Officer Trump Patrols Washington

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Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm John Phaffer.

I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

On today's show, Trump's now targeting our national museums because they focus too much on how bad slavery was.

He's trying to charge everyone he doesn't like with mortgage fraud.

Democrats are grappling with a voter registration crisis.

And MAGA is triggered by Gavin Newsom's Twitter account.

Then you'll hear my conversation with Massachusetts Congressman Jake Auchincloss, a rising star in the party, who stopped by the studio this week.

But let's start.

with the siege of Washington, where General Trump's army is waging a fierce battle to liberate the Capitol from DoorDash drivers, liberals armed with sandwiches, and the guy in DuPont Circle who asks if you can spare a dollar.

Now that the cavalry has arrived from regime strongholds across the old Confederacy, Trump sent his top lieutenants to rally the troops on the front lines of enemy territory, the Union Station Shakesack.

Here are the courageous words of J.D.

Vance and Stephen Miller, flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and some of the 1,200 troops now deployed to D.C.

where crime is statistically highest.

Well, if you've ever been to Union Station in the last few years with your family, you know the crime is actually extremely high right here in Union Station.

You have vagrants, you have drug addicts, you have the chronically homeless, you have the mentally ill.

Are we going to be releasing evidence of this?

Of what?

That D.C.

has a terrible crime problem?

You just got to look around.

Obviously, D.C.

has a terrible crime problem.

We're not going to let the communists destroy a great American city, let alone the nation's capital.

And let's just also address another thing.

All these demonstrators that you've seen out here in recent days, all of these elderly white hippies, they're not part of the city and never have been.

So we're going to ignore these stupid white hippies that all need to go home and take a nap because they're all over 90 years old.

And we're going to get back to the business of protecting the American people and the citizens of Washington, D.C.

So Miller

is a little uptight there

because of the hero's welcome they all got while walking through Union Station, particularly the vice president.

Let's listen.

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That did not sound like a 90-year-old hippie.

No, no.

Go fuck a couch.

You're going to fuck a couch, buddy?

I played that like 20 times.

So I'm guessing that Trump saw the Union Station coverage and decided that he wanted to get in on the fascist cosplay himself because he is

right before we were recording this,

he gave some remarks, flanked by the whole crew.

You got your Doug Bergams, Pam Bondi.

I think Christy Noam was there.

A bunch of police, troops.

I think he was outside Union Station.

I don't know.

I could be wrong.

But he's supposedly going on a patrol himself through the streets.

He's going to go out on the front lines.

Although, I don't know if it was just that little press conference, if that was the patrol.

We'll find out later.

No word on whether he was wearing a sandwich-proof vest there to protect himself.

This is all still about fighting crime, yes?

Is that right?

No, John.

No, it's not.

I hate to disabuse you of your hopes and dreams here, but no, it's it's not about fighting crime.

And it's certainly not about fighting crime for the mostly black, mostly Democratic residents of Washington, D.C.

It is what it always is about with Trump, which is appearing on TV like you're solving a problem, not actually trying to solve the problem.

And so this is, it's all, I use the term fascist cosplay.

I use the term, I think it's fascist fantasy camp, where they all get to go pretend to be a fascist for a day.

Stephen Miller, who is a White House aide, who has the same rank that you and I had, gets to go to a press conference and wage war on 90-year-old hippies and act like a tough guy.

He is, you know, everyone gets, we get to occupy DC for a week with an army commanded by not one but two Fox News hosts.

What did you make of Miller's attack on

elderly white hippies?

Did that offend you personally?

Was that necessary?

I mean,

like, why?

Does it make you feel better about yourself?

Just like, oh, in

your mid-40s as I'm closing out.

I was about to say, did I say I'm not an elderly white hippie?

No, No, you asked it to me.

You do a show with

two other elder millennials.

You could have done that, but no, you went after me.

Let me tell you something.

Tommy,

I'm feeling my age this week.

I got a problem with my hip.

My eyes are going.

I'm podcasting right now with walking pneumonia.

I'll have you know.

You have walking pneumonia?

I have walking pneumonia, yes.

Oh, no.

My dad had that earlier this year.

Yeah, I got it from.

I got it from Jack.

Oh, God.

That's from Jack.

Yeah.

You take some antibiotics.

You're fine.

But

if I start coughing in the middle of this Joe Biden debate, you'll know why.

Well,

apologies for personally offending you.

Either way, I just thought it was very aggressive.

Sorry, you're a Gen X white hippie.

That's fine.

That's sorry.

Yes.

So

barely, but that's barely.

Police Chief Pam Bondi,

the new police chief,

she says that her stormtroopers have now made about 630 arrests as of August 21st.

Just to put that in perspective, during a similar period last year, August 7th through August 19th, so it's actually a shorter time period because today's the 21st, the D.C.

police alone made 667 arrests.

That's according to the Washington Post.

So they've made fewer arrests this week than they did this week last year.

With with

1,200 National Guard troops, DEA agents, FBI agents, an army of ICE agents, and the D.C.

police under the command of Pam Bondi.

There could be a good explanation for this, which they would not like to offer, which is that crime was down this year over last year.

But then that gets to the whole pretext of why they sent troops in to begin with.

The White House won't release the data on who's been arrested for what.

Or by whom.

Or by whom.

We don't know if it's just regular D.C.

police officers who did it.

Yeah, so we don't know who's been arrested.

We don't know what anyone's been arrested for.

And we don't know who arrested them.

What we do know is that the U.S.

Attorney for D.C., Janine Pirot,

said this week that her office will no longer bring felony charges against people caught carrying rifles or shotguns in Washington because she thinks the city's ban is unconstitutional.

On the flip side, she did order prosecutors in D.C.

to push for maximum charges and sentences for anyone who's arrested in D.C.

Throughout this period of emergency, I guess we're calling it.

We also saw the first military civilian incident this week when a 14-ton armored National Guard truck crashed into a civilian SUV and the driver had to be cut out of the wreckage by firefighters.

Unsurprisingly, a post-poll of D.C.

residents found that eight in 10 oppose Trump's military takeover of DC.

7 out of 10 strongly oppose it.

A national poll for Data for Progress found 51% of voters opposed, 44% in favor.

And then they asked, would you want this in your city?

52% opposed, 43% in favor.

Any thoughts on the numbers and more broadly, how Democrats should talk about this now that we've had a few weeks to see how it's playing out?

I want to get to the numbers that Pambandi is putting out.

What is really notable is that prior to the invasion of Washington, D.C., if someone someone was arrested by the D.C.

police, there would be a publicly available incident report within 24 hours.

So you would know what that person was arrested for, where they were arrested.

And that's how people track crime in their city, right?

And what the police is doing.

They stopped doing that under the leadership of Chief Bondi.

And so no one has any idea what these crimes are.

It's very, like they are stemming off any information that could undermine the mission here.

And it's just very notable.

Now, on the poll numbers, I guess I will take solace in the fact that the data for progress poll found that a majority of americans oppose

deploying the military to command a united a u.s city i guess that's that's a positive we can take that right sure it's good as for how to talk about it i've wrestled with this a lot i listened to you guys have this conversation on the tuesday pod there i don't think there's an easy answer here it is just a simple fact that americans think crime is going up and it's going down They are much more worried about crime in their community than statistics would ever suggest they should be.

Like they are, many Americans are more likely to die from a piano falling on their head than being murdered, but they're not worried about pianos falling on their head.

I mean, you and I have had this conversation about the fear of flying, right?

It's not, people's fears are not rational.

And so you can't like bombard them with statistics to make them feel better.

And you don't want to fall into the trap of seeming like you don't care about crime or you don't think crime is serious because the perception of that for Democrats is one of the things that undermine Democrats with certain segments of voters

between 2020 and 2024.

So I think, and I heard you guys talk about the distraction language and all of that, I think the simplest way to do this is to say that Donald Trump wants to send at taxpayer expense the United States military and massed ICE agents to U.S.

cities against the wishes of the local officials, the local police, and the residents.

And that this is a stunt that doesn't help us fight crime.

It doesn't make us safer and just wastes a lot of time and money.

Just full stop there.

Yeah.

Just play it straight is what I'm sort of saying.

I think playing it straight is good.

I also think, look,

this is early days.

You know, I keep drawing the parallel to what happened with immigration, right?

Which at first, because of everything that happened in 24 and in the Biden administration, you know, after the election, I think it was right to realize that a lot of people in a lot of communities where there were an influx of migrants, it's not like they were all worried about crime like Donald Trump worries about crime or worried about just the fact that immigrants were around them like Stephen Miller worries.

But public resources, public services were stretched thin.

There weren't enough places for a lot of the migrants to live.

There were just too many people around.

Like there was just not an infrastructure set up to accept that many migrants, right?

And so it led to to sort of perceptions of public disorder that were real to people in those communities, right?

But at the same time, most of those people who were upset about that are now very upset that there are massed ICE agents in the cities rounding up people without due process and disappearing them.

One thing that's happening, you mentioned that Pam Bandi is not releasing any data.

So there was another post story about how what's happening is ICE agents are basically all over the city and they're riding around with with police officers.

The police officers are pulling over all of these moped drivers who are delivery drivers.

And then the ICE agents come over and then they take the people away because they, you know, they're undocumented immigrants or they might be undocumented immigrants.

And a lot of these people's families who live in D.C., because they've lived in DC for a long time, whether they're asylum seekers, undocumented, whether they're legal residents, whether they have a visa, whether they're on their way to getting their citizenship, it doesn't matter to ICE.

They're just picking up everyone.

And the families can't find them.

They don't get a call.

They don't know where they are.

They don't know where they've been taken.

And look, that's where we are right now.

And you can't tell me that people want that, that most Americans want that.

In fact, we know they don't because we're seeing some of the polling on this for immigration.

We saw it change in a huge way.

