Mile High Bribe Club

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Welcome to Pod Safe America.

I'm John Paper.

I'm John Levitt.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

On today's show, we'll talk about Trump's Middle Eastern cash grab, the president's latest retreat in his trade war with China, the Republican plan to throw 9 million people off Medicaid, and the administration's threat to suspend more constitutional rights and and arrest Democratic politicians.

Then Tommy talks to his doppelganger, Rob Sand,

who is also the Democratic candidate running to be Iowa's next governor.

Come on, Rob.

Exciting for Rob.

You got to win, man.

I've known Rob since 2004.

He's a very good guy.

I think he's got a shot.

Off-year governor's race.

He's won statewide.

It's pretty good.

We can do it.

Fingers crossed.

Come on, Iowa.

All right.

First, we got to talk about His Majesty's new Palace in the Sky.

It's the name for a $400 million luxury jet that Donald Trump will accept as a gift from his fellow royals and the Qatari government, who he'll be able to thank in person when he sees them this week during the first big foreign trip of his second term.

A trip that will also include a visit to Saudi Arabia, where Trump's family business is working on six different deals with a Saudi real estate firm.

Total coincidence.

As well as a stop in the United Arab Emirates, where a government-backed firm is doing a $2 billion business deal using the Trump family's crypto coin.

Oh, and the Qataris are also backing a new Trump golf club.

But the $400 million plan really stands apart.

The Palace in the Sky will be upgraded to serve as Air Force One.

But don't worry, when Trump leaves office, he gets to take the jet with him as a keepsake.

The plane will be transferred to Trump's presidential foundation.

Now, some of you may think this generous gift from a foreign government that also funds groups like Hamas and Hezbollah raises a series of ethical, legal, constitutional, national security questions.

But according to Donald Trump, that makes you stupid.

Let's listen.

I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer.

I mean, I could be a stupid person and say, no, we don't want a free, very expensive airplane.

Mr.

President, what do you say to people who view that luxury jet as a personal gift to you?

Why not leave it behind?

You're ABC fake news, right?

Why not?

Only ABC, well, a few of you would.

Let me tell you, there was an old golfer named Sam Sneed.

Did you ever hear him?

He won won 82 tournaments.

He was a great golfer.

And he had a motto, When they give you a putt,

you say thank you very much.

You pick up your ball and you walk to the next hole.

A lot of people are stupid.

They say, no, no, I insist on putting it.

Then they putt it and they miss it.

Remember that, Sam Sneed.

When they give you a putt, you pick it up and you walk to the next hole and you say, thank you very much.

Same thing.

I hadn't heard the putt thing.

Really?

That was news to me.

It's a very topical reference to a golfer who died in 2002 at 89.

When they give you a $400 million putt.

Snag that fucker.

Leave only footprints.

Take only airplanes.

So is this the most openly corrupt action an American president has ever taken?

Or is Mr.

Trump just doing taxpayers a favor?

Now we don't have to pay for a new plane.

You want to go?

No, you fire away.

So when I saw this break over the weekend, I had questions.

I just, I had questions.

Like,

hey, isn't it a, like, before I even got to the ethics, I was like, we can't accept an airplane from a foreign autocracy to be Air Force One.

Yes.

Okay.

Security challenges there.

Yeah, like I just.

I think they'll do a once-over before.

It's an already finished plane.

You'd have to take it apart, like literally every single panel.

You'd have to, you couldn't, it's not, I don't think it's possible to secure a plane.

The U.S.

government would never leave Air Force One unattended for five minutes in France, let alone accept a plane from a foreign government.

And then I was like, okay,

then they have to update it.

The Air Force One isn't just a nice plane.

It's one of the most sophisticated pieces of technology in the world.

It would surely take years to update the communication system, the security systems, all the different military safeguards and redundancies that are required to make Air Force One the most secure and robust airplane ever built.

That wouldn't take six months, nine.

That would take literal years.

It's part of why the two planes that Trump wants aren't ready.

It takes fucking years.

And he's only going to be president for a couple more years before it's given to him.

You You don't know that.

Well, sure.

Right.

Yeah, but yeah, but does any plane have the good bones of the Qatari plane?

No, look, it's beautiful.

It's beautiful.

The bones are good.

The rest don't matter.

That's right.

Yeah, no, I and then I don't know why you're getting hung up on this.

And so then I see all this.

He's like, what about the communication system?

This is the problem.

I just assume.

What are you a Democrat in Congress?

But then you look into it and like, no, they haven't thought about any of it.

None of that.

It's just purely just a gift for him It's not

they acknowledge that it would probably take a couple years and it might not be ready until he's about to leave office But this is where the point is It's like they have not given Trump Air Force One This will never be Air Force One This is just a private jet for Donald Trump's personal use.

That's all it will ever be That's all it could ever be He says he says he's not gonna use it though.

It's funny.

I think ever since Trump got in the crypto business We all been like what stuff's happening behind the scenes that we don't know about and I'm sure there's a lot of it But turns out there's a whole lot happening right in front of our faces like I was talking to a a guy named Casey Michelle who runs an anti-kleptocracy program at the Human Rights Foundation.

And he said, basically, you should think about this as a starter gun for a corruption arms race.

And part of that is because the Qataris and the UAE and the Saudis don't get along.

The Qataris, we can talk about later, but they play this, they piss everybody off in the region.

But

they just love drama.

Teachers pet these people.

Also, are they Qataris or Qataris?

You know what?

Does it matter?

People go back and forth.

Okay.

I don't know.

Yeah, no, I've gone back and forth.

Qatar, Qatar, I don't know.

We'll pick one for this.

Sure.

Let's say Qatar.

I just think that they are likely to, they put this giant deal on the table.

They put this plan on the table for Trump.

And now I imagine the Emiratis are going to feel like we're going to match this.

Or Trump will sit down with Mohammed bin Salman when he gets to Saudi Arabia and be like, you know, the Emir just gave me

747.

What have you done for me lately?

How do you top that gift?

I mean, part of this.

Well, I mean, you know, the $5 billion real estate development deal in Qatar is probably ultimately more lucrative.

So do you remember when Trump toured this airplane?

I forgot that I forgot about it.

Yeah, it's not like this gift just like came along as a surprise.

No, he checked it out first.

It landed near his beach club in Florida in February.

He got a tour and he was like, oh,

this is pretty cool.

Well, at the time, so at the time,

you just, he went on this tour of this airplane and he used it as like a cudgel to say, Where are the Boeings that we're supposed to be having?

He used it as a way to hit Boeing for being slow to deliver the new Air Force Ones.

But now, in hindsight, you say, Well, this, what, was it just a, it wasn't on a layover in Palm Beach.

They flew this fucking thing so that Donald Trump could go walk around it and see it.

Uh, and yeah, he turned it into a Boeing thing, but now it was just this was a long con.

This was a long con about a gift they were going to give to Donald Trump.

And it really reminded me of that

scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when the Nazis are bribing

some

monarch and they give him the Rolls-Royce.

He's like, and it's even in my color.

And it's as like brazen or corrupt.

It's unbelievable.

It's unbelievable.

It's also just incredible that it comes after several weeks where the message from the Trump administration was, you don't need so many dolls.

You don't need so many pencils.

A lot of pencils in that plane.

So it's like fewer dolls for you, bigger planes for Donald Trump.

I was thinking about the dolls thing.

He's like, you have too many dolls.

He is angry that the two.

So

there's a plan to replace the Air Force Ones that have been in service since 1990 with these two planes.

There have been, as is the case with everything American makes these days, cost overruns and long-term delays.

But he's not angry because he's not able to do the job from the current Air Force One.

I mean, we don't say this very often, but we've all been on it.

It's cool.

It's cool.

It's a very nice plane.

We're just a bunch of bumpkins.

It's an incredible plane.

We don't have the taste of a Donald Trump.

For us, it's amazing.

For Donald Trump, the accommodations are left wanting.

It's a Hampton into him.

And so he doesn't want this because he's not able to do meetings.

He doesn't want this because

he's not able to get the secure communication system.

He's not worried about what happens in a nuclear bomb.

He just wants a brand new spanking airplane that he can drive off the lot.

He's ordering a giant entree and putting most of it into Go Bag.

Yeah, it's like going to the Sizzler and filling.

It's like you order the entree at the Sizzler.

It comes with a salad bar.

You don't eat the entree.

You take that out.

You're going to mothball this thing and leave it at the presidential library.

That's what you're trying to tell us, Donald?

Give me a break.

This is going to be your plane for life.

And also, we are well aware that you're aware that the Supreme Court has said that you have immunity for all official acts and that the DOJ is no longer going after people for corruption, whether it's the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, where they've basically given up on prosecuting people for illegal foreign lobbying.

He just doesn't care.

It's also such bullshit.

He's trying to say, oh, well, Reagan's, at the Reagan library, there's an old Air Force One.

Yeah, a little different.

