“The Age Old Question.”

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

Speaker 3 I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

Speaker 2 On today's show, prosecutors inch closer to potential indictments of Donald Trump. Nikki Haley officially becomes the the first candidate to challenge him for the Republican nomination.

Speaker 2 Democrats quietly and not so quietly worry about Joe Biden's age.

Speaker 2 Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow joins to talk about passing gun safety legislation after this week's shooting at Michigan State University.

Speaker 2 And Crooked's own Hallie Kiefer takes us on a meandering journey through Elon Musk's adult mind.

Speaker 2 We're covering a lot today. But first, some big news.
We are excited to share that the first book from our very own Crooked Media Reads is available for pre-order today.

Speaker 2 The novel is called Mobility by Lydia Kiesling, who also wrote the incredible book, The Golden State. We've been fans of Lydia's work for a long time.

Speaker 2 We think Friends of the Pod are going to love this book. Mobility is gripping and hilarious.
It's one of those novels you'll nag all your friends to read.

Speaker 2 It's part coming-of-age story and part indictment of capitalism in the oil industry.

Speaker 2 It moves between Houston, Athens, and Azerbaijan, and attracts themes of class, power, politics, and desire all through the life of a very compelling character, Bunny Glenn.

Speaker 2 The book has already earned outstanding early praise. Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks called it, quote, a masterpiece of misdirection and a cautionary tale for our times.

Speaker 2 Pre-order mobility at crooked.com slash mobility or wherever books are sold. So you can be the first to read it when it's released on August 1st.

Speaker 4 Can I nag you about this for a second?

Speaker 2 Please do.

Speaker 4 So I read The Golden State when it came out a a couple years ago.

Speaker 2 I loved it. Of course, you read everything.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 That's the point I'm trying to unsubtly make here.

Speaker 4 And loved it. It's a great book.
I was super excited to find out that Crooked was publishing her follow-up. So how do I, why do I have to wait till it comes out? Can I get an early copy here, people?

Speaker 2 Can someone get Dan an early copy of the book and also maybe some more Dan merch that we have now discontinued?

Speaker 2 Poor Dan, he's just sitting up there in the Bay Area looking for early books and merch with his name on it. And we can't seem to deliver either.
So, yes. Anyway,

Speaker 2 and again, you should also go to crooked.com slash mobility. Yes.

Speaker 4 If you're not me and you're going to have to pre-order the book, then that's how you would.

Speaker 2 But we are all very excited and can't wait to announce more Crooked Media Reads books in the future.

Speaker 2 And one more thing before we start, because it's President's Day weekend, we will not have a pod this coming Tuesday. So the next pod you'll hear will be Dan and I once again next Thursday.

Speaker 2 But if you're hungry hungry for some content on Tuesday, you can go to the Pod Save America YouTube channel and watch Tommy and Brian Tyler Cohen do another draft this time of Fox News Outrages.

Speaker 2 All right, let's get to the news. A grand jury in Georgia has found by unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the 2020 election.
Breaking news.

Speaker 2 And believes that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses who testified about Trump's attempt to overturn the election. But that's all we know for now.

Speaker 2 Judge Robert McBurney only released parts of the final report after District Attorney Fannie Willis asked to keep most of the findings sealed to protect the ongoing criminal investigation and the rights of the potential defendants in the case.

Speaker 2 She has also said, however, the charging decisions are imminent.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, special counsel Jack Smith is moving quickly in the federal investigation into Trump's attempted coup and hoarding of classified documents.

Speaker 2 In the last few days, he subpoenaed Mike Pence of Hang Mike Pence fame, Mark Meadows, and Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran.

Speaker 2 That last one is interesting because Smith is trying to get around Corcoran's claim of attorney-client privilege by invoking what's known as the crime fraud exception, which means that Smith believes that Corcoran's legal services were used to further a crime.

Speaker 2 Dan, we didn't get him today. Today wasn't the day.

Speaker 2 We thought that maybe we heard that the grand jury, that some portion of the grand jury final report would be released this morning.

Speaker 2 We thought maybe the day would end with Trump getting frog marched down to a courthouse in Atlanta. No, we didn't actually think that.

Speaker 2 But anyway, we didn't get much. We got the intro, the conclusion, and then this portion of the report where they said that they do believe some of the witnesses lied under oath.

Speaker 2 Anything more we can read into these developments, or do we just have to wait for Jack Smith and Fannie Willis to hold their respective press conferences?

Speaker 4 It feels like we will continue waiting, and what we should do in the interim is just tweet at Merrick Garland, which seems to be what everyone else is doing this morning.

Speaker 2 Oh, is that what they're doing? Yeah, people are very upset about this.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, I'm sure he's reading all your tweets. He's very

Speaker 4 specific thing, but that's neither here nor there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, there's

Speaker 4 it's like that. Remember that jelly bean container we did to raise money for a fair fight?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's yeah, Merrick Garland has one of those in his office for the indictment, so it just fills with tweets. When it gets to a certain line, he goes to jail.

Speaker 4 Look, I think think there are a couple of, in all seriousness, some interesting things here that could mean something, could mean nothing.

Speaker 4 But the fact that it goes out of its way to point that some witnesses lied and the fact that the one finding of this report is that no widespread fraud happened, which is a precipitating finding that they will need in some of the potential charges that may come.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 4 this does not mean that no one's getting charged. It very well may mean that someone is getting charged at some point in the not too distant future.

Speaker 2 And it is interesting to speculate who may have committed perjury. Some of the witnesses included Lindsey Graham, Rudy Giuliani.

Speaker 2 I guess CNN's Manu Raju caught up with Lindsey Graham this morning after the report was released and asked him if he's still pretty confident of his testimony that he didn't perjure himself.

Speaker 2 And he said yes.

Speaker 4 For a brief second there, I thought you were saying that CNN's Manu Raju had testified.

Speaker 2 I was like, why did you get caught up? What a surprise.

Speaker 4 The other thing that's interesting on the Evan Corcoran

Speaker 4 part of the Jack Smith investigation is that if a judge were to find, we're agreed with Jack Smith on this, Trump will within one calendar year have had two attorneys in two different crimes had their attorney client privilege lifted because a judge believed the preponderance of evidence showed that they had been, that they had committed a crime, which is just a wild thing for the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.

Speaker 2 And I realize it's tough to keep all the investigations straight. In the Evan Corcoran case, that seems to have to do with the classified documents.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Because it seems like it's possible that when Evan Corcoran released a statement saying, oh, yeah, all the classified documents are back. Don't worry, we don't have any more.

Speaker 2 He may have lied about that.

Speaker 2 He may have.

Speaker 2 Well, we don't know if Evan Corcoran committed the crime or Trump used Evan Corcoran to commit the crime. We don't know that yet, but Jack Smith thinks someone committed a crime.

Speaker 2 We also know back to the Georgia case that Rudy and the fake, the potential slate of fake electors all received target letters, meaning that they were informed that they have been targets of the investigation.

Speaker 2 That doesn't necessarily mean they'll be charged or indicted, but it does mean that the prosecutors in the case believe that they may have committed crimes.

Speaker 2 There's also, we should say, no known communication between the

Speaker 2 DA and Trump and his lawyers in the Georgia case. And Trump didn't testify there, so who knows?

Speaker 2 How do you think potential Trump indictments might affect the Republican primary that has now begun in earnest?

Speaker 4 I think that probably a large group of Republican voters will look at this and say, we cannot stand it anymore. Our party is too good for this.
And they will toss Trump overboard. We're done.

Speaker 4 That's it. That's what we were looking for.

Speaker 4 We are the law and order party. We cannot have criminals in charge.
We're out.

Speaker 2 What did Lindsey Graham say right after January 6th? I'm out. Count me out.

Speaker 2 Now

Speaker 4 he's been pulled back in, as many people often are in two large crime syndicates.

Speaker 4 I think that

Speaker 4 we should expect that the MAGA media, which is the most powerful force in Republican primaries, will rally to Trump's defense, that Trump is being persecuted by his political opponents, a Democratic-elected official in Georgia, the special counsel appointed by the Attorney General appointed by Trump's most likely Democratic campaign opponent.

