“The Old Man and the CPAC.”

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Speaker 2 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.

Speaker 3 I'm John Levitt. I'm Tommy Vitor.

Speaker 2 On today's show, Donald Trump says indictments won't stop him from running. Ron DeSantis tells his Florida story here in California.
CPAC is down to the most hardcore mega grifters.

Speaker 2 And Joe Biden balances public safety with self-governance in opposing D.C.'s crime reforms.

Speaker 2 And here to take us through all the weekends, G.O.P Shenanigans is a reporter who was forced to endure CPAC in person. Semaphore's Dave Weigel.
Welcome. Good to be here.
My 16 CPAC, by the way.

Speaker 2 So I'm glad you have me. Wait, what now? I usually don't have to go on a podcast after they're over.
16? 16? Yeah.

Speaker 4 That's so many CPACs.

Speaker 2 That's a lot.

Speaker 2 Since the days when they thought George Bush won existed, which is not really a thing anymore at CPAC or the conservative movement, but since people would wake up at like 3 a.m.

Speaker 2 to go see George Bush, I guess there's like a few CPACs a year. So it's not right.
Now there are. There used to be just one.

Speaker 2 That's part of the story. That's part of the story.

Speaker 2 I'm doing too much talking for nothing to get introduced. This is good.
Before we begin, I think, Love It,

Speaker 2 you have a little housekeeping for us.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 4 You bet I do.

Speaker 4 We've got a special episode episode on the Love It or Leave It feed with Ike Baron Holtz, Mitcher Juhari, Poppy Lou, and Dave Stassen, who's one of the producers of History of the World Part 2.

Speaker 4 We did a very funny episode

Speaker 4 as part of the launch of History of the World Part 2, and I've seen it. It's great, and the episode is really funny, and everybody should check it out.

Speaker 2 Nice. I love it.
All right, let's get into it. Donald Trump dominated a conservative political action conference that was both emptier and more extreme than ever.

Speaker 2 The twice-impeached loser of the last election handily won the 2,000-person straw poll with 62%. Ron DeSantis, who skipped CPAC, came in second with 20%.

Speaker 2 Failed Michigan gubernatorial candidate Perry Johnson, who I hadn't heard of until yesterday, came in third with 5%. Nikki Haley got 3%.
No one else broke 1%.

Speaker 2 Trump said right before his more than hour and a half speech that he, quote, wouldn't even think about leaving the race if he gets indicted, and then tried to frame his candidacy as a vehicle for revenge.

Speaker 5 Here's a clip: In 2016, I declared, I am your voice. Today, I add, I am your warrior.
I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.
I am your retribution.

Speaker 2 See, some of that Stephen Miller speech writing is back. Some of the old testimony is that you're not going to be able to feel it.

Speaker 2 You get them.

Speaker 2 Dave, what were some of the biggest applause lines from Trump's speech? And what was the general reaction from the CPAC crowd to Trump? Well, the crowd was there to see Trump. And it spent three days.

Speaker 2 More people came on Saturday just to see Trump, just to just to get in that room.

Speaker 2 Rapturous for everything and rapturous for just like what I'm kind of used to in a Trump stump speech now.

Speaker 2 And he hasn't made that many, but I still have the muscle memory for what kind of promises he makes.

Speaker 2 He's been,

Speaker 2 I would say, was really striking how little applause there was for anyone but him because Nikki Haley was there and half filled the room.

Speaker 2 You mentioned, as you mentioned, Mike Pompeo was there, filled it less,

Speaker 2 lost the crowd a little bit as it was going. And I try not to do the theater criticism version of

Speaker 2 things of watching a speech and nodding. No, you should.

Speaker 2 That's what we're here for.

Speaker 2 But it was, none were making an argument that you could sum up as Donald Trump used to be president, but he can't win again.

Speaker 2 They would kind of hint at it. Haley hints at how we've lost the popular vote.
Seven out of the last eight elections hint he actually lost it.

Speaker 2 And Pompeo talks about, oh, he was tough on China and Trump was not, to sum that up. Just people didn't react to that at all.

Speaker 2 Like, no one reacted to the lines that were, hey, there's this guy who's going to speak later and he can't win. No one reacted totally sitting on their hands.
Every Trump line hit. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's as usual.

Speaker 4 It's funny.

Speaker 4 Nikki Haley and Michael Payo have been observing Republican politics very closely for a long time and the one thing we know really works for them is subtlety.

Speaker 4 That's the mood for them.

Speaker 2 When you were talking to some of the attendees, were they as

Speaker 2 into Trump as they always have been? Or did you detect people being open to some alternatives, even if the sort of oblique lines from Haley and

Speaker 2 Pompeo didn't really hit. Just a little bit of that, but then I'd ask about whether they're worried about losing to Democrats.
And it was either

Speaker 2 one person who said they would steal it, which is actually a pretty common view.

Speaker 2 One person who said they thought Biden could win again because they underestimated him. The rest were basically anyone can win.

Speaker 2 Trump had it stolen from him last time. But this is the sample size, but this is about half as big as CPAC in its prime.

Speaker 2 And if I didn't actually go to the 2020 CPAC that Borat was at, like the one where COVID was coming down, you have the clip of Mike Penn saying, as of today, there are 27 cases of COVID.

Speaker 2 I wasn't at that CPAC.

Speaker 2 I skipped that. I was just covering Democrats, like everyone dropping out for Biden.

Speaker 2 But I remember it used to fill

Speaker 2 that whole National Harbor.

Speaker 2 you know, conference center, and it didn't anymore. And a lot of people left because of the scandals around, well, one scandal around Match Schlap, which he has denied

Speaker 2 making an unwanted sexual advance on a Herschel Walker staff earlier in court. He says he didn't.
Most Republicans will say he didn't, but a lot of them said, well, it's a great year to skip.

Speaker 2 So like Fox Nation skipped after spending a quarter of a million dollars. The RNC spent an eighth of a million dollars previous years.
They skipped this one.

Speaker 2 A lot of people just said, it's not worth it. Maybe they'll come back.

Speaker 2 And it didn't have the function it used to of, well, there's Donald Trump, but what, or, well, there's a Republican field. Who else is in this? It didn't have that function.

Speaker 2 It just was about a Trump restoration with some other people allowed to come along and hang out. I didn't even hear the only conversation about like who should run for vice president.

Speaker 2 It wasn't about Haley. It wasn't about Pompeo or anyone else.
It wasn't about Barry Johnson, who I know more about, but I'm not sure it's worth spending time on him.

Speaker 2 It was Carrie Lake. Kerry Lake was there

Speaker 2 for the Reagan dinner, and she won the VP struggle. It was just a Trump crowd that thought he won the election.
She won her election.

Speaker 2 Even though that means they're technically both now president and governor, they should run for president and vice president. That was the mood.

Speaker 2 Tommy Lovett, anything stand out to you guys from Trump's speech?

Speaker 3 I mean, I noticed, you know, as with any sequel, you got to kind of up the stakes. So we went from concern about socialism to Marxism is coming.
So everybody keep an eye out for that.

Speaker 2 I noticed he flip-flopped on early voting.

Speaker 3 We're now saying we need to swamp the left with early votes, mail-in votes, same-day votes. Until we eliminate ballot harvesting, we will become masters at ballot harvesting.
That was interesting.

Speaker 3 They've sort of realized the political implications of telling lots and lots of people not to vote a way that makes it easier for them to vote. I always take note of the isolationist language.

Speaker 3 There was a lot of like, we should be in East Palestine, Ohio, and not in Ukraine. We should lock down our border, not the Ukrainian border.

Speaker 3 You know, that's a very extreme sort of MAGA America-first version of it. It did make me think, though, is this all that different than John Kerry in 2004 saying we should be.

Speaker 2 building firehouses in Indiana, not Iraq, right? I mean, there's sort of always a version of this in politics.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It was a little bit different than that.

Speaker 2 I would say it was different than CPAC one year ago because CPAC 2022 is the same weekend that Russia

Speaker 2 invades Ukraine, and no one knew what to think yet.

Speaker 2 So you started to hear some people in the crowd remember talking to a congressional candidate named George Santos and asking for his take, which is now the mainstream take that we shouldn't be involved at all.

Speaker 2 Like Russia's not that bad, et cetera. But I remember a lot of the speeches made talked about the bravery of Zelensky and they weren't,

Speaker 2 the narrative hadn't shifted yet to any money spent there is being taken away from widows and orphans in America. It's also, you mentioned the carry thing.

Speaker 2 The difference between this and that, though, is they're not saying, and we should also be spending more money.

Speaker 2 And they're saying it when George Bush wasn't like passing infrastructure bills and going to open bridges. Biden is.