A little different to have like an old Air Force One or other stuff from the White House and various presidents' libraries, which happens all the time.

And the ease with which he's lying and the like, oh, I'm not going to use it.

It's going to be decommissioned.

Oh, is it?

Because however many years from now, when suddenly Donald Trump's riding around on the fucking Qataris plane after post-presidency,

you think he's going to be

succumbed to a lot of pressure there?

You're going to be, no, no, no, I made it.

I'm going to keep my word.

I made a promise to the American people.

It's actually like,

it's the worst of all possible world, right?

It's a brazen bribe.

It will cost as much as the plane costs to retrofit it if they even do that.

And then the other two planes will still have to be completed because he says already explicitly he's taking it with him.

Yeah, he's taking it with him.

Taking it with him.

Don't you feel comforted, though, by the fact that Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, they signed off on this.

Pam Bondi and her sharp legal mind said, actually, even though the Constitution specifically says you're not supposed to accept any emoluments or gifts from foreign governments.

This is just the Defense Department.

Haven't accepted it.

Pretend lawyer as our attorney general is not great.

I mean, so she was a registered lobbyist for a DC-based firm called Ballard Partners.

In that capacity, she represented more than 30 different clients, including Amazon Uber, a private prison company, nice, and the government of Qatar.

What?

Which paid her $115,000 per month.

A lot of that work was PR stuff ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

I'm going interchangeable now.

But in particular, I think she's trying to deflect criticism of their workers' rights and human rights violations.

But also, for those who are worried that there's no one watching the watchers, remember that FBI Director Cash Patel also provided consulting services for the government of Qatar, which he did not disclose to the Senate during his confirmation process, nor did he register under FARA.

They were a client of his until November of 2024.

You can't fly into Newark anymore.

I know.

It's uh, it's not safe.

We don't have enough air traffic controllers.

We're losing radar, but there's one plane, one plane that's going to be okay.

Maybe you can fit a lot more people on it.

So I never wanted to fly into Newark, so that's true.

Yeah, silverlining.

Teterborough.

But the, the, in a rare win for the at Democrats Twitter handle, they did put out, uh, like they pointed out that this is how, like, they said, like, this is how Trump flies, and this is how all of us fly.

And it was Trump in this, in all of his lavish private jets versus delays and security issues and, and near misses.

And it is worth keeping in mind that while Trump and his cronies fly on Air Force One or fly private, members of Congress fly commercial all the time.

So my hope is that these Republican members of Congress, forget the fucking plane for a second, do start paying attention to the fact that the head of the transportation secretary is going on television saying the system is blinking red.

It's a nation of Newarks.

Well, I think they assume they're just going to get a ride on

the floating palace.

What is it?

What do we call it again?

Not the floating palace.

The pals in the sky.

The pals in the sky.

Yeah, the palace in the sky.

That's what he calls his toilet.

The floating palace.

I was,

the last time I flew from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.,

I was sitting next to Washington Post columnist George Will, and Travis Helwig, formerly of Crooked Media and Love It or Leave It, was sitting in front of us.

And as we were coming in for a landing, Travis just kept texting me things about what it might feel like to run into a helicopter.

And then things like George Will, 80 others die in a horrific plane crash at DCA.

I was like, thank you, Travis.

I needed this right now.

Needs to read this.

Well, let's talk about the reaction from Republicans and MAGA world,

which has not been as uniformly obsequious as usual.

Various MAGA pundits have posted criticism of the deal, the most notable coming from Trump's unofficial personnel director, Laura Loomer, who tweeted the following, I love President Trump.

I would take a bullet for him, but I have to call a spade a spade.

We cannot accept a $400 million gift from jihadists in suits.

The Qataris fund the same Iranian proxies in Hamas and Hezbollah who have murdered U.S.

service members.

This is really going to be such a stain on the administration if this is true.

I'm so disappointed.

Just one stain.

It's this one.

Otherwise, unblemished record.

Unless the stain happens to be where some of the other stains already are.

Is Trump in danger of being loomered?

I don't even know.

Yeah, Yeah,

he's been loomered.

What do you think Republican politicians say about this?

Love it, you have hope.

You have hope that maybe this will be, this is the red line.

I don't know if this is, I don't have hope that this is going to be, I don't think there's no lines.

We're not going to have any lines.

I just think the stupidity of all of it and the fact that it's...

I think once it becomes clear that it will be years away for Trump to use it as Air Force One, and so far then it truly is only a gift to him.

I think it starts to be the kind of thing where it gets pushed up.

My hope is that there's enough internal, the quiet pressure that we're not allowed to know about because they don't do it publicly is enough to like kind of push this off.

You already have the Qataris saying, well, nothing's finalized, right?

Even though it was sort of about to happen.

So I don't know.

I don't know.

Yeah, I think they just forget about it.

Conveniently, I mean, first of all, Laura Loomer kind of played an interesting role in the administration thus far, right?

I mean, she clearly has.

Damn it.

What a thing to say to be true.

I know.

She had a personal relationship with Trump.

She got like five or six top national security staffers fired, including the head of the NSA, maybe Mike Waltz, too.

We don't know about that one.

But she's also regularly criticizing them.

It was this.

She went after the Pambandi, particularly about the fake Epstein files release.

She's been going after the Surgeon General pick on Twitter all weekend.

In this case, I think we're just seeing her Islamophobia shining through.

Qatar does play kind of a controversial, interesting place in foreign policy.

The broken Islamophobic clock is still right twice as well.

Yeah, they provided support for Hamas at times because Bibi Net Yahoo wanted them to.

They also hosted a Taliban office, which sounds terrible, but was useful because it gave us a place to negotiate during the Obama years.

Their neighbors hate them because of the role they played in the Arab Spring and Al Jazeera.

But, you know, in Trump's first term, the Saudis Emiratis, Egypt, and Bahrain imposed an economic blockade on Qatar that Trump initially supported.

And he went out to the Rose Garden and said, the nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level.

And now he's taking their plane and going there on his first term.

You're going to go back and delete those comments from the archive.

That's for sure.

You won't be hearing that again.

Got a way to kick away to kick a gift horse in the mouth.

You know, it's so like, remember the first trip that President Obama made?

And I was in this trip, we went to Saudi Arabia, and we are at like

their version of Camp David in Saudi Arabia.

And we all have our little, these little places we're staying in.

And Rhodes and I, Ben Rhodes and I, are like sharing a room.

And we

it's getting late.

It was more of a villa.

There's a couple bedrooms.

Um, and so romantic,

throw some petals on the bench, giant bathtub.

So, we're sitting there, we're about to go to a meeting, and golf cart comes up, guys knock on the door, and they hand us each a suitcase.

And inside the suitcase is a bunch of gold and jewels and watches.

And we're like, What the fuck is this?

They apparently, they just give

us the government, and then right behind them in a golf cart was the State Department attache.

And a couple of the bugs, the buzz killer.

They were like, we are here to accept the gifts because usually what happens when a foreign government gives you a gift is it goes to the State Department.

The government does something.

They either like, you know, decorate something with it or they give it back.

And then you had the State Department and said, you won't believe the Qataris got me.

A beautiful suitcase.

And that was it.

There's nothing in here.

There's nothing in here.

And then I walk around as jingle jingles in my pocket.

No, this is just, it's wild.

It's shocking it's shocking corruption um they did ask they they asked uh they caught up with some republican members of congress right before we recorded john thune said there's not enough info about this for me to opine okay john and then uh what do you need this you need the uh the exit the exit manual yeah

and then john barasso uh you know next in line in the in the number three republican said uh oh this is just rumors it's just rumors it's like donald trump confirmed it on fucking television today yeah i i've i look i think there'sn't we it's impossible to predict the future but i do see I can see kind of like they offered me the thing.

I said, yes, you know, we take the plane, I don't take the plane, we move on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's that's that's that sort of feels like the direction of the ball.

And then the last state administration, he takes the plane.

Yeah, no, yeah.

Well, that, that, that, that, that depends on us.

That depends on Democracy.

Well, Democrats are all over this, unsurprisingly.

In the House, Richie Torres has called for an ethics review.

In the Senate, Brian Schatz, Chris Murphy, Corey Booker will try to force a vote to put every member on record as to whether they support or oppose presidents getting $400 million gifts from foreign governments.

Schatz said, you don't need a law degree to know that this is, quote, wildly corrupt.

And then there was Chuck Schumer's statement on the plane: quote, it's not just bribery, it's premium foreign influence with extra legroom.

You guys have any puns or airplane double entendres to offer up Democrats who might not have put out statements yet?

You guys got any?

Sounds like Trump's flying to Doha comfort plus corruption.

I just hope a second statement doesn't hit the Twitter.

Is that what you were looking for?

Too much?

I think this is just lie flat out constitutional.

Wow, that's pretty good.

Oh, look at that.

Look at that.

That's good.

Look at that.

That's the second time we've made a second-something hit the.

