Trump's Justices Turn On Him

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I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett.
And Tommy Vitor. On today's show, we're going to cover the Supreme Court's stopping Alien Enemy Act deportations for now and bring in strict scrutiny's Leah Lippman

to tell us what it all means.

We'll also talk about Pete Hegseth's second Signal Chat scandal and the mutiny against

him from within the Pentagon, how the White House started its war with Harvard by mistake,

and the passing of Pope Francis, who held on just long enough to dunk on J.D. Vance.

But let's start with the biggest news from the weekend, which is that the Supreme Court

has inched even closer to a full-blown confrontation with the Trump administration over their use of the Alien Enemies Act to deprive people of any due process before disappearing them to prison in El Salvador. The court issued a highly unusual emergency ruling in the middle of the night that specifically ordered the administration to halt their plans to deport a group of Venezuelans, at least temporarily.
Only Justices Thomas and Alito dissented. In just a bit, you're going to hear Lovett's quick interview with our pal, Leah Lippman, from Strict Scrutiny about what the ruling means and what's next.
Before we get to that, the three of us haven't had a chance to talk since Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen returned from El Salvador after his last-minute surprise meeting with Kilyer Obrego Garcia, who had been transferred out of Seacott to a new prison, Buckele and the Trump White House, of course, attacked Van Hollen for a meeting with Obrego Garcia.

Salvadoran officials even placed two fake margaritas in front of them to make it seem like everyone's having a good time down there.

When Van Hollen returned home...

Two margaritas, I'm going to open the jail. All right.
Huh? You got one laugh and a lot of stone faces. I'm sorry.
I don't know that song. It's okay.
I thought we'd go with like a wasting away in Margaritaville. Nope.
No? Okay. When Van Hollen returned home, he did all the Sunday shows.
Here he is patiently answering questions from Fox News anchor Shannon Bream that might have caused me to burst a blood vessel. Did you ask him if he has any association with MS-13? I did not ask him directly because he's answered that question repeatedly as his lawyers have.
My purpose in going there was to, number one, see if he was alive, see if he was healthy, take his story. Do you worry, though, that you are sticking your neck out for somebody who, maybe down the line, is proven to be connected to MS-13? I want to be very clear.
I'm not vouching for the man. I'm vouching for the man's rights.
Who did pay for this trip? This was an officially cleared congressional trip, cleared on bipartisan basis. So taxpayer dollars.
Yes, like every other trip. Like the trip Kristi Noem took with her fashion show before Seacott.
Nice. Also, two Republican congressmen now.
We paid for Kilmar Obrego Garcia's trip too. Yeah, $6 million a year.
And lodging. So, shut up.
So, shut up. It was really hard to watch the whole interview.
Chris Van Hollen, patience of a saint there. He's doing a good job.
You guys have reactions to the meeting and the aftermath. The Trump folks seem to think this is a winning issue for them and that people will believe that the story is about Democrats trying to bring an MS-13 foreign terrorist back home.
I think Van Hollen did a good job of making it about bigger principles. Like he did exactly what I want Democrats to do in this moment which is he stepped up he flew down to el salvador he took personal political risk knowing bukele would try to humiliate him which he did with this it wasn't even wasn't even a good margarita stunt it was like a a cherry or something no one's drinking margaritas with cherries what are you doing dude yeah i was was in a water glass was strange it was foolish and then he knew obviously that that Republicans would attack him as like a fan of gang members.
And sure enough, the White House photoshopped a photo of Van Hollen with like gang tattoos all over his face and stuff. So it's just childish nonsense.
But Van Hollen used what little leverage he had as U.S. Senator to get the only results we've seen outside of a courtroom, which was to get access to Abrego Garcia.
And I also think, you know, he's someone who's shown a lot of courage on a bunch of issues lately, on Gaza, a whole bunch of other, a host of other things. And I think that's what we want from someone like him in a safe seat like Maryland to do, like put your neck out there.
You guys have any thoughts on like why Bukele allowed the visit last minute? These are all educated guesses because we don't know for sure, but. There was a not at all veiled threat that not allowing that access was a violation of international law and could lead to cuts to future US assistance.
Right, except it would have to be cuts to future US assistance under a different regime. I was surprised that he got the meeting because it's like he's bending to pressure.
Ben Holland was staying to try to get the meeting. It all feels very like,

I think even the margaritas point to Trump and Bukele are doing this on the fly and figuring

out what they're doing on the fly. What is the message that putting like to Margaret, like it's

so fucking stupid. But the whole point of Seacott is that it's a fucking hellhole that you brag

about. The reason Kristi Noem and these Congress of Congress took tourist photos in front of these prisoners is to send a message about how fucking terrible it is.
So what exactly is the point of the margaritas? It's not terrible. He's actually on a vacation down there.
I thought that's the opposite. He's just a troll.
That's the point. He likes to troll the left.
He's on Twitter all the time. He's super online.
So he's saying, oh, you're calling me a, you know, a despot and a dictator and that we're torturing this man. Here he is having a margarita.
Yeah, he has risen. Kind of he did.
He made some jokes. And here he is enjoying a margarita.
His Twitter bio used to say world's coolest dictator. Like he just loved to be a troll like this.
Right. So then the meeting is a troll showing that he's fine.
That's why the margaritas are there. You know what? It doesn't need to make sense.
Yeah, you can't think about it too much. Well, that's my point.
It's just like all of right-wing politics right now. Right.
It's just fascist jazz. And they thought, let's give him the meeting.
We'll make a joke out of it. We'll show that he's fine.
We'll turn it to our advantage. Yeah, that's Bukele.
And then I think the Trump White House is just like, they're going all in on the message. Democrats love MS-13.
No other facts can penetrate this message. The idea that we just want people to have due process, that the Trump administration already admitted in court multiple times that they made an error.
They haven't given any justification for why we're jailing people in a foreign prison, perhaps for the rest of their lives. None of that matters at all.
Also, they can't, I mean, we'll get to it, but they also just have to either did like kind of quickly glide over or outright ignore the fact that these aren't just Democrats expressing these concerns.

It's Reagan appointees.

It's three Trump appointees to the Supreme Court. Yeah.
And also just want to point out that another story that was, I think, broke late last week. So Trump invoking the alien enemies act requires him to claim that trend

air agua is invading the U S at the behest of the Maduro regime in

Venezuela.

Most. Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act requires him to claim that Trenda Aragua is invading the U.S.
at the behest of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.

Most legal experts believe like that kind of linkage is necessary for an Alien Enemies Act declaration. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that the National Intelligence Council, which is like the board that brings together the consensus opinion of the 18 component intelligence agencies, have determined that the Venezuelan government does not, they're not directing Trente-Aragua.
They're not directing an invasion of the United States. So that undercuts Trump's public statements and the already shaky legal basis for the entire Alien Enemies Act invocation.
Yeah. And a reminder, the Supreme Court has not ruled on the constitutionality of Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
So that could come back to bite them in the ass. And again, there's no legal justification and nothing in the Alien Enemies Act that says you're not just able to deport people under the Alien Enemies Act, you're able to send them to a foreign prison and pay a foreign country to jail them.
There's no justification for that anywhere. As a judge in the appeals court noted, Nazis were treated better under the Alien Enemies Act.
But just your question on the politics, because we, right now, Democrats are supposed to be doing some kind of cost of living week or something to that effect. It's cost of living action week.
Cost of living action. No, cost.
Action, cost of, we're doing, we're taking off.

I'm not sure what it is.

I don't think it's a cola plan.