Speaker 4 And there will be a rallying to whether that rallying will translate into actual votes,

Speaker 4 impossible to say, but I think that there will be a rally, that

Speaker 4 his opponents will rally to Trump's side in this environment, much in a very different, completely unrelated context.

Speaker 4 But when the Republicans went after Hunter Biden as part of the first Trump impeachment, all of Biden's Democratic opponents came right in defense of Joe Biden, rightfully.

Speaker 4 So now, these are obviously two very different cases, but I do think that there will be a rally, a rallying effect around Trump from some of his opponents. I'm not going to criticize him for it.

Speaker 4 I guess it'd be a better way of saying it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was going to say it seems like there's three options for each of these opponents. They can use the indictments to criticize Trump.

Speaker 2 They can just defend Trump or they can try to take a middle ground. Do you think any of them try to take a middle ground on this? And what does that sound like, a middle ground on this?

Speaker 4 It's too early to take the middle ground in this race, I think.

Speaker 4 But what a middle ground would be is to put all of these legal troubles in the context of the sort of baggage that Trump would bring to the general election and make him a more easy to defeat opponent by Joe Biden.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think you could see one of them saying, look, I'm not going to criticize the former president.

Speaker 2 All I can say is that I'm not under any investigations right now, and I don't have that kind of baggage, and I don't, and I haven't lost, you know, like you couldn't, you could see one of them doing that.

Speaker 4 Like

Speaker 4 Larry Hogan.

Speaker 4 Like, like, put aside Larry Hogan and Chris Sununo, if Chris Sunununo were to run these sort of people running the anti-Trump lane who have as much chance of being the Republican nominee as you and I.

Speaker 4 But of the people who are semi-quasi-viable contenders for the Republican nomination, I don't think that any of them will take that middle ground.

Speaker 2 You think Ron DeSantis just goes, just answers and goes right after the Justice Department? Yeah, I think it's a political winshot.

Speaker 4 Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 I think that's probably right. Or I think either maybe

Speaker 4 there's two ways that could play out. One is to aggressively go after them as a point of offense for your campaign.
And the other one is just how you're going to handle it in questions, right?

Speaker 4 Where you're going to focus on your own stuff, but whenever you're on TV, you're going to be asked about it.

Speaker 4 And then that you'll respond to it by attacking the Justice Department, the politization of the Justice Department, all of that.

Speaker 2 Well, here's a follow-up question. Who will write the first take about how Jack Smith or Fannie Willis just handed Trump the nomination by indicting him? And why won't it be David Brooks?

Speaker 4 Because it'll be Josh Crush Hauer.

Speaker 2 Shit, you got it. It's going to be Josh Crushau.
Or Hugh Hewitt.

Speaker 4 I could see Hugh Hewitt doing it too.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And so I sort of went,

Speaker 4 any group of people in the, in the MAGA media could do it, but I was just looking for someone who is at least uh

Speaker 4 theoretically and technically in the more traditional media and that's very clearly i think i see that i can see that axios headline coming right now

Speaker 2 um all right well now that we're into the republican primary let's do a quick update on the mess america pageant there she is ronda sanctimonious

Speaker 2 One might think that the prospect of multiple indictments against Trump would provide fodder for the twice-impeached president's would-be primary rivals, but alas, here's the New York Times headline after Nikki Haley's campaign kickoff this week.

Speaker 2 They're trying to topple Trump, but they barely utter his name.

Speaker 2 Haley chose not to hit Trump directly in her speech, opting instead for a series of implicit criticisms designed to persuade Republican primary voters that it's time to turn the page. Let's listen.

Speaker 5 America is not past our prime. It's just that our politicians are past theirs.

Speaker 5 We'll have term limits for Congress and mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old.

Speaker 5 And I have a particular message for my fellow Republicans.

Speaker 5 We've lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. Our cause is right, but we have failed to win the confidence of a majority of Americans.

Speaker 5 Well, that ends today.

Speaker 4 We're ready.

Speaker 5 Ready to move past the stale ideas and faded names of of the past. And we are more than ready for a new generation to lead us into the future.

Speaker 5 If you're tired of losing, put your trust in a new generation. And if you want to win, not just as a party, but as a country, stand with me.

Speaker 2 Wild that you came out swinging against Diane Feinstein.

Speaker 4 It's so bad. It's so bad.

Speaker 2 What did you think of Haley's announcement video and her speech?

Speaker 2 Just

Speaker 4 verbal consultant drivel.

Speaker 2 Just terrible.

Speaker 4 It's a bunch of sound bites that aren't connected together that don't ladder up into any compelling argument for why her and why not the others. It makes no sense.
It is, it's, it's terrible.

Speaker 4 It is absolutely terrible. It just goes to show the paucity of political talent that she has and exists in the Republican consulting class.
It's terrible. It's a terrible speech.

Speaker 2 I mean, my next question was, what do you think about her chances? But I guess I got the answer to that, huh?

Speaker 4 Well, actually, I have a slightly different take on that. But I think

Speaker 4 there is one element about Nikki Haley's candidacy that I think is just goes to show how just sort of misbegotten the whole endeavor is.

Speaker 4 is every before you you and i worked for barack obama when he was beginning the process of running for president i have been in the i've been in I've been involved with other people who were thinking of running for president, none of, many of whom didn't run, none of whom won other than Barack Obama.

Speaker 4 And the first thing you do in that conversation is you ask what is known as the Roger Mudd question, right?

Speaker 4 That is, that refers to a question that Roger Mudd, an NBC journalist asked Ted Kennedy in 1979, why are you running for president? And Ted Kennedy just fumbled the question in a way that hampered

Speaker 4 the rest of that presidential run for him. She has no reason why she's running.
There is no rationale that is unique to her. You can see it in the

Speaker 4 her argument is generational, but her number one opponent is not Donald Trump. It's Ron DeSantis.
And Ron DeSantis is of the same generation as her. In fact, he's 13 years younger than her.

Speaker 2 And so, like, what, what are you doing?

Speaker 4 Your argument is

Speaker 4 you're electable. You won a solidly red state.
Ron DeSantis just won by a huge margin a one-time battleground state in this country. It's just, there's no, there's no why unique rationale for her.

Speaker 4 And so I think she is

Speaker 4 everyone who gets into the race has a low likelihood of success. Like that's always true in every race.

Speaker 4 And there is a world, and I think maybe this is what she is thinking, although her team clearly do not think it out very well, is

Speaker 4 is it possible if DeSantis and Trump hammer the living shit out of each other that some third candidate could come up the middle?

Speaker 4 That happens periodically to individual states. That's how John Edwards almost won won the Iowa caucus in 2004.

Speaker 4 But there's no historical precedent of that person winning the nomination.

Speaker 4 And you're going to need something more than just to be the person who is not getting, you're going to need something more than being, just being the person who's not being attacked at the exact right moment.

Speaker 2 I just think she's not MAGA enough for a party that is controlled by MAGA at this point.

Speaker 2 And that doesn't necessarily mean that Donald Trump wins, but like Ron DeSantis is at least MAGA enough for most of the party

Speaker 2 and can probably, you basically, you need a nominee who can attract both the MAGA portion of the party and sort of the college-educated Republicans who are, you know, MAGA curious or maybe they're for Trump or maybe they're never Trump or maybe they're sort of kind of for Trump, right?

Speaker 2 Like that, you need someone who can straddle both of those factions in the party. And Donald Trump has obviously done that in the past.
I could imagine Ron DeSantis achieving that.

Speaker 2 I just can't imagine Nikki Haley doing that. Like, I think she had, I think she had a great announcement for a 2012 campaign for president.
That's what it felt like to me.

Speaker 2 It felt like the version of the Republican Party that was when Mitt Romney ran for the presidency. And what she's trying to, you're right, it's generational.

Speaker 2 Barack Obama's campaign was also generational, but he had a few more elements to the message than just generational change.