And so I do think that like, just we don't need to exaggerate what's going on, but we should speak plainly about what's actually happening.

in Washington, D.C.

And I do think the more people hear about it and the more this goes on, it's going to become unpopular unless of course after 30 days he like takes everyone out you know i mean it's unpopular now we should note that right a majority of people opposed it so we're already in a strong point i guess what i'm just sort of wrestling with is

like

it we know this is not everyone's top priority yeah right and i think as you guys pointed out uh trying to twist yourself into a pretzel to tie it to everyone's top priority just sounds fake and awkward.

So you might as well just tell people what's happening.

Right.

Right.

And just let them, let them, let them know about it.

Because the problem is a lot of people probably have no idea it's happening.

Tell them about it.

Tell them it could happen in their community.

Because as Trump said today, we're going elsewhere when we're done here.

And so it could be your community, could be where your family lives, could be where your friends live.

And just do it like that.

I don't think you need to overcomplicate the simple when the President of the United States sends the military for literally no reason into your United States City against the wishes of the police.

One last thing before we...

move off of this is uh i've been thinking about stephen miller's comments there one reason i pay a lot of attention to stephen miller unfortunately, is he is always

at the vanguard of what's coming from the authoritarian regime and where they're going to push the envelope next.

And the fact that he was out there saying that we're not going to let the communists, we're not going to let the communists destroy the city.

So by the communists, he means the protesters and the liberals and anyone who's criticized this.

And then he says those people who are protesting aren't part of this city.

They were never part of this city.

And I do think, and this has happened in other authoritarian regimes, and it's like, it's in the playbook.

It's exactly what happens.

They start with immigrants, they start with the most vulnerable, and then they sort of work their way up.

But a lot of it is focused on the opposition and the political opposition.

And he has already decided that immigrants don't belong in this country, right?

That this is a Western culture, Western Christian nation.

And what he's quickly doing, because they want the protests, they want to start arresting protesters, they want to start cracking heads, He wants to make sure that people realize that in this country, if you oppose Donald Trump, if you do not agree with Donald Trump, not only are you a political opponent, you do not belong in this country.

This country is not your country.

And this is where they're going next.

And so, and this is why they're in blue cities.

And this is why they're not in red areas of the country where there's high crime.

They could be fighting crime.

They could be doing more, sending more police to those places.

And they're not doing that.

They're doing it in blue cities because they want to scare the shit out of liberals and let them know that they're in charge and that this isn't our country.

It really feels like Stephen Miller took his four years between Trump's first term and his second term, read all those books on authoritarianism from like Ann Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, and just read them as handbooks, not warnings.

It's

bad.

And you know what?

And J.D.

Vance is, he puts like a, you know, a somewhat nicer sheen on the whole thing, or at least more

acceptable to a broader population.

it goes down he's i mean just stephen miller's voice and tone and just mere presence is truly odious and so it makes it so much worse i mean not that jd vance is a barrel of charisma he is not he is not but he does at least seems less angry and crazy and fascist than stephen miller does in his tone yeah but in rhetoric but in the in reality he's just as bad right but you were you were asking the other day like what is that accent from stephen miller and i was like i don't know like fascist is that an accent yeah just the way he speaks like the punctuates the words and screams it's just very oof

it really it's like a confederate general meets an ss comedon or something i don't know it's very strange fucking terrible man

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So Trump isn't just cleansing our nation's capital of commies, immigrants, and the poor.

He's also trying to cleanse our history of anything that suggests America hasn't always been perfect.

For example, slavery.

Do we really have to keep harping on what was clearly just a big misunderstanding in this country?

The president got mad on the internet this week about the Smithsonian Museums, which he says focused too much on, quote, how bad slavery was, unquote.

He has now ordered White House aide Lindsey Halligan, yet another former defense lawyer for Trump,

good field to baseball team with his defense lawyers, to conduct a review of museums using, quote, the exact same process they did for universities in order to make the Smithsonian, quote, less woke.

Halligan went on Newsmax to defend her new project, and even the host sounded a bit skeptical.

How do you balance that, that

we need to be able to review this while honoring even our not-so-pleasant past?

Yeah, I mean,

it's not about whitewashing, it's all about full context.

So,

while slavery

is obviously a horrible aspect of our nation's history, you can't really talk about slavery honestly unless you also talk about hope and progress.

And I think we need to be focusing on the progress that we've made since then, and we need to stop focusing so much on

the lack of progress.

We need to keep moving forward as a country.

So she's an idiot.

Yep.

She's really, they really pick their best for that job.

There's also a full White House report detailing all of the woke sins of our national museums.

Did you happen to take a look at the report on the website?

Any thoughts on this whole project?

I skimmed it.

It seems like they don't really understand

history, art, literature, or even what museums do.

Also, it's like,

I assume you've been to all the Smithsonian museums.

I've been there.

Pretty hopeful museums.

The American history one's pretty hopeful.

Yeah.

Maybe a little too hopeful, some would say.

I mean, like, also.

A quote from 2017 when the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened, someone said it offers a meaningful reminder of why we have to fight bigotry, intolerance, and hatred in all of its very ugly forms.

That was President Donald Trump.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Same museum.

Same museum.

He's probably trying to get that scrubbed out of the museum right now.

He's also very mad that there's nothing about the future in the museum.

It is a museum.

That's the whole thing.

It's a museum street.

It's a history museum.

If he wants the future, he should go down the street to the Air and Space Museum.

I don't know.

I mean, also, we we can't ignore the fact that he also went through and had the Smithsonian remove him from the exhibit on impeachments.

Yeah, although did you see, did you see they're putting it back and they were like, that didn't happen by any order.

It was just like we were just renovating.

We were just dusting off the bust of Alan Dorschowitz.

Like, what?

It's bad.

That's bad.

I mean, I know it's just like, oh, what is he bluffing?

Maybe.

Does he really have the authority to do this, the way that the Smithsonian is structured?

He's really.

Of course he doesn't matter of course he does not on he's not on firm legal ground to say the least it doesn't matter because like he is forcing harvard to do things for him which is last i checked not part of the federal government doesn't receive taxpayer money in the same way like it's obs

it's just he will get to this on other topics later in this podcast but he just bullies people into it and then everyone gives in they all give in and the thought is we'll just make the change now and three and a half years from now we can go back to being a real museum.

And it's much harder to go back once you bend the knee and give in.

I also think it's just like these fucking snowflakes who can't handle the fact that America has

done some things that are bad in the past because America is made up of human beings, some of whom have done some horrible things.

And sometimes we did it on a nationwide level.

And one way to look at it is, you know what?

We do some just like humanity, there is a lot of good and some bad in America.

And one great thing about America, should be great about America, is that throughout history, ordinary people have tried to change the country.

And they've loved the country so much that they will try to fight to change the country, even when the country didn't love them.

Like that is the whole purpose of what this country is supposed to be.

That is like real patriotism.

And Donald Trump and all the people and a lot of the fucking MAGA people and, you know, Republican politicians have been like this for quite a while now, right?

Which is like they think that America is so fucking fragile that

God forbid we should criticize our past because then we would have to reckon with the fact that we might not be perfect and that we might have to make some changes in this country and that we might have to make this country better.

Like, what the fuck?

What is the itch we're scratching here?

Trump?

Yeah, just for or like, what it like what are we trying to do are like we worried that people are going to know too much about our history like i can understand like i get

in the southern seats of the confederacy and like there's very comp the ones who still celebrate confederate journals like it's very it is ridiculously um complicated to people it shouldn't be but you know we went through all of this and you know a few years ago with the confederate monuments but

like

well, I don't even understand what the problem is.

And here, I just wanted this from a political point of view.

We went through this with the entire critical race theory bullshit that the Republicans did in 2021 in Virginia and elsewhere is that Pete, when you talk to people about whether they want people to know U.S.

history in context and certainly do not want the government deciding what our history is, they're 100% with us.

Yeah.

And look, I think that

I also vehemently disagree with people who say, you know, America is inherently bad or inherently a racist nation, right?

Like the idea that we cannot either accept or change the sins of our past is just, it's not in keeping with what the American story has been.

Right.

But I do think to your question about Trump, like in authoritarian regimes, in fascist regimes, they go after culture and history and education because they need younger generations to believe that the nation is great and the nation has always been great and we have never done anything wrong and we are the best and we are perfect and that is where strength comes from.

It is believing that we are perfect and great and wonderful and anything that gets in the way of that story is an opening for people who are unhappy with the current regime, the current government, to go make changes.

And so you want everyone to think, no, no, no, this has been a great, wonderful, glorious nation this entire time, no problems.

Because then everyone was like, okay, well, well, then I'll just sit tight and follow the leader and everything will be great.

I really don't feel like you can put the genie back in the bottle on this one.

Also, just not to give them advice, but remember when they were all, when the whole Republican argument was that we're not the racist ones, Democrats were the racist ones, they were the Dixiecrats, they did segregation and run the rate, and

Abraham Lincoln was Republican?

Yeah, that's that's seems like

we're past that now.

Yeah.

So, not for nothing, U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Services announced on Tuesday that it will start screening Visa and green card applicants for, quote, anti-American ideologies.

Pressed to explain what that means and how it would be enforced, a spokesperson said, if you hate America, don't try to live in America.

It's that simple.

We think it's a good idea for the federal government to determine what specific beliefs and speech constitute anti-American ideologies.

Kind of thought we had an amendment for that.

There is an amendment for that, but if we're going going to go down this road, I personally would encourage them to go through the social media postings from the first Wednesday in November of 2020 through the first Tuesday in November in 2024 and look at the social media postings from Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, Stephen Miller.

Pam Bondi.

We could go on and on because I think they probably had some pretty negative things to say about America during that four-year period.

But they're American citizens.

They're here because of their ancestors.

Their ancestors have a claim to this place, Dan.