Speaker 2 So it's just kind of like a knee-jerk line that is not followed up by, and that's why we will, instead of Ukraine, we're going, well, I guess it's finishing the wall, but not a bunch of other policy.

Speaker 2 Trump has been kind of policy-centric

Speaker 2 in his campaign so far, and no one has really competed with him. I mean, Nikki Haley barely says what she's going to do, but it's not building more stuff.

Speaker 2 It's, I'm going to get in there, lock the border back down, stop Medicaid from covering

Speaker 2 gender identity therapy, all that. He's been heavy on that, but not we're going to build things.
It's that the country is about to collapse because of Joe Biden. I mean, he's needed to stop him.

Speaker 4 Not a fan of the flying cars in the Midwest megacities?

Speaker 2 Oh, freedom cities. That's a policy, though.

Speaker 2 They do sound like just

Speaker 2 somebody from the UAE just like talked to Trump and got him, like, got him at the buffet. It's a 20 minutes.
Saudi Neome. It's like the line.

Speaker 2 Like the line.

Speaker 4 He's the city in the desert.

Speaker 2 Things that no one would want to live in and no one will ever live in. But they look amazing on like a render that you can show somebody in a PowerPoint.
That's right.

Speaker 2 And I think my guess, you know, having a couple of days ago, I haven't gone to his brain trust. My guess is like

Speaker 2 if it looks really cool, another country can do it. He does military parades, right? He went to France.
They marched. He thought that looked cool.
He tried to in America.

Speaker 2 I think he's definitely been like MBS pilled by the coolness of these city designs.

Speaker 2 You can tell that his staff is definitely aware of the criticism that all he does is talk about his own personal grievances because you could hear him try to make the turn a little bit in this speech towards the grievances of others with the retribution, I am your retribution line.

Speaker 2 It didn't make a lot of sense. I mean, there were a lot of January 6th people there and people wearing shirts like, you know, Ashley Babbitt murdered by Capitol Police.
That was a theme there.

Speaker 2 So I think he was leaning into that too. That was a hit.
That was a hit for me.

Speaker 3 He dropped a January 6th song.

Speaker 2 He did. After the

Speaker 3 literally a collaboration with January 6th, people who were in prison. It was him doing the reciting the pledge, I think, and them singing.

Speaker 4 I've always wanted them to work together.

Speaker 2 A lot of people have been saying that. I do think in general, the crime stuff got it's getting even darker with each new speech, even if the policies aren't really changing.

Speaker 2 Like he's talked about creating the tent cities before, but now it's for the homeless, the drug-addicted, and the severely deranged. He's added as well.

Speaker 2 He's talking about cracking down on juvenile criminals.

Speaker 2 He said, on these out-of-control monsters, young though they may be, and impose tough consequences on juvenile criminals. It's like, oof.

Speaker 2 It's getting pretty dark. Yeah, there's no point in saying, oh, how hypocritical that thing that Donald Trump said.
Like, who cares?

Speaker 2 But it is a reversal from the 16 and 20 versions where he was running against a Democrat who was there in the 90s and said, like, maybe, maybe, like, some criminals should go to jail. And

Speaker 2 he thought he could drive a truck through that to some Democratic voters.

Speaker 2 Still, one of my favorite moments of the 2020 campaign, which is, it's not hard to choose because it wasn't a very good campaign.

Speaker 2 Was there's like a week when there were ads in Pennsylvania both saying Joe Biden put too many black men in jail and Joe Biden is going to get rid of the police and you're going to get murdered.

Speaker 2 And he's gotten more, I mean, he will never talk about the First Step Act again.

Speaker 2 He's now a crime guy. He's a nice crime guy.

Speaker 4 He's vacillated, but he now has said a number of times that

Speaker 4 he blames Jared for pushing him into that. He He regrets it and sort of redounding back to his comfort zone here.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, this is who he was in the 80s. This is like, you know, Central Park V Trump.
So that felt, I mean, not just Stephen Miller gave him a script, but that feels very Trump.

Speaker 2 Like he's watching TV. He watches, you know, Newsmax or Tucker Carlson or something.
He sees the footage.

Speaker 2 You know, I could probably all find the neighborhood and then like Venice and like downtown LA that they get the B-roll.

Speaker 2 He sees that and he's like, lock him up, lock him up, put him in a tent city out in the desert in Palmdale.

Speaker 2 And he seems even more passionate about crime than immigration even in the latest couple speeches.

Speaker 2 Like he still has his immigration lines, but it really seems like he's zeroing in on the crime is where he really wants to make his crazy mark. Yeah, we can

Speaker 4 look, we can mock the writing and it is terrible writing, but you see Pompeo and you see Haley up there with these insipid, boring, flat speeches without much to say.

Speaker 4 And Trump gets up there and says, I am your retribution. And if I'm indicted, I'm going to run even harder.
And he cosplayed as a candidate, then he cosplayed as president, now he's back. And

Speaker 2 it is powerful in that room.

Speaker 4 Also,

Speaker 2 they both sound like

Speaker 2 neocons from the Bush era, right? Like Trump started the speech with anti-war, pro-entitlement rhetoric. Bullshit as it may be.

Speaker 2 Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo didn't even really try to go there.

Speaker 3 Trump paints the most apocalyptic vision of the future of the country out of anyone by far. I mean, he literally says, basically, if you don't elect me, you're going to have World War III.

Speaker 3 In this context, he's talking about how easy it would be for him to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine, but he means it in all kinds of ways. Like culturally, the world is going to end.

Speaker 3 Financially, the world is going to end. The whole thing is a sort of like, it really is kind of an Old Testament apocalyptic vision.

Speaker 2 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And he's going to keep having that lane, if not to himself. I mean, DeSantis had no answer on Ukraine.
Now his answer on Ukraine is the Trump answer.

Speaker 2 Haley doesn't have that answer. And there's just no a shrinking and shrinking and shrinking pool of Republican voters to talk to

Speaker 2 if you believe maybe America should take a role in helping Ukraine win. That's not his position.
That's not the one that's going to win.

Speaker 4 I think it would be cool if he said. And if I'm indicted, I'm just going to step back and really focus on my defense.

Speaker 2 So he didn't mention any of his current rivals by name, though he did say this.

Speaker 5 We had a Republican Party that was ruled by freaks, neocons,

Speaker 5 globalists, open border zealots, and fools.

Speaker 5 But we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Carl Rove, and Jeb Bush. We're not going back to people that want to destroy our great social security system, even some in our own party.

Speaker 3 I wonder who that might be.

Speaker 2 So we've been talking about how Trump wants to define DeSantis and the other candidates as establishment rhinos in the mold of Jeb and Paul Ryan.

Speaker 2 How much of a challenge do you think that will be for him, particularly with DeSantis?

Speaker 2 With DeSantis,

Speaker 2 the opening is there because DeSantis was a congressman for six years. He was there

Speaker 2 during the, not the first debt limit fight, but let's stop Obamacare. He signed on to every Ryan budget.
So the numbers are there for it. It's just none of that became law.

Speaker 2 I think he can do it because DeSantis,

Speaker 2 he can at least stagger him because DeSantis is never, he just doesn't take questions from people who ask about that.

Speaker 2 I mean, he's on this, I think he'll talk about it, this media tour, this speaking tour. He talks to friendly media that just ask him how well he's doing.
I mean, he's

Speaker 2 created or handed, handed like, you know,

Speaker 2 FOIA advice to his friendly media. So he's like the most VLPN candidate in this race.
He just never, he never has somebody ask him about a part of his record.

Speaker 2 And this is not like a scandalous part of a record. It became scandalous because Trump won.
And you're not allowed to be interested in slicing back entitlements in Trump's Republican Party.

Speaker 2 He's never asked. So I think if he forces DeSantis to an answer, I think that's the first thing I think DeSantis doesn't have a pat response to.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Now, the tough thing, guys, is when it comes down to the nickname, he's been testing out even more nicknames.

Speaker 2 And if you want to cast DeSantis' establishment, maybe you go with Ron Destablishment, which apparently he's testing out, Ron Dishonest. But then he's also been testing out Tiny D, which

Speaker 2 I don't know what you guys think. Grown adults.

Speaker 2 Grown adults. I want to to know who the freaks are when you're saying

Speaker 2 before we record it. They're the freaks.

Speaker 4 Let's see. We don't know who the freaks are.

Speaker 2 I'm like, there's, you know,

Speaker 4 there's homophobia under freaks. I'm just someone to keep an eye on.
So I'll keep our heads

Speaker 4 about us.

Speaker 2 You can't be a fun freak.

Speaker 4 Well, sure, you can. I don't think that's what Trump would mean.