Yeah, it's the mood we're in.

Really?

It's the mood we're in.

It's warranted, I think.

Anything else Democrats can do to help keep this story alive?

I will

one of the reasons, though, I do think that Trump will want to just move on from this is, to Tommy's point, given the scale of corruption we're seeing, this is Trump change to him.

Like, he is making making money on the presidency right now to buy and sell a half a dozen of these fucking planes.

And so he's not going to, like, I don't understand why he'd get bogged down in this.

A plane he's going to use now and again after he graduates, whatever.

Like he, he can buy a plane when this is all said and done, just as nice as this one.

He could buy this one if he wants.

So I do think it's a way of talking about the unprecedented corruption that will be unfolding in the next couple of days.

And I do have a little worry that we'll all of a sudden get a story of like Trump says no to the plane.

It'll be seen as like, oh, look, this was stopped.

We stopped this corruption.

But like what's happening with crypto?

What's happening with these fucking golf deals?

What's happening with what his idiot sons are doing is as brazen and large a corruption scheme any country on earth.

We have short of Putin.

Yeah, the idiot sons are just either a couple days ahead of him on these trips or a couple weeks behind just mopping up cash.

I do think it's so hard to keep a handle on all the different facets of the corruption.

I know.

I know.

I was really that this this morning.

Like a lot of it's happening in these Gulf countries where he happens to be going on his first trip.

What a surprise.

But I do think it would be smart for Democrats to, like, they're setting up like shadow ministers and shadow hearings.

Like have a full-time operation just focused on corruption.

Make this digestible, make it understandable, crank out content on it.

I think it would matter.

Like people don't want a corrupt president of the United States.

The challenge is there is this very stupid thing.

People, I think, genuinely believe that billionaires don't want more money because they don't need it when the reality is like billionaires are billionaires because they're selfish and venal and want it all, which is what Donald Trump is.

But I think we can sell this one.

You know, like the debt limit clock

always like keeps changing with the debt.

Can we have one of those with how much money the Trump family is estimated

having made and like where it's coming from?

I don't know, something simple.

Then we can have like the price of gas and eggs underneath it.

Elijah, let's make one of those after this.

Give me a ticker.

Seems crazy.

Let's talk about the rest of the trip.

I've mentioned all the deals at the top that the family is involved in.

The New York Times has a great breakdown.

Just to trigger Tommy, the three countries that Trump is visiting have together pledged more than $3.5 billion to Jared Kushner's private equity firm.

They bribed their own.

Mentioned the sons.

Don't forget the son-in-law.

What do you think about the trip and specific stops from a foreign policy perspective?

Is this the kind of Middle East visit a less corrupt president would plan?

No.

I mean, remember that Trump blew this up the first time, but like historically speaking, the first official trip by a president was Canada or Mexico, like literal neighbors, little literal allies.

In 2017, Trump changed that because he went to Saudi Arabia first,

famously gripped the orb.

But then he went to Israel, Vatican City, Belgium for NATO, and Italy for the G7.

So it was kind of like the weird Saudi thing tacked onto a normal trip.

This time, he's just skipping all the democracies.

He's just doing all the hereditary monarchies.

You call them democracies.

We call them enemies now.

That's right.

That's right.

Yeah,

I was having kind of a moment of just sadness that the president is far more welcome in Saudi Arabia and Qatar than he is in France, certainly Canada, you know, that he has made himself and made us a pariah nation.

And like, I can't imagine the amount of security and protest and disruption there would be if Donald Trump right now tried to go to like Belgium.

Wealthy autocrats who just want to throw a bunch of money at you to try to influence policy, that's like his jam.

He loves it.

Some good news.

On Monday, Hamas released Eden Alexander, an Israeli-American soldier captured on October 7th as a gesture of goodwill as Trump arrives in the region.

Alexander was the last surviving American hostage.

Trump won't be visiting Israel or meeting with Netanyahu, though.

What do you make of that, Tony?

It is interesting.

He's blowing off BB on this trip.

You're seeing a lot of background quotes with people being like, ah, what's the point of visiting Israel?

Netanyahu has been to D.C.

700 times.

I think that was in the Washington Post on background.

Trump has also cut Netanyahu out of the Iran talks that Steve Witkoff, his golf slash real estate buddy, is conducting.

Trump cut Israel out of the deal that the administration cut with the Houthi rebels that gets the Houthi rebels to stop firing missiles and drones at U.S.

ships, but not at Israel.

So

maybe he's still pissed at Bibi over

the whole acknowledging Joe Biden won the election thing.

That seems to be where the problem.

stems from.

But yeah,

it's a weird trip.

Interesting.

But one thing about it, too, though, is just

this trip is about his personal interests.

He has a bunch of personal interests right now in these countries.

Maybe he doesn't have a plane farm.

Right.

And it's a ways off from his attempt to build a fucking boardwalk in Gaza.

So once we get closer to that, maybe he'll make his trip to Tel Aviv.

Yeah, no, it's, by the way, it's just, it's great news that Adan Alexander is out of Gaza.

I think there's 23 more live hostages in the Gaza Strip.

I think this probably creates political challenges for Netanyahu that, you know, the U.S.

unilaterally seems to have gotten out the one American hostage and a bunch of Israelis are left behind, which is controversial to begin with.

The majority of Israelis want to cut a deal, to end the war, to get the hostages out.

They don't support Netanyahu's plan for endless war.

But yeah, I mean, I think

it's fascinating to watch.

I don't know.

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The other big news Monday was that the administration announced a 90-day pause in the trade war against China after talks between the two countries and Switzerland over the weekend.

I should say it's more of a semi-pause.

American tariffs on Chinese goods will drop from 145% to 30%,

still higher than they were before Liberation Day, and China will drop its tariffs on our exports to 10%.

The markets rallied in response, no surprise there.

But beyond that, we don't have many details as to whether it's possible for the two sides to actually reach a deal in the next three months or even what the outstanding issues are.

Why do you guys think Trump's already backing down without getting anything in return?

And is a 30% tax on everything we buy from China really a win for anyone?

It just seems like he blinked that he was hearing, first of all, there's a ton of bad press.

He knows saying kids should have fewer dolls and the CEO of Mattel going out there saying, like, you're going to fuck with Barbie for Christmas is not good politics.

There's a ton of

businesses that are based around importing and exporting that were at risk of going under or have already gone under.

There was no end in sight.

He wasn't getting anything from these tariffs.

China put on their reciprocal tariffs.

We were kind of at a stalemate.

And so now what happens?

Trump lowers them to 30%, which is still very high and will still be very disruptive.

China removes most of the reciprocal tariffs they put on, but has addressed none of the underlying issues that led him to put on the 140, whatever percent tariff in the first place.

And by the way, there's still a 90-day window to renegotiate tariffs,

which really means 90 days to renegotiate the kind of trade deals that take months, if not years, to negotiate.

So it just kicks the can further down the road.

There's no way for anybody to behave with any kind of certainty.

If you were a business that was waiting to make purchases or investment decisions, you can't make those decisions now.

You have absolutely no idea what's going to happen.

The markets seem to have reacted positively, but that seems to be a classic case of stop hitting yourself in the head because it feels good when you stop.

And we're basically just in a weakened position from where we were, whatever,

40 days ago.

Yeah, I mean, Trump and Besson both had the same line, which was like, they kept saying tariffs at 145% or whatever would lead to a decoupling of the two economies.

We don't want that.

And it's like, well, okay, then why did you put them in place?

This was entirely your choice.

So I'm with you, Levin.

Time will tell, but this seems like full capitulation.

I mean, he's basically blinked on every tariff he's put in place since Liberation Day, except for the 10% universal tariff.

My guess is Trump thought he could come out swinging, do his like madman theory bit, get China to blink or make some concessions and then pocket that as a win.

And instead, the Chinese fought back hard.

Trump slowly figured out that this fight was going to be politically untenable for him.

And then he used these talks to climb down.

And now he's the arsonist who wants credit for putting out the fire he started.

Yeah.

And it's like, I mean, it's so early.

And so now for the next 90 days, and keep in mind, the original 90-day pause on all the other countries ends in early July, I believe.

We're just, it's all based on the whims of whatever Donald Trump feels like when he wakes up in the morning.

And

if someone pisses him off in one of these negotiations, if China does something that makes him mad, maybe he slaps the tariffs back on, then he takes them back off.

Like this, it's just, it's madness.

Well, it's also, it's not about what is, it's about what Donald Trump can say it is.

He goes and says, oh, we have a deal with the UK.

So what a win.

And then you look, it's like, there's no deal.

There's nothing.

There's cheaper Rolls-Royce's and the promise to framework to start a negotiation for what a deal could look like and all these countries know that donald trump just wants wins which gives makes us even weaker right like donald trump has been saying to people he's going for this to this middle east trip because he wants to do a trillion dollars worth of deals what a signal to send to all these countries that uh they have this one moment where they know they can get something out of trump because he wants to do a press conference where he declares some fucking deal and so all these countries know that Donald Trump just wants to go in front of the cameras and say he won and they can find a million ways to help themselves and hurt us and give him that win.