Speaker 2 She's trying to say, like, look, this is a party of old white men. I am a woman.
I have Indian descent. I confronted, you know, racial division in South Carolina, although she never mentioned

Speaker 2 what she's known for as governor, which is taking down the Confederate flag outside the state capitol. I thought that was fairly notable and cowardly that she didn't mention that.

Speaker 2 Basically, the 2012 autopsy report, where it says that the Republican Party will only win if it becomes a more inclusive party and starts like looking younger into the future.

Speaker 2 You can imagine Nikki Haley trying to run to be the leader of that party. But that party's been gone for 10 years.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think if Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are beating each other up in the primary and there's a potential for a third candidate, again, it's got to, I don't think it's Nikki Haley.

Speaker 2 I don't think that she's going to be acceptable enough to the base of the party.

Speaker 4 There's two parts of this that I think are notable. One is

Speaker 4 it's not just that she's not MAGA enough.

Speaker 4 and she's not, and she is betwixt in between because she's not anti-MAGA because she worked for Donald Trump and covered up for him for years, but she's also running against him. So

Speaker 4 you don't have a lane. You're not MAGA, you're not anti-MAGA, you're not really MAGA adjacent.
What are you? And the other thing is, it's also not that she's not MAG enough.

Speaker 4 She's not interesting enough. Like, what are you saying that is different? She is rerunning Marco Rubio's 2016 campaign.
And that was an epic disaster.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, and you mentioned she has this extra challenge because she didn't just support Donald Trump.
She worked for Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 So it's going to be the same challenge that Tommy and I talked about this on Tuesday, that Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence will have.

Speaker 2 This predicament was fully on display during her post-speech interviews. Let's listen.

Speaker 4 What specific policy areas would you say part with Donald Trump?

Speaker 5 What I am saying is I don't kick sideways. I'm kicking forward.
Joe Biden is the president. He's the one I'm running against.
And what I'm saying is you don't have to be 80 years old to be president.

Speaker 4 How would Donald Trump do on the competency test if at 76 years old?

Speaker 5 You know, I think he did great the last time he did it. I have no reason to think he wouldn't do well this time.
President Trump is my friend. I was honored to work with him in the administration.

Speaker 5 I thought he was the right president at the right time. And that remains to be the truth.
We had a great conversation.

Speaker 5 I told him that I was doing this because I thought it was time for a new generation. I thought we needed to leave the status quo and we needed to move forward.

Speaker 2 Seems like she really nailed it, huh?

Speaker 4 Are they not allowed to do prep before interviews? Like, can no one just, can they just go like, just dry run a couple of likely questions that might come and prepare an answer, maybe?

Speaker 2 Yes. I mean, clearly she was not very prepared.
What would a good answer have been?

Speaker 2 And this goes to what you were just saying, which is the fundamental flaw in her candidacy is the only argument for her candidacy is I'm not as old as this guy.

Speaker 2 It's not even, I'm not as old as him. And also, he has a lot of baggage.
She's not even willing to say he's got a lot of baggage.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 You could pick one spit. You just, you don't need to win the election on this question.
You just need to have an answer that doesn't make you sound like a loser.

Speaker 4 So just pick one issue where you disagree with him. It could be something completely minor.
Yeah. And cite that, right? Like Donald Trump was, I, I was honored to serve Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 It was a privilege. He was a great president.
He did these things. I agree with him on a lot of stuff.
That's why I worked for him. But there are a couple of things where we disagree.

Speaker 4 Here is one of them. It could be

Speaker 2 tax policy. Yeah, it could be the Abraham Accord.

Speaker 3 It could be tax policy.

Speaker 4 It could be Chinese balloon policy. I don't know.
Pick one fucking thing and say it.

Speaker 4 Like, even if you wanted to do it, you know, I mean, it could be anything. It could be absolutely anything.
Just have an answer. It's just not that hard.

Speaker 2 But also, also,

Speaker 2 she does this stunt about the mental competency test, which is such a stunt and obviously an attempt at a sop to the MAGA base who all think that Joe Biden is senile, right?

Speaker 2 And it's supposed to be an implicit criticism of Trump's age. But then they ask her about it.
The Fox and friends ask her about it. And she's like, yeah, I think he took it before and he did great.

Speaker 2 So now you're saying that you're a new generation of leadership, but that you think that Donald Trump is competent enough to be president and run for president again?

Speaker 2 Then why are you running against him?

Speaker 4 It is just, it is like there is three-dimensional chess, there's chess, there's checkers, and there's whatever the fuck this is.

Speaker 4 Because like they obviously made a decision to pick an age for the mental competency test that included Donald Trump. Obviously.
But then had no answer to the follow-up question about it.

Speaker 4 Because if you did want to include Trump, you just would have picked the age of 80, which is what Joe Biden is.

Speaker 2 Right. It's like

Speaker 2 so bad.

Speaker 2 Well, this is what, but also it's a great example of this is why political stunts that like are dreamed up by a bunch of consultants in a room don't ever work or mostly don't work because they are obviously bullshit.

Speaker 2 It's like a transparent attempt. It's like it's always too cute by half.

Speaker 2 And when you and it's fine in a speech, but when you have a follow-up question, even from fucking Fox and friends, was that Brian Kilmer that asked her the question? Yes.

Speaker 4 Fucking Tim Russell over here.

Speaker 4 Man, I'm offended. I hate everything she stands for.
I hate everything she's done other than the one thing she did that was great that she won't mention.

Speaker 4 But I'm just, as a political professional, I am offended by this campaign.

Speaker 2 I feel the same way. I really do.
What do you think about the general reluctance to criticize Trump from not just Haley, but people like DeSantis?

Speaker 2 This is something else we talked about on Tuesday, Tommy, and I went back and forth on this. I

Speaker 4 do not, if I was running a Republican primary campaign, which I hope I never am,

Speaker 2 then. But who knows?

Speaker 4 Liz Cheney, you call it?

Speaker 2 I'm kidding. I'll never do that.

Speaker 4 I would not advise my candidate to criticize Trump. That's not what the voters want.
I would advise my candidate to differentiate myself from Trump in a coherent way.

Speaker 4 She doesn't have to, there's no argument right now to come out guns blazing against Trump. You just have to have some sort of answer as to why you, why not Trump.

Speaker 4 On a debate state, you and Tommy had this conversation around DeSantis and whether he sounded like Jeb Bush, whether he should sound like Jeb Bush or whatever else. And I think he

Speaker 4 DeSantis does not and should not take the bait from Trump now. On a debate stage, there will be a test.

Speaker 4 Are you tough enough to do it? And Marco Rubio failed that test miserably in 2016, to actually to many people, to Christie, to Trump, to everyone else.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Marco Rubio, he thought he had a chance and suddenly he just like finds himself going back and forth with Trump over dick jokes.

Speaker 2 That's what happens.

Speaker 2 You start off the great Republican hope and then you end up doing dick jokes.

Speaker 4 You lose a dick joke competition with Trump.

Speaker 4 So I don't think she should be out there criticizing him. I just be a little more deft about why you, why not him? And be a little more specific.

Speaker 4 It does not attack and not criticize him. You should praise the shit out of him.
It should be like a positive sandwich for Trump. Did a great job as president.

Speaker 4 Everyone's Republican should be grateful for everything he accomplished and what he did for our party.

Speaker 4 He saved us from Hillary Clinton and all these other things that you want to say that make your base feel happy. And then say where you would be different, why you need him.

Speaker 4 And then implicit in that, and even somewhat, I think relatively explicit is the electability argument. You don't have to call him a loser, but you have to say we can't afford to lose.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And she did, in fairness, she got into the electability argument a little bit when she said, we lost a popular vote in the last seven of eight presidential elections.

Speaker 2 But then I think on another interview in the Today Show, she was asked about, you know, did Joe Biden really win the election? And she did, she went with the old, Joe Biden is president.

Speaker 2 And we know there's a lot of weird things that happened in 2020 in the election because of COVID,

Speaker 2 which is like, okay, what are you doing? What are you doing? All right.