Speaker 4 I think when he refers to Carl Rove in the bush ears, you can think of talking about Ken Melman, talking about the pro-gay side of the Republican Party. They're trying to kind of

Speaker 4 excommunicate. Yeah, the

Speaker 4 tiny D thing.

Speaker 4 You know, it's because his last name starts with D and it could be a reference to his penis and he's short.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I hadn't thought about it. You get it, you get it?

Speaker 2 I agree.

Speaker 3 Surprising you too.

Speaker 4 I feel like Trump's attention span.

Speaker 4 Trump on True Social, where his id comes out, he wants to share these things that kind of malign DeSantis as a weirdo, as a kind of ambitious, creepy guy.

Speaker 4 He shared the pictures of DeSantis at a party with high school people, maybe.

Speaker 4 So I I think it's a matter of time before he pivots. This Paul Ryan, Republicans, that's not where his heart's going to be.
He wants to call this guy a fucking creep, and he's going to get there.

Speaker 4 And it's just a matter of time.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I

Speaker 2 he's been trying, and

Speaker 2 within the media, I will see people react as if this is the moment, this is it, guys. Like, this is what we've been getting ready for, Trump going negative.
Just no one on the right ends up caring.

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 there's such strong closure around their media system that I'll mention more than ever. I mean, even five years ago, I mentioned a Republican voter or something I'd heard.

Speaker 2 More than ever, if it's like a Trump fight pushback against DeSantis, they haven't heard much about it. Because he does it on True Social.

Speaker 2 He doesn't do it when he does the Newsmax or John Solomon interview.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 he needs to say more out loud, I think,

Speaker 2 for people to become aware. There's a video clip of him attacking, and

Speaker 2 he does have the poster version of his attacks, and then the one that he will go out and deliver.

Speaker 2 That's interesting because we've been talking about how DeSantis has avoided criticizing Trump directly because he's worried about pissing off Trump voters.

Speaker 2 I wonder if the reverse is true as well, where like Trump doesn't want to go too hard.

Speaker 2 Again, truth social aside.

Speaker 2 For example, he didn't mention DeSantis's name. He, you know, didn't, he said, oh, I mean wonder who I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 I wonder if he's doing that because he knows that a lot of Republican voters actually, even though if they love him, they like Ron DeSantis as well.

Speaker 2 Well, like the ecosystem is different than it was in 16. And then 20, he's president, so it's different.
But

Speaker 2 he used to tweet things. Everyone in the media is on Twitter.
People on the media would write, I remember,

Speaker 2 I think it's CNBC. Still has the image that pops my head every time of this is breaking news Trump tweet, like the guy around like it's announcing a land invasion.

Speaker 2 And he doesn't do that. So he will post some stuff on TrueSocial, and people on TrueSocial will kind of see it.
And if you love Trump already, you say, I wish he wouldn't. And you move on.

Speaker 2 But he's not tried to, like, that's what's there are many things different about this race, weirder about this race.

Speaker 2 That is the biggest one thus far is that the media is just, is just having, we're covering something that is happening next to the, the DeSantis Trump battle, and nothing they're doing is, is, is being trafficked through the mainstream media.

Speaker 2 It's just like

Speaker 2 people will, will report back to like Meg Haberman and John Swan or whatever. He had this insult.
And that's it.

Speaker 2 Like he's not going on, but it used to be, I mean, I remember being in Wisconsin with like Ted Cruz.

Speaker 2 Trump had tweeted some stuff, and everyone in the press corps was like, what do you make of this tweet? And Cruz would say, I don't like it.

Speaker 4 Well, there was that gathering in Palm Beach, and Trump could have gone much harder in that.

Speaker 4 It's like, forget, it's like there's still, he's leaving a little bit of like an off-ramp for people that are, you know, DeSantis curious or for people that

Speaker 4 skip CPAC to do Club for Growth. He's still leaving space for those people to come home.

Speaker 3 I just, I still find the rhino thing hard to believe. Like, I watched DeSantis' Reagan Library speech, and there is a very establishment-y vibe about him.
You know, he's at this presidential library.

Speaker 3 He's not like the gipper.

Speaker 3 He's not like a thousand-watt smile with his jokes that he's told 10,000 times about Hollywood, but he's there with his wife and his four and six-year-old, and they're telling stories.

Speaker 3 And he's trying to have a personality and seem like a human being, but he's more optimistic than Trump.

Speaker 3 What I thought he said that needled Trump a bit is he said, you didn't hear from my team lots of leaking and backbiting. We just got stuff done.

Speaker 3 We did it efficiently and we beat the libs over and over again. That felt like a direct shot at the Trump White House.

Speaker 3 And then he said, he talks about how we did an outsource decision-making on COVID to Fauci

Speaker 3 and creating, quote, a Faucian dystopia or a, quote, biomedical security state. So it does seem like DeSantis is just really laying down a path to go hard at Trump over COVID handling.

Speaker 2 Yeah, everything you mentioned is about Trump. He does that in his book, too.
I mean, everything I pulled out from his, I did like a speed read right as soon as it was coming out.

Speaker 2 And the stuff that jumps out is it's not just how he retells the stories, but he'll mention, and then the White House got this wrong, or even the way that he, the whole Disney thing, which I need need to recapitulate the whole thing, but basically

Speaker 2 he, legislatively, the way he took away the Disney state in central Florida was attaching it at the very end of a special session.

Speaker 2 He has a whole section about how smart he was going behind the scenes to do that. Implication, there are some Republicans who are unable to smartly do anything behind the scenes.

Speaker 2 It leaks the front page of the New York Times. It leaks on, they do a 60-minutes thing about it.
Not him. I mean, he just knows how to move in there with the SEAL team and attack and win and get out.

Speaker 4 I think you covered this too. There's a number of times in the book where he talks about, DeSantis talks about how he was ready to do the right thing and he had to wait for Trump to come on board.

Speaker 4 I wanted to move

Speaker 4 the embassy to Jerusalem. He had to get Trump on board.
I wanted to

Speaker 4 do this on COVID, and Trump did it or didn't know what he was going to do.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because I would say it's an establishment. It really is.
He is the...

Speaker 2 like the Tea Party seed planted in 2011.

Speaker 2 That is him.

Speaker 2 The Mark Meadows version of things. A lot of these guys melded with Trump and their brands got cross with Trump, but he is

Speaker 2 more of a 2011, like, we need to destroy the left's march through institutions. And the Tea Party was, it was, I mean, it's some argument you could, you could make about it was barely about finance.

Speaker 2 Like

Speaker 2 the budget is not smaller after the Tea Party fades away. It was about, we didn't realize our country was being taken away from us.
How do we get it back?

Speaker 2 And his answer 10 years later is, well, I figured it out. You just, you know, like win super majority control of the state and pass bills and watch them cry.

Speaker 2 Like, what he's doing in New College, that's that general story of I use the power of the state to dismantle the academic left. Trump was president for four years.
Trump didn't do that.

Speaker 2 Trump never thought of attaching. So that's that point you make about the book.
That's totally it. If you read it as who isn't good at this, the answer in the book is always Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he says, you don't see a drama in palace intrigue. You see surgical precision and execution.
That's right.

Speaker 2 It's just that's about Trump.

Speaker 2 No, no Kellyanne Conway in the DeSantis world. Yeah.
So I can't imagine that Trump's, just back to Trump and CPAC for a second.

Speaker 2 I can't imagine Trump's comments about running if he's indicted are too surprising to anyone, but he also said that an indictment would increase his poll numbers. Tommy, what do you think about that?

Speaker 3 I mean, it's stupid.

Speaker 4 Maybe it would be the case.

Speaker 2 I remember well.

Speaker 3 Who was the New York Times columnist who said that the FBI just gave the nomination to David Brooks, right? So I think any kind of prediction like that is silly.

Speaker 3 Trump is obviously going to make the silliest version, which is it will help me 10 times more than you think, but I take nothing at face value value from him.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think it helps short term in a primary.

Speaker 2 It didn't, I mean, I think when Brooks was saying that, the idea was, because I remember I was in upstate New York for the special election where the Democrat was running on abortion.

Speaker 2 And I think the attitude was, well, is this going to be their answer to the Dobbs decision? And

Speaker 2 neither the Republican candidate nor any voter

Speaker 2 thought that way. They're like, that's Trump.

Speaker 2 They're probably roding him, but whatever.

Speaker 2 They didn't factor it in.

Speaker 2 For the hardcore MAGA voter, he needs to spin it, though, because Ron DeSantis is not going to be indicted for anything.

Speaker 2 And he needs to. He needs to make it a badge of honor.
You didn't get indicted. I did.
He needs to.

Speaker 4 You're pushing them so hard. Why aren't they indicting you?