Now, dear listener, you won't know this existed

because you didn't get the briefing on all the news

that you get when you work on Pod Save America

because it's not going to break through

because this is what the news is.

And I was thinking about our conversation

with Sarah McBride and the way in which Democrats have kind of allowed themselves or boxed themselves in on immigration over the years to the point where you're not supposed to be talking about due process, but also you're not supposed to be talking about border security, right? Like all of these were sort of unacceptable as the balance of what we were allowed to discuss got smaller and smaller.

And there's this sort of consultant-driven, poll-driven, best-sentence message testing idea that what you really need to be doing is figuring out the message that works with the broadest group of people. But also, you should be using that message all the time.
So you need to be trying to win everybody over a little bit all the time, which in an environment like this means, for the most part, winning nobody over all the time. You have an issue like this.
A lot of people may not be following it closely. It probably isn't the most important issue for the vast majority of people that voted in the presidential election.
Maybe more people who voted in a midterm might care about this. But there are millions of people that are highly engaged that do care about this a lot.
And if you're just being cynical, if you're just being crass, you can spend every day talking about the economy in the hopes of persuading everybody a little bit, inch by inch until the midterms, I guess, even though we have no idea what the contours of that debate will look like two years from now. And I'm sure in October of next year, we'll be talking about the economy constantly.
Who knows what the main debate will be about. But right now, this is the most important way we can respond to the Trump administration.
And there are millions of people who want to believe Democrats are credible agents on their behalf. And you have an opportunity to build that credibility with people that are desperate for people to show some leadership, to show that they understand and really mean it when they say Trump is a threat to democracy.
And so, yes, I get that there are, you know, you guys talked about it Friday, Newsom saying it's a distraction and there are people who think we should only be focused on tariffs in the economy. But right now you can build a lot of trust with a group of people that will be your most important messengers a year from now.
And just on cynical terms, I think that that's worth it. Well, I mean, this is not a politically unpopular, but courageous and morally right thing to do.
It's also politically popular. Like all the polling that's coming out so far is very clear that most people think we should not send people to a foreign prison without a trial.
It's just, it been I have not seen a single poll yet that has argued otherwise. There are some polls that people are saying, oh, well, Trump's, you know, overall favorability on immigration is still the strongest issue.
Yes. When you just scratch one inch beneath that surface, all the polling says otherwise.
Yeah, I think that's true. But look.
But I'm saying I'm saying that's important because that's why these consultants, the consultant brain is especially dumb on this one. It's like trying to figure out why Bukele put the margaritas on the table.
Yeah, I think like the fair, the more generous argument is to say, sure, sure. But over time, you're creating the impression that you're soft.
I don't agree. Over time, if Democrats pick this fight, what is your memory of this fight? It is not Democrats fighting for border security or fighting to lower costs.
It's Democrats fighting for a more generous immigration system and fighting for an undocumented or illegal immigrant who applied for asylum, what have you. I don't agree with that argument, but we're making this salient for people.
And I think that is still worth doing because I think years of trying to build a little bit of credibility with everyone all the time has left us with a lack of credibility with just about everyone. So apparently the list of MS-13 Trendy Aragua enthusiasts has grown to now include John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, who joined the liberal justices in a late night emergency ruling over the weekend that blocked the deportation of a group of Venezuelans in North Texas under the Alien Enemies Act.
The court ruled so quickly that the lower courts hadn't yet ruled, the Justice Department hadn't yet responded to the challenge, and Sam Alito hadn't yet finished his dissent. Which, very rare that the court releases an opinion without the dissent, if the dissent is still being written.
Were you guys surprised these geezers work so late? I was. I assume they're alerted, but then their clerks do most of the work.
Yeah, I think it was the... It's a good question for our stricts.
Yeah, we talked about what it meant that Alito's hadn't yet dotted his T's and crossed his eyes when it went out with Alito. Well, the important point here is that the government claimed or tried to claim that it didn't have any imminent plans to deport the immigrants.
And the court's ruling, when it came, as fast as it came, showed that clearly they do not believe them. At least seven justices were not willing to trust the government and take their word for it.
Wild stuff and also a bit complicated, so love it. Talk to Leah about this ruling and Judge Bosberg's contempt finding.
Here's the interview with Leah. Joining us now, professor of law at the University of Michigan, co-host of Strict Scrutiny, Zingerman's Deli aficionado, and the author of the upcoming book, Lawless, How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories and Bad Vibes, available for pre-order now,

out May 13th. Leah Libman, welcome back.
Thanks for having me.

I want to just say, Leah, that I am at an advantage because I've already read the book.

So you know everything. Why even have me on? I have been prepared.
Well, you know,

a book can do many things, but it can't keep up with the daily news cycle. But it does

