receiving the care.

In this case, you're just telling an adult, you can't get a surgery you want.

Well, they've been doing that too.

I mean, don't say gay.

In Florida,

they lied and said, oh, this is just about kindergarten or third grade, and you liberals are crazy.

And then it's it's now all the way up through high school.

And then Rob in Iowa, right?

So he's the only statewide elected official in all of Iowa.

He's really good at his job.

He is, before he was elected to be auditor, he was prosecuting white-collar financial crimes, including this wild conspiracy to rig the lottery.

That was really interesting.

You can read about it.

But so the Republican governor of Iowa hates Rob Sand because he released a report detailing how her office had misspent about a half a million dollars in federal money.

So they're changing the rules.

The Iowa Republicans are passing a law to limit what information he has access to him.

This is his job.

He's the auditor.

And to require him to get permission from the agencies he's trying to audit before he can audit them.

So these Republicans in the Iowa House are proactively pro-fraud, waste, and abuse.

That's the message.

I do think that it's both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do for national Democrats to start lifting up these examples and weaving them together in a narrative.

Because basically the argument is when you give Republicans full control of government, this is what happens.

They don't just pass bad legislation.

They don't just pass legislation that takes away your freedom to choose, your freedom to read the books you want, et cetera.

They take away your freedom to be heard, to be represented, to choose your representative, to change the laws.

They rig the game.

That's why Wind Tales you lose.

It's really extreme.

And I think you get a big coalition of people against it.

And Biden's been doing this a little bit.

I mean, he, you know, by inviting the Tennessee reps to the White House, lifting up their story about how, you know, they were thrown out of the body for protesting or standing with protesters.

I think it's telling a broader extremism story.

Politico has a great piece about how Biden and the Democrats are planning to make the red state book bans central to the 24 campaign.

You guys think that's a smart move?

Yes.

Yeah,

it pulls insanely well.

No.

But did the book ban, like the book ban is a symbol of this sort of larger extremist tendency and this anti-democratic tendency.

It's just everyone agrees.

And we've been talking about this for a very long time.

These Republicans got themselves into a bit of a moral panic and a bit of a mania and they went way too fucking far across the board.

And they talk only to each other.

We hear so much about the liberal bubble.

The conservative bubble has led all these guys to embrace, and it is mostly guys, these incredibly unpopular positions.

And they walk around like they're the antidote and they're the ones representing some real and true America.

What Ron DeSantis is doing is really unpopular, Banning books, telling people they can't serve, they can't come and do their jobs as representatives,

telling teachers what they can teach.

These are all incredibly unpopular positions.

The book ban, too, the book bans are such an easily accessible way to understand just how extreme these attacks are.

Because even if you're not, like if you don't pay attention closely to politics, if you don't follow political news, and you just hear that someone's banning a book that doesn't seem like any kind of an offensive book, you're going to be pretty pissed.

What are these people doing?

Even if you don't care that much about politics and you hear about book bans, you're going to be pretty pissed.

Like, you're going to, because what you're going to start saying is, these fucking people are weird.

They're weird.

And like, this is what they're focused on.

Right.

Like, I don't, I live a life.

I look at, like, it actually is to me that it's the...

You know, sometimes I think Democrats, you know, we go on, we make this case, these Republicans, they're extremists, they're a threat to democracy.

They're fascist, they're authoritarian.

I agree with all that.

But you go outside and the birds are chirping and the sun is shining and we don't feel like you live in some fascist and dangerous place.

This is is the opposite of that.

These guys are running around saying that gay people are going to come and they're going to fucking come and they're going to groom your kids at a drag punch.

What are you talking about?

What are you fucking talking about?

You might talk about this later in the interview, but there was a Montana state rep who suggested she'd rather risk her child committing suicide than letting her transition.

I know.

Like, if that's not the most outrageous example of extremism and bigotry and hatred you could possibly lift up to make a political argument against this party, I don't know what is.

It's wild.

Well, I will be talking more about that and everything else else that's going on in Montana after this.

We'll have State Representative Zoe Zephyr join us on the pod.

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Joining us now, the Montana legislator who Republicans silenced and then banned from the House floor for the crime of speaking out against anti-trans legislation, State Representative Zoe Zephyr.

Representative Zephyr, welcome to Pod Save America.

Thank you for having me.

Happy to be here.