Speaker 2 Yeah, but he has like

Speaker 2 plenty of things that

Speaker 2 the wrong people attack him over. Just not like the he has

Speaker 2 other things like he's been at war with like the federal government, the

Speaker 2 education department.

Speaker 2 He criticized the Mara Logo. He can do that.
Mara Logo writer should say he can do that stuff. He just like will not personally be indicted.

Speaker 2 So Trump needs to do, but this is not like this is really only as a Trump thing. There's never been another Republican who benefits from actually

Speaker 2 committing a crime and being charged for it. They'll say that I'm being railroaded, but yeah, I don't know how that's going to play out.

Speaker 2 I think it does give him a short-term burst because everyone talks about him and every other Republican will react by saying this is terrible. This is a miscarriage of justice.

Speaker 2 I don't think it's like if DeSantis runs a good campaign, I don't think that's going to be the definitive stop.

Speaker 2 I also think that if there is a segment of the Republican Party that could potentially decide the primary that is very concerned with electability.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 Trump running with a couple indictments might weigh on them a little bit more than you might think. Yeah, it doesn't bother me.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 3 it didn't help Hillary Clinton when she was investigating

Speaker 2 2016. It certainly did.

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Speaker 2 Before we move on from CPAC, Dave, any other notable moments or messages from that circus while you were there for those couple days?

Speaker 2 I wrote about how much

Speaker 2 talk there was about China throughout every panel,

Speaker 2 and also partly because some people

Speaker 2 had backed out, like I mentioned,

Speaker 2 Steve Bannon's group with this Chinese exile, you know, new federal state of China, had a huge sponsorship and multiple booths and a high-tech

Speaker 2 audiovisual room, which I remember because I was interviewing them to get some facts about this group that Steve Bannon supports that wants to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party.

Speaker 2 And I was like, who can I talk to for the facts? And they brought me onto their TV set and just interviewed me.

Speaker 2 And I said, well, while we're here, you're the facts guy.

Speaker 2 How many volunteers are at the conference?

Speaker 2 But then the Epoch Times network, the same thing.

Speaker 2 There were a ton of anti-Chinese Communist Party media. And this has been going on for years, like three, at least three or four years, that a lot of the

Speaker 2 Chinese exile Falun Gong, like,

Speaker 2 let's,

Speaker 2 we cannot have peace so long as Xi Jinping is premier. They really were feeling themselves and they were much more present.

Speaker 2 And that attitude that everything stemmed from this coming conflict with China, which people like Joe Biden are making worse, which Trump tried to win.

Speaker 2 We blew past Pompeo, but like that's the point he's trying to make that no one's listening to, is that Trump actually got kind of snowed by these guys. I wouldn't.

Speaker 2 I think he is attitudinally correct, like right there with the base, but just they're not paying attention to him.

Speaker 2 But the idea that China just literally, like they tried to destroy us with the COVID virus, they tried to to destroy Donald Trump personally by releasing it when it was in election year.

Speaker 2 They're stealing RIP. They're spying on us.
All that much more kind of like a great power conflict mind, even though they're moving away from neocon

Speaker 2 attitudes, it's more like what I would hear from John Bolton 10 years ago at CPAC. And you were not hearing the same, we are in a midnight struggle for

Speaker 2 Taiwan. It's really, it's not new.
I mean, this is like who lost China is as old as this version of China.

Speaker 2 But I wasn't hearing it at previous CPACs. The move was, let's de-escalate.
It's the Libs who want to bomb people and get into foreign conflicts. They're not saying we want a war with China.

Speaker 2 It's that we need, what's it, Vivek Ramaswamy, who was also there, like running for president based on

Speaker 2 his book.

Speaker 2 Anti-woke platform. His anti-woke platform is like, we need a declaration of independence from China, cutting off all manufacturing, all drugs, go back to 1998 before we had trade tests.

Speaker 2 That was like not, I think it didn't show up as many of the articles because it was less of a headline gravy than Trump or like the anti-trans stuff. But that was like ran through everything.

Speaker 2 Every other panel was, and also the Chinese are behind this, and also they're giving us fentanyl, and also they're addicting our kids to TikTok, et cetera.

Speaker 3 Incredibly conspiratorial.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, speaking of the anti-trans rhetoric there, one of the more horrifying moments was when Daily Wire host Michael Knowles said that, quote, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely, the whole preposterous ideology.

Speaker 2 He and the Daily Wire then threatened to sue anyone who interpreted his comments to mean that he was calling for harm against transgender people.

Speaker 2 What do you think about his attempt at drawing a distinction there? Love it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, it's like, what does he mean? Well, you look at what the anti-trans far right actually advocates for when they say they want to, what he describes as ending transgenderism, which is

Speaker 4 they want to punish doctors who provide evidence-based care to anyone, teens, adults, anyone. They want to ban that care.
They are doing that.

Speaker 4 They're banning it in Mississippi and Tennessee and elsewhere. They want to punish teachers who support and embrace trans kids.

Speaker 4 And they want to make those teachers afraid to even talk about LGBT issues because they're not sure exactly where the law is going to end. They want to punish parents who support those kids.

Speaker 4 That's what they're trying to do, or they are doing in Texas. And more broadly, they want to convince parents that if your child says they are trans, they are being deluded.
They are part of a hoax.

Speaker 4 You should spurn them and not listen to them.

Speaker 4 This isn't real. They want to ban trans people from using bathrooms that match their gender, which is another way of saying they want to make it unsafe for trans people to exist in public.

Speaker 4 They want to stigmatize and ban gender non-conforming performances of all kinds.

Speaker 4 They want to malign non-conforming people and the entire medical community as a danger to children while claiming that in order to protect kids, they have to do medically, scientifically unjustified examination of kids in order to comport with an anti-trans moral panic about sports.

Speaker 4 And as they do all of that, they then mock anyone who trans, non-binary, just gay or queer or just not comporting with standards of masculinity and femininity.

Speaker 4 They want to ostracize anyone who does that as being depraved and a harm to children. So, not only are we going to tell you what your gender is, there's only one way to be that gender.

Speaker 4 So, it's live exactly how we tell you to live.

Speaker 4 Then you have our permission to exist. So, no, I don't think there is a distinction.

Speaker 4 When they say they want to end the ideology, they do mean they want to make it impossible for trans people or non-binary people to exist in public life.

Speaker 4 And so, they are part of an eradication campaign, as all fascistic movements do.

Speaker 4 They like to troll and pretend they're not saying what they're obviously saying, claim offense when you point out the implications of what they're actually saying.

Speaker 4 You know, it's, we're here to fix you, is what they want to say.

Speaker 3 Like, that's like Michael Knowles is kind of a slimy, like, B-team propagandist of the Daily Wire, and he knows exactly what he's doing here.

Speaker 3 He chose the word eradicated for a reason, and he chose the word transgenderism for a reason, because he wants to make clear that he doesn't think transgender people have the right to exist, but then get offended when you point out how dangerous that language is or the logical extension of that language.

Speaker 3 And I agree with you, it's a distinction without a difference because he has said previously that transgender people, quote, are not a legitimate category of being and therefore cannot be the target of genocide.

Speaker 4 But that doesn't make it better.

Speaker 3 You can't tell people that they are illegitimate. These are human beings.
It's a group of people.

Speaker 3 You're saying you don't exist, that you, that you can't exist, you can't live your life in the way you want. That is the definition of dehumanizing language.

Speaker 3 And so, yes, this guy is like a B-list troll, but he also has influence. Until very recently, he he did a podcast with Ted Cruz, until Ted Cruz dumped him to go take the show to iHeart.

Speaker 3 But he's not the only one talking like this. It's like TP USA, it's Candace Owens types, it's the Daily Wire.
And they try to gloss over it with like faux intellectual language sometimes.

Speaker 3 And then Charlie Kirk will go and say, man, we should take care of these trans people the way men did in the 50s and 60s, meaning...

Speaker 3 physically harm them. And so I do think it's worrisome.
It should be called out. We should refuse to play his little word game.
And if he wants to sue people that say as much, fuck you. Sue them.

Speaker 2 If someone gave a speech talking about eradicating Judaism or Christianity or Mormonism, what do you think the reaction would be? Yeah, if they didn't say Jewish people, right? Like, come on.

Speaker 4 And this, you know, look, this is influential. Another Daily Wire person spoke at the bill signing of the Mississippi law.

Speaker 2 Matt Walsh.

Speaker 4 Matt Walsh, some of the most incendiary, violent rhetoric proudly embraces the fact that he uses violent rhetoric around trans people.

Speaker 2 It talks about going to war against them.