Thank you. So you know everything.
Why even have me on? I have been prepared. Well, you know, a book can do many things, but it can't keep up with the daily news cycle.
But it does prepare you for this moment. So I really do urge everyone listening to this to pause this podcast and put in a pre-order.
Let's get this thing on the bestseller list. That's one thing we can do to fight back against the freaks.
It will make Sam Alito very mad if this makes a bestseller list. And he keeps up with his Google alerts.
Oh, yeah. He hate reads the internet.
So a lot of developments over the last few days. There was an extraordinary ruling by Judge Harvey Wilkinson in the Abrego Garcia case on Thursday.
On Friday, an appeals court paused. Judge James Boesberg's plan to begin contempt proceedings against the Trump administration over their failure to turn around deportation flights to El Salvador.
And then on Saturday, in a 7-2 ruling, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the deportations of any Venezuelans held in Northern Texas under the Alien Enemies Act. Judge Samuel Alito issued a pissy little dissent to which Justice Clarence Thomas joined.
Let's take each piece of this. First of all, what is the status of the Boesburg contempt proceedings? That is on hold because the two to one D.C.
Circuit panel, two Trump appointees in the majority, paused the contempt order, which basically prevents Judge Boesburg from moving forward. And he had asked the government to submit declarations or to purge their contempt by bringing back everyone from the El Salvadoran prison that the government had wrongfully sent there.
So that is just on hold until further action by the D.C. Circuit.
There are so many strange and extraordinary things happening. On the list of, obviously, it's not high on our list because of what else is happening.
But this is a strange order, right? Because Bozberg didn't hold anybody in contempt. He was just beginning the process to try to gather information.
It is, as we say, on strict scrutiny, just total fuck shit, right? Like you are not ordinarily supposed to be able to appeal a ruling that does nothing, that is not final, that leaves additional things to be determined. And Judge Bosberg, as you note, didn't hold anyone in contempt.
And he held out the possibility that he would never hold anyone in contempt, so long as the government returned people from El Salvador. So I don't know what the F the D.C.
Circuit panel thought that they were pausing, but obviously the prospect of holding the Trump administration accountable under the law was just too galling for them to note, and they had to take a pause over that one. So as you've noted on strict, Trump has a lot of power here.
First of all, Boesberg might, one way in the past a judge might try to enforce contempt is by referring it to the Department of Justice that's run by a Trump stooge. Bozberg can actually appoint a prosecutor himself, right? But even then, the president would have pardon power, so it could shut it down at any moment.
Look, we're far from here, but it is a question that I had. When Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, the contempt was concluded, right? If the administration takes no steps to right this wrong of these deportations that Judge Bosberg ordered stopped before they had even reached El Salvador and Trump pardons anyone connected to it, the crime would be ongoing.
It would be a pardon of a bank robber while they're inside of the vault. So presumably contempt would just begin again because the president, though the pardon power is incredible, can't pardon people in the future.
That's true, although the president can issue a preemptive pardon here before any criminal prosecution would begin. And it's possible, and I think even likely, that in the event the president did that, I don't really see the federal courts then trying to go back and say, well, even though he basically pardoned the offense up until this date, that offense has continued.
And I think there would be difficult questions about whether it is indeed a new offense. And my guess is the federal court would probably stand down in that situation.
So let's talk about what the courts are willing to do. Is there a reason to have some tiny kernel of relief, if not hope, that seven members of the court, including three justices appointed by President Trump, stepped in to halt deportations under the Alien Enemies Act? Short answer, yes.
You know, I think at minimum, it evinces a sense that the seven justices in the majority aren't willing to take the Trump administration at their word because, of course, the Trump administration was saying, well, we're giving these guys like reasonable time and reasonable notice to file their challenges when obviously they weren't. And the administration has basically been thumbing their nose at the Supreme Court's directive and Judge Sinis' order to bring back Mr.
Abrego Garcia. And so I think the Supreme Court looked at all of that and realized, look, the prospect of the government shunting these people off to El Salvador and then never bringing them back is so real and the harm is so profound.
We need to order a halt until we figure out what is going on and whether the administration is indeed providing the individuals with the notice that we said was required in our previous decision. So you're reading into what would have driven the order, but the order doesn't, it's not detailed.
We actually, we got more information in Alito's dissent than we got in the order. But is there any other way to read this than as the seven justices looking at their previous ruling, requiring reasonable time, and being concerned that it's not being followed? No.
One is that's basically the point in Justice Alito's dissent. He says, you know, we should assume that the Trump administration is going to comply with our previous order, directing them to provide reasonable time and notice.
And he faults the seven justices who halted the deportations for not doing so. And I just wanted to kind of pause on the irony that the Supreme Court basically did in this case what they faulted Judge Boesberg for doing previously, namely halt on a wholesale basis a bunch of deportations rather than requiring every individual to challenge their deportation themselves.
And I think that underscores what we were talking about, which is the Supreme Court realized the error of their ways, that there actually needs to be this wholesale pause, because if there isn't, the government is just shuttling people around between jurisdictions, trying to find some court somewhere that will allow them to expel these people without due process. So Alito writes this short but very mad dissent.
And reading it, it's very technical, actually. But it seems to be, if you step back, what he's saying is nothing extraordinary is happening to require this extraordinary response.
Yeah. So he basically faults the court for not adhering to their normal process.
And the things he points out the court did were, one, to grant this pause in deportations before waiting to hear the government's response is one thing. Second is the Supreme Court acted by halting the deportations before waiting for the U.S.
Court of Appeals, the intermediary court between the trial court and the Supreme Court, to act on the request to halt the deportations. And so those are two kind of abnormal procedural moves the seven justices made that Justice Alito says, what reason is there to do that? But the reality is, of course, we're not dealing with ordinary circumstances.
So, right, like you need to adapt in those circumstances where, again, it looks like the administration is trying to evade any prospect of judicial review by just quickly expelling individuals without any prospect of judicial oversight. He sort of plays dumb, like, why would we do this? Why would we do this? But

seven of his colleagues have decided it was urgent. And there's two aspects of it that I

wanted to hear your take on. One is they put out the order before Alito had written his dissent.

They thought this was such an emergency that they put out the statement freezing the deportations

without the attached dissent. And have you seen that ever before of the dissent coming later? That has happened before.
It happens in some courts of appeals, and it does sometimes happen in the Supreme Court. It's exceptionally unusual.
And honestly, a part of me read into this, the idea that not only do the seven justices think that the Trump administration might be acting in bad faith. Maybe they think Sam Alito is, too, because if he sat on his dissent and just didn't release it until it was too late, until after the administration had expelled the many individuals to El Salvador, then they would be facing the situation once again where they're trying to order the administration to return people from El Salvador.
door. And so a part of me wondered if that is what was happening.
And maybe that's why he's so mad, although he's usually mad. There was he is usually mad.
There was another part of this, too, which you also talked about on the most recent episode of strict, which is there's a kind of jurisdictional issue that happens with members of the Supreme Court for a case like this. And in this case, it would have gone to Alito alone first.
And in that case, normally Alito would have had the chance to rule or refer it to the full court. But it seems like maybe that didn't happen here.
Yeah. So there's an odd wording in the order, which just noted there's an application that is pending before the court.
The usual wording is the application was presented to Justice Alito and referred by him to the court. That's not what the order said.
And so that too lends itself to some speculation of, was Sam Alito just sitting on this application, not referring it to all of the members of the court, again,

in order to buy the administration time. And we don't know whether that did indeed happen.

I just like to note to any member of the Supreme Court that I am on signal if you want to accidentally

add me to your group chat and let me know what's going on. But that too, you know, is a possibility that the seven justices were just concerned he was trying to run out the clock.
On the other side of the conservative legal spectrum, you have Judge Harvey Wilkinson, who wrote a beautiful and extraordinary ruling around these deportations. And I'm wondering what, you know, it's been a few days since it came out.
Is there any part of it that has stuck out with you? Any impression that it's left? I think it was an incredibly powerful writing. I especially appreciated his call to other judges and to the executive branch to insist that the executive branch abide by the law.
And I thought that was especially pointed because many of the Supreme Court's actions to date have looked like attempts to avoid confrontations with the Trump administration and to avoid really holding their feet to the fire and them accountable to the law, maybe out of concern that they just wouldn't abide by the court's order. But that's an unsustainable state of affairs.
You can't just give the administration the green light

and not do anything because you think they will disobey a court order. You're in effect,

allowing them to violate the law if that's what you do. And so I really appreciated

Judge Wilkinson coming down hard on that point and really writing, I think, for the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court. Leo Littman, thank you so much.
We'll be right back. Thank you.
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All right, so if you're wondering how MAGA types are taking the news of the Supreme Court's intervention, Georgia Congressman Mike Collins retweeted the New York Post headline about the order with the words, let them enforce it. A Trump official named Paul Ingrassia, who's the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, posted on Truth Social that the court, quote, including three members appointed by President Trump, no less, is, quote, infected with a parasitical ideology and has, quote, absolutely no understanding of law and its proper function and role.
The CEO of The Federalist said, quote, if the Supreme Court is going to ignore the law and the Constitution, then the president is obligated to ignore the Supreme Court and put it in its place. And MAGA radio host Jesse Kelly wrote, quote, ignore the Supreme Court, arrest anyone who tries to enforce this, dissolve the Supreme Court entirely if they push.
nevertheless, as lawyers were arguing to halt removals in court, ICE buses in Texas carrying detainees were seen turning around. Totally normal reactions from MAGA World.
How are you guys feeling about all this? On one hand, 7-2 ruling. We like that.
On the other, the calls from Trump's base to defy the court, and extension, the Constitution seem to be getting louder and more numerous. Or melt them in acid, it sounds like.
Yeah, well, yeah, just the head of the federalist posted after that missive. When we're done deporting illegals, it's time to start deporting rogue judges.
Huh. Cool, cool, cool.
Also, if you're using the word parasitical, you're just trying too hard, in my opinion. Yeah, it's like you're like the White House liaison to Homeland Security.

It's not like you got to find some attention there.

It's just an intellectual treaty.

It's like saying irregardless.

Right.

It was just this sort of like treatise about why seven justices, including the three Donald Trump appointed, are not just wrong, but they have to be captured by liberal ideology.

