"MAGA King v. RINO Loser."

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Speaker 5 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.

Speaker 6 I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

Speaker 5 On today's show, Donald Trump unloads on Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis hugs Donald Trump on Ukraine.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass stops by the studio to talk housing and crime.

Speaker 5 And later, Dan and I answer your questions on everything from oil drilling in the Arctic to the new season of succession. How's that for Range?

Speaker 5 All right, let's get to the news.

Speaker 5 Donald Trump used his first trip to Iowa to unload on fellow Florida man Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence of Hang Mike Pence fame, both of whom also visited the site of the first GOP caucus in recent days, with a new CNN poll showing Trump ahead of DeSantis by just 40 to 36 percent in a crowded field, though other polls give him a larger lead.

Speaker 5 The twice-impeached 2020 loser spent 10 minutes going after the Florida governor on the flight to Iowa, telling reporters on the plane that before his endorsement, DeSantis was, quote, dead as a dog, dead as a doornail, a dead politician, and that even George Washington couldn't save him.

Speaker 6 Would you say

Speaker 6 Donald Trump was beating a dead horse?

Speaker 5 Boo.

Speaker 5 Don't boo me.

Speaker 6 Boo Donald Trump. Don't boo boo.

Speaker 5 Or whatever.

Speaker 5 Later, at the actual event in Iowa, Trump said this during his first Iowa speech.

Speaker 7 Ron was a disciple of Paul Ryan,

Speaker 7 who is a rhino loser who currently is destroying Fox and would constantly vote against entitlements. He would just vote against, remember that, the wheelchair over the cliffs, the Democrats used it.

Speaker 7 The wheelchair over the cliff commercial, very effective. That was about him.
But Ryan, Paul Ryan's a big reason that Mitt Romney, I'm not a big fan of Mitt Romney, lost his election.

Speaker 7 And to be honest with you, Ron reminds me a lot of Mitt Romney. So I don't think you're going to be doing so well here.

Speaker 5 Dan, are you writing speeches for Donald Trump now?

Speaker 6 I don't know, but I'm kind of liking these speeches.

Speaker 5 Are you a persuadable voter?

Speaker 6 You're not going to persuade. He has persuaded me not to like Ron DeSantis.
How's that? If there was ever any question, I don't like Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 5 So Politico also reported this week that Trump's campaign is preparing a big opophile on DeSantis that includes an attack that, as a U.S.

Speaker 5 attorney, he was, quote, an extremely lenient prosecutor in cases that involved, among other things, child pornography.

Speaker 5 In that same CNN poll that I referenced earlier, DeSantis is the first or second choice of 65% of Republican voters. Trump's number is 59%.

Speaker 5 74% of Republican voters said they'd be enthusiastic or at least satisfied if DeSantis is the nominee. 71% said that about Trump.

Speaker 5 How risky do you think it is for Trump to go after DeSantis this hard, this early?

Speaker 6 I think it would be risky not to go at DeSantis this hard, this early.

Speaker 5 Interesting.

Speaker 6 Ron DeSantis is a Rorschach test for Republicans. Most of those Republicans who say they are open to him or enthusiastic about him,

Speaker 6 many of them couldn't pick him out of a lineup. Some of them, most of them have never heard his voice.
They just know, they just want.

Speaker 5 That's going to be a problem.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Wait till they do because it's not awesome.

Speaker 5 It's an annoying voice.

Speaker 6 You don't want to be run for president sounding like the most annoying person in someone's high school class.

Speaker 5 That's Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 5 We talk about the substantive things here.

Speaker 5 No theater criticism from us.

Speaker 5 No shallow analysis from this crowd.

Speaker 6 The optics. Worry about the optics, Ron.

Speaker 5 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 6 And so Ron DeSantis is an empty vessel. What he really represents is a MAGA Republican who can win, or Trump without the baggage.
That's all they know about him.

Speaker 6 And so Donald Trump is trying to fill in as much information as possible while Ron DeSantis is on his...

Speaker 6 behind rope instances tour of america speaking only to fox news and other mega media and And so he's trying to define him. And Ron DeSantis is not defining himself.

Speaker 6 And because you look at this from Donald Trump's perspective, right now in this race is

Speaker 6 Ron DeSantis,

Speaker 6 Mike Pence, someone whose murder is an

Speaker 6 undecided question in the Republican Party.

Speaker 6 There is Nikki Haley, who is a joke. And maybe Chris Christie may get in the race.
Like, that is who we're talking about here. And so if he, Ron, he's looking at this and saying.

Speaker 5 Mike Pompeo erasure.

Speaker 6 Who?

Speaker 5 Mike Pompeo?

Speaker 5 Wait.

Speaker 5 I only know about him because of Pod Save the World.

Speaker 6 Was he the CEO of Exxon, the one that Trump fired on the toilet?

Speaker 5 Oh, shitter. No, that's not.
No, he's the other guy. Okay.
That's sexy, Rexy Tillerson.

Speaker 6 You're on one today. This is good.

Speaker 6 Start 30 minutes late and you come in with some fire of energy.

Speaker 5 She needs a little more caffeine in an extra half hour.

Speaker 6 Trump realizes if he destroys Ron DeSantis, he walks the nomination. So he's going to go destroy Ron DeSantis before Ron DeSantis can do anything to define himself.
It's quite smart in my mind.

Speaker 6 And he's doing it in the exact right way. Make him an establishment loser.

Speaker 6 And like, that's, that's what the Paul Ryan thing is possibly an attempt to specifically win me over, but it is also to remind voters that Ron DeSantis is in with all the Republicans you hate.

Speaker 6 And he's like Mitt Romney. And what he means by Mitt Romney is not a guy who votes for impeachment.
He means a guy who can't beat Barack Obama, a guy who can't win elections.

Speaker 6 And so he knows that voters want a Republican who can win. And so he's trying to define him.
And he's doing a pretty good job, I think.

Speaker 5 I think I mostly agree with that.

Speaker 5 Here's the other side of what I'm wrestling with.

Speaker 5 I think Trump has never had a Republican opponent who is as well known and well-liked by Republican voters, including much of the MAGA base, as Ron DeSantis. He is not, I do not think he's Jeb.

Speaker 5 I do not think he's Marco. He's not Romney.
He's not McConnell. It is true that this DeSantis approval is untested, for sure.

Speaker 5 But I do think he is, I think it's hard to compare DeSantis to any Republican opponent that Trump has previously faced. So I think we're in a little bit of new territory here.

Speaker 5 I also wonder if Trump fires all his bullets now

Speaker 5 and DeSantis doesn't plummet in the polls,

Speaker 5 what's left for Trump? And at that point, doesn't Trump look like the worst thing Trump could look like which is weak that he couldn't take DeSantis out

Speaker 6 I mean there is a world in which DeSantis is just going to win this race if he doesn't screw it up where there are just enough voters who are sick of Trump you have these looming shoes to drop around multiple indictments and multiple elections like at any moment Donald Trump can stumble into having lunch with a white supremacists like all these things can happen and that may be the case but if Donald Trump wants to maximize his chance of winning it is to destroy Ron DeSantis as soon as humanly possible.

Speaker 6 And right now, there's no pushback. Ron DeSantis isn't saying anything back.
He's not fighting back. There are no ads pushing back.
He just has free reign and he's taking it.

Speaker 6 And maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but this is the right strategy in my mind for him to take if he wants to win.

Speaker 6 Because it's actually, it seems patently obvious to me that this is what you would do.

Speaker 6 And I know, I think Donald Trump, there is a world where other Republicans could pay a price for attacking Donald Trump because he is well known and well-liked, even among Republican Republican voters who are not planning to support him.

Speaker 6 And that can make you look like a Democrat. Donald Trump has free reign to be an asshole to anyone he wants in the Republican Party.
We know that from the John McCain stuff, everything out there.

Speaker 6 And so I don't think anyone's be like, man, that Donald Trump has changed.

Speaker 5 To your point, it would also be completely out of character for Trump to go easy on DeSantis right now to the point where it may lead a lot of MAGA voters to be like, is Trump weak?

Speaker 5 Did he lose a step? Like, what's going on? Why isn't he unloading on DeSantis? So, and like you said, clearly, if he defines him early as a rhino loser in the mold of Jeb and Ryan, then that's it.

Speaker 5 Donald Trump wins the nomination. It's over.
You talked about DeSantis not fighting back. Trump is also desperately trying to bait DeSantis here.

Speaker 5 He wants DeSantis to get down in the mud with him because if voters can say, eh, yeah, Trump's attacking DeSantis, but DeSantis is attacking him right back. They're both attacking each other.

Speaker 5 Trump always wins a fight like that. He always wins the fight where people are like, you you know what? Yeah, Trump is bad, but the other one's attacking him too.

Speaker 5 They're both fighting and I'd rather take Trump because that's who Trump is. We all know that.