Speaker 4 And so the other just point I would make, too, is that like this is the context of the current,

Speaker 4 this is the context of the state of politics around

Speaker 4 trans policymaking. You have outright bans, you have fascistic, violent rhetoric emanating from very big media organizations on the right.
It is everywhere. It is on Fox.
It is at CPAC.

Speaker 4 It is in the states. It is coming from powerful people inside of states.

Speaker 4 And then you have a very stupid conversation playing out on Twitter, dancing on the end of a pin about the meaning of the word bias.

Speaker 4 And people really do need to get their heads out of their asses and stop focusing so much on the intra-liberal debate taking place among a very small group of people and actually focus all of their ire and all of their attention on the actual threat that is playing out.

Speaker 4 right now. Does the coverage that emanates from the New York Times, does that affect the coverage and the impact and the politics in places like Mississippi and Tennessee and elsewhere?

Speaker 4 It absolutely does, but we should focus on the actual ongoing emergent threat right now.

Speaker 2 I also think if the New York Times didn't exist,

Speaker 2 they'd still be doing that.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 in those states. That would still be happening.
I mean, a lot of the people in these movements, in these social conservative movements, look at what happened in the UK.

Speaker 2 I think they're speedrunning it in ways that are politically a little riskier. The UK, this is a whole different topic.
But the UK,

Speaker 2 it crosses party lines. A lot of the the momentum for rolling back like self-identification and transgender rights comes from this thing called the LGB Alliance, like this fairly fringe group.

Speaker 2 But there are a lot of, I'm a gay man. If I was a gay man and I was given hormones and I was 10, I wouldn't have grown up to be who I really am.
That's kind of absent here. It is just the Matt Walsh,

Speaker 2 the Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles version of things. And

Speaker 2 it's very coherent. And I feel like that is

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 these things are just racing through state legislatures. There is no opposition that matters to them when they pass.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 as a political cause, it is concentrated completely within the Republican Party. And because it is, I think it's getting,

Speaker 2 it's a little bit less, let's worry about the children, and more of that sort of, you know, patent in front of the flag rhetoric of we need to stop this right now. We are at war against this idea.

Speaker 2 I think any

Speaker 2 people, especially conservatives have been called out, the idea you could just... obviate like an entire idea and way of being somehow legally and it'll go away.

Speaker 2 I think that that's what happens when you just get so hyped up and you're not listening to yourself. You don't have a, it's not a strategy.

Speaker 2 It is just, I want those people to go away and we've got momentum. So let's pass the Make Them Go Away Forever law.

Speaker 2 That doesn't really make sense, but they don't have left-wing allies telling them to moderate these things like they do in the UK.

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 4 and it is all very, there is a,

Speaker 4 you know, it is very frustrating that this is what is happening in our politics. And meanwhile, there's a vast kind of anti-woke ecosystem.
The Barry Weiss's Weiss's and J.K.

Speaker 4 Rowlings and Bill Mars and now Dave Chappelle's of the world all kind of talking about the way in which this whole debate is an imposition on them

Speaker 4 and the allegations against them. That is incredibly frustrating.
But politically, I feel like

Speaker 4 we have to go past them and focus on the actual laws and the substance of the actual bills that are moving through the state houses and then make a larger argument about these people like Michael Knowles and all these right-wingers who they just want to tell you how to live in every way.

Speaker 4 They want to tell doctors what to do and teachers what to do and parents what to do.

Speaker 4 You know, when Mark Kelly, there's a great moment that Mark Kelly had in that debate right before the election where he said something about

Speaker 2 that skeleton.

Speaker 4 What's his name? Blake Masters. Blake Masters.

Speaker 2 We all know guys like this.

Speaker 4 We all go know guys like this. And Michael Knowles is another guy like that.

Speaker 4 And we need to get back to a larger argument about the way in which they are trying to tell people how to live their lives and tell parents how to parent and teachers how to teach and get it out of this kind of bias,

Speaker 4 broader debate that plays out amongst very engaged progressives online.

Speaker 2 Great segue because one of the people who's trying to tell people how to live their lives like that is Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 2 So let's dig a little bit more into his speech at the Reagan Library in California that happened on Sunday. Let's take a listen.

Speaker 4 It's ideology run amok. That's why the quality of life has declined in places like San Francisco and New York City and Philadelphia and Chicago.
It's all rooted in that.

Speaker 4 And that woke ideology rejects the core foundational principles that have made this country great. So in Florida, we say very clearly, we will never, ever surrender to the woke mob.

Speaker 4 Our state is where woke goes to die.

Speaker 2 Tommy, you were talking about what you thought of the speech. I'd like to hear more.
It struck me as, this is like the first like full Ron DeSantis speech that I've listened to.

Speaker 2 I thought it was interesting that he began by trying to tell like the Florida story, the story about Florida, and it was much more of like a general election intellectual pitch about what's happened in Florida than I had expected from Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 2 A lot of economic data. Yeah,

Speaker 2 which made it really wonky and a little boring. And then he gets to the culture war stuff at the end of the speech, and that's where all the applause lines come in.

Speaker 2 But it's interesting because we were just talking about Trump's speech and Trump sort of flips it.

Speaker 2 Trump didn't speak about the economy and inflation until an hour, 30 minutes into the seatbelt speech. And DeSantis does most of the beginning of the speech all about that.

Speaker 2 I thought that was interesting.

Speaker 3 And that to me was what gave off the establishment vibes and sort of the Reagan vibes.

Speaker 3 I mean, DeSantis also has this little sort of war of words going with Gavin Newsom, where like Gavin Newsom attacks him in the press and puts up posters in Florida or in Texas about how great it is to live in California.

Speaker 3 And they go back and forth. And it, frankly, benefits both of them.

Speaker 3 So I wonder if part of that was just needling Gavin Newsome and talking about how much better it is to live in Florida or have a business in Florida than California, which has seen net outflows of residents and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's like, when I was growing up in Florida, you never saw a California license plate. Now you see them all the time.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they go, oh, it used to worry us. You know, so I, you know, I, I,

Speaker 3 there is, there, there's a piece of the message that's like, I'll do all the culture war stuff, but I'm also good at the job and I'm competent and I'm a little less of a psycho.

Speaker 2 And he can't, if he wins the primary, he can just sort of drop the last quarter of the speech. Yeah,

Speaker 2 at least minimize it.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 4 The anti-woke stuff is why he's famous. The economics is more why he's popular.
When the national press covers his CRT, anti-diversity, anti-gay, anti-trans stuff, that's what covers the news.

Speaker 4 But then the part that probably had the biggest impact is a bonus for teachers or raising teacher salary minimums, right? So he has been very smart, and we should be aware of that, too.

Speaker 3 He has a great electability argument, too, which he barely won in 2018, and then he kicked Charlie Chris's in 2022 by like a million votes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he doesn't even say as much as he could. I mean, that they like like got a supermajority.
They now have like no Democratic opposition to speak of. Like they humiliated like everyone

Speaker 2 up and down the ballot.

Speaker 2 It's also coherent. So the thing that if you're like going to the Wregon Library to see him and you were like a deputy undersecretary or something and you retired

Speaker 2 like Sherman Oaks and you want to see him, you want to hear more about the economic stuff. It's more that he is a

Speaker 2 like Trump, although Trump kind of came around to it. It's kind of

Speaker 2 ham-fisted. Like the DeSantis theory of how the world works is just there is an incompetent elite who was revealed by COVID to be incompetent.
We never need to listen to them.

Speaker 2 And if, hey, if they were wrong about COVID, what else are they wrong about? I bet everything. I bet they're wrong about everything.
So

Speaker 2 look at our tourism data. And then while you're looking at it, look at our school choice program.
Look at our bill that makes it illegal for

Speaker 2 a fourth-grade teacher to mention, to have a rainbow flag in the room.

Speaker 2 Expertated that. Well, are they wrong about COVID? And that actually, as just like an icebreaker, as a way to, as a way to get an audience going, has been very effective.
And he's built on it with

Speaker 2 This very, you know,

Speaker 2 they, I think liberals think you mentioned Orban in Hungary, and that might, that might spook people. In Florida, not, not, not a, not a, not really controversial.

Speaker 2 There is cross-pollination that they talk about between a European state that figures, all right, we don't trust the experts.

Speaker 2 We're going to build our own national state and go back to traditional values. Exactly what he's doing.
And so he actually doesn't, I don't think sells it as well as like, unlike Trump, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, like once he's rolling, he's the best at explaining why like people liked him in office.

Speaker 2 The DeSantis version can be a little more boring than the one that excites people so much, which is like, I am going to personally, it's not just I humiliated Fauci, but I humiliated the entire medical industry, the same people who are providing

Speaker 2 HRT and stuff. They're probably wrong too.
They're probably in it for the money, too.