They must be evil.

Because there's no other way to make sense of why why they would do this disagree yeah the like the it's interesting like just these people that you've picked out a lot of them have sounded like these are the fringe that are now in more either in in the government or just louder voices that reflect a bigger part of the base these are people that have talked this way and thought this way for a long time. But for the first time, there's a genuine possibility that the president, that the people that work for the president might actually listen to these cranks, these sort of authoritarian right-wing fucking cranks.
And it is really, really scary. I also think it's important to note that before this ruling, Trump was planning to openly defy the Supreme Court by deporting these men without giving them due process that was ordered by the Supreme Court.
And they were given a piece of paper in English only, told to sign it, and then load it on buses. And thank God the Supreme Court was working weekends this week, or else these men would almost certainly be in El Salvador right now.
And God bless the ACLU, by the way, for these lawyers like, you know, sprinting through courtrooms and filing emergency injunctions and doing everything they can to protect these people. I understand why there's been so much focus on Abrego Garcia, because that is the one case where the government admitted in court multiple times that it was an error.
But when you really dig into a lot of these folks who are getting deported under Alien Enemies Act to El Salvador, you know, the administration's putting out like, here are six people and all of the most horrible things they've ever done that we're sending there. And it's like, okay, fine.
There was like 200 something that have been sent there. and you know the New York Times did a story on this about the what led to the

late night ruling

and sort of the scramble

by the

eight

and the there was like 200 something that are, that have been sent there. And, you know, the New York Times did a story on this about the, what led to the late night ruling and sort of the scramble by the ACLU.
And they said, one of the men, last name Prieto said, quote, there had been no order for his deportation and that his immigration documents were in order. He said, I have American children.
They brought me here and I'm innocent. They arrested me without any warrant for nothing, for nothing.
They brought me here. Like, and then, you know, they mentioned this story Tommy told about the guy who was forced to sign, you know, another guy who had TPS, the ice broke into his house and was about to deport him.
They held him for a couple of months. We've talked about Andre, the Venezuelan makeup artist we've talked to.
And there's just so many stories like that, that it's, and some of these people have even less of a connection than, you know, Garcia was alleged to have and, you know, by some random cop somewhere. The other sort of line of reasoning from some of these far right people is, well, if we can't deport people, well, we don't have a country anymore.
And first of all, Donald Trump can deport people. Has.
Has his will's allowed to deport tens of thousands every month so far uh the other part of this is why is he deporting people to a foreign gulag that's they never wanted they never no one no one on fox none of these people will grapple with the fucking gulag part of this none of them will defend it they act like well, we just dropped them off in El Salvador and suddenly they ended up in the jail there, which is just not what happened. We're paying them to house them.
And that's what makes I think, and I talked about this a bit with Leah, like sort of the legal aspects of it. But it is extraordinary that the Supreme Court has done this because they're basically acknowledging the urgency of it, the doing it in the middle of the night, the doing it before Alito could finish his own dissent.
They are acknowledging that by the logic of the Supreme Court, which Wilkinson talked about in his ruling last week, that if they deport someone in error to this prison, they can't get them back. And the Supreme Court, which already said people have a right to a certain amount of time to respond, is clearly saying here, this is so urgent, this is so dangerous, we've got to shut this all down right now until we've had more time to examine what the Trump administration is doing, and we can't take what the Trump administration says at face value.
We cannot believe them when they say that, oh, there aren't going to be any flights this weekend, or they're not aware of any flights this weekend, that the lawyers that are speaking to the court on behalf of the Trump administration either are not telling the truth or don't have all the facts themselves. What's confusing about this is, politically speaking, there seems to be a much easier, much smarter path for Donald Trump, which is to say that the border's locked down, take the win there, and then slowly, methodically deport people.
I mean, the proximate reason why they are deporting Venezuelans to El Salvador is because Venezuela won't take back Venezuelans. Right.
So but that doesn't mean that it has to happen tomorrow or the next day. And I assume that they're shredding the Constitution because this is Stephen Miller's passion project.
Donald Trump cares a lot about it, too. There's an element of their base that loves it.
But I do and there's probably a deterrent effect for others who might come here if they see the United States being just unbelievably cruel to everyone, no matter what. But politically speaking, I do think there is some risk that people are going to say, why are you doing this? Why are you so focused on this stuff? Why are we not allowing people a day in court? Like that doesn't seem that hard.
Like JD Vance's fucking Twitter op-ed screed about how sometimes it's inconvenient to allow for due process or it costs too much or it takes too many resources. Like, I don't think anyone believes that.
Well, it's true that there is a large backlog of immigration cases because we don't have enough immigration judges and we just, our system has been broken for a long time. There's a way to fix that, which is pass legislation that funds more immigration judges.
Oh, by the way, that was the legislation that Joe Biden, Democrats in Congress, and a bunch of conservative Republicans tried to pass and then Donald Trump killed it because he wanted the issue, right? So that tells you a lot about if they're really interested in actually solving the backlog of immigration cases. Also, there's plenty of ways to expedite deportations if you need to.
If there's a public safety threat, you can. Like, there's a million different ways to deport people.
They've done it before. Joe Biden's done it.
They're doing it now since they became president. Barack Obama did it.
George W. Bush did it.
It's complete bullshit, this whole, like, if we cannot throw people in the gulag, we don't have a country anymore. If we can't, we're not going to deport millions of people 100 at a time on an airplane to a foreign jail.
Even all of this is still a sideshow. There are millions and millions of people in this country who are undocumented.
They came here to work. They came here to work because we built a system of second-class citizenship for people who can get to this country, they can be employed.

There are people that have wanted to do things like E-Verify, which would require employers to make sure someone is a citizen before they are hired.

There are lots of steps.

I think undocumented people, I think we should have a path to citizenship.

I'm not saying that these are good ideas.

There are lots of steps you could take to address undocumented immigrants. They have chosen to target people who have received temporary protected status, asylum seekers, right? Like they're choosing this because, first of all, I think they like the politics better.
And second of all, it doesn't make a lot of their biggest, wealthiest donors angry when it cracks down on the people that work for agribusiness, when it cracks down on the people that work for construction companies, when it cracks down on the people that make our economy go. Yeah.
So like you said, this is not just about Abrego Garcia. It's not just about other immigrants who came here illegally.
So far, more than a thousand foreign students have had their visas canceled, including many who aren't political activists, haven't even publicly shared their political views. We're also seeing more horror stories about the government throwing people behind bars for doing nothing wrong.
We learned on Friday that Jose Aramosio, an American citizen from New Mexico, was arrested by Border Patrol while on a walk during a visit to Arizona and was then detained in an ICE facility for 10 days, 10 days until his family was able to prove his citizenship and get him out. We also learned that in mid-March, two teenage girls from Germany were detained at the Honolulu airport after saying that they hadn't booked accommodations for their entire five-week stay in Hawaii.
They were held overnight in what they said were appalling conditions and then deported to Tokyo. DHS says they were kicked out because they said they told CPB agents that they planned to work while traveling, which they didn't have the right visa for.
But the students say that when they were pressed on this, they simply told the agents that they sometimes do freelance jobs online for customers back in Germany. Feels like this probably isn't helping the huge drop off in tourism to the U.S.
Yeah, I mean, in 2023, international visitors spent roughly $225 billion in the U.S. So if a big chunk of that goes away, that's going to be not a tiny hit to GDP.
And it will have the potential to decimate specific communities that are tourism destinations. And we're already seeing this with Canada because this precipitated immigration questions.
This was about Trump threatening to annex the country. Canadian car trips to the U.S.
are down 32% last month compared to March 2024. Air travel is down 13% year over year and airline bookings are down 70%.
And so if you sort of like extrapolate that out, if people around the world are just like, I can't go to the United States, they're gonna fuck with me or treat me horribly or God knows. Like Goldman Sach sachs said there's a worst case scenario where

the u.s could lose 90 billion dollars in revenue this year from a decrease in tourism and people

just choosing not to buy american stuff i also i saw a couple people pointing out um that we're

supposed to have an olympics here yeah in a couple years we're supposed to have the world cup here

and uh other countries are issuing travel warnings yeah to the united states like like our allies are