And if you're like MBS, if you're the Saudis, you'd be like, oh, yes, sir, we're going to spend $100 billion trillion dollars in the U.S.

Do you know it's not going to happen?

One gazillion dollars?

Put us down.

Put us down for it.

We're good for it.

Also, like

this doesn't undo the long-term political damage for him, right?

First of all, there's damage that's already been done.

that people will start feeling supply shocks in the in the coming months that has already been done right and second of all like maybe you know Goldman lowered their estimate for recession from 45% to 35% based on this that's you know I felt that this morning

I felt a little spring in my step but it's like even if we avoid a recession at this point you have 10% tariffs on every country in the world 30% on on China people in this country are still going to be paying more than they would have otherwise at a time when there were persistently high prices from inflation.

So the damage that people are feeling or the frustration people feel with the economy, whether or not Trump announces a deal, doesn't announce a deal, pause, not a pause, it's still going to be there.

He's not going to be able to bullshit his way out of this one.

No, and then we'll get to it.

And then on top of that, they're about to throw a whole bunch of health care cuts.

into the mix, which will have impacts on a lot of the places where he claims to have been the kind of tribune of the working man.

And the biggest fight is still with China, and they're still a 30% tariff in place.

Monster impact.

And on the other side of this, the tariffs aren't high enough or they didn't make enough deals to actually change, to do what he set out to do, which is either bring in more revenue or bring in enough revenue or bring jobs back and manufacturing jobs.

Like it's just, it's the worst of all worlds.

It is.

Yeah, he's a terrible president.

Well, his China retreat wasn't the only big announcement on Monday.

The president told us he'd be signing, quote, one of the most consequential executive orders in our country's history, which which then turned out to be a more aggressive version of a policy he already tried and failed to get done in his first term, instituting what's known as most favored nation pricing for prescription drugs, which means that the amount our government pays for any given medication would be pegged to the lowest price paid for that medication by other countries.

So if a prescription costs $50 here, but $10 in the UK, the U.S.

government would tell the drug companies we're only paying the $10.

You can imagine this plan may run into some legal issues, as it did in Trump's first term when the courts blocked a similar proposal that only involved Medicare.

This did not stop Trump from claiming that drug costs would fall by 30 to 80 percent, quote, almost immediately.

And by the time he announced the policy at the White House on Monday, it was up to 90 percent.

What do you think?

Has Trump found the one weird trick to finally make prescription drugs affordable?

He has not.

You know, it is confounding that other countries pay far less for drugs that in the U.S.,

our companies develop them and then charge us far more for them.

But as Trump knows, as many have pointed out, this policy won't solve that problem.

It's a way for him to claim he's doing something before the courts can shut him down and gives him a rare opportunity to be on the right side of

I'm not going to say right side of a policy, but the right side of the thrust of an issue

and say, I'm fighting for the working people of this country, but the courts are stopping me.

They won't let me solve immigration.

They won't let me bring down health care costs.

So I don't really like that.

But meanwhile, what's going to happen is this thing will get stuck and the problem of extremely high prescription drug costs will remain.

And Trump has been an obstacle to rules like allowing Medicare to negotiate for more drugs.

He's obviously does not appreciate the fact that many of the drugs that will start coming down in costs in the next couple of years will be coming down in costs because of the Biden administration.

He will either deny that or take credit for that while without helping the policy.

So that's where I'm at.

Yeah, I mean, sir, compliment sandwich.

You're good at identifying problems.

Yeah.

You just got to work on the solution part.

And as far as I can tell, Congress is working on a pretty big bill.

There's a bunch of healthcare stuff in there.

You could talk to them about putting into law things that bring down drug prices if they won't actually do it.

Probably helped the legal case, though.

John Thune said it would be very controversial to do this, so he's not sure.

They don't want to do it.

No, they don't care.

No, they don't want to.

No, they don't want to do this.

No, they do not want to do price controls for drugs.

They don't even want to do negotiating for lower prices for drugs.

That is why we don't have it except for a small number of drugs.

It's because Republicans have stood in the way of allowing the government to negotiate for better drug prices for fucking ever.

Now, you think that the President of the United States, especially this one, has some sway over what Congress does or doesn't do because he has forced them, encouraged them, pressured them to do other things that he really cares about.

But we'll see.

We'll see if this one is one of them.

Well, it is worth saying that he is, after 100 days,

he has signed five bills into law.

He's the least effective legislative opening to an administration ever.

So he has just kind of ignored Congress where he can, and now Congress is stuck on this, we'll get to it, but

this budget bill.

But he hasn't really been able to get Congress to do what he wants.

Yeah.

Let's talk about the budget bill.

House Republicans finally released details on their proposed Medicaid cut Sunday night, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that their plan would cause nearly 9 million people to lose their health insurance who rely on Medicaid.

Believe it or not, of all the different proposals Republicans were considering, this was the one that the more moderate House members supported, which means that, of course, the hardliners aren't happy with it.

They want deeper cuts and more people to lose their health insurance.

Chip Roy, one of those hardliners, tweeted, I sure hope House and Senate leadership are coming up with a backup plan.

So the Republicans who support this plan are trying to sell it as modest, common sense changes to Medicaid, because who could be against requiring people on Medicaid to work and make sure that they're eligible?

Love it, what's the best response to that?

How should Democrats handle this fight over the next few months?

They want to take health care away from millions of people to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

They are hiding behind the idea that they're just doing work requirements.

The vast majority of people on Medicaid already work, or they have a disability, or they're in very poor health, or they're caregivers, or they're at school.

You're talking about 8%

of people on Medicaid that are adults are people that might be subject to work requirements.

What ends up happening is they are so afraid of the politics of just coming out and outright cutting Medicaid by tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars.

They're creating a kind of workaround to do it using paperwork.

What ends up happening is a bunch of people that are taking care of kids, working, going to and from their job, maybe don't have great transportation, maybe don't have internet at home, get stuck in fucking paperwork.

This is a bill to use paperwork to take away health care from millions of people who are eligible to receive it so that Donald Trump and his friends can get a tax cut.

And on top of that, they want to add co-pays for the working poor in this country.

That's what we need to do.

We need to make millions of people who are barely getting by pay $35 to $100 more to go to the doctor so that they can cut taxes for Elon Musk, for Donald Trump, for all of their rich friends.

And the end result of this is not just that those people get hurt.

The rural hospitals will close.

Nurses will lose their jobs.

Healthcare providers will lose their jobs.

Millions of people will be negatively impacted by this, not for any reason, not to, and to Chip Roy's point correctly, not to do any reforms to the program, right?

Not to do any changes in the long term, just to create a kind of bureaucratic fuck, like a bureaucratic bureaucratic cluster fuck.

What's a bureaucratic fuck?

A bureaucratic fuck?

That sounds too fun.

Yeah, I don't know.

You got to get in the retent.

I tell you in the wrong line.

You got to go to the other line.

Oh, I just got dosed.

But

it's awful.

It's awful.

Yeah.

It's just

such a sneaky way.

And they'll, of course, be like, well, work requirements, it's fine.

People should, if they're eligible, they should be fine.

It's like, well, there's a reason that the CBO scored it that that many people would lose their health insurance and that you'd actually save $800 billion because it assumes that a bunch of people wouldn't be able to do the paperwork and would just be kicked off the program.

That's all.

And the copays would also push some people out of the program too, because or just won't get the health care they need.

Right.

And they're thinking of copays for like, I think it's, you know, if you're between 100% of the poverty line and like 135 or 150%,

that's the band where they want you to do copays because those, because those are the people, those, those incomes where you're where you're like, yeah, where you're just above the poverty line and working, those are the people they want to really afford to feed.

That's who they want to create the bureaucratic fuck for.

It's people that they're basically to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the richest people in our society.

They want a family that's barely getting by to say, you know what,

we're not going to go out to dinner this month because we have to do a copay now.

That's it.

That's where the money went.

We don't get to go out because Donald Trump and these group of fucking assholes decided that the richest people on earth deserve just a little bit more take-home.

And they tried, you know, work requirements in Arkansas, and almost immediately, like 18,000 people lost their Medicaid who were eligible, who were like, you know, many of them just couldn't work, right?

Like you said, these are people with disabilities.

These are seniors, people who are way past retirement.

It's a terrible policy, but we need to be very careful.

It can be sneaky popular.

Work requirements were surprisingly popular and a challenge around the child tax credit, which did not have work requirements.

So it's just a thing I think Democrats have to be mindful of, which is just frame this as exactly what you said, big picture.

It's a cut, throwing people off Medicaid to pay for a tax cut for the richest people in the world and not get into a fight about work requirements, I don't think.