Speaker 5 And so I do think that's why DeSantis is not fighting back right now, because if he gets down into the mud with Trump this early, then

Speaker 5 I don't know why people go with him over Trump.

Speaker 6 There are varying degrees of getting in the mud with Trump.

Speaker 5 There is...

Speaker 6 Responding, as DeSantis has done a little bit subtly about how he won re-election, there are ways to defend himself without getting into a manhood measuring size contest like Marco Rubio, right?

Speaker 6 Like there are different ways to do it.

Speaker 6 Most people will end up stumbling into completely demeaning themselves against Trump because he has no shame.

Speaker 6 But DeSantis is in a, well, we'll talk about this later, but I think there are ways he could be doing this that would be smarter than what he's currently doing.

Speaker 5 Yeah. We talked on Tuesday's pod about how Mike Pence recently criticized Donald Trump for almost having him murdered on January 6th.

Speaker 5 Trump responded on his way to Iowa by telling reporters that, you know, Mike Pence wouldn't have been in any danger if he had just participated in the coup like a loyal vice president should.

Speaker 5 And then Trump said, I guess he decided that being nice isn't working because he's at 3% in the polls, so he figured he might as well not be nice any longer.

Speaker 5 I feel like that's a fairly accurate analysis of Pence's remarks. What about you?

Speaker 6 Yeah, I mean, Donald Trump's logic is truly unassailable there. If Mike Pence had just given us his wallet, I wouldn't have had to beat him up.

Speaker 5 Like, it's just so

Speaker 6 if he had just engaged in the non-violent insurrection I suggested, there wouldn't have been a need for the violent insurrection. Like, it is, uh, it's a, it's an impressive syllogism, I guess.

Speaker 6 I mean, look, Mike Pence is at 3% of the polls. He's probably always going to be at something around 3% of the polls.
It's always going to be the explanation for what he's doing.

Speaker 6 You guys touched on this on Tuesday.

Speaker 6 Why he decided, after taking the high road with Donald Trump for years now after his murder, decided at a bizarre off-camera white tie Washington dinner where Washington media figures perform musical theater, did he decide to finally unload the core of his campaign?

Speaker 6 It is the most bizarre thing I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 back to your, you know, DeSantis' pitch is, I'm Trump without the baggage.

Speaker 5 Mike Pence's pitch is, I was fine with literally everything Donald Trump did until he tried to get me assassinated, and history will not look kindly on that.

Speaker 5 It's just like

Speaker 5 that's your pitch.

Speaker 5 I was with Trump up right up until the moment he almost got me killed. And then that was not a good thing.

Speaker 6 And it took me two years to come to terms with the fact that I was going to walk away with him.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Yeah.
So that's, you know, don't have a lot of, I would not be, I would not be jumping on the Pence train and put a lot of money on that one.

Speaker 5 So because Ron DeSantis was also pseudo-campaigning in Iowa last weekend, we got a piece from the Washington Post contrasting his style with Trump's.

Speaker 5 Quote: The Florida governor's unofficial pre-campaign book tour has consisted of more scripted and stage-managed events, while Trump's campaign is, quote, leaning into his freewheeling style and placing a strategic bet on more unscripted, up-close, and personal moments with his fans.

Speaker 5 You know, just the unscripted, freewheeling, up-close, and personal style of a guy whose second impeachment was for inciting a violent insurrection as a last-ditch effort to overturn the election that he lost.

Speaker 5 Do you feel like maybe there's a slightly more accurate way to cover Donald Trump after the last seven years of everything we've all been through?

Speaker 6 Look, John, some politicians, they're glued to the teleprompter, they're scripted. Others are just out there, they're saying stuff.

Speaker 6 And sometimes that gets you some high highs, some real moments with the crowd. They're laughing.
Other times, you end up just pushing a conspiracy theory that leads to a violent insurrection.

Speaker 6 That's what happens. That's the risk you take.

Speaker 5 Yeah, like sometimes sometimes you like swear an oath to protect the country from enemies, foreign and domestic.

Speaker 5 And other times you're like, yeah, get rid of the mags, let the people with the guns through on the way to the Capitol because, hey, they're not coming after me.

Speaker 6 Like,

Speaker 6 this was the risk the moment that Donald Trump said he was going to start running for president: is that slowly but surely, the press would be sucked back into the way in which they had, they feel this just like chemical desire to write about politics, as some sort of game or sport where you can't account for the true danger that one particular candidate poses because he tried to violently overthrow the government like 26 months ago, right?

Speaker 6 It's just you.

Speaker 5 And look, I don't like, first of all, I don't, I don't like these days to focus

Speaker 5 my limited well of outrage on media outlets that have like, you know, 90 plus percent of their readers are people who would never vote for Donald Trump anyway. So it's like, what are we doing?

Speaker 6 That's all media outlets?

Speaker 5 All media outlets. So that's part of the the problem anyway.
But I also think that, like, of course, you're going to analyze the politics of the primary. We do it all the time.

Speaker 5 It's not like we just sit here every Tuesday and Thursday and scream about how dangerous Donald Trump is. That's just, you know, like 30 or 40% of the pod.
But like, it would not be hard.

Speaker 5 as you're analyzing Donald Trump's style and analyzing the primary to at least remind people of the multiple investigations, the multiple impeachments, the potential coup, the violent insurrection.

Speaker 5 Like, it would be helpful. You can throw that in.
You can throw that paragraph into your analysis.

Speaker 6 It's just, it's so hard for them because after January 6th, or at least in the run-up to January 6th, when Trump was pushing the big lie, the press changed the way they covered Trump.

Speaker 6 They stopped covering him live.

Speaker 6 They decided, because I think, because he had lost and was theoretically off national stage, they could take a stand for accuracy and truth and against disinformation, their entire reason for being.

Speaker 6 But that was a deeply uncomfortable position for so many of them because it required going against how they were taught journalism in the pre-Trump era, that if the both sides,

Speaker 6 the need for balance. And Donald Trump's going to be is running for president.
He's going to be running for president for a long fucking time. And that, and so you can just, you see it happening.

Speaker 6 It's like a tractor beam pulling them back there. How much does it matter?

Speaker 6 Probably not that much, other than just for our general blood pressure.

Speaker 6 I don't think it's great for the long-term future of putatively objective political journalism that they can't handle this very obvious challenge. But is it going to change this election?

Speaker 6 Probably not because of who consumes media and how they consume it now. It's just very different than it was in 2016 when they dramatically contributed to Donald Trump's election.

Speaker 5 Particularly if it's a rerun of 2020 and it's Biden versus Trump, and just about everyone in the country has a strong opinion of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump at this point.

Speaker 5 So a couple of paragraphs in the Washington Post or the New York Times are not going to change that. And this is also, but this is like a practice run here, analyzing the primary.

Speaker 5 Like they start doing this shit about Donald Trump and Joe Biden's competing freewheeling styles or not freewheeling styles in the general. It's going to be a little more annoying.

Speaker 5 Back to the style of DeSantis, at least. Do you think his staged and scripted events are an intentional strategy meant to contrast his style with Trump's?

Speaker 5 Or is that just who he is, which may or may not be an awkward dweeb who doesn't like human interaction?

Speaker 6 Both, I think, is the right answer.

Speaker 6 More broadly, we know from DeSantis' book, and you guys talked about this on a Tuesday pod a couple of weeks ago, he's making a very clear point that he is Trump without the chaos.

Speaker 6 That if you have Trump's beliefs with a more effective, more efficient executor of the agenda, you're going to get more done. And that because Donald Trump is a chaotic Yahoo,

Speaker 6 there are a whole bunch of priorities that did not happen. And so I do think that Trump Without the Chaos and Crimes is the message, Trump Without the Baggage, however you want to describe it.

Speaker 6 But the specifics here are because he is an awkward dweeb who hates human interaction.

Speaker 6 He likes to be in his safe spaces. He likes to know what the questions are.
He gets uncomfortable when the questions are about things he's not prepared for from

Speaker 6 interviewers who are going to ask him tough questions or follow-up questions. He does not like to interact with humans because he does not like them.

Speaker 6 And I think he knows that if he were to interact with them, that hatred would become a two-way street. And so

Speaker 6 this is the kind of campaign he is going to run.

Speaker 6 I do think his team is going to try to make that a feature, not a bug by contrasting it with Trump, whether that'll work or not. Open question.

Speaker 5 Yeah. No, I agree with the general strategy that

Speaker 5 he doesn't want to make any mistakes.

Speaker 5 If he's going to beat Donald Trump, it has to be in a near-perfect campaign. And you can't be

Speaker 5 having a gaff here and there when some reporter yells to you a question. You can't be going off the cuff with your remarks.

Speaker 5 Like, everything seems very, you just get that sense from his campaign that they are, um, they're sort of running scared yeah i i can't see

Speaker 6 the flaw in running the political equivalent of the strategy that the atlanta falcons used when they were up big on the patriots in the super bowl

Speaker 5 all right so the biggest news de Santis made this week and this goes right to the conversation we were just having is when he finally took a stand on Russia's invasion of Ukraine after his boss, Tucker Carlson, demanded that every Republican candidate answer six key questions about the war.