Thank you. years we're supposed to have the world cup here world cup and uh other countries are issuing travel warnings yeah to the united states like like our allies or former allies and the the soccer the world cup it's supposed to be a pan north american games so if we're still fighting with the canadians and fighting with the mexicans it's not gonna be good it'd be like when carter didn't let the amer Russia, you know? Yeah.
Multiple U.S. citizens now have gotten these random emails, letters from ICE, from the CPB, saying you have to leave the country now.

And maybe they were in error.

Maybe they weren't.

Another U.S. citizen was detained in Miami for a while.

Four students at Case Western Reserve were told their visas were revoked and that they needed to leave.

And then they had to go to court.

And the government was like, oh, maybe we screwed up.

we're not sure. The judge was like so angry.
He was like, this is Kafkaesque. I can't believe it.
He's like, the government's telling me they don't even know if these people are here legally or not. You can't even tell me this, the government counsel, but you just arrested them.
And the other thing that I think what's happening here is these agents, whether they're ICE agents or CPB agents, like they're starting to, they're lying. And I'm not, I don't want to impugn all of them, right? But like the Hermosillo, the guy who was detained in Arizona, like he was arrested in Tucson.
The agent says he was actually in Nogales, which is an hour south of Tucson. And that's where they picked him up.
So we know he was lying about that. So the rest of the lie, which is like, oh, he told them he was here unlawfully.
And that's why they detained him, which is now what fucking DHS is saying. Tricia McLaughlin, the spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted that this 19 year old American citizen walked up to a border patrol agent and said, hey, I entered illegally from Mexico.
He offered up this information. And she tweets this thinking that this is a credible story in any way.
He doesn't think that maybe fact check it. It happens all the time.
You get caught by a federal agent. You're like, I'm here illegally.
I came from Mexico. It's like the fact throughout all of this.
Right. We've been saying like this could come for U.S.
citizens. right? And like the fact that the government is willing not just to do this without due process, not just to repair it when a judge orders it, but that the spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security is actively lying about this case.
Here it is. This is an American citizen who was picked up.
They are clearly lying. She is just passing along this fucking lie.
And what if he had been on a plane to El Salvador?

The kid was in jail for 10 days

before they sorted things out.

The government couldn't call the government

to figure out if he was a citizen?

It took 10 days?

This is where it's like the kind of intellectualizing

that like J.D. Vance and others are doing

to defend this behavior.

It's just so ridiculous and just so false on its face.

Let's say every single sentence about what you're trying to do is true why wouldn't you want to fix mistakes why would you want to lie about americans why wouldn't you want to get it right even on your own fucking terms why wouldn't you want to get it right because they want i think it's like what tommy was saying they i think they just want to scare the shit out of people you know and i also think they have a one million deportee quota that steven miller is pushing them to meet there's a over the course of your minnesota look last week there's a guy from indonesia who's here on a student visa working at a hospital in minnesota his student visa was revoked four days before his arrest but he wasn't told he wasn't notified that the visa was revoked and so then they just arrested him because he overstayed the visa for four days after not telling him. They asked why.
He has an eight-month-old daughter, American wife citizen, doesn't understand. Has been here since 2015, came legally.
And they said, oh, he's a threat to public safety. So then they looked into his background.
In 2022, he pled to a misdemeanor for spray painting graffiti on a bridge. And then the big one, he was charged with unlawful assembly over a protest around George Floyd's murder that was later dismissed.
Not violent, not nothing, no property destruction, no nothing, just showing up there. And so I do think that on student visa stuff, they're starting with the Gaza stuff, but they're just going after, and they're doing this with like AI too.
They're looking through anyone who's here on a student visa. If you've ever had any run-ins with the law that aren't political or if you've ever shown up at any kind of political protest anywhere, that's how they're targeting people now.
It's not January 6th. Right.
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One sign that the deportation stories are starting to break through in a way that the White House can't be too happy about is that they're losing Joe Rogan. Here he is talking about it on his show.
The problem with things that are going in a radical direction and then there's an overcorrection. So the over correction is lack of due process the over correction is like round them all up Ship them to jail like that's like some things that you say when you're not thinking things through like what do you do? About all the criminals take them all fucking send them to El Salvador.
Yeah, what about due process? No fuck that Well, here's the problem with fuck that. What if you are an enemy of, let's not say any current president.

Let's pretend we got a new president, totally new guy in 2028.

And this is a common practice now of just rounding up gang members with no due process

and shipping them to El Salvador.

You're a gang member.

No, I'm not.

Prove it.

What? I got to go to court. No, I'm not.
Prove it. What?

I gotta go to court.

No due process.

Joe Rogan making a lot of sense.

Yeah.

It's also like,

back to where we started,

like,

do you want to,

like,

this is breaking through for people.

Do you want to be seen as fighting,

as having a genuine moral conviction

during this moment?