No, that's why I think talking about it in terms of people with disabilities and seniors, that this is who they're talking about.

Yeah, but I know you're absolutely right, that like it just, it sounds like a

polls well, it's just something to be mindful of.

I also just think one other, and one other part of it, too, is that you'll start to see like rural hospitals, nursing homes talking about some of these rules and what it will do.

And rural hospitals, there was a great kind of sort of screed in the Times by somebody that runs a small rural hospital in Colorado.

They are barely able to stay open.

They are the closest hospital within 100 miles in any direction.

They are barely able to stay alive because this fixed cost or the fixed cost.

Running a hospital costs a certain amount of money.

If a bunch of people that were on Medicaid no longer have Medicaid, if a bunch of patients they no longer get to see, hospitals like that will just close down.

Hundreds of them already have.

And that will just leave whole swaths of the country that, by the way, voted for Trump in huge numbers with even bigger health care shortfalls, with even fewer local hospitals.

They have to go even further to get health care.

I think that's part of it, too.

And by the way, this is if this proposal is the one that ends up in the final bill, because

we heard Chip Roy already.

There's some Senate Republicans, too, who are like, we want deeper Medicaid cuts.

So it could get worse.

Also, we haven't included the push to let the Affordable Care Act credits expire, which now, as CBO said, okay, it's 9 million lose their health insurance under Medicaid with this proposal.

If you include letting the Affordable Care Act subsidies expire, that's another 4 million and ends up being 13 million people losing their health care, 13 and a half million.

Aaron Powell, and there's another, there's a proposal in here that's also just about making people that are eligible for Obamacare less likely to get it for more onerous paperwork.

A lot of this really is just about making life worse for people who access these services because they know that people just screw up.

We all screw up.

We all screw up this country.

And I know that people will be like, oh, I don't know, the insurance company screw me.

So I just, you know, I couldn't get my health care that I wanted, and I'm mad, and I don't know who to blame.

That's what they're assuming.

One more populist proposal that Trump and some Republicans keep flirting with is raising taxes on the wealthy.

We talked on the Friday show about how Trump floated to Mike Johnson the idea of a new tax bracket for folks making over $2.5 million a year.

But he's now once again backed away from that idea, posting on Truth Social that, quote, Republicans should probably not raise taxes, but that he's, quote, okay if they do.

This is like the second or third time he has floated this or it has been floated and then walked back.

What do you think keeps happening here?

He wants the headline.

He wants someone to replace it.

It's like the drug pricing thing.

Yeah, yeah, and it's never actually going to do it in a million years, and he knows that.

And like he also is smart enough to know politically that all of these Republicans have signed pledges to various interest groups to never raise taxes.

And so it's dead on arrival, but he looks like the reasonable guy.

Right.

Right.

So he can propose this.

There's also ways they could just extend the Trump tax cuts just for people making under $400,000 a year, which might not violate that pledge.

Those groups will score to return.

Of course.

But regardless, like this is a non-starter.

To me,

I think

the more real a proposal like this becomes, the more clear it will be to Trump that no bill can pass at all so that he can get the win.

Because as of right now, it's not clear how these Venn diagrams overlap.

Because you're right.

There are a bunch of people that want steeper cuts.

They're all the people that are not, you know, you have Josh Hawley in the Times doing a fucking Tribune and the Working Man thing, talking about how he's for no Medicaid cuts at all.

So, you know, this compromise proposal isn't enough for Chip Roy.

It also goes very far for a bunch of vulnerable House Republicans already.

Yeah.

Yeah, and then that's not, and we're not going to talk about it now, don't worry.

But the people are very upset with the SALT proposal.

Well, can we talk about it for one second?

So boring.

Well,

it's not baked yet.

So we'll have a couple more bites at that out.

Yes, we will.

The only thing that's interesting about salt, too,

the only thing that's interesting about salt is so people understand this is a giveaway to rich people in high-tech states.

If they do nothing, they go back to the higher salt limits, which are better for, which is what these Republicans in these blue states want.

And so they have a lot of power.

That's all.

Yeah.

Salt burn.

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One other topic that Trump touched on during his drug pricing announcement on Monday, his plan to welcome a new group of refugees to America, white South Africans.

That's right, the same administration that stopped accepting most refugees and is currently asking the Supreme Court to let them strip legal status from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians, Afghans, and others who fled dangerous places, just admitted the first group of 49 Afrikaners this week.

Here's what Trump said when pushed on this by reporters on Monday.

Why are you creating an expediting path into the country for Afrikaners but not others?

Because they're being killed, and

we don't want to see people be killed.

It's a genocide that's taking place that you people don't want to write about.

Farmers are being killed.

They happen to be white, but whether they're white or black makes no difference to me.

And the newspapers and the media, television media doesn't even talk about it.

If it were the other way around, they'd talk about it.

That would be the only story they'd talk about.

Tommy, is there a genocide going on in South Africa we don't know about?

That the white genocide line used to be like stuff you'd see on the Daily Stormer, like the most far-right, super racist, agit prop.

And now it's just coming out of the mouth of the President of the United States, who seems to think it's real.

Oh, yeah.

I mean,

these white South Africans we're talking about are primarily descendants of Dutch colonial era settlers who then put in place the apartheid system in 1948.

And Trump seems to think that these people are the real victims.

And now,

in January, he put forward an executive order that halted pending and future refugee entries into the United States.

So the refugee program is just completely stopped, except for white South Africans who, I think 50 of them, just arrived at Dulles and were greeted by the Deputy Secretary of State, who will then, then they will then get to go meet with Trump at the White House.

So like literally a red carpet getting rolled out for this group of people.

For the YouTube, let's just throw up the family guy, okay, not okay meme.

Anybody know what I'm talking about?

That's what's going on here.

It is unbelievable

that

we're at the, like...

We're at the letting in the villains from Lethal Weapon 2 phase of Donald Trump's authoritarian rise.

The same day that there's a headline that they are repealing temporary protected status for Afghans, like people who were our allies in Afghanistan against the Taliban.

Yeah.

Yeah,

it's insane.

I mean, white people make up 7% of the population of South Africa, and they own something like two-thirds to 75% of the land.

And according to the World Bank, white South Africans earn nearly three times the average wage of black workers in South Africa.

So

the

proximate thing that that seems to have set off Trump is the South African government passed a law that could allow the government to take land away from people, including without compensation.

But most experts you see say it's either never used or rarely used and really just kind of clarifies powers the government already had.

But it is quite obvious that Elon Musk is like in his ear whispering about this stuff and has been for a while.

But also this got on Trump's radar in the first term.

I remember Tucker Carlson did a segment on it, and then Trump tweeted something and he like demanded that Mike Pompeo launch some investigation.

And it's

coming back.

And then we figured out, everyone was like, wait, where did this come from?

And then people went and saw that it had been on Tucker Carlson the night before.

Tucker prime time.

It's also just like, it's a small group of people.

Fundamentally, this is just a signal to the worst elements of our society that Donald Trump is on their side, that he hears them, he sees them, that he has their back, and they should have his back.

You storm the Capitol if you're a white South African.

Absolutely.

Exactly.

It's the whole, it's the same thing.

Meanwhile, like, I think we talked about this last week.

One of the people they sent to Seacot was like someone whose refugee status had already been certified by the United States.

They were already a settled refugee.

Yeah.

Isn't it weird that Elon Musk has just kind of gone away?

Yeah, I was just thinking about it.

He was omnipresent for, what, two months?

And now he's just gone.

I think he saw the.

I thought about this the other day and I started scrolling through his Twitter feed because he still posting?

His tweets aren't.

He's still posting, but it's much more about like Tesla, Starlink, Rockets.

And then he retweets like MAGA stuff once in a while, but not a lot of original MAGA-like politics posts from Elon.

I'd love to know why.

I think he's probably like these people.

He's saw the writing on the wall in terms of like his popularity.

I'm sure that that call with Tesla, where he's like, I'm going to be focusing more on Tesla, like that company's.

Yeah, but he's lied on every earnings call for like a decade now.

He'd be like, self-driving cars are coming tomorrow.

Self-driving robot car, helicopter cars.

He's just full of shit.

But I wonder if Trump or somebody slapped him down and told him to stop being so publicly out there because his unfavorabilities had gone up so much.

Yeah, that's not a problem.

He also was burning the candle at both ends.

Yes.

It can only go on for so long.

He needs a rest.

One of the other big storylines on immigration we haven't had a chance to talk about yet, the White House is considering suspending habeas corpus, a person's right to challenge their own detention, which has been considered a basic human right since the time of the Magna Carta.

The Constitution says that habeas can only be suspended when the country faces invasion or rebellion, though it still doesn't say who can do it.

And it's only happened a few times in our history, most notably during the Civil War and during the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

But Stephen Miller told reporters on Friday that Trump is considering it based on, quote, whether the courts do the right thing.

In other words, if the courts keep upholding people's challenges to their detention, the president might just stop letting them go to court at all.