Speaker 2 It's like, I don't know how long you can, but I sometimes hear people think, oh, can you just talk about COVID forever? And it's more than COVID. It's like every time.

Speaker 2 I'm tested, I disagree with the establishment and I'm right.

Speaker 2 The thing I'm trying to figure out is about this primary with him and Trump is it seems like DeSantis' argument is it's a very intellectual argument. He's trying to make a case.

Speaker 2 He's trying to like, it's a head argument, right?

Speaker 2 And obviously there's a, I think among college-educated Republicans, we're seeing this in the early polls already, DeSantis is like crushing Trump among college-educated Republicans.

Speaker 2 But knowing the composition of the Republican Party right now and how most of the party now is non-college educated white folks, I sort of wonder if there are, and there's more of them than the college-educated college set in the Republican Party.

Speaker 2 Sort of wonder if that argument will find an audience as big as Trump's argument.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I feel like the Trump, what you were talking about, tried to make him look like part of the establishment thing is a good way in.

Speaker 2 Just anyone who's been, who's held elective office can't be trusted, which is something like DeSantis trafficked in.

Speaker 2 Like, he won his House seat by beating a guy who'd served one term in the state legislature and he called him a career politician. Like, he knows how this works.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But, but that, that DeSantis argument, I mean, he has, like, Leonard Skinner wrote a song for him. He does have that appeal to the beer track voter, and he destroyed.

Speaker 2 I mean, he had like historic margins with exactly the kind of voter we're talking about, better than Trump, not just like Miami and Palm Beach County, but like that guy who has the Trump flag.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. I mean, the flag I've seen, I've been to Florida in a minute, but I've seen a lot of like Trump DeSantis flags.
It is just convincing people that you should dump him and put him in power.

Speaker 2 But I've not met a Trump voter who does not like DeSantis at work. They're like, he should just get more seasoning and then be president for eight years after Trump.

Speaker 2 And it does seem like, and you guys were talking about this with DeSantis' book, seems like his argument against Trump that's emerging, and right now it's a very sort of oblique argument, is that Trump was just sort of messy and undisciplined.

Speaker 2 It's a competence thing. Yeah, right.
And that like the guy,

Speaker 2 there's an electability argument. There's also a, he made decisions.

Speaker 2 He wasn't great at making decisions. He was kind of impulsive.
You see his behavior. You don't like his behavior.
I'm like, just a smarter version of him. Yeah, I'll own the libs without the chaos.

Speaker 2 Even the way they talk about college, like Trump loves talking about how he went to a good college.

Speaker 2 Remember, I think one of his worst political antenna moments was when he makes fun of Biden for not going to as good of a college as he did in the debate.

Speaker 2 And like DeSantis' version of things, like, I went to Harvard and Yale and I learned I must destroy these people.

Speaker 2 Like, he never emphasized that he went there except to say, like, and I learned that they are destroying America for within. They have been for decades.
Not look at my shiny degree.

Speaker 2 Like, he doesn't care about it.

Speaker 4 Sometimes people make good points.

Speaker 3 I mean, just worst person I know.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the worst person I know just made a really good point.

Speaker 2 So here's some of what DeSantis wants to get through Florida's annual legislative session that begins this week.

Speaker 2 Conceals carry without a permit, eliminate diversity and equity programs at state colleges, expand school vouchers, allow death sentences without a unanimous jury, repeal in-state tuition for dreamers, make it easier to sue the media for libel and further restrictions on abortion.

Speaker 2 Love it, what do you think are the biggest targets on that list for Democrats?

Speaker 2 Should, well, I was going to say, should DeSantis make it to the general, but maybe just start talking about right now while he's still in the primary.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so just first of all,

Speaker 4 when he did the banning of diversity and equity programs, he said he wants to fight ideological conformity, which, but, and the way he's doing it is by banning one kind of teaching and mandating Western civ.

Speaker 4 And it's like nothing, nothing makes us more kind of ideologically heterodox than everybody does a week on the fucking Greeks and then everybody does a week on the Romans and then one week on Jesus, then about the Dark Ages.

Speaker 4 That's just a small point I wanted to make.

Speaker 2 It's it's just like,

Speaker 2 Trump is talking about architecture, too.

Speaker 3 They're all sort of doing that.

Speaker 4 Oh, it's all just this. It really is just like, I don't know why these things always end up going together, but it is just, that's fascism for you.

Speaker 2 But oh, yeah, Trump wants to clean up the building. He wants to

Speaker 4 figure out. They want Roman columns.
They want symmetrical columns, big fucking arches, none of this modern shit. This is like, it's 2023.
Like, pave a road. You're against the Bauhaus.

Speaker 4 What the fuck is going on? So stupid. Like, we're trapped with these fucking assholes.
Anyway, the point is,

Speaker 4 two policies I'd pull from that. One, further restrictions on abortion.

Speaker 4 Florida currently has a 15-week abortion ban that has exceptions for life or serious injury, but not for sexual assault or incest. DeSantis is aware of how bad the politics on this are.

Speaker 4 He barely references abortion in the book.

Speaker 4 I think it seems like he'd hope the 15-week ban would get him through, but it won't. Activists feel like he's not leading.
There's a push for a six-week ban. He has now embraced that push.

Speaker 4 The only reason, the only thing that stands in his way is a Republican supermajority and some resistance among Republicans in the Senate.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 that is going to be, I think, something Democrats try to make toxic with some hard votes, even though they don't have the ability to stop it. And then the other is concealed carry.

Speaker 4 Only 14% of Americans want looser gun laws. Most Republicans don't.
Most conservatives don't. Concealed carry without a permit is an 80-20 issue, even among Republicans.
Only 35% support it.

Speaker 4 I think abortion is a big one.

Speaker 4 Then the permitless concealed carry. And then he's going after these fucking dreamers.
Rick Scott signed the bill to

Speaker 4 allow dreamers to use in-state tuition. By 80-20, Americans, Republicans, everybody believes dreamers should be able to stay and have a good life.
And it's this cruel thing.

Speaker 4 Rick Scott went out of his way to criticize DeSantis over that. The only reason he's doing it is because it's such a fucking loser of an issue.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I got to say, too, that he's real, the dictating what exactly is taught in our schools and going through colleges too,

Speaker 2 I don't think it's, I don't think it's super popular across the country because it doesn't, it doesn't really scream freedom.

Speaker 4 Well, that's why he makes the point about we're fighting ideological conformity. He feels the weakness that he's going after people's ability to learn what they want to learn.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and unlike the sort of Michael Knowles of the world, he tries to scope his culture war arguments in ways that sound more palatable.

Speaker 3 He's like, Look, we're just telling teachers you can't teach sex ed to third graders. You know, he's like, What's so crazy about that? He acts like sort of the left completely overreact.

Speaker 3 But, you know, arguably, maybe the most important bill for DeSantis in this session would be one that would allow him to run for president without resigning first.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I saw that one. I was flipping that one up.
Keep an eye on that one.

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Speaker 2 All right, before we go, President Biden caused a bit of a kerfuffle last week when he tweeted the following about the D.C. Council's changes to the city's criminal code.
Quote, I support D.C.

Speaker 2 statehood and home rule, but I don't support some of the changes that the D.C. Council put forward over the mayor's objections, such as lowering penalties for carjackings.

Speaker 2 If the Senate votes to overturn what the D.C. Council did, I'll sign it.

Speaker 2 This enraged many criminal justice advocates, D.C.

Speaker 2 residents, and House Democrats, many of whom just voted against repealing the new criminal code after the Biden administration had released a statement that also opposed repealing the new criminal code on the grounds that, quote, Congress should respect the District of Columbia's autonomy to govern its own local affairs.

Speaker 2 Okay. So for people who may not know, what's the backstory on this crime bill and why can the federal government overturn what the D.C.
Council does? Well,

Speaker 2 D.C. is not a state.
Please call in with your comments about this. I mean, it's in the Constitution, as a zone where the government works.
It has a home rule deal with Congress.

Speaker 2 It's had its rights mostly expanded since the 60s, not really retracted, except when Newt took over. They took a couple of powers away because Marion Berry was mayor.

Speaker 2 And there is a tug of war where D.C. representing liberalism, representing like a majority black liberalism and urban policy is a punching bag for Republicans.

Speaker 2 That's been true for the entire history of Home Rule, really, since the 60s.

Speaker 3 Home rule just specifically says that Congress reviews, can review legislation passed by the D.C.

Speaker 2 city. Yeah, Homeru is kind of referring to the powers D.C.
has, but like in case you get out of line, and this is something that like a lot of states have, Florida, good example.