Or do you want to be out there

saying it's a distraction

and that we really need to be talking about the cost of living? Like there are people watching to see what people stand for right now. Yeah.
I think Rogan weighing in on this really is meaningful. I mean, it also just reflects the reality that there are like, we hear the MAGA dead ender crazies that you read out, like they get quoted, they get picked up in the media.
But most normies are like, of course I believe in due process. Of course you should have a day in court.
The idea of like hurting an innocent person, you can empathize with that easily. And it's offensive to you.
So like, it's great to hear Rogan talking about this to his audience. I hope he keeps doing it.
I also think it reflects the reality that Trump is good as an opposition leader, but he fucking sucks at government. Yeah, and to your point, there point there's also this like well the trump white house thinks they're winning the issue because they love talking about this one reason they might be talking about it so much is because they're worried that the narrative is going to get away from them and that they're going to lose the argument and that's why they have to lie about everything and talk about it non-stop and that's why like steven miller is screaming which by the way did you hear the strict scrutiny uh hosts call him Peewee German? Yeah.
Amazing. Great.
Amazing. Peewee German.
Well, one of the reasons they want to be talking about this is the markets are tanking. People are angry about the tariffs.
The cost of living is going up, not down. His approval on the economy is as low as it's ever been since he's been president last term, this term.
So they have a real big problem on their hands. But I also think that they are genuinely, there is a concern that they're going to lose the narrative here.
And right before we recorded, I don't know if you guys saw that Trump posted about the court in the 7-2 decision. And it was a very uncharacteristic Trump truth because he was like, I have great respect for the court, but even the Supreme Court, I have great respect for, are now saying that I can't deport Venezuelans or anyone back to their country, even if they're violent, and I don't like that, and blah, blah, blah.
But he's like, at least Alito understood. Well, that's what he's, look, they're fucking all hyper, all the people that are around Donald Trump are like super online and reading all the same stuff we're talking about.
What Trump has been doing is saying, Pam, we got to figure out what the law is got to follow the law i have great respect for the street in court while they kind of play this sort of this game of breaking kind of breaking directly breaking um the orders i do think you kind of get back to this sort of like the you know the pope died and there's this apocryphal maybe it's apocryph Stalin quote of like, oh, how many divisions does the Pope have? And you see a lot, you see Joe Rogan, but you also see a lot of, I think, respected conservative people talking about the importance of following the Supreme Court. I think the Wilkinson opinion matters.
I think the intellectual conversation on the right does still impossibly matter. I remember when Kennedy, senator from Louisiana, was doing a hearing.
He said, the one rule is you got to tell me you're not going to break a court order. You got to follow court orders, right? That's what Schumer has been banking on.
And I don't know, but it does feel like they, at least in the White House, are not completely sure that they will get away without right breaking right now a Supreme Court order. Yeah, which is why I think you have Stephen Miller just like lying about the decision.
Although, you know, you did have J.D. Vance said many times before he became vice president, he did the whole Andrew Jackson quote, you know, the Supreme, the justice, the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.
So that's where he is. Other big news from the weekend.
The Times reported on Sunday night that a second Signal group chat has hit the Pentagon. Whoa.
Jesus. So I did a video on this yesterday.
Elijah recommended that as the title, and we decided not to. I like that you read it out.
You know. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly shared those same Houthi war plans in a chat called Defense Team Huddle.
Made up of 13 people, including Hegseth's Fox News producer wife and his brother, who's now one of his advisors. A couple hours after the Signal story posted, newly resigned Pentagon spokesman John Ulyat published a Politico piece describing, quote, a full-blown meltdown inside the Pentagon, which he called the month from hell, before citing rumors of more bombshell stories to come.
Jesus, what's left? And predicting that Hegseth will be out soon. Literal bombshell stories.
He did make sure to say of Hegseth, I value his friendship, and we accomplished a lot together. Well, tell me about the friendships you don't value.
I know, it's a little confusing. Predictably, Democratic lawmakers are back to calling on Hegseth to resign.
And so is at least one Republican member of Congress, Don Bacon of Nebraska, who happens to be a former Air Force general. He said that if the signal report is true, it's, quote, totally unacceptable.
And that Hegseth is, quote, acting like he's above the law. And that shows an amateur person.
Today, NPR reported that the White House has already begun the search for his replacement, but Caroline Levitt quickly shut that down as fake news. Still, the work of the nation must go on, and both Hegseth and his boss, Donald Trump, were at the White House Easter egg roll on Monday, where they both commented on the situation as a jazz combo played in the background.
Pete's doing a great job. Everybody's happy with him.
We have the highest recruitment numbers I think they've had in 28 years. No, he's doing a great job.
It's just fake news. They just bring up stories.
You know, what a big surprise that a bunch of, a few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hopes. And as they peddle those lies, no one ever calls them on it.
See, this is what the media does. They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees, and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations.
Not going to work with me. Anonymous sources like the guy who was your spokesman until he quit and published an op-ed about it under his own name.
There's nothing better than like statements of grave national importance made next to a giant bunny. There were several today.
There were several today. Trump issued his statement about the death of Pope Francis standing next to the fucking Easter bunny.
The real hero of Easter. And like these are the people that are saying, it's just like like it's not important but these are the people saying that they we need to trust them on these on on on random deportations but they can't figure out a way to get donald trump to speak to the cameras about the death of the pope probably the one time trump will ever get to talk about the death of the pope as president without the easter bunny standing next to him that is fucking insane.
Well, he's so good. He is.
He's going to the funeral with Melania. He's excited.
He is looking forward to being there. Exclusion.
He meant the food. He just wants some good pasta.
Tommy, anything new and interesting in terms of the details that Hegseth shared here in both Signal and I thought the op-ed from Politico was wild. But why don't you? I mean, it sounds like he was sharing the same basic information, like the F-18s are going to bomb this target at this time.
It's a classic to share the same joke in multiple group chats. Yeah, that is true.
So he had the same information. Yeah, I mean, the difference here is the first Signal Gate group chat was started by Mike Waltz, a national security advisor.
And that was a group of people with whom one should discuss whether or not to bomb Yemen. This was a group started by Hegseth himself, and it was created on his personal phone, which is a very, very big no-no.
I mean, I think there's probably a half dozen intel agencies that have tried to break that phone. A few probably have succeeded, and he's just sharing classified information on it do you think he's do you think he uses a really great uh password manager on his private phone pete exit do you think you think pete has got state-of-the-art he was a box news anchor uh three months ago weekend can we talk about the okay can we talk about the uh the chaos in the pentagon that this guy wrote about who used to be spokesman like it It sounds, they They're trying to brush it off as a few anonymous sources, but it seems like there's a mutiny going on in there.
What's weird about this is they've already purged the Biden-era professional people. C.Q.
Prown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, out. Lisa Franchetti, who is the director of the Navy, out.
And they're slowly starting to replace them. But the people we're talking about, Hegseth firing here, or they're getting pushed out in this leak investigation or whatever, are like his guys.
Like Dan Caldwell, the dude who was his senior advisor, he was his friend of over a decade. They worked together at that nonprofit.
He was the point of contact on that original Mike Waltz signal gate, being like, if I can't be around to talk about this issue, Dan is my proxy. And now they're forcing these guys out.
So Hexeth is missing. Now he no longer has his senior advisor, his chief of staff, his deputy chief of staff.
And I think there's some other officials that have been pushed out. So it just sounds like it's chaos over there.
I mean, the spokesman says it's chaos. And it is the defense department running the U.S.
military. military well it's almost as if uh when when people noted before that he'd run two tiny non-profits poorly poorly couldn't do it uh had a bunch of public intoxication uh chaos uh missing money all kinds of problems and running these groups when people say allegations he wasn't up for the job of running these organ this the the biggest, the, the biggest bureaucracy in the federal government, uh, there might've been some fucking truth to it.
And that now is the, you can, you can spin your way to it. You can bully a bunch of, um, uh, Republican senators into going along with this, but now he has the job and it's a real job and he can't do it.
And like, you know, shit could go down. Like, we don't know what's happening behind the scenes.
We don't know what debates are, you know, might scare us if we were aware of them.

But, you know, CQ Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chief, got pushed out. The new guy, Dan Cain, was just confirmed the other day.
Raising Cain. And he had been retired for like a year.
So he's like kind of getting back up to speed. And also there is this battle in Republican foreign policy between the more isolationist wing of the MAGA world and the more traditional neocon hawkish types.
You're seeing it really play out in this debate over the Iran nuclear talks that are happening that Steve Wyckoff, the actual secretary of state, not make a wish secretary of state, Marco Rubio. So, I mean, it's just interesting.
Like, that's kind of the backdrop is these guys are still figuring out what they believe and what they're going to do. And now the Pentagon was just purged.
And it does feel like we're once again in a situation where maybe if this didn't break in the news and was all over the place that Donald Trump might like quietly get rid of him. But of course, you got to dig in.
Everyone starts. Now, who knows? Because like there was a room, you know, the NPR had that one source that said they're looking for someone new and then everyone fake newsed it to death, you know, but.
But the problem with being a bunch of liars is we can't take it seriously. Nobody knows.
And by the way, he could be out by the time we are done recording this. Donald Trump has said, I'm sticking with Donald Trump has said about people he fired within days, if not hours, I'm not firing this person.
So we true. So we will see.
But this Donald Trump does not like this is this is this reflects very poorly on him. It looks fucking bad.
He's getting nothing for it. Terrible press.
I mean, well, what he's got. Yeah.
What he needs is if he's going to replace him, he's got to find someone else who can get confirmed, who will be absolutely loyal to Donald Trump over the Constitution, the military and anyone else. Yeah.
That clip of Hexeth was so unconvincing. He's like shouting at a C-SPAN camera.
He's pointing to his own children, kind of like using them as a shield from the media in that moment. And he just had the look and the feel of a man who is in so far over his head, and he does not know how to get out of it.
It seems like a bad dream. It seems like a bad dream.
You're at the Easter egg roll. There's a bunny next to you.
Donald Trump is next to you being asked about these terrible mistakes that you made. I will.
And you got your spokesman out there being like, oh, there's there's so much worse stories are going to drop this week. And I say that as a friend.
That's very real housewives, by the way. As a friend, Pete, I'm telling you, you're a piece of shit.
But the the other. Yeah, the one the other side of it is that the more the more Pete Hegseth is under siege, the more loyal he'll have to be to Donald Trump, right? Which Donald Trump loves.
My boss. My boss mentality.
There is that aspect of it of like, can he hold on, get to the other side of a news cycle and still be there at Trump's largesse? But just to be crystal clear, if any uniform member of the military did what Hegseth did with Signal, they would be fired if not court-martialed.