Do you think American citizenship is going to protect you?

No, I don't.

Well, so right before we started recording, too, I think I sent this piece around, but they also said they are now, the State Department will be reviewing all 55 million visa holders in this country to make sure they deserve to be here.

And they're going to go through their social media presences presences too.

So if you're here on a visa, if you're here legally, the State Department's going to continuously review whether you should be here or not.

So that's where you get to, bet a lot of those people, good number of those people are probably in the MAGA movement, have probably voted for Donald Trump, might have said some things about America that some would classify as anti-American.

But this is no fucking problem.

Immigration cannot be based, like if you are basing immigration on what the current administration believes is anti-American or pro-American, then like it's just at the whims of whoever rules the fucking country, which is what they want.

That's what Stephen Miller wants.

He doesn't want immigrants here.

People who are here legally, people who are here not legally.

He just doesn't want them here.

Or people who are citizens who came here recently.

Right.

Or people who are liberals or communists or people who oppose them or protesters.

I mean, it's just, you know, not

trying to sound alarmist here, but like this is, it just keeps happening.

People should be alarmed.

So I know what you're thinking.

Why isn't the Trump administration focusing on what people actually care about, like figuring out how to charge the president's political enemies with mortgage fraud?

Well, good news on that front.

A Trump loyalist named Bill Polt, he's on it.

This is the guy who was installed as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, an obscure regulatory position that turns out to be useful when you need to drum up some crime in a pinch.

Polt has made criminal referrals to the Justice Department alleging mortgage fraud by Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Tish James.

He's accused Fed Chair Jerome Powell of fraud for going over budget on building renovations.

We've talked about that.

And now he's targeting one of Powell's associates, Fed Governor Lisa Cook.

On Wednesday, Polt tweeted a letter accusing Cook of mortgage fraud and referring her to DOJ for investigation.

Trump immediately took up the call, posting, Cook must resign now.

Three exclamation points.

Polt has been making the rounds on cable to press the case and sounding just as serious and impartial as you would expect from the head of a federal regulatory agency.

She lied, in my view, in her statement tonight because she said that the first time she heard about it was through my tweet.

She didn't hear about it from my tweet.

There's no way.

She doesn't follow me on Twitter.

And I think it's very disrespectful both to the country, to the president, and frankly, even to the Federal Reserve.

for this lady to stay in office.

You know, it's funny is they tried to go after President Trump on complete nonsense.

He was totally innocent.

In this case, you see these signatures.

Did you sign this document or did you not?

And she can say whatever she wants.

But at the end of the day, the facts speak for themselves.

And I'll tell you, this is the hottest story in the world right now.

Who the fuck is this guy?

Okay, I know.

I've learned a lot about him in the last 24 hours here.

Go for it.

First, I'm going to let you guess his age based on having seen him on television.

Oh, he looks like he is 51.

Well, you'll be incorrect.

He's 37.

No.

Yeah.

All these fucking MAGA people who are younger than us in high positions of government.

I wouldn't say I look rated at a high position of government either.

So I'm not throwing that.

I look better than that guy.

I'm better than

30, a 37-year-old, or how old is Stephen Miller?

I don't even know if he's 40 yet.

J.D.

Vance is younger than us.

That's fucking nuts.

Yeah.

Anywho, so here, let's do Bill Polt.

I would say I learned so much about Bill Polt other than the pronunciation of his name because I was going to say Bill Pultey several times here.

You know, I was going to go with Pulte, and then once I went with Pult, I decided I'm going with Polt the whole way.

Is it definitely Polt?

And afterwards, when the staff says, Do you want to do a pickup on that?

I'm going to say no, because I don't give a fuck.

Okay, yeah, who cares?

But here's who he is: he is a Nepo baby from Michigan, who is the grandson of one of America's most successful home builders, who, in a typical Horatio Alger story, did what many do right after graduating college is started a private equity fund

where he had a lot of money, made a lot of money.

But what he's really, really good at, and here's how he became famous.

This is really wild, is getting attention.

So what he did is he went on Twitter and offered to start giving money away to people on Twitter if they followed him and retweeted him.

He did Twitter philanthropy.

And this actually got him 3 million Twitter followers.

And at one point, he said, I'm going to give a veteran who follows me $30,000 if Donald Trump retweets this, which Donald Trump did do.

And then after doing that for a while, he got very involved in the meme stock stock world, became very famous, meme stocker, tried, worked GameStop and Bed Bath and Beyond.

He was very famous.

A well-trodden path.

Yes.

Well, and then he did what many influencers who want to work in government did is he gave a half million dollars to Trump's super PAC.

And now

he's just drumming up fake mortgage fraud charges for all the president's enemies.

Yep.

And then going out and talking about it and saying that it's the hottest story and

that

the Fed governor is a liar because she doesn't even follow him on Twitter.

How could she know what a tweet said if she doesn't follow the tweeter?

He must have tapped her.

He didn't tap her phone.

Otherwise, how would he know?

We should just note that the FHFA director is not a law enforcement official.

He's not an inspector general.

His job is to manage two government-backed mortgage companies.

Yeah, that's it.

They're rarely on Fox News.

They certainly are not offering.

I'm sure this is the first, second, and third criminal referral ever offered by the FHA director.

It's totally like he's doing it.

Like we could do a criminal referral.

Same way.

Criminal first, he's writing a letter to the attorney general.

Referring a crime.

Maybe we should start.

I don't know if Pam Bondi's going to accept my note, but

I was looking into these charges to what they're trying to do here.

It's very common for opposition researchers in a political campaign to check this because basically if you have two homes, which

so if you don't have two homes, don't worry, everyone.

But if you have two homes, they'll give you a better mortgage rate on your primary residence than they would on your secondary residence, right?

And so what happens is sometimes people say that one is their primary residence and then they say the other is their primary residence too.

And so they get good mortgage rates on both.

And often the pun, almost always the punishment is a fine or embarrassment or in the campaign, you get in trouble for it.

And now, and sometimes it happens where, you know, you don't know because someone put in your mortgage application.

And so, you know, like super rich people didn't sign it or whatever whatever else.

So now they must have decided that like since Schiff got a pardon for being on the January 6th committee, the preemptive pardon from Biden and other, they're just going to check everyone's, everyone who might have two homes, they're going to check their mortgage status and they're going to see if they can get them on this.

And then what?

They're going to find them?

I mean, who knows?

I think the...

The truth is most of these get, they're looking for indictments here, right?

Because it's easy to get an indictment.

And they want to say, you know, crooked Adam Schiff was indicted, crooked Trish James was indicted, and then they get to court and they laugh the indictment out of the court or they get off whatever, but they got the headlines and then they could say some crooked judge let them off, right?

Or they, or some crooked jury in DC got them off, right, or whatever.

And, but they just want the embarrassment, which is why, do you know that fucking, did you see Ed Martin, the weapon is the crazy Ed Martin?

who was who was Janine Perrow until he was too crazy for Janine for that job.

So we had Janine Piero is the saner choice for this job because Ed Martin, he's like all in with the J Sixers.

He showed up outside Tish James's house in a trench coat, posed for a picture, and then put the picture out.

Why?

Why did he show up outside her house?

Because he was like, that's a very important house.

It's a very important house.

So you're just now showing everyone where Tish James lives because you are trying to maybe charge her with mortgage fraud?

Yeah, I mean, it's not a felony, right?

No, I don't believe it's a felony at all.

I think the end game here is not just the indictment.

It's the beginning of a criminal investigation.

Right.

So it's just it gives you, now you're getting subpoenas to investigate things.

You're pulling all their financial records.

You're digging in.

Now you're finding other things.

Now you're finding other things and you're just torturing them.

Right.

You are you are causing them the reputational damage and you're hoping to devastate them financially.

And perhaps more usefully, you are sending a message.

to everyone else that if you come after us, if you oppose us, if you challenge us, this could be you too.

unrelated but still kind of a big deal did you see that uh at least two of the law firms that cut deals with trump under threat of punishment paul weiss and uh kirklandellis are now reportedly doing free work for the commerce department

just fucking deserve it what an embarrassment for these law firms who theoretically should have understood the constitution and could have fought this instead they cut a deal and then when they cut the deal like oh we're gonna do pro bono work but it's not really a big deal because we do pro bono work anyway.

It's going to be for things like helping veterans and fighting anti-Semitism.

Instead, we're going to paper Donald Trump's ridiculous trade deals for free.

And do you see who brokered this and forced him to do it?

Boris Epstein.

Yeah.

Who's not even a Trump?

He's like a Trump enforcer

who did this deal to begin with.

He just shows up and is like, go to the Commerce Department and do this.

And they say yes.

He was the one calling up law firms to threaten law firms, to threaten people at law firms, to like back off right before all the law firm threats even started.

This fucking mob boss.

And because they said yes the first time, now they say yes.

So, what happens next time when it's like,

I don't know, come defend my,

I don't know, Tiffany Trump's husband, who knows, like, whatever the crime is, right?

Yeah, I don't know if you read the New York Times story about Tiffany Trump's husband's family.

I didn't miss that today.

A lot of corruption happened in there.

I'll tell you that.

No,

I know it's shocked.

Shocked.

What?

Best part is they built Jared Kushner on a yacht deal.

Ooh.

Yeah.

Intra-family corruption.

Yeah.

Love that.

Good for them.

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All right.

I wish we had a better topic here, but I wish we had a brighter topic here.

But for those of you who think the next blue wave is going to build itself,

some tough news from our friends at the New York Times.

Shane Goldmarker published an extremely thorough analysis on Wednesday that details how, in all 30 states that track voter registration by party affiliation, Democrats lost about 2.1 million voters between 2020 and 2024, while Republicans gained 2.4 million voters.

Again, Democrats lost 2.1 million voters between 20 and 24.

Republicans gained 2.4 million.