I mean, this feels both constitutionally egregious and just hard enough to understand that maybe it doesn't break through.

And also, is it a threat?

Is it real?

How does this work?

I don't know.

What do you guys think?

Yeah,

he did it on Friday.

It does sometimes feel like they do this sort of chum-in-the-water thing.

I also like it's not a comfort to think, oh, they're not actually planning to do this.

They are using this to threaten the courts to kind of keep the courts more in line or to second-guess their decisions to push back in the Trump administration

by saying that if the courts go too far to try to limit Trump, they will ignore the courts altogether, which is, you know, like

a very old dance.

But just the idea that

one of the cheap principal advisors to the President of United States is going after the cameras and saying, everyone will be a Kilmar Rayo Garcia if you're not careful.

It's like very dangerous.

It's very scary.

Yeah.

I mean, on the merits, Trump keeps telling us that border crossings are down 99%.

So the invasion is not going so good.

This is in D-Day.

We're not landing on the beaches here.

Our intelligence community, Trump's intelligence community, said that the Maduro government does not, in fact, direct or control Trenda Aragua.

So the entire pretext for the Alien Enemies Act has been shredded.

Which was confirmed by a Trump-appointed judge in Texas already.

Yeah, and it was, you know, they declassified the assessment.

So I can't tell if this is like Stephen Miller doing his fascist dirty talk.

You know, he's just kind of getting revved up for a big night out on the town.

But if they suspended habeas corpus, it would be the end of our democracy as we know it.

Yes, and I think they know that.

And

I think it is a threat to the courts.

And also, they have to know that in the original decision, the 5-4 decision on Seacot and the Alien Enemies Act, the Supreme Court said, you know, all nine of us, of course, know that everyone has habeas, and it's just a question of where they can exercise their habeas rights and is it in the wrong jurisdiction?

That was the only split in the court.

Like, should it be in Texas or D.C.?

But they all agreed that everyone has habeas.

So by suspending habeas corpus, now keep in mind the historical times when they've done this that I mentioned, in every instance, Congress came behind the president and said, okay, we're going to vote on this and say that it's okay for you to suspend habeas corpus because there's a little gray area, whether the president can do it or whether Congress needs to do it.

So you would have, if this happened, you would have Trump do it.

The court has already said it's wrong.

Congress would not rubber stamp it.

So it would be the end.

I mean, it would be the end of democracy.

And at that point, you'd have to say, like, law enforcement, military, like

it would be up to them.

Do you want to actually abide by this unconstitutional order?

I mean, that's, that's just, it's the worst it can get.

The interment of Japanese Americans, also a moral stain on our country.

And the civil war, I would consider extenuating circumstances.

Yeah.

The courts are open.

The courts can handle what is going on in this country, right?

Habeas corporate, the courts are functioning.

The courts can handle what is happening.

There was a bill in Congress to make the immigration courts work faster and more smoothly by hiring more people and reforming the system, which Trump personally stopped from passing.

They have stood in the way of having the courts work even more effectively to deal with this problem.

I also, there's one part of this that I don't think I haven't seen people talking about enough, which is

how dangerous suspending habeas corpus is for law enforcement.

That if you send a signal to the country that if you are arrested, there's not a guarantee that you will get to go before a judge, that you will get to the benefits of the American judicial system, of our Constitution, that raises the stakes for every single arrest.

It makes it more dangerous for police.

It makes our whole country a more dangerous place.

And they are playing with

this shit because they have no respect for it.

They don't care.

They've never lived in a world without habeas corpus, but they are.

Stephen Miller is just a little punk.

He's just read a lot of books.

Maybe, but he's just, you know, he's like a little punk.

Well, the wrong books, all the wrong books.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

Yeah, right.

I think we've all read books.

He's read different books.

He's read different books.

He is a threat to democracy for sure and the existence of this country.

Last thing on executive branch power grabs.

On Friday, Newark Mayor Raz Baraka was arrested outside a new ICE detention center run by a private prison conglomerate and expected to house up to a thousand migrants at a time.

Three Democratic members of Congress from New Jersey went to the facility as part of their oversight duties, while Bakara has been raising concerns that the lockup is operating illegally because it doesn't have a valid certificate of occupancy.

Other New Jersey officials are raising the same concern.

So the three representatives had scheduled a tour of the facility, which they can, it's part of their oversight power, and they were allowed in after waiting for an hour and a half to get into the facility, but they were allowed in.

Baraka was not allowed in.

He was told to step outside.

He did, like he was asked, to a public area outside the facility.

And at that point, he saw some of the federal agents, some of whom were masked, on the phone with someone.

And then they came outside and they arrested him.

So newly minted U.S.

attorney for New Jersey, Alina Haba, formerly Trump's worst personal lawyer, it's quite a contest, confirmed and essentially celebrated the arrest in a post.

Baraka was taken to a separate ICE facility in Newark and released a few hours later.

Tricia McLaughlin, the spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, then the next day on Saturday said that members of Congress who were there could face assault charges for what she called attacks on ICE agents.

The actual video footage, including the body cam footage that was on the federal agents, doesn't show the agents being assaulted by the members of Congress, one of whom, Bonnie Watson-Coleman, is 80 years old.

Antifa super soldier, Bonnie Watson Coleman is.

It seems to me like my take on this is that the administration has been looking for any excuse to arrest Democratic politicians.

They decided to make their move here.

We heard Tom Holman talk about this last week when someone asked him and he's like, just wait, just wait to see what's coming.

Because he was asked, are you going to arrest Democratic officials?

So that's what it seemed like to me.

What do you guys think?

Yeah,

they want to fight with liberals.

They want to fight with Sanctuary Cities.

They want to fight with Democrats.

I do feel like this was quite an overreach.

I mean, Trump might want this fight.

It does seem like they're leaning into it, suggesting that you're going to arrest even more members of Congress reflects that fact.

But

the mayor, he was just on the sidewalk, wasn't in the facility.

The guy was just chilling out.

Yeah, he, so

when the mayor was interviewed about this, he basically said, you know, he went there with these members of Congress or he was meeting them there.

They go in.

He is not allowed to join them, but he is invited inside the the facility, like on the other side of the fence, and he's just waiting there.

Right.

And then at some point, they did ask him to leave.

He said they asked him several times, which I respect.

And then he walked out.

He's not, he wasn't inside the facility when they decide to arrest him.

And they keep saying, and then all these right-wing kind of goons are saying that, you know, they're doing it ironically, but not ironically, that this was an attempt to storm the facility.

But the members of Congress had already been inside, as they are legally required to be, to do their oversight duties, and then were leaving.

I do think there's some, there's just a, I do want to just, there is a kind of, in the way that Fox News and others have been putting out the body cam footage, they've been really focusing on La Monica MacIver.

And I, and I do think what they're counting on is there is a black woman who is furious about what is happening.

And they are, they're like all these headlines like, oh, she was like bullying her way into the facility.

And they're kind of basically counting on like, oh, there's a group of angry black people and therefore they must have been doing something wrong and that their audience just won't like seeing it.

And even then,

you can hear her say, he just assaulted me, he just assaulted me, because the ICE agents put hands on her as well, as well as Bonnie Coleman.

But I think it's extremely dangerous because this is how they want to escalate things.

Because, so it's peaceful.

Then they decide they're going to arrest the mayor of Newark.

And there's a bunch of protesters anyway.

And then the members of Congress are like, why are you arresting the mayor?

And so then there's chaos and there's, and then there's people pushing because they've got the mayor.

And so then there's the protesters.

And so they're counting on the fact that when they overreach like this, there's going to be a response.

And the response is going to be either yelling, screaming, moving, trying to protect the mayor like they did.

And then they're going to get footage.

And whether people believe.

the administration story or not, because they're just going to lie about it, they're going to confuse enough people.

So people are going to be like, nah, and you saw this in some of their initial headlines.

It was like arrested at a protest.

And it makes you think that there was like a protest inside the facility and they shouldn't have been there.

And maybe they were just having a sit-in or something and then you have to you have to really unspool the story to be like it wasn't a fucking it wasn't even a fucking protest

you have to kind of dig into they were already inside they were leaving right

yeah the uh yeah and the lies that trisha mclaughlin

she is fucking terrible everything she says is a lie like it's relentless it's constant she's just

it's out of control i mean i think ice

this seems like it's going to result in a lawsuit um i hope braka sues the hell out of them for this hopefully we'll get to the bottom of who made the phone call or the decision to arrest him and why and what email or text traffic there might have been.

But like,

I agree with you that this is incredibly racialized, especially the way it's being aired in the kind of Fox news media, the sort of mega media.

But I don't think anyone wants to set a precedent of arresting members of Congress or elected officials for just doing like lawful oversight.

It seems like a real problem.

And I just, you know, there's, there was also news this weekend that Trump is trying to get another 20,000 ICE agents and he's going to start pulling them from other departments and other parts of the federal government.