Speaker 5 DeSantis, then his campaign released a statement to Tucker, called the war a, quote, territorial dispute, which is not in America's vital national interest, said that providing Ukraine F-16s and long-range missiles should be off the table, and implied that the U.S.

Speaker 5 is pursuing a policy of regime change in Russia, all of which are arguments that Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin make all the time. So, knowing that polls show broad support for U.S.

Speaker 5 involvement in Ukraine, with even a slight majority of Republicans supportive, maybe less than half, depending on the poll, but it's up there.

Speaker 5 What do you think DeSantis' calculation was here, considering that he himself has been tougher on Russia in the past? To me, this goes back to what we were just saying.

Speaker 5 If you're going to be Trump without the baggage or Trump without the chaos

Speaker 5 and crimes, then you've got to have, you've got to make sure there's zero policy daylight between you and Donald Trump because you don't want the primary to turn in to a contest on actual policy positions.

Speaker 6 Yes, and I think there's an even more practical reason here, which is he does not want Tucker Carlson going on TV every night and calling him Dick Cheney.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 5 Or a Bush. Oh, yeah, either one, right? Just like the Bushes that he loves.
He's a big interventionist. Yeah, that's, yeah.

Speaker 6 It is. So he, even if there is, I think, a tiny modicum of risk here for DeSantis

Speaker 6 because there was an echelon insights poll which showed which looked at Trump voters and DeSantis and DeSantis voters and DeSantis voters were 47 47 on whether

Speaker 6 Ukraine was a vital interest in the United States. Trump voters were 2232.

Speaker 6 But beyond that, the point here is what's what's more important than that is whether a very influential, trusted messenger within the Republican base, a la Tucker Carlson, starts screaming about you every night.

Speaker 6 And all of a sudden, you're going to start looking like a Paul Ryan disciple or like Mitt Romney, if that's the case.

Speaker 6 And so if you can take that off the table, you take that off the table, even if there is, you're going to have to deal with some consequences of that, not just in a general election, but if you were to become president.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Yeah, no, I would say.
Yeah. Well,

Speaker 5 someone made the point that

Speaker 5 this basically,

Speaker 5 for Putin, gives Putin the incentive to keep the war going until 2025, at least, when hopefully Trump or DeSantis become president, and also to interfere in the 2024 election to help Trump or DeSantis become president, because he knows if they do, then the NATO alliance will fall apart because the U.S.

Speaker 5 won't be supporting Ukraine anymore. It's really just

Speaker 5 dangerous shit.

Speaker 6 The thing that I think is important here, because there was a lot of people, particularly in the never Trumpish neocon Republican

Speaker 6 community, who were very alarmed and angry at Ron DeSantis about this. And they're saying, this is going to hurt him because look at the polls polls on Ukraine.

Speaker 6 And I think we constantly make a mistake in polling is we spend all our time trying to figure out how people feel on an issue without trying to figure out how much they care about an issue.

Speaker 5 And I

Speaker 6 am skeptical, particularly if you get down to 2024, that Ukraine is going to be an issue that changes people's votes.

Speaker 6 Even if you, there's a whole bunch of people, Republicans, even potentially like DeSantis, who disagree with them on this issue.

Speaker 6 But I'm just not sure this is going to be high up there in terms of what changes their mind about who they vote for, either in the primary or the general election.

Speaker 6 So, I think this is a relatively, from a political perspective, it's low risk.

Speaker 6 I think this says a lot about DeSantis' character because if he really thinks he's going to be president, you can tell the people who are serious by the ones who make decisions in the primary to ensure, even if they take extra short-term political risk, they don't tie their hands as president.

Speaker 6 You know, Obama faced this a whole bunch in 2008 around Iraq and some candidates we were running against who tried to get far to the left on

Speaker 6 how you would end the Iraq war.

Speaker 6 And Obama did, even though that was his bread and butter, was his opposition in the war, did not go with him because he thought there was a good chance he's going to be president and he did not want to have his hands tied by something he said to try to win over six additional Iowa voters in 2007.

Speaker 5 Yeah, clearly no one in the Republican primary

Speaker 5 feels that kind of anxiety.

Speaker 5 But look, I do think that I think it was interesting that so many Republican senators came out and dinged DeSantis on this

Speaker 5 when,

Speaker 5 I mean, you couldn't get that many Republican senators to ding Trump on anything since January 6th, and that was only for a couple days.

Speaker 5 I was surprised that they, why do you think that they all did that?

Speaker 6 Because I think a lot of them hope that DeSantis is

Speaker 6 playing MAGA, but is really an establishment Republican, right?

Speaker 5 MAGA. They can get him back on the team.

Speaker 6 What would the same be? MAGA in the streets, Rhino in the sheets, or something?

Speaker 5 Ask Lovett for it.

Speaker 6 And they also know they're going to have this big fight on Ukraine funding coming up with the House, and it does not help that Ron DeSantis is going to make this worse.

Speaker 5 I will also say that when you really pick apart that DeSantis statement, it's like

Speaker 5 written,

Speaker 5 you know, in a nuanced enough way, in a lawyerly sort of way, that he's like left himself enough loopholes to sort of come down from that maximalist position just a little bit if he somehow wins the general.

Speaker 5 You can see that there's a little thinking in there that he could

Speaker 5 that he could back off from it a little bit.

Speaker 5 But this goes to the next conversation we're just going to have, which was like, how, if he does somehow win the primary, like how successful can DeSantis be in pivoting to become a palatable general election candidate?

Speaker 5 Former Bush speechwriter David Frum just wrote a piece that asked the question, is Ron DeSantis flaming flaming out already?

Speaker 5 Where he argues that Tiny D has a plan to win the Fox News primary and lose everything else.

Speaker 5 I know that, of course, you and From have mind-melled since you expressed displeasure that he beat you to this take. What's your case that DeSantis is already flaming out?

Speaker 6 It's not that he is flaming out, and it's certainly not for the reasons that David From suggests. People should read the piece.
It's largely about his

Speaker 6 appealing to the mega base on foreign policy that upsets David Axis of Evil from.

Speaker 6 And you see this, there's a lot.

Speaker 6 This is, I think, to your point about why people got so upset: is DeSantis, there is this hope that DeSantis will be bad on a whole bunch of other things, but he will return to the Republican core on some things Donald Trump walked away from.

Speaker 6 Trade, foreign policy.

Speaker 6 entitlement cuts, those sorts of things.

Speaker 6 But my argument for why I think DeSantis is screwing this up is Donald Trump has a strategy. He has a very specific strategy.

Speaker 6 He is executing the strategy, not with the most discipline anyone could have, but he is absolutely doing it. His strategy, I wrote about this in the message box a couple weeks ago, but is

Speaker 6 one, hug DeSantis on cultural issues.

Speaker 6 That's why he's been putting out these policies.

Speaker 6 He's up his bigoted anti-trans rhetoric. He's doing a bunch of stuff on schools.
And he's trying to destroy Ron DeSantis by getting to the left of him on populist economic issues.

Speaker 6 And the race, I think, really boils down to

Speaker 6 a race between whether Donald Trump's going to destroy Ron DeSantis before Donald Trump destroys himself. And right now, he's doing a better job of destroying Ron DeSantis.
And DeSantis

Speaker 6 is, I think,

Speaker 6 if you look back two months ago, Donald Trump was much weaker than he is now. He was as weak as he's ever been.

Speaker 6 And in that moment, DeSantis could have jumped in, become a vessel for all of the anti-Trump concern, locked out a whole bunch of people and got moving. But he did not do that.

Speaker 6 He's waiting and waiting and waiting. And every day he waits, Donald Trump's getting a little bit stronger, becoming a little bit more inevitable.
And what is DeSantis' strategy thus far?

Speaker 6 Is he not really defining himself? He's running this very establishment, high donor,

Speaker 6 Ropenstanchian campaign. He's basically running, like if I were to give him a nickname, it would be MAGA Rubio, right? That is his strategy.

Speaker 6 He is basically running a MAGA version of Marco Rubio's strategy. And he has a lot of strengths.
Rubio does not.

Speaker 6 I agree with you that he is by far the strongest Republican Donald Trump has ever faced. But I think he is, his chances of winning the nomination today are less than they were two months ago.

Speaker 6 And that's in part because he did not jump in at the moment that he had. There's a reason.

Speaker 6 You and I know that we went from, that Barack Obama went from deciding to run for president officially to in the race in like two and a half weeks because he knew he had a moment.

Speaker 6 John Kerry had not decided if he was running yet. Hillary Clinton had not announced yet.

Speaker 6 And he had to get in there because the longer he waited, the more it was likely people would move to other candidates. And I think that Ron DeSantis is waiting too long.