Unfortunately, the limited data for 2025 hasn't shown any signs of a reversal yet.

There are now 160,000 fewer Dems and 200,000 more Republicans than there were on Election Day, 2024.

Dan, walk us through the numbers and why they matter and why it's as bad or not as bad as it sounds.

It's actually worse than it sounds, John.

Do you know why it's worse?

Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.

Because California, the biggest blue state, has partisan registration, so those numbers are included.

Texas, the biggest red state, does not.

So it could be worse, is what I'd say.

We're not calling Texas a purple state?

Come on.

No, no.

Well, it could be either you want to call it blue.

You're definitely not calling it blue state, but it's a state that clearly moved,

got redder over the last year.

So those numbers are not even included in the

shift because you've certainly lost Democrats in gain Republicans there.

But let me just go through some numbers, put this in perspective.

Sure.

In 2018, Democrats accounted for 34% of new voter registrations nationwide.

Republicans accounted for only 20%.

In 2024, Republicans accounted for 29%, and Democrats accounted for 26%.

So we had a 17-point swing in new voter registrations in a four-year period.

And to make things even worse, in 2018, two-thirds of people who picked one of the two parties picked Democrats.

In 2024, 52% picked Republicans.

These are voters under 45.

2020 through 2024, bad fucking years for the Democratic Party.

I'm not done yet, John.

It also shows that all of the core battleground states are getting more Republican.

And these are the states that decide the presidency and the Senate.

Put some perspective on that.

In 2020, on election day, Democrats had a 400,000 person

registration advantage in North Carolina.

Today, that number is down to 17,000.

In Pennsylvania, you say, oh, well, we haven't won North Carolina since 08, whatever.

How about Pennsylvania?

Porton State, if I remember correctly, we had a 500,000 person registration advantage on Election Day 2020.

That number is down to 50,000 this summer.

Nevada, Republicans actually exceeded Democrats briefly this past year.

Just across the board, we are seeing a dramatic shift.

This is a party in crisis.

And it fits with everything we've seen in the party's approval rating remaining deeply mired in the toilet, even though Trump is one.

Like you would have expected in a normal thermostatic reaction where like politics is often a seesaw.

One side goes down, the other one goes up.

Trump's approval numbers have come down significantly.

He's now about as popular as he was in 2018 when Democrats were doing so great, but our numbers have not gone up.

Our approval numbers haven't gone up.

Registration numbers haven't gone up.

trust in the party is down.

Democratic voters overwhelmingly want to change their leadership.

I mean, it is like, I do not think the people at the helm of the party

have been willing to contend with the depth of the crisis the party is in.

I mean, it is at its worst point than at almost any point in our history.

And I would probably even occlude after the 1984 election when we lost 49 states.

Well, I was going to say, I do think that's an important point for people to understand because, you know, there's a couple other things you might think, which is, oh, well, the party just lost and that's what happens but this did not this kind of thing didn't happen between 2016 and 2020 the first trump term no it didn't happen

the opposite happened it didn't happen through two terms of barack obama it didn't happen through the bush years it didn't happen through the clinton years and one thing that you saw and i remember like comforting ourselves with this at various points in the last 10 years is you know there's some working class traditional or previously working class Democrats who then started voting Republican, and especially in Pennsylvania, this happens, and this happened after 2016.

And so they have like a historic party registration where they were Democrats for life, and they've been voting Republican for a while, but they just hadn't updated their party registration.

And so it's P.

And

that was sort of like a slow shift, especially in some working class areas.

This is different.

This is like a fucking collapse in the last four years.

Yeah.

And I think it's actually, we ought to talk about why it happened probably.

Let's do that.

Well, I mean, there's no easy answer to this.

It's a confluence of things, but I would point to three specific things that have happened.

One is the pandemic, right?

Obviously, that happened under Donald Trump's watch, but the delayed return to normalcy, the, you know, the going back to school, the thinking the pandemic's over to dealt with Omicron, that all happened with a Democratic president.

And that's not even, that's not even how we handle it.

I'm not even blaming Joe Biden for it, but it's a traumatic experience and it happened under his watch.

And sometimes policy is a very important thing.

That's particularly a, I do think, a driver of the

Gen Z numbers.

I mean, people who were locked in their homes for high school or college or whatever else.

I mean, just devastating.

And sometimes politics is just luck.

Like, are you,

you know, the wheel spins and does the bad thing happen when you're president?

Right.

You know, and that can be the economy.

It's totally outside of your control.

The second thing is inflation.

Also not Joe Biden's fault, but prices went up and

people did not think that Democrats were addressing it.

I think you can legitimately critique the Biden administration's rhetorical response to inflation and sort of dismissing it for a long time.

And the third thing is Joe Biden, both his age and the fact that voters did not want him to run.

They looked at him and said he was too old.

And the entire Democratic Party looked at them and said, ignore your eyes.

You're crazy.

And we're going to run him anyway.

And they feel, I think, with some good reason that the Democratic Party lied to them about it.

And then because of Biden's age, but also because he, and and I think frankly, a lot of the people around him had no understanding of the modern media environment.

He was unwilling or unable to, he was just absent from the political scene.

He didn't sell his accomplishments.

He wasn't part of the conversation.

He didn't lead the conversation.

And so the Democratic Party was defined by voters, not by their president of the United States, who was off actually trying to do a lot of good things and accomplish many of them, defined by what Republicans were saying about Democrats.

And so the

biggest weapon you have, the biggest megaphone is the President of the United States.

And that president was absent for four years.

And we paid a steep price for that.

And I think related to that, the last thing this relates to younger voters is that the candidate that younger voters wanted has not been on the ballot for a long time.

It was like, you wanted Bernie, Hillary won,

go vote for Hillary.

And it's like, we want a younger candidate.

We want a younger candidate.

We got Joe Biden.

We'll vote for him because Donald Trump is bad.

But he's a bridge to the next generation.

So we're going to have another chance to pick another candidate.

And then

he runs again until he can't.

And then you get Kamala Arris, who had 107 days, a number I will never forget now that she has a book out about it with that title.

Even though I think she was probably more appealing to younger voters and certainly than Joe Biden was, they didn't get a chance to weigh in on it.

Right.

They just do it.

And so it's like, and so for like 12 years, we had never had a nominee who was culturally attuned with people under 45.

And so that's going to, you're going to pay real price for that.

I I totally agree that it's the top of the party.

And

the leader of the party and the president at the time are the people whose people see most.

But

I also got to say, it's not like there were a lot of other elected Democrats out there who had cracked the code on breaking through the clutter and communicating with the rest of the country, particularly young people, particularly people who don't pay close attention to politics.

And so it is a, it's a, I think it's a party-wide systemic issue that is partly about communication, partly about having something interesting to say, not just how you say it or where you say it, and having something that's relevant to say to people's lives.

I mean, it's just, you know, I do think on the Republican side, I think Donald Trump is, as fucking awful as he is, is like...

holding up a lot of the Republican Party with his force of personality.

Like I think they have some communications problems and policy problems and ideology problems as well.

But you know, he's still around.

It's still his party.

And I think the point of this is not to just be like, I don't want people to hear this and say, oh, give up.

We're fucked.

That's it.

But I don't think we should believe, as I said at the beginning, that like, just because we are seeing all this awful, awful stuff that Donald Trump is doing, that like the blue wave is just going to magically happen.

That like, you know, negative polarization and backlash and thermostatic public opinion, like this is all just going to, everything's just going to take care of itself.

And the danger is, by the way, and you know this,

we get to the midterms.

We're getting to to the midterms and it's a different electorate than a presidential electorate.

It's favorable to us.

And so you could see a situation just like in fucking 2022 when we do better than expected and a bunch of the same, you know, party cheerleaders, because like you can't say any bad news about the party.

You got to just be.

We got to be like just like Republicans now and just pretend everything's wonderful all the time in the party and say, oh, wow, all the doomsayers, now that we did great in the midterm, and now we should just realize everything's fine.

And that is what, you know, you can't blame people online for that.

You can blame the Biden administration for doing that, which is what they did for the 2022 results.

And they're like, oh, this must mean that people love Joe Biden.

He should run for president.

So I think we got to be careful not to look at the midterm results and extrapolate from that that we have somehow fixed our problem.

If we do well in the midterms, which is still not even a yeah, it's getting harder by the day.

Right, right, right.

So we got work to do.

What I would say say is

the only way

to stop MAGA authoritarianism from taking hold in this country for the foreseeable future is to rebuild and revitalize the Democratic Party.

We have a two-party system, for better or for worse.

And sometimes it feels like for worse.

But if one party, if the only party that is can, that is standing up against this terrible trend is

a shell of itself, then we're fucked.

And I think like what I would encourage us to do, what I encourage our listeners to do, what I would encourage everyone in the party to do is just recognize the scale of the problem and then try to think about solutions that are proportionate to that scale.

Like we just can't do all the same things.

The same people can't be in charge, right?

The same candidates can't do it.

And I actually hope that whether we, I hope we win the midterms because that's going to help us so much in just stopping so much of what Trump wants to do.

For sure.

But I want the 2028 primary to be a,

I want people to run against the Democratic Party establishment.

When the party has been in its worst place,

the candidates, like the way it has been fixed, the party was in the absolute shitter after the 1988 election.

We've now lost three elections in a row.

Bill Clinton, he ran against the party.

He was going to rebuild the entire party in his image.

And he did that.

And the party got strong again.

Then we lost.

And it was not in as bad shape when Obama ran.

But the party, the Clinton-era Democratic Party atrophied and then basically collapsed on itself when most of the party voted for the Iraq War, even though they knew they shouldn't have.

And Obama was an outsider who ran against the party and rebuilt the party in itself.

And so we people should, we should be challenging the establishment.

We should be challenging the people in charge.