And, you know, you worry about

an agency here that's got a bunch of federal agents that, you know, Trump has pulled from different parts of the government and they're wearing masks and, you know, taking students off the street and tufts.

And now they're arresting members of Congress.

Like it's not, it's not good.

And now you don't support COVID protocols?

Well, I'll do it with the mass thing.

Like they just just

tried to take away federal funding from Columbia, from Harvard.

One of their demands is to stop allowing masks, right?

Because they view it as such a kind of security threat to have people in masks at these protests.

There is no justification for having masked police officers at this facility, masked federal officers at this facility, other than to provide impunity for either unlawful or deeply kind of troubling conduct at best.

I mean,

there is a moment where this

officer just gets in MacIver's face.

And she's clearly like shocked that

a law, a federal official would treat a member of Congress this way.

And Benny Thompson put out a statement, which I thought was good.

He said, this is how they treat members of Congress when the cameras are rolling.

Imagine what they'll do.

He goes on to say, imagine what they'll do when it's just a normal person and the cameras aren't there.

And it's happening all over the country.

All right.

When we get back from the break, you're going to hear Tommy's conversation with Rob Sand, the Democrat running for governor in Iowa.

Really important race.

But before we do that, a reminder: our friend Amanda Lippmann's great new book, When We're in Charge, The Next Generation's Guide to Leadership, is out now from Crooked Media Reads.

The book is a manual for leadership on your own terms.

No fluff, no gatekeeping, no losing yourself in the process, just real tools, honest lessons, and the kind of clarity that younger leaders actually need.

Get your copy of When We're in Charge at crooked.com/slash books now or wherever you get your books.

Also, Love It or Leave It just added new live show dates in LA from June to October.

So if you're in LA, come say hi.

Grab tickets at crooked.com/slash events.

Also, a tease for listeners in DC.

Oh, yeah.

World Pride's coming up.

And if you'll be there, mark your calendars for June 6th.

We are working on a great event that you will not want to miss.

That's right.

Keep an eye out for event sales and how to get tickets.

It's a tease, but it's a good one.

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Are you ready to get spicy?

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My guest today is the only Democrat currently holding statewide office in Iowa.

He is also, as of today, officially running for the governor of Iowa in 2026.

Rob Sam, great to see you.

Good to see you too, Tommy.

Thanks for having me.

It's a blast to have you.

And we'll talk about how long we've known each other and

how exciting this is but so iowa governor kim reynolds she's decided to not run for re-election she had a long career in politics she leaves office though with the highest disapproval rating of any governor in the country at the same time democrats haven't won a governor's race in iowa since 2006 we haven't won a senate race since 2008 why are you the guy who can change all that

bottom line i think is people get to know me they like what they hear uh they like what they see they like what they say so for folks who want to to learn more, it's robsand.com.

But look, I think most people in the United States right now, if you're like, okay, there's a candidate for office who was born and raised in a small town where he had to go a long way to get anywhere bigger.

They like to hunt and fish.

They own guns, including handguns, and they're in church every Sunday and it really means something to them.

I mean, what percent of people would say, oh, that's a Republican?

That's me.

Like, I just describe myself.

And so I think that that matters to a lot of people in the state of Iowa.

We have a good chunk of our population that's in rural areas, in small towns.

They want to know that their lives are understood by the person they're voting for.

But it's bigger than that, too, because a lot of people slice and dice.

They're like, oh, you know, they're too judgmental of those voters.

We are not going to get them back as though, you know, we're all different.

But a lot of the people in

bigger cities in the suburbs in Iowa came from those small towns.

And some of them were not excited to leave.

They left because of economic opportunities that were better somewhere else.

But they too want to know that somebody like understands that part of small town Iowa.

Tom Vilsack was the last candidate for governor in Iowa who was a Democrat, who had real small town roots.

He had been a mayor in Mount Pleasant.

And so I think that that is an indicator that that does make a difference for people.

And then I want to talk about your job currently.

So you're the state auditor.

That means you're the only Democrat who's managed to win a statewide race in Iowa in a while.

I want to talk about how you did that, how you won, but also just start with, give us a quick overview of what an auditor does.

Like, is it, are you doging your way through the state house?

What does this mean?

Do you create as much chaos as possible for a few months and then disappear?

I think that's what doging does.

Good question.

So

it's actually a really good question because most states have a auditor, but it's not necessarily the same job in every state.

In the state of Iowa, we are the taxpayer's watchdog.

We audit state government every year, a financial statement audit.

We also do public corruption investigations, which is how I got interested in the office because I had been doing most of Iowa's public corruption prosecution.

And then we also,

as of 2019 in my first term, we do government efficiency promotion.

So we have a government efficiency program that is so good at actually saving money that it has been copied in two other states.

Pretty good.

Pretty good.

Yeah.

And it's really about, at the end of the day, actually helping the people who are there in cities, counties, and school districts find new and better ways to save money, which I think is an effective way to save it.

You need a little planning, you need a little thoughtfulness, a little bit of working ahead to try to get people into the place where they can have an impact by giving them some ideas and trusting them to do the right thing to some degree.

So you don't just like storm into government buildings with a bunch of like 19-year-old coders, take over everything, maybe fire some people, kick them out.

That's not how it goes?

Not yet.

I haven't done that yet.

Okay.

Sorry, big balls.

You're not moving at Des Moines.

Okay.

So, Rob,

the change in Iowa politics from

when we met in 2004 or even 2008 when Barack Obama won statewide.

2012, we won.

We beat Mitt Romney and Iowa too.

Obama did.

To sort of the political landscape now.

It's kind of hard to wrap your head around.

What do you think changed that shifted Iowa from blue to red?

And how have you managed to buck that trend?

And how will you do it again in 2026?

Sure.

So I want to challenge the premise of your question, if I may, a little bit.

Challenge away.

And let's answer this question instead, because let's acknowledge Iowa is one of the slowest changing states in the entire country, right?

So we have

just a population base that is incredibly steady.

It's getting a little bit older.

We are not doing a good job of bringing new people in.

And at the same time,

we are losing some younger folks, but it's all very slow.

And so it's like, Iowa wouldn't change overnight.

It's the same people.

And so the question that is better asked to describe what happened in Iowa is: how were Barack Obama and Donald Trump the same?

And the answer to that question is pretty straightforward.

They were both

outsiders who challenged their party's establishment and said, I'm going to do politics differently.

And keep in mind, the Democratic Party in 2016, in 20, and in 24 nominated the opposite of that.

Whether or not you think that was a good thing or a bad thing,

the nominees of the Democratic Party for the last three presidential elections have been people who are insiders, for lack of a better word.

There's a good chunk of Iowans, and this is actually, this is the rural area that I come from in Northeast Iowa.

It's the driftless area of Northeast Iowa, Southeast Minnesota, southwest Wisconsin.

It is the biggest hub of Obama-Trump swim counties in the United States of America by far.

And Iowa had twice as many of those counties as any other state.

Second place was Wisconsin.

We had like 30.

They had, I think, about 20, 15 or 20.

So I just think that,

and this is the bottom line on so much of this and so much of why I do this,

there are a lot of people out there, and I cut myself in them, who don't want to be forced to be a Democrat or a Republican.

They look at this country, they look at what we learned about in public school growing up, and they look at the contrast with our politics right now and they're like wait a minute i thought this was supposed to be about grand compromises and moving uh the people forward and solving problems not just tug of war and what it feels like so often to so many people right now is it's just tug of war uh that's that's the heart of the idea in my announcement video i say i don't i don't want iowa to be bluer or redder i want it to be truer and better like

What are we doing here?

Why does this have to be a fight about what color hat you wear?

It should be about what's the right thing to do and can we do the right thing?

Yeah, I mean, I'll never forget waking up the morning of the 2016 election and looking at a map of Iowa and the counties that shifted.

And you're right.

The counties you were describing, sort of the eastern edge of the state, the river counties that were pretty reliably Democratic, completely switched to being Republicans.

And you're right.

It's not like everybody moved and they were replaced with more conservative, like alternative versions of themselves.

They were persuaded to vote a different direction.

I think you're right.

That's an opportunity there that we can get them back.

I do also agree that

people constantly talk about politics in terms of

kind of like an ideological left-right continuum.

I agree with you, though.

Like Barack Obama, even though we think of him now as a two-term president, he is someone who ran against the traditional politics of Washington, against Hillary Clinton, by the way.

And Donald Trump, you're right.

He was like the consummate outsider.

He was someone who was seen as so outside the system that people actually mocked it.

And then voters said to us, actually, we hate the system as much as he does.

So we're going to vote for him now.

Yeah, they were literally like, oh, all of you hate him?

Thanks.

That's all I need to know.

You know?

Why would I spend more time paying attention to politics?

It's awful.

I'd like to go hang out with my kids.

All of you who have never done anything for me hate this guy.

Perfect.

I'm all set.