Speaker 2 As fun as it is to talk about the mess of a Republican primary, we should also mention that it's looking like there probably won't be a Democratic primary.

Speaker 2 President Biden and everyone around him has made it abundantly clear that he intends to run for re-election and is in the process of putting together a campaign.

Speaker 2 Just about all of his potential Democratic primary opponents have ruled out running against him, including two progressives who ran last time, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Speaker 2 In fact, progressives like Warren, Pramila Jayapal, head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Roe Khanna are proudly endorsing him when they've been asked.

Speaker 2 And yet, and yet, Politico's Jonathan Martin has a piece out today, Thursday, that reflects the concern you hear from almost any Democrat you talk to inside and outside of politics.

Speaker 2 People think Joe Biden is too old to run again, but party leaders are afraid to say so publicly. Let's start there.
Why do you think Democratic officials are afraid to voice their concerns?

Speaker 4 I don't think afraid is the right word. And let me explain why.
One, I think they all like Joe Biden.

Speaker 4 They have a lot of affection for him. They're very proud of the work they did together over the last two years.
They think he's a good person. What's not to like?

Speaker 4 He, and to his credit, Joe Biden has done his small P politics incredibly well.

Speaker 4 Like there's an anecdote in the Jonathan Martin story about Angie Craig, the Democratic arms anna from Minnesota, who's one of the few people who has publicly called on Joe Biden not to run.

Speaker 4 And she was recently attacked in the elevator of her building. And the first person who calls her, Joe Biden, right? Like he's done that.
And so they like him. Two, they know he's running.

Speaker 4 They've been told he's running. And so to what end would that criticism serve now? Would it convince Joe Biden not to run? No.

Speaker 4 Would it possibly be used as fodder against Joe Biden were he to run?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 4 And so it's like, to what, like, what would be the constructive nature of it? And then there is the third question, which we will get to, which is, if not Joe Biden, then who?

Speaker 2 Well, that's my next question is, so

Speaker 2 perhaps it is not constructive to be out there just,

Speaker 2 you know, worrying aloud, either via anonymous quote or putting your name on it about Joe Biden's age.

Speaker 2 It would be constructive, you could argue, for someone to just go ahead and challenge him for the nomination.

Speaker 2 Why do you think no one has stepped up to challenge Biden?

Speaker 4 Three reasons. One, primary challenges always come from the ideological flank.
Left for the Democrats, right for the Republicans.

Speaker 4 Joe Biden, while he has not done everything the progressives want, has done a hell of a lot more than anyone thought was possible.

Speaker 4 And so there is not room to Joe Biden's left for a viable primary challenge.

Speaker 4 And that's the assessment of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pramil Jabba, all the people you said, is how would you run to the left of Joe Biden?

Speaker 4 And like, he hasn't accomplished everything, but a lot of times it's not for lack of trying, it's because of the narrow majorities he has.

Speaker 4 Second reason why no one has challenged him is that primary challengers always lose.

Speaker 4 Challenges to incumbent presidents have always failed. In addition to failing, they have invariably made that incumbent president weaker in the general election.
Of the four

Speaker 4 incumbent presidents in modern political history who have lost re-election, three of the four did so after facing a very vigorous primary challenge.

Speaker 4 Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, George H.W. Bush and Pat Buchanan.
And so there's this assessment that if I run, I will lose.

Speaker 4 I will make it more likely that Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis becomes president. And therefore, my future in Democratic politics is over.
So it's like, why would a J.B.

Speaker 4 Pritzker or Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer or any other people who would almost certainly run in a world where Joe Biden was not running to undertake what is likely a political suicide mission.

Speaker 2 Now, yeah, here's the thing.

Speaker 2 I completely agree that it seems unlikely that a challenge would come from the left, partly because Joe Biden, as president, has done everything within his power to pass progressive legislation or take executive action that progressives have wanted him to take.

Speaker 2 I think there are probably a few things you could say, I wish he took executive action on this or that.

Speaker 2 But in terms of what is legally viable, and we don't even know at this point if the student debt relief action is legally viable, he has done just about everything he can.

Speaker 2 And then we all know, we've all gone through what's happened in Congress. He's passed the most sweeping climate legislation in history.

Speaker 2 The rest of the Inflation Reduction Act, what it does for health care prices, what it does for prescription drug prices, the COVID relief bill, the transportation bill.

Speaker 2 He's done just about everything that Joe Manchin and Kirsten Cinema would allow him to do. And he cannot get around those two.
So we have talked about this.

Speaker 2 So I do think that's why Bernie Sanders has said, I won't challenge him. That's why Pramila Jayapal said, I was skeptical at first, but I'm a fan, you know, and I hope he runs again, right?

Speaker 2 So you're not going to get the challenge from the left.

Speaker 2 So then the challenge you could imagine that would be ahistorical, considering what you just said, would be someone who is younger than him and shares basically Joe Biden's politics, or at least politics that reflect the record that Joe Biden has amassed somewhere in the mainstream of the Democratic Party, maybe a little more left than people had expected from Biden.

Speaker 2 And then you have a series of governors, right?

Speaker 2 The problem there is

Speaker 2 basically exactly what we just criticized Nikki Haley for, which is

Speaker 2 the only real thing you can say about your candidacy is that you are a new generation and Joe Biden is too old. And that's it.
That's like your whole, there's not a lot of ideological differences.

Speaker 2 There's not a lot of policy differences. You could probably find some small policy differences here and there.
But mainly mainly you're talking about age.

Speaker 2 Even electability is hard because Joe Biden just won the last election.

Speaker 2 And Democrats did pretty well in the midterms, even though Joe Biden was pretty unpopular.

Speaker 4 His, the one time voters had an opportunity to render their judgment on Joe Biden's presidency, they

Speaker 4 helped him expand a Senate majority and have the most narrow House loss in recent members.

Speaker 4 So he was not rejected by the voters. It's just like, I'm not even sure what the electability argument you would make

Speaker 2 is.

Speaker 4 So it's like

Speaker 4 these people are all smart. They all want to be president.
They would all jump at the opportunity to be president.

Speaker 4 They've looked at it and there's not a good, viable argument that would give them even a modicum of chance of success against the president.

Speaker 4 And the consequences for taking it on and failing would be disastrous to them personally.

Speaker 4 We could have an argument about whether the party is strengthened, the country is strengthened by a primary challenge. And that very well may be.

Speaker 4 We have a small sample size problem when it comes to presidential elections. There just aren't that many incumbents who run for re-election.

Speaker 4 And therefore, you can't draw some statistically significant sample from what I said about how things have played out in the past, but from the personal decision-making of those politicians, it's very easy to see how you get to not running in this context.

Speaker 2 Well, let's talk about why the worry persists, because unlike a lot of things we talk about on the show, it is not a worry that is limited to a bunch of Washington insiders and pundits and strategists wringing their hands and worrying all the time.

Speaker 2 Nearly every poll shows that an overwhelming majority of all voters and a majority of Democratic voters do not want Joe Biden to run again.

Speaker 2 And I have seen this myself in all the focus groups I did for the wilderness.

Speaker 2 No one wanted Joe Biden to run again, and they were all Joe Biden voters and they all had pretty nice things to say about him and pretty nice things to say about his record.

Speaker 2 A lot of them were frustrated with the direction of the country, frustrated with inflation, but they were all concerned about his age.

Speaker 2 Sarah Longwell has been on this podcast and our bat on the clip there.

Speaker 2 But Sarah was saying that she has done many, many focus groups and heard the exact same thing.

Speaker 2 And she thinks that, like, yeah, and she, and she said at the beginning, the part that we cut out, that she is very grateful for Joe Biden and thinks Joe Biden saved America and thinks that Joe Biden could, you know, beat Trump again, but that anyone besides Trump that he'd have a problem with and that she thinks that he would lose.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 I don't necessarily agree with that, but

Speaker 2 there is a lot of data, not just in polls, but from like talking to people where people are concerned about his age. So are

Speaker 2 Joe Biden and all of the folks in the White House and all the Democratic strategists who just are all getting behind a second run, are they just out of touch with the electorate on this?