The candidates I'm most interested in 2028, 2026 and 2020, are the ones who are running against the Democratic Party establishment as it is.

Yeah.

Right.

Like we need new blood, fresh ideas, new ways of thinking.

We just can't do the same thing again.

Like there's no sort of middling or like meddling around the edges here to actually solve this problem.

Like it has to be a, we need big scale solution.

That means taking on risk.

Right.

Like that's what like that's the thing you have to change is we're all so afraid of making a mistake that no one wants to do the big things and you're going to have to do the big things to solve this problem.

All right.

One more thing to talk about before we get to my conversation with Congressman Aachenkloss.

Speaking of people who are trying new things,

we talked on Tuesday's show about how Newsom's new campaign to drive MAGA crazy by imitating Donald Trump on social media was just taken off and got sort of interesting.

Well, we are delighted to report it is working, at least in this one way.

Trump finally posted in response writing, Gavin Newscomb is way down in the polls.

He's viewed as the man who is destroying the once great state of California.

I will save California, President DJT.

But the real treat, Dan, has been watching how much this has triggered Fox News and the Magosphere.

Please enjoy this non-exhaustive sampling.

They claim conservatives don't get the joke, but we do.

We just think you look like a tool.

You're trying to do somebody else who you say it's Hitler.

And you think that we don't get the joke?

Oh, no, we get the joke.

It's just not funny.

I wish, Governor Newsom, that you would just get back to California and govern.

Because there's a lot of Californians that need right now a leader, one with a vertebrae, instead of someone that just follows Donald Trump around.

Results matter.

A new performative confrontational style, maybe it wins you points with a loony radical base in your party, but America is not going to vote for that record.

I mean this idea that Gavin Newsom is somehow gonna mimic Donald Trump's style, I think that ignores the fundamental genius of President Trump's political success, which is that he's authentic.

He just is who he is.

You've got to be yourself.

You've actually got to talk to people honestly about the issues.

I don't think it's that complicated.

Don't be a crazy person.

Be authentic.

If the Democrats did that, they'd do a hell of a lot better.

Don't be a crazy person

like when you're imitating my crazy person boss, who is genius and authentic, authentically crazy.

And talks honestly about the issues.

And he talks honestly about the current.

He's well-known for that.

Yes, and he is authentic.

He is authentically, he is an authentic fucking lunatic.

That is, but, you know, that he is authentic, which is, you know, which is true.

The self-awareness is just, I don't know how you can do that with a straight face.

Well, they've been doing a lot with a straight face for a long time over there at Fox News.

So

it's one of the things I have to do.

It's one of the tests to get in.

I mean, I sort of went back and forth a little bit with Dana Perino on Twitter as I want to do.

I mean, I saw your original tweet, and then I read in a news clip circulated in our Slack that you engaged in a back and forth with her.

I don't know.

And

you made made a dinner bet with her?

I did not make the dinner bet, Dan.

Okay.

She offered me dinner.

You offered me dinner.

She said she would.

What's the terms?

If Newsome becomes president, you get a free dinner with me.

No, apparently,

she's saying that it works if Newsom becomes the 2028 nominee, which I don't, also like, I don't think that,

whatever.

But then she would buy me dinner, which is,

you know.

So there you go, Dan.

There is no restaurant in the world with no price so high that I would want to have dinner with any one of the members of the five.

Exactly.

What?

Jessica Trump.

Jessica.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I'd have dinner with Jesse Waters.

He's my boy.

We're tight.

I would not.

Nope.

As you pointed out, I'm quite old.

My hours are limited.

I'm not wasting them on dinner with Jesse Waters.

You know, of all the back and forth I've had on Twitter, Dana Prino, she was nice and respectful.

It's fine.

I don't understand.

It's like, what?

I don't understand the conversation even.

Oh, no, I'm not talking about dinner.

I'm just saying I don't agree with her point.

I don't understand.

I mean, she was a White House Price Secretary, right?

Like, it's like,

you gotta, and George W.

Bush, like, he wasn't doing that, right?

He was doing a lot.

Yeah, we, Iraq war, bad, all the bad things about George W.

Bush for sure.

He wasn't tweeting like that.

And, like, if Donald Trump had good policies and he had still been tweeting like that for the last 10 years, we'd still think he was fucking crazy.

It's a crazy fucking thing to do.

His tweets are nuts.

They're famously nuts.

Yeah.

Now all these people are like, how dare you do an exact parody of my guy's nutty tweets?

They're his nutty tweets.

You can't do that.

You can't make a joke about his nutty tweets.

I mean, it really the reaction reveals the fragility of their position.

It's amazing.

It's like they're not getting the joke.

It's just like they missed the joke.

They say they got the joke, but they're not really getting the joke.

I wrote about this in message box today, but the point I'd like to make is that to be MAGA is to be utterly humorless.

It just is like there is no sense of humor to it.

It is, there is no like irony is not a thing they understand.

Like they're, here's how you understand that these are inherently unfunny people is that their

crown prince of comedy is Greg Gutfeldt.

Hmm.

He is very funny.

Well, that's my point, right?

Which is like they just, they can't get the joke.

And to get the joke would be to admit that what they have been like simping for for the last decade is embarrassing.

Like it's impossible to do.

And this is, I would say, the brilliance of what News was doing.

And he actually was pretty explicit about this when he was asked.

He's like, I'm holding up a mirror to these people to help them understand how ridiculous what we've come to accept is normal from President of the United States.

And it is working.

Good effort, but

it is working in its, like, their reaction is exposing what he's trying to expose.

I am, I have to say, like, when I first saw those.

The tweets, I laughed, thought they were great.

I did not know they would have the impact on MAGA that they have.

I mean,

this has been on Fox like all week long.

They can't stop talking about it.

They're so mad.

I was like, wow, this triggered them way more than I thought it would.

I thought, like, you know, you might get a Trump tweet about it.

You might get a few Fox people yelling about it, but they have no idea what to do.

I was like, wow, this is more effective than I thought.

But I guess that's how Donald Trump became president.

That's right.

That's exactly right.

I don't know if that's, I don't think that's a good thing necessarily, but, you know, good for Newsome.

Good for Newsome.

What do you think?

Here's a question for you.

What do you think other 2028 contenders, what conversations are they having with their staff right now about how they want to be like Gavin's?

They want to do like what Gavin's doing, but they know that they can't copy Gavin parodying Trump.

So now they're trying to do something else.

I think if I were to advise any of them.

Like the, like you should try to learn the lesson of his success.

And the lesson of his success is not that the best absolute 100% successful thing to do is to parody Trump.

It is to be willing to say things and do things that are controversial enough to get blowback from both sides.

Because it's not just Republicans.

Joe Scarborough was quite upset about this on Morning Joe the other day.

Oh, yeah.

There's been some, yeah, very, there's been some anonymous Democratic staffers talking about it to Politico.

And there was some, he was criticized by some political, local political strategists in San Francisco Chronicle.

It's, if you want to get attention, you, you have to engender a reaction from people.

And so you have to not, if you just say poll-tested Pablo, no no one's going to react to it, right?

You just have to be, well, you have to be willing to be controversial.

That can be in how you say things can be in what you say, it can be to whom you say it to.

Newsom has figured this out, right?

That is, that's his, like we can criticize how he executed some of his podcast interviews, but he was willing to take on heat from both sides.

And a lot of what he did, it's doing, it's obviously doing the very important thing of doing the redistricting here.

It's the social media is if you are, if you cannot do something that's controversial, no one's going to know what you're saying or hear what you're saying.

I'm just, I'm going to bring this up because I think it's key to some of the, what I think people are misunderstanding is I've heard a lot of people look at this and say, well, you know, Gavin Newsom, he first tried out going on all the bro, right-wingy coded podcasts, and that didn't work.

So now he's, now he's in the right territory because now he's like fighting hard on Trump.

I don't see those two things as disconnected at all, nor do I think that they have to be disconnected.

And I think that's like key to this whole, this whole strategy, which is you are willing to talk to anyone on any platform and hear them out and have a dialogue with them, debate them, push back, but also not take yourself too seriously and also be willing to engage in humor and also be willing to engage in mockery.

And

I saw Ron Brownstein at CNN wrote about this, is that he called it combative centrism.

Now, I don't think anyone would necessarily say that Newsom is a centrist, but it's this idea that like it's not

the style doesn't have to go hand in hand with the ideology.

And it also isn't just like, oh, if I swear more now, that's what the kids want.

Like,

I don't know if you noticed this, but like, Chuck Schumer is now just taken to saying bullshit all the time.

Yeah, he's tweeting about bullshit.

He's saying bullshit.

And I'm like, okay, good.

If that's how Chuck Schumer talks privately, then like, good.

He should just, that's fine.

He's closing the space between public and private.

But it's, some of these politicians, Democrats, it feels like their younger staffers told them like, this is what you have to do because this is what the cool kids are doing.

And so then they like go on TikTok and say, like, bullshit, no cap.

No one has said bullshit, no cap.

If Chuck Schumer said that, we should be,

that should have led this podcast.

Dick Durbin said that.

Dick Durbin?

Oh, not Dick.

But yeah,

you just got to figure out what works for you.

And it's not always.

Take J.D.

Vance's advice.

Some decent advice at the end there, except for the lack of self-awareness.

Okay.

Oh, Oh, we do have to cover.

I'm sorry.

I know it's long.

We do have to cover this because Austin is making us, and it is important.

Newsome also weighed in on the great Cracker Barrel discourse of 2025.

Are you familiar with this, Dan?

Do you know what's going on?

I am.

I think you should explain it.

Okay.

Because you insisted on including this in the podcast.

I did, yeah.

No, I, that's, see, I take my, I take my advice from Austin now.

So, Cracker Barrel, restaurant chain, we know it.

We love it.

The MAGA people think it's MAGA-coated.