Speaker 5 I think he's got plenty of time. I think he's got plenty of time.
I do, I mean, look,

Speaker 5 I think that Ron DeSantis' path to the nomination is incredibly difficult.

Speaker 5 And I think that is because Donald Trump still looms large and still has a hold on most of the Republican base, which by the way, happens to be people who do not consume a ton of news and are not political junkies and are probably not paying attention and have low social trust.

Speaker 5 And they don't, sometimes they don't register in polls. The press doesn't pay attention to them as much.

Speaker 5 The press is going to over-index on covering the college-educated Republican voters that DeSantis will surely win and crush Trump with, but that's just not enough to win the nomination in this party.

Speaker 5 So I think that's all true. But I do think that like, I think what, what, I think the campaign DeSantis is running right now is I'm Donald Trump without the baggage.

Speaker 5 Everyone's pissed that we've now lost a series of elections thanks to Donald Trump, and everyone knows that. So you really don't have to point it out that much.

Speaker 5 And by the way, MAGA base, I am your warrior against all of the woke enemies that you hate.

Speaker 5 Woke Disney and their corporate bullshit and the woke media and the woke libs and the Dems and look what I've done in Florida and I have all the enemies.

Speaker 5 I've picked all the right enemies, just like you always thought about Trump. And I'm focused on those enemies.
Donald Trump might be focused on me and other Republicans.

Speaker 5 I'm focused on the woke left and the real enemies here.

Speaker 5 And I think that, I think that's a... you know, it might not be enough, and he might get dinged as sort of an establishment cuck.

Speaker 5 But every time he picks another fight with someone on the left or some institution, it's going to remind people that, ah, well, Ron DeSantis' heart is in the right place if you're a MAGA voter. And

Speaker 5 maybe he can win and Donald Trump can't.

Speaker 6 I guess my, this is maybe a better way to say what my biggest beef is, and this is why I think his strategy is MAGA Rubio is he thinks he's the frontrunner. He is an underdog.

Speaker 6 He's a big underdog. I think he has a very real shot, but Donald Trump is a big favorite to win this for all the reasons you said.

Speaker 6 And particularly just because Donald Trump has a lock on a certain segment of the electorate, and Republican primaries are winner-take-all.

Speaker 5 So why from February of 2007 until the JJ dinner a year later almost did Barack Obama sort of hold his fire on Hillary Clinton?

Speaker 6 I'm not saying he has to be attacking Trump right now.

Speaker 6 I'm not saying that.

Speaker 6 I do not, I agree with you. He should not get into a fight.

Speaker 6 I think he could be defending himself in ways could raise his voice in here could be an announced candidate he could be building in real infrastructure to that's that's the main reason obama announced when he did was there was a whole bunch of people wanted to work for him and volunteer for him all across the country and he had to go get him and desantis was

Speaker 6 more the bell of the ball more in more sort of in the forefront of the mind three months ago than he is now And I just, I think he has to run his race as if he is an underdog.

Speaker 6 And that's to the whole point about not not making a mistake, not looking, trying to hug Trump in every single way. He's an underdog.

Speaker 6 You have to run an underdog race if you want to beat a front runner. And I think he, his,

Speaker 6 thus far, and it is early, he can still win for sure. Everything he's doing reeks of entitlement.

Speaker 6 It's the kind of entitlement you get when you power, when you're talking to all the MAGA, not even the MAGA, the Republican billionaires who are looking for someone else, when you are,

Speaker 6 you know, just talking to all the establishment folks. And I think that that is in it, that is giving him a false sense of comfort.

Speaker 5 I think if the campaign looks like this and he looks like this in summer, early fall, then I would be more inclined to

Speaker 5 be with you on this one. I still think, gun to my head, I still think that Donald Trump is the,

Speaker 5 I definitely think he's the frontrunner and probably pulls it off, but I don't know. I feel like, I feel like it's, DeSantis could do it.
All right.

Speaker 5 When we come back, I will talk to the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass.

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Speaker 5 Joining us in studio today is the 43rd mayor of Los Angeles, who just hit the 100-day mark in her term. Karen Bass, welcome back to the pod.

Speaker 10 Thank you. Great to be back.

Speaker 5 All right. You just spent about 10 years in Congress and about 100 days as mayor.
That's right. Which is the harder job?

Speaker 10 You know what? No question. It's mayor.
Yeah. But, you know, when I went to Congress, it was when the Tea Party took over.
So that was pretty traumatic.

Speaker 5 I remember that.

Speaker 10 But now I look back at the Tea Party and they look mild compared to the latest crop.

Speaker 5 You've lived in L.A. most of your life and you started as an organizer in L.A.
Has anything surprised you about the job so far?

Speaker 10 Well, actually, you know what surprised me was, you know, on day one, I didn't go to City Hall. I went straight to the Emergency Operations Center and declared an emergency.

Speaker 10 Because to me, 47,000 people on the street with multiple people dying every day is an emergency. So what has surprised me has been how that has been so welcomed.
And I have not found resistance to it.

Speaker 10 And one of my goals was to align every level of government, federal, state, county, and city. And I thought that would take a while.
It's already happened.

Speaker 10 And just the openness of the city family to saying, okay, let's do something different. It is an emergency.
I really expected to have more resistance than I found.

Speaker 5 During the campaign, you promised to get 17,000 people off the streets in your first year. Yes.
How many people have you been able to get off the street in these first 100 days?

Speaker 10 Well, in the first hundred days, now, not all that I'm responsible for, 4,000 have been housed and off the street.

Speaker 10 In the program that I initiated inside SAFE, which is moving people out of tents and into temporary housing, it's been over a thousand.

Speaker 10 And then there have been a few other ways that we have expedited building and also getting people housed. So one of my big

Speaker 10 goals was to cut the red tape. But you know what? I was just thinking about red tape in terms of the building process.

Speaker 10 What I didn't realize was how much self-imposed red tape there is to get people housed.

Speaker 5 So we give examples of housing.

Speaker 10 Oh, absolutely. We have only moved 64 people into permanent housing.
However, the city has lots of vacancies. It takes us a while to move them because of the red tape.

Speaker 10 So the federal government said you have to have a system to prioritize who gets housing first.

Speaker 10 And then LA came up with a system that's so crazy,

Speaker 10 it's very hard to get people through the process. So since it was self-imposed, since we did it, that means we can undo it.
So we introduced a motion.

Speaker 10 Actually, Councilwoman Nithya Rahman introduced a motion yesterday to untie the process.

Speaker 10 So that has been very, very important. And that will be able to expedite moving people out of motels into the permanent housing that actually exists.

Speaker 5 What are you doing differently than the last administration on this issue and what's been working the best?

Speaker 10 You know, I actually can't speak to what the last administration did, but let me just tell you, though, that I am the beneficiary of Proposition HHH.

Speaker 10 And you remember, voters were up in arms over the fact that we have taxed ourselves twice and they didn't see the housing come online.

Speaker 10 Well, that's because the process was so darn long because of the red tape. So the red tape has played out, and I've been going to ribbon cuttings every other day.

Speaker 10 Now, they're not ribbon cuttings that, of course, I'm responsible for, but one thing that I can certainly do is make sure that when those ribbons are cut, they're actually people in the housing and that the red tape is not keeping them out.

Speaker 5 What new tools or powers did declaring a state of emergency give you?

Speaker 10 Well, you know, it's an interesting question because it does give me extra power over the city council in terms of land use, but I have not used that power because I've not needed needed to.

Speaker 10 So my first

Speaker 10 job to me, even before I was sworn in, was to build relationships with every member of the city council.

Speaker 10 Now, of course, most of the members I already knew and had pre-existing relationships with, including several that we served in the state house together. Then we have our new council members.

Speaker 10 So we have been working so collaboratively, there has been no need for me to actually use the powers. However, I also issued executive directives after that to expedite the process.

Speaker 10 So one of the things that developers complain about is that when they're trying to get something built, they never know when they're going to get appointments.

Speaker 10 They're held up because of approvals by the Department of Water and Power and all of that. And so the executive directive orders those departments to act with time certain so that a developer knows.

Speaker 10 And a number of developers have told me, gee, I had an appointment in September and I got a letter telling me to come in in two weeks. So we have definitely fast-forwarded that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, you mentioned, obviously, permanent affordable housing is the ultimate solution. Yes.

Speaker 5 Housing is a top issue across the country and cities across the country and for people who just can't afford it.

Speaker 5 Obviously, this is an issue that to solve it, it requires federal action, state action here, county action, city action, coordination.

Speaker 5 What tools do you have to make a difference on sort of the creation of and the building of more affordable housing and doing it more quickly?

Speaker 10 One of the other executive directives that we did was to marshal city land.

Speaker 10 However, the county, and by the way, I meant to say this too: the county declared a state of emergency. Long Beach did, Santa Monica did.
So several cities are doing that.