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 4 I think it's worth just for a second unpacking the age issue to what it actually means.

Speaker 4 And I think there's four elements of it. The first is, is Joe Biden too old to do the job now or in four years? And there is no evidence to say that he is.

Speaker 4 In fact, he has done a great job as president. There's nobody in the people who are in the meetings with him, no one makes that case because you would hear it.

Speaker 4 People heard it about Reagan in his second term. But right now, as we stand here, Joe Biden can do the job and he's doing a hell of a job at it.
And that's just a fact.

Speaker 4 The second is, is he too old to campaign vigorously enough to win the election? Running for president is hard. Being president is hard.

Speaker 4 Running for re-election, well, being president is really fucking hard. Because you don't just go to rallies.
You get off the rally.

Speaker 4 Your national security team has told you that yet another balloon has arrived over the Hudson and you got to shoot it down.

Speaker 2 There's like a lot of shit going on.

Speaker 4 And can he do that?

Speaker 4 His State of the Union was clearly designed to show people that he can, how he delivered it.

Speaker 2 And I think as we said last episode, and I think he did it rather effectively during that state. Very, very effectively.

Speaker 4 That's the question. That's an unanswerable question right now.
And then the third question is, will his age be a political factor?

Speaker 4 Not can he do the job, but can someone make the generational argument against him? Will you be able to say he's too old for the presidency?

Speaker 4 And as we sit here today, the most likely Republican nominee is four years younger than him. And so in that sense, it's not.

Speaker 4 And so, and then the fourth reason is, and this really shows up in the polls, is there is certainly a disconnect right now between Joe Biden and younger Democrats.

Speaker 4 They are the group least enthusiastic about him running. They're the group who told pollsters pollsters that they're least enthusiastic about the idea of him winning again.

Speaker 4 They were his toughest constituency in the 2020 primary. And can he get those people to turn out? Now, 2022 suggests some positive evidence that he could, but that is ultimately the age question.

Speaker 4 And it's going to be on Joe Biden to answer some of those questions throughout the process of it. But it's hard to make that the basis for

Speaker 4 a primary challenge. It's just like, as you said, it doesn't.
And we actually saw a purely generational

Speaker 4 argument play itself out in the Massachusetts Senate primary between Joe Kennedy and Ed Markey. And once you got past I'm younger than Ed Markey, Joe Kennedy, who we love and

Speaker 4 really and have got to know over the years, didn't have anything else there. And that's how you can see one of these, like a Gavin Newsom or a J.B.

Speaker 4 Pritzker or a Whitmer who agree with Joe Biden on almost everything.

Speaker 2 Like what happens after that? You're old.

Speaker 4 No, I'm not old. I'm not too old.
I have experience. Okay, that's the end of that.
Where do we go from here? It gets very challenging.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And also, when you ask people, do you think he should run again?

Speaker 2 That is a different question than when you ask people, okay, he's running and it's Joe Biden versus Donald Trump or it's Joe Biden versus Ron DeSantis. And then they have to pick.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 In all of those polls, it's much, much closer.

Speaker 4 Yeah, they're essentially tied.

Speaker 2 They're essentially tied. Right.
They're all essentially. And I, again, back to the focus groups, I noticed the same thing.
Do you want Joe Biden to run again? No.

Speaker 2 Do you want Donald Trump to run again? No. What happens if it's Joe Biden and Donald Trump again? And then just about everyone picked Joe Biden, at least in my series of focus groups.

Speaker 4 I also think, just on this, one more thing is that you look at Joe Biden's approval ratings, you look at some of the numbers we're looking about about lack of enthusiasm from running and all of that.

Speaker 4 And that all seems like kind of scary. Like, and obviously we worry about everything here.
But I do think we probably

Speaker 4 have not updated our priors to account for an era of historic negative polarization where extremism is the central issue of American politics.

Speaker 4 Because we, all the traditional fundamentals said that we should have gotten our ass kicked in 2022, and we didn't.

Speaker 4 And I think some of the same, some of the same directions, it won't be exactly the same because it's all going to be about Joe Biden. It can't be all about Herschel Walker or anything else in 2024.

Speaker 4 But there are, I think politics has changed in a way that maybe might obviate some of the traditional concerns you would have around some of these numbers.

Speaker 2 Well, on that note, the flip side of not a lot of voters and Democratic voters being enthusiastic about another Joe Biden candidacy is there's not a lot of people who are really angry about Joe Biden, right?

Speaker 2 Like he does not, he is not as polarizing of a figure as a lot of other politicians in either party over the last decade or so. Like that's just a fact of who he is.
And so that could help him too.

Speaker 2 Look, I don't want anyone to walk away from this thinking that we are like sanguine about Joe Biden's candidacy here.

Speaker 2 Like, yeah, I worry about the performance in a presidential election again in 2024. Of course, I I worry about this.

Speaker 2 But when you think about all the other alternatives that we've just laid out, it's pretty clear, like, this is what's happening, right? Like, this is what's happening.

Speaker 2 No one is stepping up to challenge him. Progressives are endorsing him.
He has done a great job as president, I believe. He has passed a lot of what I hoped he'd pass.

Speaker 2 Probably, he probably beat my expectations on his legislative agenda. For sure.
And so, you know, and so

Speaker 2 that's what it is. That's what it is.

Speaker 2 And whether it's Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, this goes back to the negative partisanship point: like whoever the Republicans nominate is going to be a serious threat to this democracy, to this country, and a lot of people are going to be a lot worse off if one of them wins the presidency, especially if it's Donald Trump again.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 that's where we are. Anything else you'd like to add?

Speaker 2 It seems like a trap.

Speaker 2 I'm sure we'll talk about this again. Yeah.
At some point.

Speaker 4 You're right to point out that

Speaker 4 we are not overly sanguine about this, or frankly, anything.

Speaker 2 I'm not sanguine about anything.

Speaker 4 And if you were to say, if Joe Biden were to come out tomorrow and say, I am not running, and we're like, Pete Buddigez is the nominee, or Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris, I'd be worried about all of them.

Speaker 4 If someone changed the Constitution and Barack Obama was going to run again, I would be worried because invariably every one, this election, no matter who is our candidate, who is their candidate, is going to come down to something like hundred thousand votes over five states that's it that's how it's going to be it's going to be decided on the margins and so we're going to have to worry about everything and it may be age it may be in this situation that joe biden is old it could be that pete buttiges is young it could you know it could be any list of things and so just this is the one that biden is navigating other candidates would have other things to navigate and no one has made

Speaker 4 a compelling argument that someone else is obviously more electable.

Speaker 4 Put aside everything he's accomplished and the right to go finish the job, as he said, but that's there's this Kenneth who would definitely win in the wings that we're like ignoring out of so we can get Easter egg roll tickets.

Speaker 4 Like, that's not what this is, right?

Speaker 2 Are we going to get Easter egg roll tickets?

Speaker 2 I don't know. Gee, I didn't know that.
I'm going to go back and edit this segment just to make sure.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 When we come back, I will talk to State Senator Mallory McMorrow about the legislation that she and her colleagues are about to introduce in Michigan to promote gun safety.

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Speaker 2 And we're back. This week, there was yet another horrific school shooting, this time at Michigan State University, where three students were killed and five more were injured.

Speaker 2 Joining us to talk about what Democrats in Michigan intend to do about this now that they've won back control of the state legislature, Senate Majority Whip Mallory McMorrow.

Speaker 2 Senator, welcome back to the pod.

Speaker 9 Thank you.

Speaker 2 So yesterday, a big group of Michigan State students came to the Capitol to demand action on gun safety.

Speaker 2 They sat outside the steps in rows because that's how they've been trained to sit during lockdown drills. You were there with them.
What did those students tell you?

Speaker 9 It was really.

Speaker 9 Really moving. I mean, first, it was one student organizer who asked all of the legislators to come in front and sit in front and just look at all of them, which was really powerful.

Speaker 9 And then she asked anybody, any student who was there who wanted to share a story one by one to come up to the microphone.