I don't want to go into why.

I don't know why.

But they did a rebrand.

Everyone's doing rebrands this week, last couple of weeks.

So Cracker Barrel did a rebrand and they posted,

I'm going to show two photos now for everyone.

And again, if you're listening, that's great.

Go on to our YouTube channel, check it out.

So here's the logo.

They changed the logo and it was the original logo, sort of an old-timey vibe.

There's a barrel there, a man sitting next to the barrel.

It's got some southern charm to it.

The new logo, pretty dry, pretty antiseptic.

It just says cracker barrel on a yellow background.

So that's the logo.

Now let's look at the restaurant.

So we got the old is a pretty dark room, not a lot of windows, and just a lot of memorabilia on the wall, sort of, again, just old-timey vibe.

And it's great.

It's good.

It's cracker barrel.

The new one,

it seems like they've put in some more windows.

There's a little more space, and all the decorations have been updated.

Okay?

Speaking of things that have triggered MAGA, this has triggered them in a big way.

Donald Trump Jr.

has been tweeting about this.

Other Trump staffers and advisors have been tweeting about it.

All the influencers have been tweeting.

They're very mad.

And they're mad because they think it is the work of a new woke CEO of Cracker Barrel.

And Cracker Barrel has gone woke.

What do you think?

Has Cracker Barrel gone woke?

I would say I have a lot of strong takes on a lot of chain restaurants.

I could talk to you about Waffle House,

Cheesecake Factory.

I spent my youth at the All-You-Can-Eat Sizzler Buffet.

Bubba Buffet.

I'll take any buffet.

Talk to Shonis.

I've never had a strong Cracker Barrel take.

I've eaten a Cracker Barrel many times.

I have some questions about the logo.

I don't know why they took the barrel out.

Look, I think both the logo and the indoor rebrand are shit, for sure.

My question is, why do these fucking people have to make everything

about politics and a culture war?

Why is it woke what they did?

Why can't it just be bad?

Well, in their worldview, progress is bad.

Because progress, I'm being dead serious here.

Progress implies that

that the world, that the

a new, diverse more like progress is progressive in their head and that things are going to change and the way things were were great if you were a white christian male of a certain stature and so this idea that the world is changing and change is inherently bad right that's like what being a conservative technically means in its actual definition and so they're constantly looking for really fake issues to fire people up about that yeah but the the new cracker barrel logo isn't a fucking pride flag with an immigrant uh on it

They took the cracker off of it.

Like, you know, MSNBC rebranded to MS Now.

They got a new logo.

I didn't think it was great.

I don't think it's some fucking plot to make it centrist.

You know, that's not a problem.

I mean, well, here's the problem, right?

These are people whose entire life is grievance, but they're in charge of everything.

They're deciding what exhibits are in museums right now.

So they have to do

it to the bottom of the cracker barrel to find real grievance see what i'm saying

oh okay

sorry that i called you an aging hippie

look dad jokes know no age right

yeah it's just it's like man they they really they they control everything they have all the power and they just they need to look for fights to pick every single day Sidney Sweeney to Cracker Barrel to she should be the new spokesperson.

Didn't we pick Sidney Sweeney?

We picked that fight.

No, we didn't pick that fight.

We were again, we're backlash.

We're here.

We're here to deliver us, not us.

But we're here to deliver the backlash to the backlash.

Yeah, okay.

That's what we're doing.

That's what we're here for.

So that's, you know, it's a great role.

We're heroes.

We're heroes.

We're just doing a public service.

All right.

When we come back, you'll hear my conversation with Jake Aachenkloss.

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Elijah keeps his job.

I know that's going to be upsetting to some of you.

But Elijah's happy and so is his family.

He's got a young child.

So good for him.

And thank you all for making it possible for Elijah to keep his job.

And now with every subscriber over a million, Tommy has to pay Elijah a dollar.

Is that true?

Oh, up to 250, right?

We've been saying that.

Yeah, but now we decided that it's probably not great for Tommy to just like, you know, pay a one employee on the side out of his pocket.

So now, so then, so then Tommy said, now he's going to like, maybe we'll donate it to the North Carolina Democratic Party.

Okay.

And that's like a charity.

That's like a charity

choice.

And then at 200, at 1,250,000, then that's the Emily and Paris joint.

JD Vance.

J.D.

Vance.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's like the rewatchables, Emily and Paris with Tommy and J.D.

Vance.

Okay.

All right.

Gonna be great.

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This Labor Day, see the thrilling conclusion to the summer of superheroes, the Toxic Avenger.

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Jake Auchinkla, welcome to the pod.

Thanks for having me on, John.

So you now work in a city where over a thousand National Guard troops from six states have been deployed, along with lots of federal agents from the FBI, DEA, ICE, all under the president's command, as is the D.C.

Police Department.

You are a Marine who fought in Afghanistan.

You've worked in D.C.

for almost five years now.

You represent a district in Massachusetts that includes a city with one of the state's higher crime rates.

Is this militarization of Washington a legitimate attempt to fight crime?

Could it do any good here?

No, it's not a legitimate attempt to fight crime.

It's another tinpot dictator move.

And it has echoes, of course, of what we saw in Los Angeles, where militarizing the police force is, one, a violation of the principle of posse comitatas, the idea that the military should not be used for law enforcement.

And two, an attempt by the president to try to distract from the issues that are front and center for for Americans and he doesn't want to talk about, which is the price of living.

Aaron Ross Powell, do you think it's, I've been going back and forth on this because do you think it is he's trying to distract?

It seems to me that he's doing it to, A, show

that he's in charge, that he wants to show force, and especially since a lot of the

troops and the most visible presence is in high-traffic, tourist, higher-end areas in D.C.,

residents of high-crime areas of like, you know, I haven't seen as much of the presence there.

And I also wonder if it's an excuse to just continue the mass deportation since it seems like ICE is the real star of the show here.

And a lot of the troops are just like standing around Union Station with very little to do.

Yes.

We know that politically his safety blanket is immigration.

Whenever the news cycle is bending away from him, whether it's cost of living, whether it's Jeffrey Epstein, whether it's him getting embarrassed by Vladimir Putin in Alaska, he wants to talk about immigration because he feels like that's where he can ratchet up public support for himself.

And I think Democrats need to do two things simultaneously.

One is we've got to reject what he is doing, as we did with Los Angeles.

We have to reject what he's doing with District of Columbia and support home rule.

We also have to explain to Americans how we would do things differently, though.

And this is where we fall into a trap, I think, as a party, is we have spent the last decade telling Americans what we're against.

And they know that we're against Donald Trump.

They're pretty clear on that.

His favorable ratings are exactly what they were a decade ago.

We have to explain to people, all right, here's what we would do.

And on Law and Order, I think we have a particular opportunity because the Republican Party, which used to try to carry the mantle of being the Law and Order Party, has voted to defund the FBI, has tried to overturn a free and fair election, has violated due process.

They are vacating that field.

And voters do trust Democrats to defend the rule of law and to defend democracy.

Here's what they don't trust us on, though.

They don't trust us on upholding public order in the cities.

And this is a hard conversation we have have to have as a party.

Open-air drug use, homeless encampments, shoplifting, quality of life violations, we do have to take those seriously so that we don't get associated with degradation and quality of life.

And we can say, actually, we're the law and order party.

Yeah.

I do feel like he has sort of narrowed in on two issues, immigration and crime, where it's an opportunity for him because Democrats maybe haven't taken people's concerns about the border seriously enough, haven't taken people's concerns about crime seriously enough in the cities.

We just say, you know, crime rate's actually down.

But, you know, if you live somewhere where there's crime or you live somewhere where an influx of migrants and public services are stretched to the point where we can't house all of them and take care of them, you're going to be pretty upset.

And then

you're going to give Trump a chance to go way over the other side and be extreme on it.

Yes.

And

if you look at Democrats' positions on gun safety, for example, they empirically have saved tens of thousands of lives and have reduced violent crime.

It's not just violent crime, though.

It's also non-violent violations, and it's the perception of safety and comfort in public spaces.

I want to be able to walk to

accommodations without walking through an open-air drug market.

We have to take that seriously.

I think we're seeing a lot of Democratic mayors who do take that seriously and are representing, I think, an up-and-coming bench for the party.

People tend to trust their mayors more than they do a lot of national politicians.

And these mayors have earned that trust by taking seriously public safety, housing, education issues.

Before we move off this topic, you know, because you've served, how would you feel if you were called up to go into a city like D.C.

or L.A.?

I served in 29 Palms, California as a Marine Infantry officer, and that is the base from which the Marines deployed to L.A.

were stationed.

And it was actually my first thought when the president called up these 700 Marines.

I think keep in mind that, I don't know, 400 to 600 of those Marines are under the age of 25.

These are kids, really.

And they joined the Marines because they wanted a mission bigger than themselves.

They wanted to have discipline and direction in their lives.

They wanted to put their patriotism to work.

And instead, they're being used as political props.

It's terrible for Esprit de Corps.

It undermines good order and discipline.

And these young officers, and again, they are young.

The lieutenants, the captains, probably 25 to 30, are in this impossible position where they have taken two oaths.

One is they've got to support and defend the Constitution.

It's the most important important oath.

And the second is they have to obey all lawful orders from the commander-in-chief.

And he's putting these young officers in this impossible position.

And ultimately, it's terrible not just for the military itself, for its own sense of itself, it's terrible for the public's perception of the military.

And that's scary, because the military is the last federal institution with bipartisan support.

They're not trained in law enforcement.

They are, not only are they not trained in law enforcement,

they are trained to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy.

I mean, they are trained to be fighting the People's Liberation Army in the Philippines.

They are not trained to be doing habeas corpus due process

law enforcement in our cities.

It's just grossly unfair to them.

A lot of meetings this week

the White House has been engaged in over the Russia-Ukraine war.