Speaker 10 Well, one of the executive directives that I did after the declaration called for identifying all city land. Well, having said that, the county has come forward.
They're identifying land.

Speaker 10 Metro has come forward, as well as LAUSD. So to me, the first place to begin is on land that's already owned where we can build and the purchasing of the land is not an issue.

Speaker 10 So that's one of the concrete steps. But I do want to make a distinction between permanent affordable and permanent supportive.

Speaker 10 So permanent supportive housing, what that means is that's housing with wraparound services for the people who are coming out of tents and out of motels.

Speaker 6 Right.

Speaker 5 So another major barrier has always been, you know, what's known as NIMBYism, not in my backyard.

Speaker 5 These are LA residents and landlords, you you know, not wanting the unhoused population to be placed in their neighborhoods.

Speaker 5 What do you say to people who care about this issue, have even voted to raise their own taxes to fund housing

Speaker 5 but don't want it to be

Speaker 10 built in somebody else's neighborhoods. Yeah.
Well, one of the things that, you know, I am finding is that much of the housing that has been built has been built in South L.A. Now,

Speaker 10 one of the ways that the that what exists now is so broken. So you have all of this housing in South LA.
You know who lives in South LA.

Speaker 10 They have to place people from Calabasas, from all over the place, everywhere but South LA. So, the first thing we have to do is get rid of that process.

Speaker 10 But I'm finding that in some of the neighborhoods that you would think would be NIMBY neighborhoods, they will tell you, I don't want housing over here, but why don't you build it over there?

Speaker 10 So, one of the things that I believe has to be created in

Speaker 10 our city is a spirit of everybody needs to have skin in the game. This is an issue.

Speaker 10 The problem of the unhoused impacts everybody, whether you're housed or not, all of us are impacted by the problem, which means all of us have to be invested in the solution.

Speaker 5 What do you think are some of the biggest obstacles left in terms of delivering on that promise to get 17,000 people off the city?

Speaker 10 Oh, there's tons of obstacles.

Speaker 5 What are the ones that are keeping you up at night the most?

Speaker 10 Lots.

Speaker 10 You know what? The main one that's keeping me up at night are the wraparound services.

Speaker 10 so we have community-based organizations that do this and they do great work but they don't have the capacity the other thing that keeps me up at night are motel rooms in every area so that has been a problem for example when we uh encourage people to leave an encampment we would like to house them near the encampment right one because they have built a sense of community there

Speaker 10 and they have relationships, but not every area has motels that are affordable.

Speaker 10 Case in point, Katie Yarslowski's district, we wanted to move people out of a encampment, but we had to move them into Hugo Soto Martinez's district because the motels in her district were way too expensive.

Speaker 10 Now, we're in the process of purchasing a building in Katie's district, but we don't have it right now. So we move them over to Hugo's, but then we also want to move them back.

Speaker 10 So that has been a real problem. And we don't want to have the notion of we're just moving people far away from where they were.

Speaker 10 But when we moved the encampment in Venice, we were fortunate to find a couple of motels in Venice. But then there were more people.
So there's a world of problems.

Speaker 10 But you know what? I view these as good problems in the sense that one thing is so important is that we completely dispelled the myth that people don't want to move.

Speaker 10 We have not had anybody turn us down. Now they might turn us down for a couple of days.
Say maybe there's an encampment of 15 people and 10 say I'm ready to go and five say I'm never leaving.

Speaker 10 And then the bus comes and 10 people get on the bus and all of a sudden I think I'm leaving too.

Speaker 10 So now the problem has morphed into not only are 15 people going to get on the bus, but five of those people called people they know who are in tents a few blocks away.

Speaker 10 And so instead of being 15 people, it's 20 people that show up. And we have to be ready to have rooms for everyone because we don't want to leave people on the street.

Speaker 5 You mentioned that this is an issue where everyone has to be in it together. Everyone has to have skin in the game.

Speaker 5 If there's people who are listening who are like, I'm frustrated by this, I want to help.

Speaker 10 What can people do? Absolutely. Let me give you an example.
As I mentioned, the community-based organizations really don't have the capacity to reach scale.

Speaker 10 So when you move a person from a tent to a motel, they're not going into a motel

Speaker 10 where there's room service or maid service every day.

Speaker 10 So what neighbors could do is neighbors could assemble welcome packets. They could assemble towels and soaps and shampoos and basic items that somebody in a tent doesn't have.

Speaker 10 So we've also run into problems where in some of the motels they haven't had adequate supplies.

Speaker 10 And then the community-based organizations don't necessarily have the resources to run out to Target to buy towels for everybody. everybody.
And I don't think they should have to.

Speaker 10 So there is a community organizing component to this that hasn't come online yet.

Speaker 10 But where we will go in the next month or so is that our organizers will go to the neighborhoods where the encampments are and talk to the neighbors who are housed to say, we're going to be moving the people in your area.

Speaker 10 We're going to give them a choice. Would you guys organize the welcome packets so that on move out day, you can come and present?

Speaker 10 the people who are in your neighborhood with this to be supportive of them.

Speaker 10 So we want to do that. The other thing is, is that after the encampment is cleared, we don't want a new encampment to emerge.

Speaker 10 And so getting the neighbors who are housed to reclaim that public space, to occupy that public space, and if one tent shows up, to call the social service provider.

Speaker 10 Because the way encampments happen is you'll have one tent, a few days later there'll be three, then there'll be five. So let's prevent it.

Speaker 10 by when one tent shows up, let's get that person housed right away.

Speaker 5 The other big issue that mayors across the country are dealing dealing with is crime.

Speaker 5 A lot of folks have pointed to crime as the reason that Mayor Lori Lightfoot just lost her bid for re-election in Chicago.

Speaker 5 Most people, most voters across the country want to feel safe from violent criminals and from violent cops.

Speaker 5 You were at the center of this issue in Congress. You led the fight for the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act.

Speaker 5 What lessons from that experience about the politics of crime and police reform have you brought with you to your job as mayor?

Speaker 10 Well, first of all, I think that what has happened in our city and in our society, especially over the last 30 years, is we have divested from health, social, and economic supports, the safety net.

Speaker 10 And all of these social and economic and health problems flow into our cities. And then the big problem we're having, of course, is on the metro line.

Speaker 10 And so we don't solve the social problems, and then we expect the police to clean up everything. And then we get upset about that.
So I believe you have to have a comprehensive approach.

Speaker 10 I do believe believe you have to have law enforcement.

Speaker 10 But I have established an office and I have a deputy mayor for public safety, but I also have a deputy mayor for community safety to come up with non-law enforcement methods of addressing problems.

Speaker 10 For example, because we have pretty much shredded our mental health safety net, people with mental illness are on the street.

Speaker 10 We allow them to deteriorate to the point where they commit a crime where they either hurt themselves or hurt someone else.

Speaker 10 We have no problem or we don't say anything about the fact that we incarcerate mental illness.

Speaker 10 But I think sometimes people need to be hospitalized and they need to be helped. And I think that sometimes people don't know that they need to be helped.

Speaker 10 If you're in a full-blown psychotic break and you're hearing voices, you're not in a state of mind to say, gee, I better go check myself in.

Speaker 10 And if one of the lessons I learned from George Floyd, because I was examining officer-involved deaths over a period of time, like a few months, and there were 30 to 40 percent of those deaths involved somebody who was in an acute mental health crisis.

Speaker 10 Why should we expect police to handle that? So, we need to have mental health professionals who intervene first.

Speaker 10 And that's one of the commitments that I made to the chief: that I'm going to focus on really building up our mental health capacity so that people don't deteriorate to the point where they hurt others or hurt themselves.

Speaker 5 And I imagine, as you're talking about building up capacity, that we probably don't have that capacity right now because we've relied on law enforcement to do this job for so long.

Speaker 9 That's right.

Speaker 5 That's right.

Speaker 10 And I think that that is, it's, it's expensive, it's inhumane, and it doesn't work. And I don't understand why we keep repeating things the same way and expecting another result.

Speaker 10 I think that's called insanity. Yeah.

Speaker 5 You've called yourself a pragmatic progressive. You told the New York Times in a recent piece that you see similarities between Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and yourself as a young activist.

Speaker 5 And you said, that's who I was, that's who I still am. It's just that after a while, you want to begin to make a very concrete difference in people's lives as opposed to your positions in educating.

Speaker 5 Can you talk more about

Speaker 5 like the evolution in your theory of change and politics as you've gone from activist, organizer, member of the state legislature, member of Congress, and now mayor?

Speaker 10 One of the things I've enjoyed the most about being an elected official is applying community organizing principles and strategies in a legislative context. It's different.
It's different.

Speaker 10 But that's why the first order of business to me is always to organize my colleagues, which is why I said before I was sworn in, I focused on building relationships with everybody in the city council and the board of supervisors and anybody else around.

Speaker 10 So what we have done is, you know, my little theme is locking arms with different levels of government. And then I consider it my job to make sure that the members of council are successful.