Any normal administration would fire him on the spot and refer to DOJ for prosecution.

And the fact that we're even talking about this, like, there's also reports that Pete Hegseth was bringing his wife to his meetings with, like, the NATO counterpart.

Like, these are defense minister to defense minister talks.

You need a Fox News producer there at all times.

Imagine if we're just in our Wednesday Pod Save America meeting,

and you're like, oh, Hannah's going to sit in to be here.

Well, we're not discussing classified info.

But I'm saying even without that, we'd be like, that's weird.

If Hannah was like, bomb Poland, yeah, we'd have a real problem. after this week in the markets, bud.
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Speaking of chaos and the category of serious news that's also funny, the Times reported on Friday that Trump's war on Harvard started by accident. The original letter demanding concessions received by the university a week before apparently was sent without proper authorization at the White House.
At the time, Harvard was engaged in what it thought were productive talks with administration lawyers from the White House's anti-Semitism task force, which is how they're laundering their attacks on academic freedom and free speech. Harvard was expecting a letter from the task force with some details about their concerns.
What they got instead was the nuclear option, an email from one of the task force lawyers making a whole host of crazy demands, including federal oversight of admissions and hirings.

That is fucking nuts.

Eradication of all diversity efforts and the disbanding of pro-Palestinian groups.

Some of the anonymous leakers who talked to the Times said the guy who sent the letter did so prematurely.

Others said he'd meant to send it around internally for review.

Ah, hate when that happens. Anyway, it caused Harvard to publicly reject the demands the following Monday.
As we discussed last week, the administration then froze more than $2 billion in funds, threatened Harvard's tax-exempt status, and threatened to shut down its ability to enroll any foreign students whatsoever. The Wall Street Journal reports that, of course, doubling down again, the administration is now planning to pull another $1 billion in research funding.
So administration admits they sent Arbrego Garcia to El Salvador in error, but then they refuse to correct the mistake, and then they dig in even further. They accidentally sent a crazy letter to Harvard, then they refuse to correct the mistake, and they dig in even further.
You guys notice a pattern here? So what is strange about this is it took a few days for us to find out that the administration is claiming this is a mistake. But if it was an actual mistake, they would have known instantly.
And yet they spent a week freezing the funds, then adding this new threat to tax-exempt status. So they went forward as if it wasn't a mistake.
Fine. The problem with the claim that this is somehow a mistake, it would imply that these demands are materially different than the demands they put on Colombia, when they're really not, right? That like these- Well, the federal oversight of admissions and hiring, is that what- The set of it that Colombia, I don't know exactly what Colombia ended up conceding to, but those were part of the demands on Columbia, up to and including a new provost to oversee a specific department, right? Like the demands that Columbia agreed to, which is why it was so pathetic that Columbia caved, basically, in the same way this does, made Trump dean.
They're different. They're different.
But like I think it's hard to claim that these are so much more extreme than what columbia had already agreed to i thought that they were much i thought they were much worse but i think some of them are worse some of them aren't the same they treated them differently but like i think donald trump basically demanding a private university hire a specific fucking uh administrative official is crazy right demanding that columbia take greater control over student groups is crazy. Like these are, maybe these demands are different, but this is exactly the plan, including them then threatening the funding after.
So like, all right, maybe this was sent an error, maybe it was sent too quickly, but like I partly wonder if this is cleanup because the blowback was so much worse than they expected and all the other schools jumped in behind Harvard after Harvard went forward. But it does sound like the sourcing on the story is the administration sent a letter in error, and then someone from the administration called Harvard to be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, delete that, delete that, delete that.
Yeah. Yeah.
So it's confusing. I mean, we should also be clear that, you know, the grant money that's getting cut off to Harvard, it's not going to like caviar for the kids.
It's mostly like research for medical, you know, cancer research, Alzheimer's research, like cutting edge scientific research. This is stuff that benefits all of us.
Well, and it's a contract. It's a government contract.
The government pays our best institutions to help do medical research, scientific research to benefit the country. That's the whole deal.
Anyone else notice that one of the lawyers that Harvard hired to deal with this is Robert Herr? Sure did. Coming back for the new season.
Do we, hey, hey, Robert Herr, listen, you know, there's a lot of things were said last year. 2024 was an interesting time.
And, you know, we can look back on it. I don't think we should look back.
I think we just move forward. Robert Herr getting hired by them is interesting.
Clearly, like, you know, very conservative lawyer, well thought of, you know, worked at DOJ for a long time. Though, as a choice to make Donald Trump happy is an odd one because he did not prosecute Joe Biden.
Right. Yeah.
We remember he was he wasn't a hero on the other side either. No, they hated him, too.
Yeah. Well, whatever.
He called him old. Cool.
But didn't prosecute him. Which we found at the time to be ridiculous.

There's so much about this in Jake Tapper's book that I can't talk about yet because there's still an embargo.

But conversation for a month from now.

Yeah, exactly.

All right.

Before we go, we're recording this on Easter Monday, less than a day after the passing of Pope Francis.

Francis took a visit from J.D. Vance on Sunday morning.

Talk about your last day.

And apparently that was enough to put the ailing pontiff over the edge after allowing himself to be photographed shaking Vance's hand. The Holy Father then blessed the crowd of tens of thousands in St.
Peter's Square and had one of his deputies read what would be his final Easter address in which he implicitly blasted Vance and Trump decrying, quote, how much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants, and saying, quote, I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear. He also reiterated calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and a return of all the hostages and for an end to the war in Ukraine.
A day earlier, Vance had a longer meeting with the Pope's number two cardinal, and the Holy See's readout of that meeting mentioned, quote, an exchange of opinions on, quote, migrants, refugees, and prisoners. That topic was not in J.D.
Vance's readout of the meeting. The Pope in the past had called Trump's immigration policies, quote, a disgrace and not Christian.
Legend. What did you guys think about the Vance interaction? We're all going to make the same joke because we deserve this, but there's got to be a little piece of them who thinks, did I kill the vote? Did I kill him? Right? Like that would cross my mind.
I think any time spent with J.D. Vance does kill the vibe.
My mother went on, it was, we didn't call it this this but she it was not to their faces but it was a farewell farewell tour to visit some of her oldest relatives before they died and uh we had a a great uncle jerry and just before he died uh my mother brought him a blueberry muffin and he ate the whole thing and he'd never been so happy he was dead in 48 hours it's crazy um i will say i loved this pope jesuit first jesuit pope i remember when uh benedict is picked stepped down and francis picked and i was like a jesuit from south america i know who was like all about social justice i'm like, is this real? Is the church going to make him now,

now that he's going to be Pope,

is he not going to be like that?