How do you feel about where negotiations to end the war stand after

not just the meeting between Trump and Putin, but the meetings with Trump and the European leaders in the White House this week.

With Putin, you have to negotiate from strength.

And this president is dealing from weakness.

What strength looks like is taking the 300 billion frozen Euros held in Brussels.

Those Euros are Russian, but they were being held in Brussels before the war.

And the Europeans and the Americans control them.

Seize those frozen Russian assets, use it to fund the Ukrainian military.

And the Ukrainian military needs about 30 billion euros a year to do air defense and a rapid response force.

So right there, you have just funded the Ukrainian military for 10 years using Russian money.

You integrate Ukraine with the European Union's Collective Defense Treaty, and you authorize Ukraine to do long-range strikes into Russia.

All of these things cost America nothing, but they signal tremendous strength and not just strength, sustained strength.

This is telling Vladimir Putin, Ukraine's in this, and they're in this well-armed and well-backed.

And then you summon Vladimir Putin to a neutral third party.

You don't roll out the red carpet on American soil, my goodness.

And then you do a deal from strength.

Mark Orubio said over the weekend that life in America will not be fundamentally altered if the war in Ukraine continues.

Is he right?

No,

he's not right, because Americans benefit from the Pax Americana in innumerable ways.

I think our generation of Americans have had the luxury of forgetting what conflict in the North Atlantic and in Europe can mean for our way of life.

But

it does matter that we have allies who are able to sustain their own sovereignty.

And it matters not just on the Eurasian continent, it matters for how China and Iran and North Korea think about their ambitions.

Xi Jinping is watching what happens in Ukraine on a daily basis, and he's incorporating it into his calculations for the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

And our ability to project strength in Ukraine is directly linked to our ability to deter Chinese belligerence in the Indo-Pacific.

So over in Gaza, Hamas has accepted a ceasefire proposal that's very close to a version that Israel previously accepted.

The Israeli government hasn't yet responded as of this recording.

It's Wednesday morning.

And instead is mobilizing to launch a military campaign in Gaza City over the objections of the hostages' families and thousands of protesters who worry that Hamas will kill the hostages.

Israelis still aren't letting in anywhere close to enough aid, even though 2 million Palestinians are on the brink of starvation.

They aren't doing anything about the most violent settler attacks in the West Bank ever recorded.

How is it in America's interest to keep funding bombs and weapons for the Israeli military?

Well, first, Israel should take this deal and should not attempt to occupy Gaza City.

And I think, second,

we have to start from a place of

alignment, which sounds contrary to where so much of the U.S.

debate about Israel has been.

I think most Americans agree that the attacks of October 7th were atrocities and unconscionable.

I think most Americans agree that starvation in Gaza is unconscionable and should not be supported.

And I think most Americans agree that the Palestinian people should be able to pursue self-determination and the Israeli people should be able to live in peace and security.

And the question is, how do we get there?

Part of it is military strength.

So Israel is, on October 7th, was surrounded by terrorist armies to its north, to its south, to its east, and of course in Iran itself.

U.S.

military aid helped Israel battle back Hezbollah, Syria, Iran itself, and the Middle East is safer because of that.

It is safer to not have Hezbollah in control of Lebanon.

It's safer to have al-Assad out of power in Syria.

It's safer to have the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps weakened in Iran.

What has failed to happen is that this hard-right coalition in Israel has not capitalized on tactical victories to actually offer an alternative to governance in Gaza.

And it's a moral and strategic failure by the hard-right coalition.

And the United States should use all leverage to force Netanyahu to engage with the Arab League on post-Hamas governance in Gaza that actually can end this conflict and return the hostages.

Is military aid part of that leverage?

Of course, military aid is part of that leverage.

I don't actually think that's necessary, though.

So let me give you an example.

Right before the president struck Iran,

I argued that he should require that Netanyahu define and execute an endgame in Gaza before he struck the nuclear sites.

We had that moment of leverage and he let it pass by.

But the president still has tremendous leverage over Netanyahu just with a phone call.

And what has happened is that the 22 member states of the Arab League issued a declaration in the United Nations that

is actually the closest thing to an olive branch we have yet heard from the Arab League.

It condemned October 7th unequivocally.

It recognized basically Israel's right to secure itself.

And yet Netanyahu has not taken that olive branch.

We have another opportunity.

I'll be leading an effort in Congress to try to get him to take it.

Let's talk about the Democratic Party, which has now had about 10 months to improve its image since the last election.

New analysis from the New York Times this morning shows that in the 30 states that track voter registration by party, Dems lost about 2.1 million voters between 2020 and 2024.

Republicans gained 2.4 million.

The limited data for 2025 hasn't shown any signs of a reversal.

There are now 160,000 fewer Dems and 200,000 more Republicans than there were on Election Day 2024.

What's your take on why this is happening and what it's going to take to turn around?

Americans believe that this country is stuck in a corrupt status quo that is a threat to the American dream, and they associate the Democratic Party with the status quo.

And until we are demonstrated that we are willing to disrupt that status quo, not just by fighting Trump, but also by being willing to take on our own received orthodoxies as a party, are we going to be able to earn back voters' trust?

And I think there are three vectors in particular where we need to have big ideas.

Cost disease and treating cost disease, particularly in housing, healthcare, and utilities.

Corruption.

And corruption broadly defined, not just the corruption of individual politicians, which of course is rampant, but the corruption of the system, a system that can be hijacked by health insurance or social media corporations, a system where the vast majority of congressional races are not actually competitive.

And then finally, classrooms.

This is an issue, education, John, that

neither party has talked about for five years.

The school closures were a catastrophe.

25 million American students are grades behind on reading and mathematics.

And because Democrats haven't put forward muscular plans for how we're going to fix it, we're stuck to having to talk about bathrooms.

We should be talking about classrooms.

You had a great

line that's Democrats, as they think about retooling, should remember that voters who ordered a Coke don't want to die at Coke.

What do you mean by that?

What I mean by that is that we should reject the siren song of cultural...

of ceding to maga cultural populism.

There is this trend in the party to say, whoa, on immigration, on trans rights, on a whole host of other hot-button issues, we just have to reflexively moderate.

And my view is that it's a little bit more nuanced than that.

One, we have to stop condescending.

People are willing to disagree with politicians, and in fact, they appreciate a politician who will authentically explain their point of view, but don't talk down to voters, ever.

They have an allergy to that, as they should.

And then, two, we need to do a better job of explaining where we stand on the issue from a place that explains our why.

So let's talk about trans issues.

It's constantly bubbling up.

Republicans want to hammer this issue.

My view is we believe in the pursuit of happiness and non-discrimination.

People should be able to live as they see fit to pursue happiness.

And we don't discriminate in this country in housing or employment

for how adults want to make their own decisions.

I also think that there are issues of safety and sportsmanship and high school sports and middle school sports that of course have to be taken into account.

I think think 70% of Americans are basically there with that statement.

And we should be able to address it.

We should not, though, just cede this terrain to Republicans.

We should be authentically ourselves as Democrats.

I also think that we should pick our own cultural fights.

The most important to me is, I think, the emerging fault line of in-real life versus online.

We are stuck in a society where increasingly you've got these merchants and miners of dopamine, whether it's online gambling, whether it's pornography, whether it's the social media corporations, whose entire business model is about taking young people in particular and monetizing their attention span.

And we accept it as like, yeah, this is, I guess how it is.

It's like, yeah, the average kid will spend more time on their screen than they will outside.

The average inmate will spend more time outside than the average American child.

That's not acceptable.

The Republicans just tried to pass a law that would forbid states from regulating AI for the next decade.

So it's not like they're pioneers on this issue.

issue.

Let's seize it from them.

What do you think we should do?

So first of all,

strip the special privileges and immunities that these social media corporations have enjoyed since the mid-1990s.

They can't be sued.

You publish deep fake non-consensual pornography on Facebook.

It's not Mark Zuckerberg's problem.

It needs to be.

We're sin Section 230.

We need to raise the age of internet adulthood.

Right now, it's 13, not enforced.

Needs Needs to be at least 16, enforced.

And then I think we've got to start taxing these corporations.

Wealthiest, most powerful corporations in the history of the world pay virtually no taxes.

I think we should tax their digital advertising revenue and route those dollars towards the construction of trade schools, towards surging one-on-one tutoring to American students, reading, math, writing, help them get back up to grade level and be prepared for success.

We got to stop treating these social media corporations like they're these autonomous digital empires and make them accountable to the American public.

Aaron Powell, you've talked about an attention tax, which I assume is what you were just referencing with taxing their digital advertising.

Can you talk a little bit about how that would work?

Because I guess if you want to, if you tax their digital advertising, you'd want to not just have revenue to

invest in what you just said.

You'd also want to incentivize their behavior to do less of what they're doing, which is keep everyone hooked to the algorithm.

Yes.

I actually think there's two separate

policy threads here.

One is directly tax a business model that we don't like.

It's sort of a vice tax.

We do the same thing with cigarettes or alcohol, right?

So we basically say, hey, your business model is you turn children into products through digital advertising, and we're going to directly tax that to make that business model less attractive.

I think it would be naive, though, to think that that alone is going to

sort of unravel their entire network effects that they've built.

So I also think we need to start thinking about digital dopamine as a phenomenon unto itself.

So what I mean by that is like, whether it's online gambling, whether it's social media clicks, what all these companies are doing is they're trying to give you a little hit of dopamine.

It's an artificial hit of dopamine.

There is very limited research and no regulation around that.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, for example, has a range of regulations and guidances around bicycles, which is great.

As a dad, I want to know about bicycles.

I also would love to know, like, what is the effect of this app in terms of its delivery of digital dopamine to my son and to my daughters?

And I think we need to start thinking about it, not just in a business model way, where we're constantly chasing these corporations as they shape-shift through antitrust law, and start thinking about it in a biomedical lens.