Speaker 2 Lots of laws in Florida are passed. Like, hey, your city is not allowed to do X, Y, Z.
The difference is you can still elect a state rep from that city. You can't in Congress.

Speaker 2 Just you have no voting representation. So that's the backstory.

Speaker 2 Congress has the power to do this. D.C.
had been working on updating its criminal code, which has not been updated in decades, with a combination of 100 years, I believe. Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 There have been tweaks, but like the last time Congress overturned some of the D.C., it was they reduced the criminal penalties for adultery and sodomy. And Congress said, No, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 We need to keep that on the books. Congress.
But they've been doing this for a while.

Speaker 2 The mayor opposed some changes to the code that were more lenient, that were lowering the sentencing guidelines, specifically carjacking.

Speaker 2 Carjacking is the one that gets the attention because there's been a rise in carjacking, just like teenagers jacking cars because there's nothing else to do.

Speaker 2 It It increased some other penalties. It created like gun crime penalties that didn't exist before.
But the council didn't do a very good job explaining any of this.

Speaker 2 And there was a kind of, to the extent anyone heard about it outside D.C., it was the mayor was against part of it.

Speaker 2 A lot of mayors, I mean, like Laurie Lloydfoot just went down in flames because there are a lot of Democratic mayors. If crime went up under your watch, you either quit or lose.

Speaker 2 You need a good explanation for it. But they dawdled because they're not used to Congress.

Speaker 2 I think they had confidence in Biden. They had confidence in the Democrats, the Senate.

Speaker 2 They dawdled and they let it get into this zone where there's 30 days that that you have to overturn one of DC's laws.

Speaker 2 And their lobbying was, please save this law because it's not the mayor's letter to the Senate, et cetera. Their lobbying was not, we're going to defend this bill on the merits.

Speaker 2 We're going to defend how it actually increases penalties. It was, hey, this is not nice.
Like DC's taxation was at representation. You're doing, you're violating our sovereignty.

Speaker 2 So they managed to get a fight with Biden over that without getting into any of the substance of the law, which is

Speaker 2 Mark Joseph Stern at Slate has a good article about the criminal code.

Speaker 2 There are things in there that are politically toxic, but like there's any bill, any update to the code, you can like sell it in a particular way.

Speaker 2 You can emphasize like, actually, this puts more people in jail for like violent crimes, or you can not say anything, which is what they did.

Speaker 2 So there's like a little political story here about the DC Council of just your Democrats. They're all Democrats, having no idea how to like politics, just do politics.

Speaker 2 But the larger story is, yeah, they tried to update this, this code.

Speaker 2 It was a, I mean, you had a mayor who looked, I think the iconic Marion Barrow Bowser, the mayor of DC move, was she painted Black Lives Matter on 16th Street in front of the White House, and then activists painted equals to fund the police, and she painted over that.

Speaker 2 Like, she is a very symbolic, let's keep things, let's keep the party, let's keep the party going while saying all the Black Lives Matter slogans kind of mayor.

Speaker 2 And none of them are good at politics. Like, none of them were in a good position to say, here is a great series of reforms that will make the city safer.

Speaker 2 What they were competing with, and they had no idea about, is Republicans going home and seeing their their voters see images of D.C. on TV or they'll hear reports about the crime there.

Speaker 2 And it's just an easy punching bag to say, I went there and I'm not going to let this city that can't govern itself like make it more dangerous. I'm trying to go to work in D.C.

Speaker 2 Yeah, just a case of just, you know, some good, some good policy ideas, some probably bad policy ideas, and then just like awful politics,

Speaker 2 not taking seriously that a new Republican majority in the House of like five, you know, a five-seat majority or whatever absolutely cannot wait to like dismantle D.C. laws.
They hate it.

Speaker 2 Tommy, what do you think of the criticism of Biden? Well, so, yeah,

Speaker 3 today's point, I mean, it's important to point out the mayor of D.C. opposed the bill.

Speaker 3 Her veto was overridden. She says she supports 95% of the bill.
The parts she's worried about are parts that she thinks would explode the number of misdemeanor cases that end up in jury trials.

Speaker 3 She's worried if every misdemeanor case goes to a jury trial, it will overwhelm the system. They'll never get anything done, whatever.
The other part is this:

Speaker 3 you mentioned carjacking. There's a provision that drastically reduces the penalty for armed carjacking.

Speaker 2 The recommended penalty because right now it's 40 years, and it will, you're going to explain.

Speaker 3 So today, what I read, and tell me if I'm wrong, today I read that if someone commits an armed carjacking and the victim is not injured, the minimum sentence is 15 years.

Speaker 3 The new bill says the maximum sentence would be eight years. So it's a big difference according to the mayor's office.
So Biden is getting hit. on a number of fronts.

Speaker 3 The first is people who are saying he's undermining D.C. statehood.
And I get where they are coming from, but this is not a D.C. statehood bill.
He would sign a D.C. statehood bill.

Speaker 3 It's a bill going through the current established but also dumb process, right? So, like, he's just working with the system he's got.

Speaker 3 The second criticism is people who say he's undermining criminal justice reform.

Speaker 3 But I think what Biden would argue is, I'm in favor of decriminalizing marijuana or reducing drug sentences, but I never came out in favor of cutting in half potentially the sentence for an armed carjacking.

Speaker 3 The third criticism is from Democrats in the House who voted for this bill, thinking Biden put out an initial statement of administration policy that made it seem like he had pledged to veto the bill, even though the SAP didn't specifically say that.

Speaker 3 And now these House Democrats feel like they had the rug pulled out from under them because now Biden says

Speaker 3 he

Speaker 3 will allow the bill to pass. So I think that is a very fair criticism from House Democrats who are like, yo, no heads up, confusing statement of administration policy.

Speaker 2 House Democrats did a terrible job at every part of this. Yeah, well, that's still the mystery to me is there's somebody in the White House staff who put out this memo.
It wasn't a a veto statement.

Speaker 2 It was just like, we're against the bill. And then there's the president.
We wouldn't agree with that. And that's weird.
That doesn't happen that often.

Speaker 2 You guys know that like the White House comes into position remanded by the president once he finds out about it.

Speaker 3 There's this weird wonky process.

Speaker 3 I remember learning about it like six months into the White House where bills come out and all of a sudden there will be a statement that comes out from OMB called a SAP, statement of administration policy that sort of lays out how you feel about it.

Speaker 2 And that's what this is that we're talking about.

Speaker 3 And we're talking about that. And I guess there's just been no real coordination on how that came out and what it really meant.

Speaker 2 Yeah, very good PR push by the antis by the Republicans on the car.

Speaker 2 The carjacking he mentions in his, the president mentions in his tweet, that is just a very vivid crime that has gotten a lot of negative attention in D.C.

Speaker 2 The irony being most of the gruesome cases are like teenagers who wouldn't be subject to the full criminal code because they're juveniles. But every time, I mean,

Speaker 2 it bleeds, it leaves. Every time there's one of those stories, even I'll be across the country and I'll hear about it.
I'll like notice

Speaker 2 Fox News does have, as much as there's like closure around conservative media, Fox News has the power by it ping-pongs it to a member, a Republican member of Congress, that Republican member of Congress makes a speech.

Speaker 2 Fox News was driving a lot of this. The White House reacts to Fox News, and the D.C.
council doesn't.

Speaker 2 And then the rest of Democrats, like Durban, the rest, I think they just didn't know what was going on. As far as I can tell, they just had no idea

Speaker 2 how this is going to play out. Yeah, I do.

Speaker 4 It's also, you know, this is a criminal justice reform bill going for whatever tacit approval to a recently elected Republican House, many of whom have said they want to have more more authority over DC.

Speaker 4 One of the people that has spearheaded the effort to reject this law wants to repeal home rule altogether.

Speaker 2 And so in that ban abortion in D.C., you know, repeal the gun laws in D.C.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 4 And so in that context,

Speaker 4 this bill goes from the D, this bill is, they overcome the veto of the mayor.

Speaker 4 And the mayor basically says, I won't lobby for this through us through a through someone on their team says it's not up to the mayor to lobby for something she doesn't believe in, right?

Speaker 4 Which is just, you have a kind of divided DC government sending up a controversial controversial bill in which you need basically Democratic unanimity.

Speaker 4 And once it was clear that it might not be able to get through the Senate, which it was very easily going to lose, you know, your mansions, your cinemas, then a couple others, all of a sudden it's whether or not Biden is going to actually veto it and make this a national issue.

Speaker 4 And clearly they decided not to. And they'd rather the I'm going to say it, souris,

Speaker 4 of angry House Democrats who are right to be angry about this

Speaker 4 and angry D.C. advocates who are right to be angry about this than have a national issue in which D.C.
Democrats supported these carjacking rules.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's two issues here. One is, you know, there's criticism that the president can't be for D.C.
statehood and

Speaker 2 self-rule while still signing the repeal of this criminal code.