So for people who don't know, can you talk a little bit about the piece of legislation you originally spoke out against?

Yeah, I was speaking out against the governor's amendments to Senate Bill 99, which is a bill banning gender-affirming care.

for trans youth in Montana.

That care began with disallowing state resources or state facilities to advocate for things as simple as social transitioning, which is like allowing a child to cut their hair short, grow it long, go by a different name or pronoun.

Then it also banned things like puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy, which it's important to note at that juncture that these are,

this is health care that is done in conjunction with a child's parents, with a therapist, with their doctor, in accordance with the guidelines by every major medical association in our country.

So it banned that care as well.

And then how did your Republican colleagues respond to your criticism?

So they responded, I think, via their majority leader the way we responded when someone feels like they didn't like a particular comment.

The majority leader stood up and said,

you know, that comment is uncalled for.

And

off they went.

We've done that when they have said a variety of things around hot button issues, including when Republican colleagues have insinuated that my existence itself is somehow sexualizing children.

And so how did it deteriorate from that to them banning you from the floor of the legislature?

So that evening, the Montana Freedom Caucus, which is a state chapter of the national far-right freedom caucus, put out a letter in which they intentionally misgendered me.

And in that letter, where they did that, they also claimed, you know, for civility and discourse purposes, I needed to be censured.

And the following day, the speaker asked if I would

retract or apologize for my remarks.

And I said, I spoke to the real harms.

I stand by my statements.

These bills kill my community.

And that evening, he told me he would no longer recognize me going forward.

And when I tried to speak on the next bill on Thursday, April 20th,

he refused to recognize me.

And so your comment was that bills like this have been shown to lead trans youth to take their own lives.

And because you said that, they thought that it was right to ban you from the legislature.

When we talk about legislation, it's important to acknowledge that legislation like this, anti-trans legislation that bans our art, art forms, bans our books, histories, allows people to be cruel to us in schools or takes away our health care, they create conditions of daily life that make it incredibly difficult for trans people to have the joy and sort of meaning that comes when we're allowed to have access to those things.

And so when I spoke to these harms, I was talking about not just the statistics.

And we know that trans youth who access gender-informed care have a 73% reduction in suicidality, But I was talking about real impacts, people in my life who I'd lost to suicide, Montanan families who had called me.

There was one ER doctor who wrote us and said they saw a trans teen

came in for a suicide attempt.

And in their discussion with that trans teen, the teen kept saying, my state doesn't want me.

We heard examples of a trans teen who attempted to take her life while watching a hearing on one of these anti-trans pieces of legislation.

And when I spoke, I was talking about those kinds of things, the real harm that this legislation brings to real Montanans.

You decided today to file a lawsuit with the ACLU challenging your censure.

How do you feel about your chances of winning?

You know, I think it's really clear that

to target me for my speech and debate on the House floor is a violation of my First Amendment rights.

But more importantly,

when the Speaker chose to no longer recognize me,

what he was doing is also taking away the voice of the people who elect me.

He was undercutting the very first principles.

of our democracy, which says we have the right to democratically elected representatives.

We send them

to go to their legislatures and their capitals to speak on our behalf.

And so to me, I think, you know, I feel like there's a good chance that the courts will recognize this for what it is, which is unconstitutional and quite frankly, anti-democratic.

I'm curious, what's been the reaction among not only your colleagues and your constituents, but people throughout the state of Montana?

There has been, I think, two parts.

One, a little bit of shock and frustration at that they would actually go as far as as to undercut our democracy to to silence someone who opposed their legislation but i think people also see

that the world turned its eyes to montana in this moment and saw this move for what it was saw it as an attack on democracy and the vast amount of people who have recognized that i am getting emails and text messages and dms

not just from progressives, not just from senators.

I'm getting conservatives coming to me and saying, you know what, I typically disagree with you, or maybe I even would have voted for that bill, or, you know, military vets all saying, but listen, despite all that, I see this for the attack on our democracy that it is.

Republicans have honed in on the trans community in part because they think these tactics will work on Americans who have less understanding of the trans community, perhaps.

Do you think that Democratic leaders in general, both in Montana and around the country, have a strong enough message to counter that?

Are they doing enough to fight that?

You know,

I will always say that there is more that can be done in defense of the trans community until the day that we don't see any of these attacks on our community.

So there's always more on that side of things that can be done.