How do you feel about where we're headed on AI?

Because it does feel like we have failed to sufficiently regulate or deal with social media companies and those algorithms.

And now we are facing an even greater challenge that's going to arrive even quicker.

Yes, it is.

And we can't be caught unawares, as frankly, we were with social media.

I think a blanket point of view on AI is not going to serve us well because it's a general purpose technology.

So I give you two examples.

If we're going to use AI to accelerate drug discovery and narrow the number of endpoints that a new therapeutic could target and thereby make clinical trials cheaper and make it cheaper to get drugs to market, great, let's do it.

If we're going to use AI, because Mark Zuckerberg wants to have sensual, quote, sensual conversations, according to Facebook documents with 12-year-olds,

not signing up for that.

If we're going to use AI, actually I was visiting a company here in LA last year.

It's a defense and aerospace manufacturing company.

uses AI to basically do high mix, low volume manufacturing.

And it's not entirely automated.

There's humans in the loop, but it is creating good jobs in a way that is strengthening the United States supply chain.

Great.

I'm pro-tech, where it takes out costs and makes us more efficient.

But the American public deserve to have a say to make sure that technology is empowering us and is not just becoming another tool for these, particularly these social media corporations, to just attention frack us.

You mentioned cost disease.

Can you talk about cost disease?

I love talking about cost disease.

I hadn't heard it before.

We all know about inflation.

What is less obvious is that inflation is not evenly spread across the economy.

Some sectors inflate really fast and some sectors, actually, prices have gone down, like electronics.

And the sectors that are most infected by cost disease are housing, healthcare, utilities, local taxes.

And the reason is because they're very labor-intensive and they've had low productivity growth.

When you get your rent bill, when you get a utility bill for energy, when you get a health insurance premium for sure, that bill is afflicted with cost disease.

And Democrats have got to be doctors of cost disease.

We should be specific that our goal is to treat cost disease within housing, within healthcare, within utilities.

So how do we do that?

One,

we should cut regulations that are making it too hard to build stuff.

Housing here is a great example.

We need to build 5 million more units of housing across this country in the next five years.

We should adopt technology where it takes out cost.

Energy, great example.

We should be building five Hoover dams worth of nuclear power over the next five years.

Nuclear Nuclear power is safe, affordable, reliable.

We need to build a lot more of it in a standardized way.

And then we got to take on special interests where they are artificially keeping prices high.

Health insurance is a superb example.

John, your old boss, help Democrats see that fighting health insurance corporations turns out to be good policy and good politics.

I would like us to rediscover that.

In President Obama's 10 year, the central thrust of the fight was about coverage, coverage, right?

Let's get more Americans covered, pre-existing conditions, up until 26 on your parents.

We started talking about costs.

You did.

And then the more politically popular thing to do was to focus on coverage.

And vital.

And Medicaid expansion.

And we got work to do, right?

We got 90% of Americans.

We got 10% more to go.

I think that inflection point has arrived, though.

It's about costs now.

People have health insurance, but it doesn't feel affordable if it's going up 15% year over year and your out-of-pockets are $20,000.

I think the Democratic Party should say quite simply, we don't think anything's free in this world.

You pay health insurance premiums, but if you then get sick and a doctor tells you you need something, you don't have to pay out of pocket costs.

You're not paying twice for this service.

You pay one time and you get the service.

We spent an entire primary in 2020 arguing about the finer points of Medicare for All and Medicare for anyone who wants it or all the different versions of Medicare for All.

What would be the debate you'd like to have or you'd like to see in the next presidential election about healthcare?

Because I think think the easiest thing for some in the party is to lean towards universal coverage that has, you know, either Medicare expansion or Medicare takeover completely.

And, you know, that is attractive to some voters.

Then when they hear about the details, it's less attractive.

So how do you think about that debate?

Who Americans trust more to lower health care costs?

And it's a three-way choice.

Do Americans trust Democrats to lower health care costs?

Do they trust Republicans to lower health care care costs?

Or do they trust health insurance corporations to lower health care costs?

I want to have that debate.

And the answer is Democrats.

We will demonstrate that we will fight both Republicans if they're trying to

collapse Medicaid and health insurance corporations when they're using these pharmacy benefit managers and these group purchasing organizations and these prior auth bureaucracy to try to deny care.

We will fight both of them to lower health care costs for Americans.

And we will also attack the central drivers of health care inflation,

which is to say

we know the most expensive sites of care in this country.

It's intensive care units, it's long-term nursing facilities, it's jails,

it's emergency rooms.

And our key, our goal needs to be how do we deflect care from those expensive sites and do mental health on-site, do expand generic drug or medical device use so that we are basically

attacking the drivers of disease upstream rather than allowing them to compound into chronic disease.

But the central fight, before we get into those policy details, is about trust on cost.

Aaron Ross Powell,

you've talked about sort of both parties' turn towards populism, you know, first under Donald Trump.

And when we talk economic populism, it seems pretty clear there are good faith arguments on both sides of various policy debates around economic populism.

Politically, it seems to be be quite attractive to a lot of voters.

Obviously, the most recent and notable example is a New York City primary.

And it's not just New York City primary voters, but you see this in areas of the country that are swingier than New York City, where people

have such anxiety about rising costs and have such little trust in whether it's an insurance company, whether it's a bank, whatever it may be, that they are attracted to more economically populist policies.

Why shouldn't Democrats embrace what a lot of voters seem to want?

Aaron Powell, I think we should.

You could call it productive populism, but Democrats should absolutely sail to windward of a populist moment in American politics.

Here, though, is I think a distinction that Democrats need to be clear about with Republicans' version of populism, which is the Republican version of populism is based on fear.

It's telling Americans who to be afraid of, whether it is elites or immigrants or

other nations.

I think the democratic version has to be about improvement, an ethic of not just national improvement, but also self-improvement, about how we as a country can get better.

We want to be the party of improvement.

And to do that means we have to deliver.

We deliver at the local level, we deliver at the state level, we have to deliver at the federal level.

And this is why I think the momentum in the party right now is going to be more with mayors and with governors.

Because while we in Washington have to fight Trump and it's a righteous fight, we're in the minority of a trifecta.

And so I've recently helped launch this group called Majority Democrats.

32 of us, a handful of members of Congress, but actually the majority are mayors, lieutenant governors, governors, or soon to be governors.

And what we're trying to do is demonstrate that Democrats can deliver again, and we can deliver in a way that is picking fights with government or corporations.

This debate about, oh, it's the government that's the problem or it's corporations that are a problem, it's a stale debate.

It can be both.

And oftentimes, they're propping each other up.

Last question.

Living in an attention economy unfortunately means that political leaders need strategies to capture voters' attention.

Trump has certainly figured that out.

There's been a lot of discussion lately about how Gavin Newsom is figuring that out with his Twitter account.

What is your theory of attention?

Aaron Powell, it's the currency of politics and the most valuable

of it.

I guess I view it less as a political opportunity.

Maybe I should as a politician, but, and I view it more as a dad.

I have three young children.

John, I know you have two children as well.

And

I am fixated on the idea of how do I protect their attention and cognition from a society that's trying to monetize it.

And as we talked about earlier, this is a really emerging fault line for me is like, I want my kids to tie in real life effort to in-real real life outcomes.

I want them to have real friends.

I don't want them to have Zucks AI friends.

And

I want them to be able to have, I guess, like attention autonomy.

And candidly, I'm not sure I'm a great role model.

I'm on my phone more than I should be.

Right.

I bought a book recently called How to Break Up with Your Phone in 30 Days.

I made it to day two.

I've tried.

I've tried myself.

Right.

So like, I got to be better.

But that's, that's, when I think about attention, it's like,

it's less in terms of me being a politician, more in terms of me being a dad.

It's just, it's tough.

I think about this all the time because we're caught in this odd profession where

I could not agree with you more on what I want for my kids, what I want for myself, what I want for all of us.

And then it's like, okay.

Trump is dominating everyone's attention.

And if we want to win power back, we need great ideas.

We need new ideas.

We need to talk about the future, everything that you've been talking about.

We also need people to hear it.

Yes.

And I don't know how to play that game without falling further into the trap of all of our attention going to our screens and our phones.

Let me ask you a question.

Do you mind?

One thing I was impressed by with Mom Donnie is he seemed to use his online presence less as like a bulletin board for here's what I'm doing and more as a backstage past in real life experiences.

And that strikes me as a a thread to pull on for how we think about

engaging with voters going forward.

What's your thoughts?

I literally just talked about this yesterday.

Ben Reds and I did offline my other podcast about the internet breaking our brains.

And we mentioned this example, which is, I think the days of a politician standing behind a podium and sort of separating themselves from the voters

is gone.

And it doesn't feel authentic.

It doesn't feel authentic to how people communicate today in this information environment.

And so I think having these conversations, which aren't necessarily all, and I was a former speechwriter, but aren't prepared speeches, but you're just having conversations with voters and then you're letting everyone into those conversations is a good way to get people's attention.

I think that it's hard to resist the tactics that grab your attention with outrage or humor, which is a better version of that or anything else.

And I think politicians probably need some of that too.

But I think the core of what you're offering has to be, this is who I am.

This is who I really am.

The space between how I am in public and how I am in private has to be as narrow as possible.

You can't ever erase it, but it's narrow.

And if you come across that way to voters, then I think they're willing to give you a listen.

Agreed.

But it's tough.

It's a tough one.

Jake Auchinkla, thank you so much for stopping by and really appreciate it.

Pleasure to be on, John.

That's our show for today.

Thanks to Jake Auchenklos for coming on.

Love it.

We'll be back in the feed on Sunday with a special interview with comedian Mark Marin about the attention economy, how humor might help solve our polarization problems, and lots more.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Bye, everyone.

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