Speaker 9 There had to have been at least 100 kids who stayed out there in, it was really cold yesterday and really windy, one by one telling their stories. And one of the things that really struck me was how

Speaker 9 many of these kids who just survived a school shooting have lived through another gun violence event before, whether it was another school shooting.

Speaker 9 A lot of these kids have just survived the Oxford high school shooting 14 months ago. There's a kid who survived the Sandy Hook shooting

Speaker 9 and then everyday gun violence, people who survived suicide attempts or have loved ones or nearby neighborhood gun violence.

Speaker 9 And this is, it just washed over you to realize how much of an epidemic this is.

Speaker 2 You also spoke at that event and shared that your good friend's older brother was killed in the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007.

Speaker 2 I was struck by what you said at the end of your remarks that you felt powerless after that tragedy. What do you say to young people who may feel the same way today?

Speaker 9 I,

Speaker 9 you know, it's a hard thing because it was, as I said in my speech, the older brother of one of my closest friends. So there's always this kind of feeling of guilt that it was a step removed from me.

Speaker 9 But this was somebody I grew up with who I saw at sleepovers, who, you know, when we were still in high school and he was in college, we tried to get him to get us beer.

Speaker 9 This was somebody I knew. And

Speaker 9 I remember when it happened, you know, just watching it play over again and again and again on CNN and the news coverage and seeing reenactments and animations of where the shooter was and how he got into the classrooms.

Speaker 9 And then seeing my friend's dad, you know, just screaming in a photo that was on the front page of the Washington Post and just feeling paralyzed.

Speaker 9 And when I was running for office for the first time a few years ago, in the wake of the Parkland shooting, there were high school kids in my district who reached out to me, even as a candidate, not even somebody in office yet, and asked to get coffee with me

Speaker 9 at 8 a.m. on a Sunday at a Starbucks, which is not what I was doing when I was in high school or when it happened to me.

Speaker 9 And they grilled me and they demanded to know what I was going to do on this issue when I got into office.

Speaker 9 That pushed me to push harder. And it has happened slowly, but the reality is now we have a Democratic majority in Michigan that

Speaker 9 got to a majority partially on gun violence, on all of us committing to do something. So my message to all of these kids or anybody is that you're not powerless.

Speaker 9 You know, it is night and day difference from Virginia Tech to now.

Speaker 9 And in Michigan, we are going to act.

Speaker 2 Can you talk about what legislation you and your colleagues are preparing to introduce on gun safety?

Speaker 9 Absolutely. The bills are being

Speaker 9 finalized and drafted and being introduced right now, actually.

Speaker 9 We're on recess to go back into session to introduce them. So there will be a package of bills on three key issues.

Speaker 9 One, to create red flag laws, emergency risk protection order here in Michigan, as well as requiring safe storage of firearms when they are not in use, and universal background checks.

Speaker 9 These are pieces of legislation that we have introduced multiple times, time after time after time.

Speaker 9 But we now using the best research and data from states that have enacted these policies already, our policy teams were already working on these before this horrific event happened.

Speaker 9 But just credit to staff, who I don't think ever get enough credit, stayed up, you know, long nights all of this week to expedite the end of this process to make sure that we could introduce them today.

Speaker 2 So for folks who don't know, it takes two-thirds support in both chambers of the Michigan legislature to enact a law immediately.

Speaker 2 If you have a simple majority, there's essentially a waiting period of about 14 months.

Speaker 2 Do you think you guys can get any Republican support on these measures that'll be necessary to get to that two-thirds number?

Speaker 9 I do hope we can. There have been some moments in my time in the legislature where there has been

Speaker 9 bipartisanship.

Speaker 9 In the wake of the killing of George Floyd a couple of years back, there was a police reform bill that even under a Republican-controlled legislature passed out of the Senate unanimously in the wake of that crisis.

Speaker 9 It ended up dying in the state house, but I think that showed me that

Speaker 9 when it hits home and when it is a devastating moment, there's an opportunity, there's a window that opens up for us to actually come together and put our differences aside.

Speaker 9 Michigan State is four miles away from our state capitol.

Speaker 9 This has not only impacted the families and the kids directly, this is quite literally everybody's staff, everybody's family, everybody's kids. I mean, everybody

Speaker 9 in the capital is affected by this. There were some speeches today from both sides of the aisle about what this meant to them.
And this feels like it can and should be one of those moments.

Speaker 2 Do you envision any issues getting enough Democratic support for a simple majority? No.

Speaker 2 That's great. That's great.
You know, as I said at the outset, this is the first time in 40 years that the Democrats hold a trifecta in Michigan.

Speaker 2 What other pieces of legislation are you all looking to get passed in these next two years?

Speaker 9 Oh, there's... I think this is a whole episode in and of itself, but I will say, you know, beyond this is an issue that, again,

Speaker 9 I know some of the opposition is going to say that we are rushing to introduce these bills in the wake of a crisis.

Speaker 9 But I really want to reiterate: we've been working on these for years and years and years. This was a priority coming in.

Speaker 9 But we also signaled as a new Democratic majority that we're tackling a lot.

Speaker 9 On day one of this new legislature, in both the state house and the state Senate, we introduced six bills that include repealing our 1931 abortion ban, expanding our state Civil Rights Act to explicitly include the LGBTQ community, expanding the EITC tax credit to support working families,

Speaker 9 repealing the pension tax, which is something that Republican Governor Snyder taxed seniors' pensions in order to give big businesses a $1.8 billion tax break back in 2011,

Speaker 9 and also repealing right to work and restoring prevailing wage. So we came out the gates with a big message that we're going to tackle kind of democratic social issues and economic issues.

Speaker 9 And Michigan right now is making the case that we are the anti-Florida. The governor said in the state of the state that bigotry is bad for business.

Speaker 9 So we are addressing inflation issues, making things better for people's pocketbooks, but also signaling to everybody, you are welcome here in Michigan, no matter who you are, and we're going to protect you.

Speaker 9 And gun violence and gun reform is a big piece of that as well.

Speaker 2 So you got national attention for your response to a Republican state senator who accused you of grooming and sexualizing children because you stood up for LGBTQ kids.

Speaker 2 The Republicans running for president in 2024 seem to be competing to see who can do the most to marginalize kids based on their gender identity, sexual orientation, or what they learn in school.

Speaker 2 I think like Pence is going to spend a million dollars in Iowa on some parents' rights bullshitty thing.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump has a new policy where he's going to try to ban gender-affirming care for all minors. Obviously, Ron DeSantis has been doing this for quite a while.

Speaker 2 What's your advice to Democrats on how to handle these issues and this dynamic that we're going to see play out in the Republican primary over the next year?

Speaker 9 Look, I think you just said it. I mean, these issues that they're running on, they're bullshit.

Speaker 9 They are an attempt to distract and make people believe that all of their very real issues related to inflation or the economy or jobs or education or whatever it is are somehow somebody else's fault.

Speaker 9 And that somebody else, they seem to be coalescing around the LGBTQ community and trans kids, it is absolute horseshit. And Democrats should call it out, call it what it is, and make that connection.

Speaker 9 You know, I think that's something that we did here in Michigan and did it well, is point out that

Speaker 9 banning two kids every year from playing soccer with their friends. is not going to do anything to lower your health care costs or fix the roads or bring teachers back into the profession.

Speaker 9 And I think if Democrats stand up and show that, then Republicans have nothing to run on.

Speaker 2 Last question before I let you go. Speaking of 2024, could be a crowded primary to replace retiring Michigan Senator Debbie Stavano.
You haven't yet said if you're considering running for that seat.

Speaker 2 Anything you can tell us?

Speaker 9 No.

Speaker 2 I had to try.

Speaker 9 I know.

Speaker 9 I respect the attempt.

Speaker 2 Senator Mallory McMorrow, thank you so much for joining Pod Save America. And good luck introducing the legislation in a few minutes.
We'll let you go do that. Take care.

Speaker 9 Thanks.