Right.

He's my guy.

So let's talk about Trump for a minute.

So his entire economic policy in Trump 2.0 is tariffs.

The size of the tariffs, the countries he's tariffing, that changes by the hour.

But it is his primary focus is to put in place trade barriers.

What do you think the impact of a protracted trade war with China or, I don't know, name your country would be for Iowa in particular?

Brutal.

I'm with Chuck Grassley.

He is the only member of Congress that has had the guts to say it from Iowa

out of the two senators and the four that we have.

He said, hey, if this works, I'll be saying amen, hallelujah.

I don't think it's going to work.

The United States exports agriculture.

That is a huge piece of it.

You really can't answer in a trade war without putting tariffs on agriculture.

And China understands this.

We've had a special relationship.

Iowa Agriculture, we, has had a special relationship with them for a long time.

But in the first Trump administration, they realized the volatility here and they built what is now the single largest new port in the world in Peru to ship Brazilian agriculture products as a substitute for American agriculture products.

They literally built it from scratch.

And so in the first administration, they basically built this spigot.

Now all they got to do is turn it on.

And so the threat to Iowa agriculture here is a much larger threat, I think, than it was in the first Trump administration, where it was kind of like, well, what are you really going to do?

Take the Brazilian exports all the way down around Tierra del Fuego and then up?

Like, no, like, we feel good about where we are.

It's a different question now.

And that has an impact, too, in Aberdeen, Washington, Washington

has hundreds of jobs in their port.

That's where most of American agriculture, corn and soybeans from Iowa flows through, or pork as it's on its way to China right now.

And so that ramification isn't just going to be confined to Iowa.

It's going to be nationwide.

The other sort of broad economic challenge I hear a lot about Iowa is that a lot of Iowa businesses are really struggling to hire workers and then retain those workers.

Why is that?

And what do you think the governor's role is in kind of fixing that problem?

There's a couple of things there.

Number one, you know, Iowans are pretty welcoming people.

They don't really care much about,

at the end of the day, they're not particularly concerned with who you are as long as you treat people, I think, decently and you're trying to be productive,

try to give something to society.

But our state laws lately have not been welcoming to people.

It's been the opposite of that.

It's hard to grow a state when you tell a good chunk of people like you aren't welcome here.

Because it's not just those people that you're making feel unwelcome.

It's also people who, you know, like if you're concerned about how the gay community is treated in the state of Iowa, well,

if you're someone who wants to have kids someday and you don't care about who they love as long as they treat people decently and they're trying to be a productive member of society, you might think twice about being here.

I think that's crazy.

We need people in the state of Iowa.

And I think most Iowans agree.

We need people in the state of Iowa.

And I don't think that they like the way state government sort of picks and chooses there.

So I think that's a tremendous piece of it.

I think the other piece is that we aren't doing a good job of

really building the state.

State government is not doing a good job of making the state attractive.

We are 49th for public land.

We are 49th for the economy.

It's hard to get excited about a place where the economy is not doing great.

And hey, to boot,

if you're not doing great economically, it's also hard to go out there and enjoy the outdoors.

Yeah, absolutely.

A couple more political questions, and I'll let you go.

For forever, not forever, for several years, decades, the Iowa caucuses kicked off the presidential primary process.

Then the Biden team made a bunch of changes.

They switched things up.

South Carolina went first last cycle.

We don't know what exactly the schedule is going to look like in 2028.

Do you think there's any chance that on the Democratic side, Iowa might get back to its cherished first place in the process?

Or is that something that people are moving on from?

You know, I don't know.

I am not well connected to the DNC.

I've never been to a convention before.

I would sure hope that they would do that.

I think that would be smart.

I think by removing Iowa, they said to a great number of people outside of the state of Iowa that were less interested in your opinions, right?

And they did it.

It was so weird because they were like, oh, well, we want states that are more competitive and more diverse, but South Carolina is less competitive and New Hampshire is less diverse.

So what is it really?

I don't know the answer to that question, but I know that in Iowa, we're going to follow state law, and I think it would be smart for the DNC to

put Iowa back in charge on that.

Yeah, well, I definitely think, I'm not sure, maybe they'll do some sort of rotation, you know, get a first four, maybe move stuff around.

Yeah.

But I agree, like, you know, my experience in Iowa was people took it very seriously, and it was fun to go there and watch the process happen.

And I hope it's a part of that process in some way.

Rob, people have been confusing us,

making jokes about us looking alike.

I was wondering if we were going to go there.

Yeah, we're going to have to because people are going to go there for us.

I've been tagged in your announcement video about 6 trillion times today alone.

Sorry.

Sorry for.

You know, honestly, I should have told you that this was it because then you would have known, like, I'm just not going to open Twitter today, right?

Go to the next one.

Listen, this is.

Here's my question.

Given that fact,

if you win, can I be governor for one full day?

We could announce it or we could do like the movie Dave and you just get a day off.

Let me give that some thought and get back to you on that.

I can't make any promises today.

I'd want to think through the legal ramifications.

I also wouldn't want to promise you something that for some reason the Iowa Constitution says we can't do.

I think you'd have to be lieutenant governor first.

That works for me.

Is that an offer?

Am I your running mate now?

You're going to move to Iowa?

Sure.

I love living in Des Moines.

Then we could have like two candidates at the same time out there and just say all of them are me.

Like, hey, this is is Rob Sand.

Where's Tommy Veter today?

No, he's the other guy in the other place.

Rob, now you're cooking with gas here, buddy.

Uh, final question for you: What's your plan to win this thing?

How can listeners help?

Like, what can we do?

We got a bunch of people who care a lot about politics, the state of the country.

Um, some of them might live in Iowa, a lot of them don't.

What can they do to help out?

Look, robsand.com is the place to go.

You can donate.

Here's my plan to win.

We're going to need volunteers later, but right now, we certainly want people pitching in who care about the state of Iowa, who want to see us break the trifecta here.

Plan to win?

Letting people know who I am.

My plan has always been do what I was told to do when I was growing up.

Be yourself.

I do 100 town halls every single year.

They are advanced notice to the public so that everyone can come, everyone can ask me questions and get answers from me.

We're going to do those again.

I like to do 100 because, for those who really know your Iowa geography, I do every county seat and Lee County has two county seats.

So while most elected officials in Iowa do the 99 county tour, because I'm competitive and I like bad jokes, I like to say, well, I do 100 town halls and that way I'm the hardest working elected official in the state of Iowa, which is kind of fun.

But I'm going to be out there.

I'm going to talk to people because I thought that's what democracy was about.

Sorry if I misunderstood.

I thought you're supposed to literally go meet people and say, hey, how are you?

And listen to them and answer their questions.

I think that that works because I've been doing it so far and it's been working for me.

I think I think it'll work too.

And just a final point of personal privilege here.

Not everything about getting older is cool, but it is very fun now that I've known you literally since 2004.

We've worked together.

We've been friends.

We've hung out.

It's great to know that there is people in politics that are genuinely good and decent and in it for the right reasons and care a lot about the job.

And you just know that they would do an incredible job.

So that's just my way of saying to people listening: if you want to get involved in a campaign and you want to back someone who will make you proud, check out Rob's campaign.

Thanks, Tommy.

That's really nice of you.

I appreciate that.

Of course.

I'll tell one little story about that because I think that everybody, all of us, whether we're running for office or not, we sometimes

we tell ourselves stories about ourselves.

And sometimes they're accurate and sometimes they're not.

But in 2022, I had a physical reaction to something that helped me understand actually why I do this and it's not for me.

On election night, my re-election was super close.

So we had an hour and a half where we were like, ooh, on pins and needles and then we had a half an hour where we were like it's over we lost

and for that half an hour I felt great I felt fantastic I was like I'm I'm free I'm free and it made me realize like I had a physical I felt three inches taller I felt like lighter all the weight was off of my shoulders and it That reaction literally helped me realize like, no,

I think I should be glad that I won because half an hour later, when the weight came back, I wasn't honestly happy about it.

But it did make me realize I should be happy that I won and I should keep trying because that reaction to me told me, like, no,

I know I'm not doing this for me.

I know I'm doing it to try to make a difference.

And you can't fake that kind of feeling.

So I appreciate you feeling that way too.

Absolutely.

Well, I'm hoping.

That crushing, crippling weight remains on your shoulders for many, many years to come.

And thank thank you for coming on the show.

I hope to do it again soon.

I appreciate that.

Happy to

that's our show for today.

Thanks so much to Rob Sand for coming on.

Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday.

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Our producers are David Toledo and Saul Rubin.

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Are you ready to get spicy?

These Doritos Golden Sriracha aren't that spicy.

Sriracha sounds pretty spicy to me.

Um, a little spicy, but also tangy and sweet.

Maybe it's time to turn up the heat.

Or turn it down.

It's time for something that's not too spicy.

Try Dorito's Golden Sriracha.

Spicy.

But not too spicy.