But I think what we'll see is what we saw with gay rights, which is as people come to understand that trans people aren't boogeymen.

We're your neighbors.

We're your colleagues.

We're your friends.

As people come to recognize that and more and more people have trans people in their lives, I think we'll start to see these bills fade away.

because they're not popular already.

And the more people come to know trans people and understand us, the less popular they'll be.

I saw that President Biden just met with the Tennessee three, the lawmakers in Tennessee, who were expelled.

Have you heard from the White House yet?

I have not, but I also have been in Florida meeting all day today.

So if I have and I don't know, I'm sorry.

But no, I haven't heard anything that I'm aware of yet.

Republicans with supermajorities in states like Montana seem to be taking these extreme anti-democratic actions more frequently.

Do you think this will generate enough of a backlash to break the supermajority in your state?

And have you been talking with other Montana Democrats about a strategy to sort of break the supermajority in Montana?

How do you see that playing out both in your state and across the country?

You know, I think what we're seeing is that marginalized groups who are impacted the most by this by legislation, whether that's me being targeted by anti-trans legislation, whether that is the Tennessee III and people coming in and talking about gun violence and the impact it has on their communities.

Whether it's the American Indian Caucus in my state, who were one of the first groups to come to my defense and they said, hey, you know, this is targeting a trans person in a moment where the far right is targeting trans people.

But remember, you know, this is part of a long trend of targeting marginalized communities and lashing out when

they rise up in defense of their community.

So

people are starting to see that.

And I think there is

a path forward to move away from this kind of legislation.

But it starts with people recognizing the attacks for what they are, that it's not just a policy disagreement.

It's an example of what will the right throw away in order to achieve an ideological goal.

And what we're seeing in Tennessee, in Nebraska, in Oklahoma, Representative Maury Turner, and here in Montana, is that they're willing to throw away first principles of our country.

And that should be concerning to American citizens.

And I think we'll see a shift because of that.

What would you say to trans youth who are living in some of these deep red states and probably pretty scared right now?

When Senate Bill 99 first came to the floor, I spoke to the camera and the first thing I said was, please stay alive.

And the reason I said said that is because

I know

I see the polling shifts.

I go through the communities.

I see the way in which acceptance for trans people is growing across this country.

And I know that that will ultimately lead to these bills going away.

I know that many of these bills will fail in courts.

And so, for example, SB 99 in Montana, it goes into effect on October 1st.

I am confident confident that it will go to court before then.

And so what I tell trans youth is understand that yes, there is cruelty here in this moment.

And yes, it is very scary.

But we will persevere and we will ultimately win in the end.

And so

have faith.

Keep your chin up and stay alive.

Representative Zephyr, thank you so much for joining.

What you're doing is courageous.

It's inspiring.

And particularly so because I imagine these last weeks have not been easy for you personally.

And for you to be speaking up not only for yourself, but on behalf of your constituents and for trans youth everywhere is really admirable.

And we're lucky that you're doing that work.

So thank you.

Thank you so much.

It's easy to stand tall when you're on the right side of history.

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All right, before we go, we wanted to play some of President Biden's best jokes from Saturday's White House correspondence dinner, which is the most important weekend all year, to be seen in Washington, to see and be seen, which is why Dan and Lovett

and I, we all made a brief appearance.

Tommy didn't think it was that important.

He wanted to be with the people.

We had a great party.

We had a party.

An event.

As Shaniqua said, parties have music.

Now,

I was told

you guys served

soup at a standing-only event.

Mike O'Neill actually served the soup.

Our good friend Mike O'Neill for some reason.

He volunteered to ladle the soup.

A lot of lessons.

Is that a good finger food?

We also tried to keep Susan Rice out.

Susan Rice was stopped at the door.

They said, We're at capacity, and she said no.

Which was awesome, which is pretty cool.

And then, and then she got in, which is why that's you don't fuck with Susan Rice.

Shaniko and our whole policies team did a fantastic job.

That was fucking on a great event.

Our event was cool.

The other ones were a lot.

You know, that's what we're going with.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We do not care about the hypocrisy.

All right.

Let's play.

Let's play some of Joe Biden's jokes.

After all, I believe in the First Amendment.

Not just because my good friend Jimmy Madison wrote it.

Call me old.

I call it being seasoned.

You say I'm ancient.

I say I'm wise.

You say I'm over the hill.

Don Lemon would say that's the man in his prime.