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Speaker 2 All right, before we go, Crooked Zone Hallie Kiefer is here. I guess we're doing something with Elon Musk's tweets.

Speaker 13 We are.

Speaker 13 You know, we wanted to do a little twist on the form and just to establish, you guys are, you're over OK stop.

Speaker 2 We're over it. Way over it.

Speaker 13 And, you know, unfortunately, the audience loves it. They're constantly asking for it.
And you guys said, never again. Don't even bother.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 13 And it is sort of like, even though we've given up on it, it's like the old story of Pagliace, the clown. You know, it's like, doctor, I'm depressed.

Speaker 2 It's like, oh, I have something for you.

Speaker 13 Go listen to Pod Save America. They've got a great segment called Okay, Stop.
Doctor, I am Okay, Stop. This is Okay, Stop.
It's just a verbal version. I'm just going to tell you the story.

Speaker 13 And then you guys will say, okay, stop. And I was reading this, and it is about Elon Musk.
And going through this, it really,

Speaker 13 it felt like I was telling a horror story. And so I'm going to call this, again, we can change the title later.
I'm going to call it Tales of Online Terror.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 13 I like this. Okay.
Because I'm going to tell you a spine-tingling story. And then you tell me when you want to stop and scream.

Speaker 2 Okay. Okay.

Speaker 13 Oh, wait, before we go, did you guys watch the Super Bowl?

Speaker 2 Are you Super Bowl boys? Okay.

Speaker 2 I mean, I don't know if I was yes to the first question, no to the second question.

Speaker 2 It's entirely subjective.

Speaker 4 It's totally subjective.

Speaker 13 But you had strong feelings about it.

Speaker 2 No, I didn't really have strong feelings about it. I don't like the Eagles that much, but that's about it.

Speaker 13 Did you tweet at all? Did you, were you putting anything on the internet?

Speaker 3 I did some tweeting.

Speaker 13 Well, I personally watched only the halftime show with Rihanna, and then I watched the puppy bowl, which is the perfect amount of the Super Bowl.

Speaker 13 However, the story begins when cosmic flop Elon Musk discovered that his Super Bowl tweet got less engagement than President Joe Biden's.

Speaker 13 And I'm going to just describe the tweets to you because they are just the most nothing tweets. Like, these are not tweets, but it's like the people needed to know.
Biden, it's a video of Dr.

Speaker 13 Jill Biden in a eagles jersey and then biden just says as your president i'm not picking favorites but as jill biden's husband fly eagles fly cute yeah totally benign appropriate elon musk this is the tweet that inspired this whole saga which by the way he deleted in shame apparently it's not up anymore it just said go eagles exclamation point with six american flags which felt like it could have been a biden tweet I was like, that could, it could have been either.

Speaker 2 That's just the most anodyne possible. Exactly.
Okay.

Speaker 13 For those of you keeping score at home, go outside.

Speaker 2 Don't do that.

Speaker 13 But for us, who cannot do that, apparently Elon's pro-Philadelphia Eagles tweet got 9.6 million impressions. So we're just talking impressions compared to Biden's 29 million impressions.

Speaker 13 According to a report from Platformer, Elon was so enraged, he immediately boarded his private jet, which by the way is destroying the planet.

Speaker 13 flew to San Francisco and demanded his staff fix the issue or they'd be fired. A fact that that makes me want to destroy the planet.
Gentlemen, are your spines tingling yet? How does that strike you?

Speaker 4 Did he fly directly from the Super Bowl where he was in a box with Rupert Murdoch? Is that where he flew from?

Speaker 13 Allegedly, yes.

Speaker 2 He has other pictures of that. Wow.

Speaker 13 Doesn't that feel like it should just be an email?

Speaker 2 Am I wrong? Doesn't it feel like you should not have had that concern in any way? Because you're...

Speaker 2 What the fuck?

Speaker 4 What's the point of over-leveraging yourself to buy a $44 billion failing company if you get poor engagement in your tweets?

Speaker 13 I mean, I think Dan's got the point.

Speaker 2 But here's the thing. He didn't put any effort into that tweet.
It's only a good idea. That's the point of owning the company.

Speaker 4 The rest of us have to think hard about what can go viral. He shouldn't have to think hard.
Could you imagine if you owned a restaurant and had to wait for a table? That's ridiculous.

Speaker 2 He is like the epitome of the tech founder personality where you do something and you just are used to everyone around you being like, oh, sir, that's amazing.

Speaker 2 Oh, you're changing the world. Absolutely.
Incredible, incredible job changing the world.

Speaker 4 I know this is about Elon Musk, but can I just go on one slight tangent?

Speaker 4 Absolutely. I feel like the White House lawyers are being overly careful with Joe Biden that he, a guy who's grown up rooting for the Eagles, can't just root for the Eagles.

Speaker 2 Do you think it's the White House lawyers or do you think it was like his political team? Well,

Speaker 2 he doesn't need Kansas City.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's not the Eagles against the Atlanta Falcons, right?

Speaker 2 Or the Arizona Cardinals.

Speaker 4 This is a layup. Just be for the Eagles.

Speaker 2 People will like that.

Speaker 2 He cares about Red America, even if Red America doesn't care about him. That's Joe Biden's message.
Okay, there you go.

Speaker 4 All right, back to Elon Musk. Sorry.

Speaker 13 In the grave of night on Monday morning, Twitter engineers received an urgent at here Slack message that said, we are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform.

Speaker 13 Any people who make dashboards and write software, please, can you help solve this problem? This is high urgency. If you're willing to help out, please thumbs up this post.

Speaker 13 Gentlemen, 80 engineers had to gather after that Slack message went out. They gathered at the Twitter office to begin working through the night.
When was this message sent? 2.36 a.m.

Speaker 13 These people who are human beings with families, hopes and dreams, sleep schedules, maybe even children, had to go do this. Is your skin crawling?

Speaker 2 If you are still at Twitter right now, my question is, do you have hopes and dreams?

Speaker 2 Do you have sleep schedules?

Speaker 13 Like, you can't anymore, right?

Speaker 2 I want to know. I also want to know which engineers declined to give the thumbs up emoji.

Speaker 13 The ones that I have one foot out the door. The ones who are like, my fourth interview is tomorrow, and I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 2 So do we think that 80 engineers showed up at Twitter headquarters, whatever's left of it, at

Speaker 2 like three in the morning to try to start fixing this engagement engagement issue.

Speaker 13 I mean, I do believe that because I think, unfortunately, that's where they're at. Now, if you guys were to slack me, I'd be asleep.
I wouldn't even get it.

Speaker 13 That's what's hard is like, they got the message, which means that they know that this is happening all the time. That's the terrifying part.

Speaker 4 Yeah, they have sounds enabled on their Slack messages.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 2 In the general channel.

Speaker 13 According to reports, Elon Musk then ordered his engineers in the middle of the goddamn night to build a a system that boosted his tweets to all Twitter users or else they'd be fucking fired.

Speaker 13 And then they adjusted the algorithm that would, quote, green light all of his tweets to bypass Twitter filters and boost them by a factor of 1,000.

Speaker 13 Basically, his tweets were receiving special treatment that no other user could ever or has ever received. And without any of us knowing about it, are your bones chilled, gentlemen?

Speaker 2 Are you

Speaker 2 the core? I am.

Speaker 13 Because this, to me, this is at this point, it's insidious that we don't know what's happening.

Speaker 2 Isn't that so? So, Twitter has become just like affirmative action for Elon Musk, Musk's tweets.

Speaker 13 To go back to Dan's point about owning a restaurant, it's like if Elon Musk bought a restaurant and then he started making the chicken parm and then was mad that everyone was like, this is not as good as anyone else.

Speaker 4 Joe Biden's chicken parm.

Speaker 13 And so, he hired 80 chicken parm engineers to come in and for not even make his chicken parm better, force people to eat it.

Speaker 2 It's terrifying. Yeah, except he was making the chicken parm with like hamburger and ravioli.
Like, I, right, there's no chicken in it.

Speaker 2 Is there chicken in it?

Speaker 13 No, it's just, it just says go eagles.