Speaker 10 And doing that, then we can work on things collaboratively together.

Speaker 10 And that is, you know, one of the basic principles of activism.

Speaker 10 And then I also believe, though, that you have to have the outside pressure. You need the outside.
And I believe in fundamentally an inside and outside strategy.

Speaker 10 The difference between me and AOC and some of our new city council people is that when I was their age, the last thing in the world I would have thought about doing is running for office.

Speaker 10 And so now that they've run for office and they're in office, you know, I'm very committed to making sure that they're successful.

Speaker 5 I imagine the other challenge is when you're an activist and organizer, a lot of what you do is in opposition to people that you disagree with vehemently.

Speaker 5 And when you're in a position like this, you probably have to build relationships with people who you disagree with on a whole bunch of issues.

Speaker 5 And I think that's probably hard for a lot of folks who are activists and organizers to imagine doing.

Speaker 10 Well, exactly. And I think in a way, you got to get out of your head in the sense that what is the goal?

Speaker 10 The goal should be more than you.

Speaker 10 And so people, which I kind of chuckled at, people are like, oh, how are you going to work with city council? They're so different. It's like, do you know I just came from D.C.?

Speaker 10 The most conservative city council member. could not fly as a conservative in D.C.
Yeah, I know that, yeah.

Speaker 10 And, you know, I spent time building relationships with some of the most extreme members of Congress because I keep my eyes on the prize.

Speaker 10 And the prize is the issue that I'm working on. And so I can tolerate lots because the end result is what matters.

Speaker 5 Which is a very community organizing mindset. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Exactly. Mayor Karen Bass, thank you so much for joining Pod Save America and stopping by.
Come by again.

Speaker 10 Thank you for having me on, and I will.

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

Speaker 9 It's smart, it's spooky, and it's just the right amount of weird. Two new episodes drop every week, and there's even a bonus once a month.
Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Speaker 5 okay before we go we wanted to haven't done this in a while so we wanted to take some questions from all of you and so we will dive into the old mailbag

Speaker 10 questions all right.

Speaker 5 First one, we had many, many questions on this. What do you all think of the Biden administration's recent approval of the Willow project? The Willow project is basically

Speaker 5 ConocoPhillips, big oil company, wants to drill at a site in Alaska near the Arctic for oil, and it had to be formally approved by the Biden administration. They approved it.

Speaker 5 Dan, what do you think?

Speaker 6 Obviously, I don't like it. I think it's

Speaker 6 I've been trying to figure out why the Biden administration did that. The president made a pledge in the campaign, no more drilling on federal lands.
He

Speaker 6 was, he's been excellent on climate as a president, so much better than I think anyone expected, both in what he's accomplished and doing things like putting Obama's climate advisor in charge of his economic policy and all these things like that.

Speaker 6 And based on the reporting,

Speaker 6 what it seems to have been the decision point here was Conoco has had this lease for 20 years and that

Speaker 6 they were going to lose the case if they went to court. And not only would they lose,

Speaker 6 it would cost upwards of $5 billion if they lost because

Speaker 6 it's not just that they would force them to do it, but that the courts would force the U.S. government to give

Speaker 6 ConocoPhillips all of what the expected profits from said lease would be. And so they made a decision.

Speaker 6 I'm not, I don't know this, I don't know about the law to know whether this was the only decision, the right decision, but they made a decision to essentially negotiate into a more narrow project than would have been approved otherwise.

Speaker 6 So instead of five sites, it's three sites. They're walling off a whole bunch of the land around it to make sure that stuff is never used for drilling.
It is a deeply

Speaker 6 unfortunate choice. I don't know that, you know, some of the points suggest they didn't really have a choice.
Other people say otherwise.

Speaker 6 The one thing I do think President Biden deserves the benefit and his team deserve the benefit of the doubt is there are all these people saying he's doing this to appeal to middle-of-the-road voters concerned about gas prices.

Speaker 6 I don't think that's the case. That's not how these things work.
I think this was a substantive policy decision made by...

Speaker 6 people who work in policy and government, not the president's reelection campaign or anything like that.

Speaker 6 I think they were forced with a work, as is often the case when you're the president, a series of shitty options, and they chose this one. I wish this wasn't the one they chose.

Speaker 6 I wish they had better options, but this is how we got here.

Speaker 5 No, this is the most important thing for me, too, is that like, I just, there's a lot of understandable cynicism out there about politics and government, not just Republicans, but Democratic politicians as well.

Speaker 5 And everyone, and partly it's because the press covers every decision as like the politics first. And obviously, politics factors into just almost every decision you make.

Speaker 5 Politics in terms of like, what do most people in the country want? What will they accept? What won't they accept, right?

Speaker 5 But we have been here a million times before where a bunch of lawyers or policy people or whoever in the administration and the federal government tell you that you can't do something that you really want to do.

Speaker 5 And or you have to do something you don't want to do, right? Or you have to do something you don't want to do. And I think that it's not just the Biden administration saying that about the law.

Speaker 5 Like there was

Speaker 5 the inspector general of the Department of the Interior from the Clinton administration, which was in the 90s. That was the administration that ended up giving them the lease.

Speaker 5 So these people, it's so the Biden administration did not give any new leases to drill on federal lands, but sometimes you just have to approve the existing leases.

Speaker 5 ConocoPhillips had that lease since the 90s. And they were just, you know, they concluded based on all the legal advice they got that they were going to lose in court.

Speaker 5 And like you said, it was going to cost them money to lose in court, cost taxpayers money. Now, could they have said, fuck it, we're going to fight in court anyway.

Speaker 5 And if it costs us, you know, a few billion dollars for the taxpayers. So what? At least we tried to fight.
Yeah, they could have made that decision.

Speaker 5 We are now seeing what has happened in the courts every time the Biden administration tries to take an executive action?

Speaker 5 Many times the courts and particularly the Supreme Court seem hostile to what they're trying to do. We're dealing with that with student debt right now.
So it sucks.

Speaker 5 It is notable that they were, and we should not pretend, I think, that like the Willow Project is, it's not going to be, it's fine.

Speaker 5 It's horrible. It's bad to spew a bunch of carbon into the air at a time when we can least afford it and we should be doing everything we can to take our carbon out of the air.
It sucks.

Speaker 5 They were able to reduce the size of the project by like 70,000 acres. And so now the calculations are that, like, you know, the project represents like 0.009%

Speaker 5 of the total emissions reductions we will get from the Inflation Reduction Act. So, relatively speaking, to the scale of what they were able to achieve with that climate legislation, it's small.

Speaker 5 Still shitty, but it's small.

Speaker 5 And then, of course, the next step is, I think, because they were forced into this decision, the Biden administration also took a step this week to basically close off the entire Arctic Ocean for any new oil and gas gas development, a step which really pissed off the oil and gas companies.

Speaker 5 So everyone got mad at them on this, but I think we didn't realize how annoyed the oil companies are for the fact that he used this occasion to then close off the rest of the Arctic for new drilling.

Speaker 5 So I just, again, one of those two really bad decisions and he had to pick the least bad one.

Speaker 5 All right, next question. What tips would you give the Biden team for next month's anticipated 2024 campaign announcement address?

Speaker 6 You're the speech writer. Let's hear what you got.

Speaker 5 Big crowd, lots of energy. Number one, I know this is just please put him in front of some screaming, yelling people who are all fired up and have been for a while.

Speaker 5 Just no, no small crowds, no dreary crowds, definitely not anywhere near the wet. Get him out on the road.
Big crowd. Short, keep it short.

Speaker 5 The theme, the theme, I would do a choice between Republican extremism and Biden willing to work with anyone to focus on actually improving people's lives and focus on the issues that they care about.

Speaker 5 I would do basically a shortened version of the economic section of the State of the Union, and then I would include a section that highlights the Republican extremism and anti-freedom agenda on abortion, gay rights, trans rights, civil rights, and sort of wrap it up with a big

Speaker 5 ending about democracy and preserving democracy both here and abroad and why that's so important.

Speaker 5 That's what I would do. That sounds great.

Speaker 5 That's my speech.

Speaker 6 How much do you remember from the speech you wrote Barack Obama in April of 2011 announcing his re-election campaign?

Speaker 5 Well, that's interesting because I don't remember that speech at all.

Speaker 5 What I remember is the speech that tried to frame the re-election campaign, which is a speech that he delivered in Osawatomie, Kansas,

Speaker 5 which

Speaker 5 was a speech. This was before he knew that Mitt Romney was going to be the nominee, and it was just a crowded Republican field.
It was, I think, the fall of 2011. And we went to Kansas.

Speaker 6 December of 2011, I think.

Speaker 5 December, yeah, I think you're right. And we went to Kansas and it was a big crowd.
And he tried to frame the election as a choice between,

Speaker 5 he basically said that, like, protecting the middle class is the defining issue of this election and the future of the middle class.