Nice.

I do think it's hard to listen to Joe Biden now and not hear the Tommy AI version of Joe Biden.

I

think that's a little easier to understand the Tommy one

sometimes.

I did think that,

you know, you always hold your breath a little bit when Joe Biden gets up there.

His delivery was excellent.

Look,

I've talked about Joe Biden.

Sometimes watching him speak is like watching a small airplane in a dangerous weather condition.

He did fucking awesome.

He was so, I was, he like like crushed it.

He did a really, really good job.

He had some good Ron DeSantis jokes.

Let's listen to this.

At Ron DeSantis, I had a lot of

Ron DeSantis jokes ready.

But Mickey Mouse beat the hell out of me.

He got there first.

Now, look,

can't be too rough on the guy.

After his re-election as governor, he was asked if he had a mandate.

He said, Hell no, I'm straight.

I'm straight.

I'll give you time to think that one through.

I would say that those jokes.

Those jokes go in the category of incoherent but still work.

Okay, I was going to ask you.

The first one, it kind of seemed like an example of where you like kind of tripping on the joke actually made the joke funnier.

Because he said Mickey Mouse beat the hell out of it.

It should have been Mickey Mouse beat me.

To the jokes.

Beat me to the jokes.

But that doesn't really make sense.

I had jokes about Ron Ron DeSantis, but Mickey Mouse beat me to them.

Mickey Mouse hasn't made jokes about Ron DeSantis.

Mickey Mouse has made a joke of Ron DeSantis.

Oh, really?

It's to me like the joke, math.

You know what I mean?

But you gotta love a good mandate joke.

Yeah,

it's a class.

It's an oldie but good.

It's surprising to hear a mandate joke from Joe Biden.

I enjoyed it.

It felt like outside his comfort zone.

Really stretching as a comedian.

Yeah.

I do think these

last set of jokes were his best.

Let's listen.

It's great the cable news and networks are here tonight.

MSNBC owned by NBC Universal.

Fox News owned by Dominion Voting Systems.

Last year,

your favorite Fox News reporters were able to attend because they were fully vaccinated and boosted.

This year,

with that $787 million settlement, they're here because they couldn't say no to a free meal.

And hell,

I'd call Fox honest, fair, and truthful, but then I could be sued for defamation.

It ain't nothing compared to what they do to me.

Look,

I hope the Fox News team finds this funny.

My goal is to make them laugh as hard as CNN did when they read the settlement.

But then again,

CNN was like, wow, they actually have $787 million?

That was great.

That would have been the best joke.

That was the best joke.

Yeah, so good.

Just

Fox always.

I'm just.

You should get in there.

I'm going to get in there a little bit.

Fox always gets it at that speech.

And boys, it turned out well for them over time.

Yeah.

I was watching the Fox table when he did those jokes and and the

deucey.

That's that because you were sitting with Axios?

I was home.

I got home by then.

I saw the deucey faces too.

And they did, yeah, they were, they looked annoyed, but then they did laugh at the CNN joke in the audience, which is everyone wins, you know.

All their faces are pretty frozen by Botox.

You're not going to get much out of those, any of those faces.

He had a hard joke about Kevin McCarthy, too.

Like the last time he voted on something that hapless, it took 15 tries of a McCarthy speakership.

Like, I was like, all right, Joe.

I know.

It took me a second to get that one.

I was like, what's he talking?

I was like, oh, the speaker vote.

Yeah,

yeah.

But he nailed him.

Nailed him.

We were talking about this before we were recording.

Joe Biden has

changed the setup.

So it's sort of a longer, serious section, tighter set of jokes, and then you close again with more serious.

And I thought that the, I remember hearing that he was going to do the serious stuff at the top, and I was like, oh, poor Joe Biden.

That's going to be tough to like, it's just tough to transition from something serious to humor.

But it actually worked great.

I mean, it was the right thing to do.

He spoke a lot about Evan Gershkovitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter who's being held captive in Russia and press freedom in general.

And he did a great job speaking about that.

And then the transition into the jokes was the Jimmy Madison one,

which is perfect.

Yeah, it got a better, it got a great laugh because it was just the perfect way out of the serious section.

There's also just something fitting about Joe Biden.

Joe Biden, who is this institute, is this like person who like has real,

who really values and believes in Washington institutions in an unironic way.