And he ended up being every bit the person he was

when he was in South America.

Yeah, I'll always call him Ratzinger,

but yeah, after it.

Ratzinger, yeah, he was a tough one.

I'm just like very much hoping that we don't go back to that.

And I don't know that anyone can, you know,

fill the shoes of Pope Francis, but-

We still need a woke Pope.

It's time for a woke Pope.

Well, we... I'm very much hoping that we don't go back to that.
And I don't know that anyone can, you know, fill the shoes of Pope Francis, but— We still need a woke pope. It's time for a woke pope.
We also need, like, one world leader insulated from politics who is willing to speak about compassion and empathy and justice in a way that, you know, J.D. Vance's of the world and the right will probably shit on that person, but at least they can do so with some sense of moral authority.

Yeah.

Look, I'm Episcopalian, so I'm a lazy Catholic.

And I'll be honest, I don't love the Catholic Church as an institution.

No, I don't feel like it's always been a force for good in this world,

especially some of their social views. But I think, like, Benedict Cardinal Ratzinger wasinger was yeah like he was kind of he had that opus dee vibe you know that was when that dan brown book was really big those expensive red shoes right he was like a kind of scary guy then and then francis came along and a lot of what made people love him was his tone you know he couldn't fully moderate the church's anti-lgbt views, right? But he could be decent when he talked about them.
As you mentioned, he cared about poverty. He cared about refugees.
He cared about migration. He cared about climate change.
He was a huge critic of all wars, including the war in Ukraine. He helped facilitate the Cuba normalization deal between the U.S., the Obama administration, and the Cuban government.
So he used his office to bring about change and facilitate good works. And he was from the global South and I think brought that perspective to the job of understanding the horrors of colonization and when great powers act in ways that are brutal and selfish.
And I don't know, I think we will miss him on the global stage this guy a guy who washed the feet of um aids patients back in when it was um not a very popular thing to do yeah like there was that moment a couple weeks ago where jd vance was talking about um uh uh what the golden rule means and seems to have uh not fully understood it no um and there was again I'm so Jewish. But there was always just something beautiful about

a... seems to have not fully understood it.
And there was, again, I'm so Jewish,

but there was always just something beautiful about a pope

that even in an institution that, yes,

that does not acknowledge the rights of LGBT people,

that does not allow women to be priests,

that he gave voice to the beautiful parts of Christian values,

like the parts that everyone ought to appreciate.

And that is so absent from American politics so much of the time. There is such a vicious and cruel version of Christianity represented to be the one true path.
And then you had this Pope, this undeniable Pope, right? Moments before he dies, telling J.D. Vance in not not so many words, to fuck off before he dies.
But also, you know, the other thing he did was some people thought that he was going to snub J.D. Vance.
That was the first thing because J.D. Vance got the number two the day before.
And then Pope Francis was like, I will meet with him. It's the vice president of the United States.
I will meet with him. I will criticize him to the people.
But like, because I show compassion to everyone, I'm also going to meet the vice president, which is nice. Yes.
And there's something that I think like our, you know, as we think about what it means to build a big, small D democratic movement, there's something beautiful in that, in that he, that what he is fighting for applies to everyone, even the people that disagree, even the people that are getting it wrong, even the people that are horrible.

And that we are fighting for that here, right? We are fighting to build a democratic movement because we believe in democracy for everybody. There's some, I tweeted it so you can see it on X, but there's this beautiful video of a young kid.
I don't know, he's like five, six years old, eight years old. He had just like lost his father and he was so nervous to ask Pope Francis a question and he goes up to goes up to him and Pope Francis whispered in my ear.
He whispers it in his ear. He goes and sits down.
And the Pope said, his father is an atheist, even though he baptized his three children. He wants to know if his father's going to go to heaven.
And he gives this whole speech about how he's like, the God that I believe in has a father's heart and a father's heart would never want to keep his children too far away. And it was a really like, because the Catholic church I grew up in, you'd go to church and they'd, and you know, like my mother was Greek Orthodox and they'd be like, if you are not Catholic, do not come up for communion, sit in the bench.
Ratzinger's like, sorry kid, he's burning. No, it is.
It's like that, you know, and it's just being able to do that in an institution that's hard to, hard to change is, is, is laudable. Rememberaccinis, though? That was funny.
You know, fragaccinos. I love everybody, even the fragaccinis.
And he's like, you can't say fragaccinis. All right, I'm going to say it one more time.
Fragaccinis. It was a real Bidenism right there.
It was awesome. I will say next Pope, we're going to have all the speculation of who it may be there's a there's a lot of choices out there there's one who is the um who uh would be like the first asian pope from the philippines and he like spoke out a lot against duterte probably doing horse race right yeah and yeah he would be he would be with the swing where's he with the swing cardinals well tommy i'm good and so he's like the furthest left I think you'd go but then there's the only one that really scares me is there's one from fucking Hungary who Orban likes nice and conservatives all like it's his time and he thinks that they need to like pull back the whole trip so that would be that'd be cool and then there's a bunch of other like sort of centrist leftist centers types listen it's all going to come down to turnout.

Conclave.

Conclave.

Best movie of last year. I haven't seen it.

I haven't seen it either.

I'm going to watch it.

I'll watch it before this thing.

I'm going to watch it.

The real deal.

Tommy's a very religious person.

That's why I made him

godfather to my child.

God and I.

Charlie and I.

Not the Hebrew fag.

Charlie.

Got a good Christian on that.

Yeah, good and religious.

He's got a Jewish godmother.

That's true.

That's true.

Tess is his godmother.

When's the last time Tommy saw the inside of a Bible?

Give me a break.

Give me a break.

You going to a lot of Sunday mass?

Who are you seeing there?

Maybe a lot of friends at church?

Give me a fucking break.

I'm glad you pivoted this back to you.

Fucking pontifex over here. There's no i'm free it's really beautiful okay before we go one quick housekeeping note lgbtq people are under attack and this year pride is more than an excuse for levitt to talk over us a lot in june what a segue it's it's life or death well that didn't really come out as serious as it should have.
So grab a Join or Die t-shirt or sticker from the Crooked store. This design is a nod to the famous historical political cartoon, but we updated it to meet the moment and stand for LGBTQ resistance.
Love it. Anything you want to add to that? It's a great.
Zevi, our designer, did an amazing job. Listen, if you go to any government website right now, they're trying to get the T separated from the LGB, and we got to make sure we keep the T's with the LGBTs, because otherwise they're going to, will be S out of L, you know what I mean? That's a shirt.
Yeah, that's pretty good. That's pretty good.
Get that on the shirt. And by the way, that reminds me, because Sarah McBride said this, listen, if you haven't, and you're like, oh, the Sunday interviews, who knows? The Sunday interview with Sarah McBride was like my favorite conversation I've had with a politician.
And I can't remember how long. Both of us were like really enjoying listening.
I feel like there were several moments where either one of us could have cried. Seriously.
I think I was just like staring at her at one point. Just like, wow, this is amazing.
How do we have a politician like this? Anyway, check it out. That's our show for today.
Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday. We will be live from D.C.
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