Speaker 5 And he talked about income inequality and economic inequality as the core issue.

Speaker 5 And are you going to, you know, throw your lot in with what eventually will be Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and a bunch of people who want to deeply cut taxes for the wealthy so they can and then get and then pay for it with cuts to Medicare and Social Security, or everything Barack Obama had been trying to do to move the country forward.

Speaker 5 I remember that speech a lot.

Speaker 6 Here's what I remember from Obama's announcement speech, re-election announcement speech: there was a slight screw-up and there were some empty seats in Ohio. Remember, was it Tufer?

Speaker 6 It was Ohio and then Richmond.

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 6 And most of the coverage was about how Obama had lost his mojo and couldn't fill a large arena anymore.

Speaker 5 Wow,

Speaker 5 of course, I'm glad that you remember that.

Speaker 6 The words were great, too, I'm sure.

Speaker 5 All right, please discuss the Miffitt-Pristone case in Texas and its ramifications. I'm very, very concerned.

Speaker 5 Uh, so this is a case where a federal judge appointed by Trump in Texas may rule, uh, may ban one of two extremely common and safe abortion drugs that the FDA approved decades ago.

Speaker 5 Dan, what do you think?

Speaker 6 Yes, we should be concerned. This is not just a Trump judge.
This is like the Trump judge. Matthew Kazmarek is

Speaker 6 he is seeks out these sort of national

Speaker 6 MAGA issues. You know, there's always like this idea that every district court judge is auditioning to be an appeals court judge, and every appeals court judge audition to be a Supreme Court justice.

Speaker 6 Matthews Kazmarick is auditioning to be Judge Janine Piro. Like that is his goal here.
Right. And so he, you know, they,

Speaker 6 the legal experts that I read said that the,

Speaker 6 he, he is a dangerous entity. We should be worried about him.

Speaker 6 He raised, there were some real questions in the hearing about the 50-state impact of this because you have, I think it is, 22 state attorney generals with the plaintiffs trying to ban it.

Speaker 6 But like with all things that are really important that would eventually head to the Supreme Court, now we live on the razor's edge of an extremely important,

Speaker 6 long approved, very safe drug that is often used to protect the health and life of the mother.

Speaker 5 The FDA has approved it.

Speaker 5 The safety profile is as safe as Tylenol, something like 99% safe with like with no other complications in this drug. So

Speaker 5 if he does decide to ban it, the DOJ will seek an emergency stay from the Fifth Circuit Court Court of Appeals. That's also a very conservative court.
It could then go right to SCOTUS.

Speaker 5 SCOTUS could then either decide to grant a stay or accept the injunction, which, of course, if SCOTUS accepts it, then that means that it is temporarily banned before the case is heard and the Supreme Court decides.

Speaker 5 If this happens, even if ultimately the Supreme Court decides that

Speaker 5 they cannot ban this drug, it could be months and months and months without people having access to it. Now, the other option is the FDA, there's a couple loopholes in the law where

Speaker 5 the FDA could try to bypass this and reapprove the drug through the FDA's process, but even that could take several months as well.

Speaker 5 So, and look, this is also like a first test of the Supreme Court's reasoning in Dobbs was like, oh, well, this should be left up to the states.

Speaker 5 But this is something where this is not leaving it up to the states. If he bans it, it's going to be banned nationwide, including in states, possibly including states where abortion is still legal.

Speaker 5 So then those states would have to respond. The FDA would have to respond.
The Biden administration. So it's going to be a real mess.

Speaker 5 And at the very least, if the judge bans it, we could be seeing access disrupted for several months.

Speaker 5 All right, Dan, how do you think it could affect New Hampshire Republicans if New Hampshire Democrats don't have a meaningful primary to vote in?

Speaker 5 Could large number of moderates and liberals vote in the Republican primary there instead?

Speaker 6 Absolutely. It could have a real impact.
And it has in the past where

Speaker 6 in New Hampshire, you can't, undeclared voters can vote in the primary.

Speaker 6 You can actually, people from the other party can go in, vote in the other primary, and just sign up, re-register as undeclared on the way out.

Speaker 6 We saw this in 2008.

Speaker 6 One of the reasons Barack Obama lost to Hillary Clinton was

Speaker 6 a lot of the undeclared people thought that Obama was going to win by a lot, people including us and and our pollsters, thought that.

Speaker 6 And so a lot of the,

Speaker 6 I didn't feel like naming him was like really relevant. 15 fucking years, like basically almost 15 years to the day.
You're like, just bring it back up.

Speaker 5 Talk about this. Joel's one of the best pollsters in the business.

Speaker 6 We'll see if he still feels that way.

Speaker 6 But I'll hold because people thought that was less competitive, a lot of the independent, undeclared voters in New Hampshire who would have voted for Obama decided to vote in the Republican primary and pick John McCain.

Speaker 6 And so it's just, there's going to be a lot, you're not going to be splitting the independent vote between a Democratic primary and a Republican primary.

Speaker 6 If they want to vote, they're going to vote in the Republican primary. And that it's hard to know exactly how that'll impact it because independent does not mean moderate.
It will change the dynamics.

Speaker 6 And if it was just a pure MAGA primary, which would benefit Trump.

Speaker 5 Next question. What's the appropriate response when you see a 20-something at the gym watching Ben Shapiro on her phone? Not hypothetical.
That is the question.

Speaker 5 Sorry, so I'm going to take this one. You immediately knock the phone out of her hand.
No, that's not. I was going to say call the cops.

Speaker 6 Call the woke police.

Speaker 5 You mock her relentlessly. You tell her she's wrong.
No, this is what. I wanted to take this.

Speaker 5 I think what I would do is instead of mocking the person relentlessly, instead of trying to knock the phone out of her hand, instead of telling her she's a monster for watching Ben Shapiro, all of which may feel good and may be the right course of action morally, but would leave that person continuing to watch Ben Shapiro and maybe even more ensconced in her Ben Shapiro-like bubble.

Speaker 5 Or you can say, is that Ben Shapiro you're watching? Ah,

Speaker 5 I've watched him before. I've watched him before.
I just feel like sometimes he can be very like one-sided.

Speaker 5 So I've been trying to listen to some other points of view on the other side just to sort of get a balance. I've been listening to this podcast called Pod Save America.
You should try it.

Speaker 5 It's really good because, you know, I've watched Ben too, too, but I would, and I, and then maybe you should check out Pod Save America and then maybe we convince her.

Speaker 6 I have a similar approach, would be you tell that person that there is a anti-drag queen protest happening outside.

Speaker 6 When that person leaves to attend the protest, you then take their phone and subscribe to them to Pod Save America.

Speaker 5 I just, the reason I took this question is we have had people

Speaker 5 come up to us and say,

Speaker 5 love Pod Save America. I listen to you guys and I listen to Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro. It has happened.
It has happened more than once. This is my hobby horse.
I say this all the time. Voters are weird.

Speaker 5 They are complicated. They are impossible to predict.
Not everyone who listens to Ben Shapiro is everything you think that they are.

Speaker 5 And so there are persuadable people out there and we should be trying to persuade this. The reason I took this question, there's a couple other questions I didn't take, but one of them was: if

Speaker 5 I'm going to do it. If Ron DeSantis is trying to commit transgenocide and Joe Biden is the head of the military, shouldn't he use his military power to stop Ron DeSantis because he is like Hitler?

Speaker 5 That was one question. The other one was: what is the process to get rid of a state that we do not like because they're too right-wing? People,

Speaker 5 come on,

Speaker 5 just, it's

Speaker 5 you know what the process is? Going out into the country and persuading people that we are correct and then having them vote. That is the only way.
That is the only way.

Speaker 5 Unless you would like to start a civil war, in which case, a lot of people are going to get killed in the United States.

Speaker 5 I mean, that escalated because we are a country that is awash in guns and weapons.

Speaker 5 We've seen the violence happen on January 6th. We've seen it in other places.
Political violence is a real thing. And the right is extreme and they are horrible.

Speaker 5 And the way to convince people is to go out and make a case. Might not always work, might never work, but it's our best shot.

Speaker 6 I cannot wait to see how you pivot to the quote-unquote fun questions.

Speaker 5 So here's a fun question.

Speaker 5 What shows have you guys been watching? And most importantly, how is Dan feeling about the Bravo lineup these days? Are you up to date on the Scandoval? Did I pronounce that correctly?

Speaker 6 I believe you did. Do you have any concept of what that is?

Speaker 5 Only because folks here at Crooked have been talking about it. I am looking at a chart about Skandoval in the studio that I think was happening for a

Speaker 5 social first piece of content that took place here last Friday. Oh, exciting.
Yeah, so I saw it on Instagram, but I couldn't really follow it. So anyway, Dan, what do you think?

Speaker 6 I am vaguely up to date on Skandoval. I'm familiar with what it is.
I know who Tom Sandoval is, but I do not watch Vanderpump Rolls.