Coming back to this dinner, this dinner evolved, right, over a lot of years.

And

by the time Barack Obama spoke at it, it was very rote.

There was a formula.

You get up, you say hello, you tell some jokes, you do a serious close, you go, the comedian goes, everybody goes home, right?

The scholarships, you get through them.

You know, it's like, it was just a, it was very, it was, and sort of, then Trump comes in like a fucking, you know, cleansing fire and burns half the like normality out of the city.

And then some of these things start coming back.

And Joe Biden, it's sort of fitting that Joe Biden, as this sort of creature of Washington, who genuinely likes the parts of it that unironically that we would view as silly.

Like you get to talk to the people that are on both sides.

Everybody comes together.

It makes sense that he would kind of treat it in a more serious way and not do the rote formulaic thing of you tell your jokes, you go home.

It was a nice arc too, because he talked about Evan Gershkovich, who's being held in Russia.

He also talked about Austin Tice, who has been missing in Syria since 2012.

Yeah.

And presumed to be being held by the Assad regime for a fucking decade.

And, but he could say, and Brittany Griner is here tonight.

We got her out of Russia.

We're going to fight like hell for the rest of them.

So that was a nice arc to that story.

But to your point, Lovett, about sort of the roteness of this dinner.

I mean, it was remarkable reading the coverage of this White House Correspondence weekend from afar, reading about like the Property Brothers and the, what's the really popular Bravo reality show?

Vanderpump Rules.

Vanderpump Rules.

And then thinking back to like four years ago, all the sort of like self-righteous White House correspondence dinner rebirth stories about how it's now about a real commitment to the free speech.

And we had a historian speak this year because we're all so serious.

It's like, oh, yeah, all those problems are solved, gang.

Time to get the Bravo crew back.

We were there.

It wasn't any less weird in person.

I'm sure.

It's a real.

There is, yeah, it is a little bit like how.

There's a lot of like competitive party hopping and talking.

It's just like

it's a lot.

Yeah.

It's a lot.

Yeah.

It's...

It's good to, it's in and out.

In and out.

You know,

it is, though.

It's like, if the option is a world, a politics so fucked up by a right-wing authoritarian president that the city can't do these kinds of things and one where they feel kind of like they can get away with it, I prefer the one where they feel like they can get away with it.

Listen, you nerds, have your fun, have your weekend, do whatever you want to do.

I was there once, I had a great time.

But like, I did more than once.

I'm just thinking back to the

incredible, like, lesson.

We learned our lessons, you know, this was too opulent.

We're going to recommit ourselves to the principles that built this dinner in the first place, narratives from the Trump era.

Well, it's funny.

It's also just sort of like, this is why people hate DC.

I think it's low on the list.

I would say like insulin and housing prices probably higher up than the fact that like, I don't know, a fucking Atlantic reporter got buddy-buddy with a member of Congress for five minutes at a bar.

I get that people are rightly kind of uncomfortable with the fact that there are people that when the cameras off treat this like a game.

When the cameras are on, they act like they're enemies.

Like, I don't love that.

But also, like, the stakes here are not as high as some people would claim.

Yeah.

And we will, I'll see you all, hopefully, at the cricket party next year.

I mean, if you can snag an invite, it's a hot ticket.

I got to make sure I can, I don't have a wedding overlay.

Don't be in Florida.

I don't know.

I think

something about Tommy not being there really gave it a good feeling.

You guys, you guys have the best time when I'm not around.

Wisconsin.

Yeah.

D.C.

Where else have I been left out?

I don't know.

When War's a Trend.

You better clear your schedule.

We missed you, Tommy.

You were missing you.

Sure.

People asked a lot about you.

They did.

They did.

A lot of people asked.

There was a lot of Tommy.

We're not going to say it.

Where is Tommy?

But there was one person who was really interested in seeing Tommy.

Really interested.

Really interested.

All right.

Thanks to Representative Zoe Zephyr for joining us today.

Everyone, have a great day, and we'll talk to you Thursday.

Pod Save America is a crooked media production.

The executive producer is Michael Martinez.

Our senior producer is Andy Gardner-Bernstein.

Our producers are Haley Muse and Olivia Martinez.

It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show.

Thanks to Hallie Kiefer, Ari Schwartz, Sandy Girard, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support.

And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montou.

Our episodes are uploaded as videos at youtube.com/slash podsaveamerica.

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