Speaker 2 And I just think that, like, you said this, as of right now, the federal government still has the legal responsibility to review what the D.C. Council does, right?

Speaker 2 Like, we wish it weren't so, but that's the law right now. And I don't know that they can abdicate that responsibility just because they don't like what the law and the constitution

Speaker 2 and then Congress won't do anything about it. Right, but

Speaker 2 what I'm saying is if Congress takes it up, if the Republicans dispersed, which they did in this case and decide to pass a resolution,

Speaker 2 I don't think the Joe Biden and Democrats can just say like, oh, well, the reason we're not doing anything about it is

Speaker 2 because we don't like the law. Because if the D.C.
council

Speaker 2 decided to outlaw abortion in the district, and I suspect that most pro-choice activists and progressives and us would be saying, hey, Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress, you should step in and do something about that because you have the power to do it.

Speaker 2 We probably would.

Speaker 4 Yes, I think that's right. Right?

Speaker 2 I also. So I think we have to separate that from the substance of the law, which

Speaker 2 people aren't as exercised about.

Speaker 4 Of course.

Speaker 4 But the reality here, though, is that this is not because the Democrats feel a responsibility to govern D.C.

Speaker 4 It is because they know you're soft on crime, you're pro-carjacking is a more powerful and potent attack than I was just deferring to the city council, as we all believe we should do.

Speaker 2 Right, but I think all of the focus has been on the politics of this and the politics of crime, but like, and obviously the carjacking has received a lot of attention.

Speaker 2 And Mark Joseph Stern's piece in Slate is interesting on this and it's been widely circulated.

Speaker 2 And he talks about how like the maximum sentence for armed carjacking has been reduced from 40 years to 24 years, even though the harshest penalty for that crime.

Speaker 2 that's usually given is around 15 years. So he's like, what's the problem, right?

Speaker 2 But then like, if you look at all of the reduced maximum penalties in this bill, now this is the 5% that Mayor Bowser said she doesn't approve.

Speaker 2 Carjacking that includes bodily injury is reduced from 21 years to just four years. That's the most common type of carjacking.

Speaker 2 They reduce the maximum sentence for first-degree murder from life without parole to 40 years.

Speaker 2 They reduce the maximum sentences for first-degree sexual assault, kidnapping, criminal abuse of a minor, and gun crimes at a time when the number of shootings have been on the rise since the pandemic.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 politics aside, like, was it smart to do that extra 5%? That if everyone agrees that 95% of the bill is great, critics and supporters are like, great.

Speaker 2 And Mayor Bowser basically said, can you fix the 5% that's not great? And they said no. So like,

Speaker 2 let me play Ron DeSantis here and bring him to D.C., but like the pattern in D.C., like in a lot of cities, has been

Speaker 2 you look at data, the data shows most people

Speaker 2 getting arrested and getting put in prison are black and not white. And there have been responses to that policy.
This was the most considered of them.

Speaker 2 I think the less considered was that in 2018, the council lowers the penalties for like jumping the turnstile and riding the metro for free, riding the bus for free. That has its own backlash.

Speaker 2 It's not as bad as this. This was procedurally what you should do, which is years of study for doing this stuff.
They had experts. It was really well thought out.
They really did think it out.

Speaker 2 It was just they ran into the buzzsaw of, and the reason I mentioned dawdling, because it is complicated, if they just moved faster and did this in like October,

Speaker 2 Congress's role was done. You could only do this because they passed it late enough and because Bowser vetoed it.
Just everyone in the process made a mistake, not knowing that Congress

Speaker 2 would do what the Republicans of Congress said they would do.

Speaker 2 But yeah, that is, there are reasons, they considered reasons why they tried to reform this, but it all got caught up in that discussion with the mayor.

Speaker 2 You also have, I mean, I worked for the Washington Post. You have at the Washington Post editorial board, the voice of a city that says, don't.
lower any

Speaker 2 what are you doing? Like, we need to like sell this as a place to live that is as good as it was last year, as good as it was 10 years ago. Don't change this stuff.

Speaker 2 They're not calling for harsher penalties. They're They're just, they're just saying, like, why, why do any of this when the city's image and the actual rate of crime is higher?

Speaker 2 And you've even seen people like that attitude has been bubbling up. So as a political issue for Republicans to pick, it's a great one.

Speaker 2 It's just not as like, it's, it's, again, like it was something the city did, not just because they felt nice and because somebody said Black Lives Matter 2020.

Speaker 2 They're trying to do a bunch of things with this bill. It just, they just did it really with poor timing and bad PR.
That's the shame of it, too.

Speaker 4 It's just like, well, yeah. And you know, the politics of this have gone gone completely south because the D.C.
council is trying to withdraw the proposal and act like it never happened.

Speaker 4 And Republicans in the Senate are saying, no fucking way, we're going to have a vote on this. We want the vote.
This is going to be fun for us. We like this.

Speaker 2 What it does for us. Yeah.
So Republicans have basically said, oh, no, you can't, no, no take backs.

Speaker 2 You can't withdraw it now, even though the city council is trying to withdraw it. But it does seem like they could then just fix the most objectionable parts of this.

Speaker 2 Like you said, we have 95% of a bill that everyone agrees on and then just pass it again, right?

Speaker 3 From a policy standpoint, I do think that's the key for people who really do want to see criminal justice reform push forward, which is the city council should work with Mayor Bowser, fix the things they need to fix, then pass it again.

Speaker 4 Put it together a line where they send it to a Republican House.

Speaker 2 And maybe also then call Joe Biden and the Democrats and be like, you guys okay with this version?

Speaker 4 And then somebody talked to Joe Biden. Just have a meeting in the process.
Have a meeting. Come on, but drop by.

Speaker 3 31 House Democrats voted with Republicans on

Speaker 3 this initial bill. So yeah, there was some some bipartisan concern from the very beginning, including from Congresswoman Angie Craig, who was very recently assaulted in her building.

Speaker 2 The day of the vote. I mean, this is the thing.
And I mentioned Fox not just as I'm like, it's on Fox, so it must not be true.

Speaker 2 No, it's like when I travel the country and I mention, oh, I've lived in D.C., worked with the Washington Post, it's become a thing.

Speaker 2 If I'm a Republican event, they'll ask me about if it's safe there, the same way that people ask if LA is safe. Like, it was getting that reputation.
And I think the city was like naive about this.

Speaker 2 They just didn't believe that it traveled that far. People had this thought.

Speaker 3 There is clearly a concerted effort by Republicans to paint mostly black Democrat-led cities as unsafe, sort of urban hellscapes. They do it to San Francisco, they do it to LA, they do it to Chicago.

Speaker 3 It's clear what they're trying to do politically. There's very overt racial elements to these arguments.
But yeah, it's something I think.

Speaker 2 There's that that's been happening for the last 40, 50 years. Yeah.
And then there's the reality of people in these cities who are genuinely a little worried about rising

Speaker 2 crime, particularly when it comes to gun crime.

Speaker 2 Some other forms of crime have actually gone down. But yeah, when there's more gun crime, then people are going to get nervous.
And it's sometimes as simple as that. Okay,

Speaker 2 that's our show for today. Dave Weigel from Semaphore, thank you so much for coming and regaling us of Tales from CPAC.

Speaker 4 We were going to see it at home, but Dave is waving two gigantic flags throughout the entire episode.

Speaker 2 Which flags?

Speaker 4 Well, he's doing Semaphore.

Speaker 2 See, you've actually got the name.

Speaker 3 Oh, I have no idea what a semaphore is. Can you tell me?

Speaker 4 It's an art, right?

Speaker 2 It's an art of signaling so a boat or a plane can go into the harbor or land.

Speaker 4 Semaphore. Did Ben come up with this shit? Hey, he did.

Speaker 2 Well, I don't know. I wasn't there for that part of it.
I was there for putting out the publication part. And you know what semaphore is?

Speaker 4 And we know what it is.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 4 We know what that is, but the publication?

Speaker 2 Semaphore, yeah. It's online.
It's online. It has newsletters, one of which I write called Americana.

Speaker 2 I get that one delivered to my inbox. Yeah, all the time.

Speaker 3 Thank you. It's a great

Speaker 2 fantastic newsletter. And it's it's a great outlet.
So, Dave Weigel, thanks for joining. Everyone else, we will talk to you Thursday.
Bye.

Speaker 2 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 2 It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show.

Speaker 2 Thanks to Hallie Kefer, 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.

Speaker 2 Our episodes are uploaded as videos at youtube.com slash podsaveamerica.

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