Speaker 6 I would like to watch Vanderpump Rolls, but I'm intimidated by the the number of seasons to date. There's like 10 of them.
So I've been in a debate with our producers

Speaker 6 last week about whether they have opinions on whether I have whether the question is, can I just jump in right now or do I have to go back to the beginning? There's a dispute.

Speaker 6 If people have opinions, let me know. I'm curious about it.
Bravo, great. I have one concern, which is I feel, everyone knows I love Below Deck.
I feel like Below Deck is expanding too fast.

Speaker 6 We got Below Deck, Blow Deck Mediterranean, Below Deck Adventure, Below Deck Sailing Yacht. And the problem I've come to is yachting, not a huge industry.

Speaker 6 There's only so many people in yachting who are good on reality TV. And now we're spreading those people out over like seven different franchises.
So that's my concern.

Speaker 5 What else are you watching? Anything new?

Speaker 6 We are watching,

Speaker 6 we just finished 1923, the Yellowstone spin-off, which is 1923 is better than Yellowstone, but 1883, the other Yellowstone spin-off is better than 1923, but they're both good.

Speaker 6 There's a television show with Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren.

Speaker 6 Oh, interesting. It's great.

Speaker 5 I was going to say, speaking of Harrison Ford, I've been watching Shrinking.

Speaker 6 Is it good?

Speaker 5 I love it. Jason Siegel, Harrison Ford, Jessica Williams, all of them are great.
And

Speaker 5 I very much enjoyed it. It's on Apple TV.

Speaker 6 Speaking of Apple TV, we're also watching Liaison, which is this new.

Speaker 6 Did you ever watch The Bureau? Did we ever commit you to watch The Bureau?

Speaker 5 No, I think Tommy has has and Ben, everyone has.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it's the greatest show.

Speaker 6 It's on the Mount Rushmore with The Wire and Breaking Bad. It was a great show.
Wow.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 6 Liaison is sort of Apple TV's attempt to sort of recreate that magic. It's

Speaker 6 half in French, half in English, but pretty good. We're like three episodes or four episodes in.
It's pretty good.

Speaker 5 And we just finished Last of Us.

Speaker 6 I can't believe you watched Last of Us.

Speaker 5 I can't either. So Emily started watching it by herself because I was like, zombie movie about some like

Speaker 5 existential post-apocalyptic, post-pandemic world. No, thank you.
No, thank you.

Speaker 5 And then I would go upstairs to bed and I really be like crying and saying it's like the most moving show and she loves it. And she's like, I'm telling you, it's more like a, don't be scared of it.

Speaker 5 It's not that. And so I got into it and I and I very, very much enjoyed it.

Speaker 6 When I watched the first episode, Hallie would not watch it. She does not do pandemic, dystopian, zombie stuff.

Speaker 6 That very first scene where they basically do the old news show that explains what will become the pandemic that will lead to the zombie apocalypse.

Speaker 6 I thought to myself, I thought there was no, that you would be out on that was my thought. Was there was no way John is going to watch a show like that, but it's great.

Speaker 6 I wish it was longer. I feel like they, because it was nine episodes, they

Speaker 6 spent like they basically went from where they started. I'm not going to spoil where they started to where they ended way too fast.
Like it was, it was great. And it was, you're right.

Speaker 6 It is not a zombie show.

Speaker 6 And I appreciate in this like weird, kind of fucked up Hollywood moment we're in when when people take like genre stuff that will get made and get funded and then jam a whole bunch of other stuff into it in like a really smart way.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 5 We got a question.

Speaker 5 Predictions on the succession finale.

Speaker 6 What do you got?

Speaker 5 Let's see.

Speaker 5 I think Logan's got to die. That's the whole point of the show.

Speaker 5 It's called succession.

Speaker 5 I feel like Kendall is not going to end up so well. Either he's going to be arrested or maybe he dies too, but I could see him being arrested.
I don't know. I don't think Kendall comes out on top.

Speaker 5 Um, I'm trying to figure out like who ends up taking over. Like, is it gonna be a like a Game of Thrones like ending? Spoiler, spoiler, spoiler.

Speaker 5 Yeah, careful if you haven't watched Game of Thrones ending. Is it gonna be like Greg takes over? Is like Connor.
I could see Connor Roy. I could see Connor being the one that's gonna be.

Speaker 6 I think Greg. I think Greg is where it ends up.
I think that would be in line with the Game of Thrones ending, which we will not discuss.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Yeah, Cousin Greg, why not? I don't think it will be.

Speaker 5 I'm so excited for it. I'm so excited.
Yeah. All right.
Last question. Recent proud parent moments for each of us.

Speaker 6 Well, I have two because I have two children.

Speaker 6 The first one is

Speaker 6 Jack has decided to potty train himself.

Speaker 5 What?

Speaker 5 We have a... God, your kids are really smart.
We have a

Speaker 6 trip coming up. And we,

Speaker 6 I guess I can say this. We have a trip coming up.
And so we want to wait till after that trip, but he's decided he's not going to wait. And so

Speaker 6 yesterday he just took his diaper off and just went pooping the potty.

Speaker 5 Man, that's so cool.

Speaker 6 He's sort of a toilet savant. Yeah.
I mean, it's going to be a real pain in the ass when we actually do it, but

Speaker 5 he is.

Speaker 5 Charlie had to go the other day and Emily said, do you want to use the potty? And he said,

Speaker 5 potty's for big boys. And I'm close, but I'm not quite there yet.

Speaker 5 I'm not quite there yet. That's what he said.

Speaker 5 Our old boss, Barack Obama, was in town and had met Charlie. And so we went to go introduce Charlie to Barack Obama.
And it was getting close to bedtime. It was a little late.

Speaker 5 And Charlie had to wait around a bit because Obama was in another meeting. And I was like, how's this going to go? He's getting a little antsy.
We've got a two and a half year old here.

Speaker 5 He's got this like little bag of marshmallows that he's eating as a snack. Barack Obama walks out and Charlie runs up to him and says, hi, Barack Obama.
Would you like a marshmallow?

Speaker 5 gives him the marshmallow,

Speaker 5 gives our old friend Mike Brush, who was with him, a marshmallow, gives all the Secret Service guys marshmallows, and then sits down and says, my name is Charlie.

Speaker 5 I'm two and a half, and my dog's name is Leo, and then pulls out a book from Emily's purse that is a book about the Obamas, a kid's book about the Obamas to show Barack Obama. That is amazing.

Speaker 5 The president just looks at me and he's like, man, he's sharing.

Speaker 5 Good job, guy. What is this? What is this? And I was like, yeah, that's Charlie.

Speaker 6 How did Obama look at the marshmallow? Has he never seen something like that before?

Speaker 5 He looked at it and immediately turned to one of his aides and gave him the marshmallow and made a face. He's like, I am not running, I am not seeking voters anymore.

Speaker 6 I'm not going to pretend, I'm not going to eat unhealthy stuff.

Speaker 5 Pretend he liked the marshmallow. That was which is when I knew that Obama has not changed at all.

Speaker 6 I was going to say, I have to do my other one because I have two children.

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah, I forgot Kyle's sorry.

Speaker 5 When we

Speaker 5 Kyle's like, Kyla did algebra.

Speaker 5 Actually, yes.

Speaker 6 Last fall, did the same thing. Obama was in town.
We took our kids to meet him. He was, we were very excited for that.
And

Speaker 6 the Obama's produced the television show Ada Twist Scientist on Netflix, which is an amazing kid show. It's great.
There are all these books.

Speaker 6 Kyla reads all the books, loves the books.

Speaker 6 And she in... despite being my kids being entirely wild and we were desperately afraid they were going to destroy the president's hotel room

Speaker 6 Because Jack was one and a half at the time and a lunatic. But

Speaker 6 when they were finally, Kyla sat down at a table with Obama and she started talking to him about Ada Twist scientists.

Speaker 6 And there's this one episode about the Golden Gate Bridge and she's convinced they made the Golden Gate Bridge wrong.

Speaker 6 Because that's part of the, it's part of the episode of the show as a incorrectly made suspension bridge. And so she like walked him through it and he was like, what?

Speaker 6 And then we had to leave. and then obama encouraged us because we were in san francisco to go see the golden gate bridge afterwards

Speaker 6 so that she could

Speaker 6 analyze it and we did

Speaker 5 he's like oh look i think you'll uh realize that you're in the wrong here

Speaker 5 uh anyway uh thank you again to karen bass for joining us today everyone have a great weekend and we will see you next week bye everyone

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show.

Speaker 5 Thanks to Hallie Keefer, Ari Schwartz, Sandy Gerrard, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montouth.

Speaker 5 Our episodes are uploaded as videos at youtube.com/slash pod saveamerica.

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

Speaker 9 It's smart, it's spooky, and it's just the right amount of weird. Two new episodes drop every week, and there's even a bonus once a month.
Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

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