Speaker 2 I'm breathing it.

Speaker 13 So, as a result, Elon's tweets then sort of insidiously started taking over people's timelines this week, not mine. I have them blocked.

Speaker 13 When people started asking why his tweets were flooding their timelines, he tweeted, please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh algorithm that makes me want to scream in horror.

Speaker 13 Gentlemen, what are your thoughts about this? Like morally, ethically.

Speaker 2 Oh, I mean, I don't have any moral or ethical thoughts about Elon Musk because I think he left that behind long ago. I um I have not noticed more of his tweets.

Speaker 2 I stop I had like a fascination, probably a bit of an bordering on a bit of an obsession with Elon Musk's and his terrible tweets when he first took over the platform.

Speaker 2 I left that behind a couple months ago. Yeah.
I haven't muted him or blocked him,

Speaker 2 but I don't pay attention to his shit as much anymore, and my life's been better.

Speaker 13 And I think that is the problem.

Speaker 2 Yes, Dan, you wanted to take issue with what I just said.

Speaker 4 I was just going to ask if the producers could go back through your timeline and see when the last time we shooted Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 I think it was like Saturday. Well, it was this.
This was the first time in a while because I heard about this story that you're reading here. And

Speaker 13 it was bone chilling. Well, and then we could sort of talk about that because

Speaker 13 that's also on my list that Elijah gave me. Basically, sort of,

Speaker 13 you know, this isn't his only bad recent take. You know, we have the whole Paul Pelosi hammer story that he just sort of carried water for.

Speaker 2 Classic.

Speaker 13 You remember when Paul Pelosi, an elderly man, was attacked by the sable with a hammer and everyone on the right laughed about it?

Speaker 13 So he put out a tweet saying some of the smarter people I know actively believe the press, dot, dot, dot, amazing.

Speaker 13 Even though he was posting from something that was just pretending to be a news outlet. And so obviously you had a reaction to it.
And also you have a podcast about being less online.

Speaker 2 What are your

Speaker 13 like sort of like, I guess, like, what do you want people, what should people take from this? Or is it just sort of like the raw, icy terror at the whole thing?

Speaker 13 It's just sort of like, I can't even, you know, talk about it.

Speaker 3 It's just such a,

Speaker 2 I mean, look,

Speaker 2 Elon Musk doesn't want people to believe anything negative about Elon Musk. It is all like, it's so hard.
It is just, we are reliving the whole Donald Trump

Speaker 2 era again, except he's like a poor imitation of Donald Trump, not running for office that just controls Trump's old favorite platform. And that's all he is, really.

Speaker 13 You know, and it is like he's running for just our attention.

Speaker 2 And even that's what he's like, no, he can't even, that's the sad part. He paid $44 billion

Speaker 2 to get our attention. And now he has, and he captured it for a brief moment, and now he's mostly lost it.
And now he doesn't know what to do because he's just 44 billion in the hole.

Speaker 4 So I have three takes on this. One is, hell yeah.
It's deeply set, right? Here is a person who was at the bottom.

Speaker 2 It's kind of funny.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's, it's funny set, right?

Speaker 4 Which is here's the richest human being in the world, at one point at least, who has built multiple successful companies, is upset that his tweet got less RTs than Joe Biden's.

Speaker 4 Like, that's just like, that just speaks to everything about how like this gaping well of insecurity and emptiness inside this human being. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Which we can laugh at because he's the richest human being in the world or was at some point. Second point,

Speaker 4 ultimately, who cares if we all have to look at more more of Elon Musk's tweets? It's not like Twitter was this curated list of wonderfulness and now we got to look at Elon Musk's shit.

Speaker 4 But the serious part is if he is playing with the algorithm, it's Elon Musk's dumb tweets now. It's pro-Ron DeSantis content later.

Speaker 4 It is something else that fits with his, it could be something that promotes Dogecoin or some other financial thing.

Speaker 4 There is a inherent corruption, which then speaks to the more important point, which is if Elon Musk can make 80 engineers change the algorithm to promote his tweets, then we need some sort of regulation that that prevents them from changing it to promote all kinds of other corrupt and dangerous stuff.

Speaker 4 And that's where this problem is

Speaker 4 the serious point to this absurd story about an absurdly small human being.

Speaker 2 Or, you know, failing to get that regulation, which probably we will,

Speaker 2 everyone should just sort of stop treating Twitter as the media's assignment editor.

Speaker 4 And so we, that's why, that's what Mastodon is for.

Speaker 2 That's what Matt is. Fewer tweets, more time.

Speaker 13 Run it over there.

Speaker 2 Yeah. The end to this story is go sign up on Mastodon.

Speaker 13 And there's one, I think, speaks to your point, Dan, which is the final, apparently a story also reported by Platformer that Musk fired one of his last two principal engineers after they told him his tweets were declining, partly because people just cared less.

Speaker 13 Like, it's like you bought it. The months have gone on.
People are just sort of not really back. It's not like business as usual, but like, you know, maybe people know all their stuff going on.

Speaker 13 And isn't that the most horrifying thing of all? And apparently

Speaker 13 Musk had said, like, why are my tweets not reaching everybody? And he told them, this is ridiculous. I have more than 100 million followers, and I'm only getting tens of thousands of impressions.

Speaker 13 And when this person tried to explain to him how waning attention works, he told the engineer, you're fired. You're fired.

Speaker 13 Is this scary or is it just humiliating? Or is it worse, a combination of the two?

Speaker 2 I think it's the best day of that engineer's life.

Speaker 13 They're finally free.

Speaker 2 They're free. They're finally free.
They're free.

Speaker 2 Also, if that engineer would like to come on offline. Please.
Please come on offline. We'd love to talk to you about your experience of Twitter.

Speaker 13 And we just want to show you at the end a very grim little video of Elon talking to his, I mean, honest to God,

Speaker 13 three of the remaining employees who I've really, I do feel for those people. Like, whatever situation they're in, it's like, it's not good.

Speaker 13 You have to give it three in the morning because you feel like insane every night. And just if you're listening, they're sort of in a sterile, blazingly white office space.
Like there's no color.

Speaker 13 It's honest. The lights are so bright, probably to drop, again, ruin their sleep.

Speaker 13 And here we go. if you wouldn't mind playing it uh phoebe

Speaker 4 you create your own memes though don't you uh i saw it create some memes um your meme game is strong thank you yeah

Speaker 13 your meme game is strong

Speaker 2 yeah yeah i create some memes um create some memes again the richest man in the world 51 has damn near a dozen children just this is what we're doing with our time guy sucks That's all that's all I'll say about that.

Speaker 4 The whole thing is an argument for more touching of grass.

Speaker 2 And progressive taxation.

Speaker 13 Hell yeah. On that note, gentlemen, thank you for letting me tell you this terrifying spine-tingling tale.

Speaker 2 Thank you for scaring the shit out of us.

Speaker 13 It's something about it. Thank you.
I don't know. We can all, it's like, it's better to laugh because if I think about it, I'm like, well,

Speaker 13 it's not good that someone could turn out that way.

Speaker 2 It's not good at all. It's not good at all.

Speaker 2 Have that much money. No, no, no, no.
Maybe billionaires shouldn't exist. On that note.
On that note, thank you, Helly Kiefer.

Speaker 13 Of course. Thank you for having me for telling us that bone-chilling story.

Speaker 2 Thank you to Senator Mallory McMorrow for joining us. Everyone, have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you next week.

Speaker 4 Bye, everyone.

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 Seglund and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show.

Speaker 2 Thanks to Hallie Kiefer, Ari Schwartz, Sandy Girard, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montouch.

Speaker 2 Our episodes are uploaded as videos at youtube.com/slash pod saveamerica.

Speaker 14 Hey everybody, it's John Lovett of Pod Save America, love it or leave it, and for a brief moment in time, Survivor on CBS.

Speaker 14 Understanding reality TV is the key to understanding the current state of our politics. Trump gets it.
To your favorite Democrats, I doubt it.

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Over eight episodes of Conversations will answer three big questions.

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