RFK Jr. Decapitates the CDC

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Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm Jon Favreau.

I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

Right here in studio.

Nothing like the collapse of our public health infrastructure.

Bring me the office.

So good to have you in Los Angeles.

Great to be here, John.

So we got a lot to talk about today, as usual.

Trump's telling Americans he can do whatever he wants as he gets ready to send troops to Chicago.

He's telling us, again, people want a dictator.

But it turns out people may not love their cities being occupied by their military, at least according to new polls.

So we're going to talk about that.

We'll also talk about how Democrats should handle this issue.

Speaking of Dems, we'll talk about the party's wildly successful, universally praised summer meeting in Minneapolis.

Wow, that's exciting.

The possibility for a midterm convention.

That's right.

And Gavin Newsom's concerns about 2028.

Not about him.

But let's start with the CDC news.

Hope no one was counting on easy access to vaccines or credible medical information anytime soon because RFK Jr.

has decapitated the leadership of the CDC like it was one of his dead whale carcasses.

Here's what we know so far.

Things are moving fast on this story.

Earlier this week, Kennedy announced that the new Maha FDA chose to limit the authorization of this year's COVID vaccine.

You're now only eligible if you're over 65 or have at least one underlying health condition.

The CDC vaccine panel, which Kennedy stacked with anti-vax kooks, still has to approve that FDA recommendation, which they're scheduled to consider at their meeting in September.

They also plan at that meeting to consider whether to keep authorizing vaccines for diseases like RSV, hepatitis B, and measles.

Kennedy, after this, then met with CDC Director Susan Menarez, who was just confirmed by the Republican Senate last month and asked for her resignation over what he said was insubordination over vaccine policy.

She refused.

He then said she could only stay if she fired senior CDC officials and agreed to accept whatever recommendations his anti-vax kook panel comes up with.

Dr.

Menares again refused.

She then called Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a doctor, who in turn called RFK Jr., and then this enraged Kennedy that she had told Cassidy and he called, and he then demanded that the CDC director resign.

She refused again, and then Trump fired her.

Four top CDC officials left as well and were literally escorted out of the building by armed security.

The officials were the CDC's chief medical officer, the doctor in charge of public health data, the doctor in charge of vaccine safety, and the doctor in charge of vaccine recommendations, who posted quite a resignation letter on Twitter, which reads in part, quote, I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public's health.

Cool stuff.

RFK Jr.

went on Fox and Friends Thursday morning to talk about the shake-up.

Take a listen.

What's your reaction to people that are getting a little worried?

The agency is in trouble and we need to fix it and we are fixing it and it may be that some people should not be working there anymore.

Yeah, he sounds like he's fixing it.

I have seen doctors and public health experts all over social media struggling to convey just how serious and dangerous all of this has been.

I know you've recently interviewed a few of those experts for the pod.

What do you think?

What are your takes on everything that's happened here?

So, you know, in the recent weeks, as RFK Jr.

has been sort of gutting our public health infrastructure, has been undermining vaccine policy, I talked to the healthcare writer of Tulgawande, Caitlin Gettalina, who is a leading epidemiologist and writes a very prominent Substack, and Dr.

Michael Osterholm, who runs a vaccine center at the University of Minnesota.

And in each one of those conversations, I raised the question with them about what does this mean for the actual safety and efficacy and availability of the vaccines that we care about.

And at each point, they all said to me, the reason you can remain confidence, even with these kooks around, as alarming as it is, and no one was saying not to be alarmed, but it's that there were still real, serious career scientists staffing the CDC and the FDA.

Oops.

That is no longer the case.

Like RFK Jr.

and Donald Trump have gutted our health infrastructure.

They have gutted the agency that monitors pandemics abroad.

They've gutted the agency that that deals with the availability, efficacy, and safety of vaccines.

They have gutted the agency that is tracking foodborne illness across the United States.

We are so much less safer than we ever possibly could be because of these decisions.

And what it really does, and I think this is a really alarming thing here,

is there is a real risk of a sort of deadly spiral on vaccines because the people who don't trust the government now run the government and are undermining vaccine policies from there.

So then the people who do trust the government have very real questions about can we trust this group of kooks to ensure that we're getting safe vaccines?

And you can see just a complete undermining of the vaccine system that has kept us safe for generations in this country because of the work.

Because we, Trump picked and the Republican Senate confirmed a anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist to be in charge of our vaccine supply.

It's incredibly, incredibly dangerous.

Quote, I think this is quite a negative and potentially catastrophic step for the country.

That's Admiral Brett Girorer, who's a physician who helped lead the response to the coronavirus pandemic during Trump's first term.

We remember him from the briefings.

And he advised Kennedy during the latest transition.

So this is not some liberal kook.

And this is, and Jerome Adams, who was the surgeon general for the first term, he's been criticizing this.

I mean, it is, it is not like, you know, a group of liberals and Democrats on Twitter.

This is, people are very, very alarmed.

Like you said, what happens if there's an Ebola outbreak right now?

What happened, like bioweapons,

the next pandemic?

Like, we just forget about whether they're kooks or not.

None of them have the experience.

And these were some of the best, most trusted officials who had served both Republican and Democratic administrations, including some in Trump's administration over the last couple of decades.

And now the CDC doesn't have that expertise anymore.

It's not just that they question the science.

It's they explicitly reject the science because it's science.

Because if you were to actually listen to the science, to actually take a moment to listen to the people who know what they're talking about, to look at the research,

just eviscerates their entire position on vaccines and so now we're gonna we're we basically we have our public health infrastructure is run by anti-scientists yeah and just so people understand what limiting the authorization for a vaccine like covet 19 actually means.

So they say, okay, you can get it if you're over 65.

It's authorized for people over 65 and for people with one comorbidity, one underlying health condition.

So of course it has not been approved yet by this CDC panel as well.

FDA already did this.

The COOK's over there now.

And now we're waiting for the CDC Cooks in September to approve this too.

If it is approved, that means if you or I wanted to get the COVID vaccine, we could try to ask our doctor.

But a lot of doctors know that if they prescribe something that is off-market, which this would be if it's not authorized for people like us, then they could be open to litigation, to lawsuits, to malpractice suits.

And so, you know, some doctors will probably say, sure, I'll still do it anyway because these people are fucking crazy, but others won't.

And another thing, a lot of people, most people get these vaccines at Walmart, CVS, places like that.

They're not going to administer them to people who aren't over 65 or have one underlying healthy condition.

So you're really going to have a lot of people who just don't get this vaccine.

And this is the COVID-19 vaccine.

The fact that they're going to look at and reconsider measles, hepatitis, I mean, it's like really fucking scary.

It's well, at least measles hasn't been in the news recently.

I mean, as you see, the guy that was in charge of vaccine recommendations, I read some of his resignation letter.

He also said in that letter, it's clear that he's never once, the senior leadership, he and his team have never once had the opportunity to brief Kennedy.

And it's clear that Kennedy is only listening to outside, to outside groups.

Yeah, like this is my point.

Like, he, Kennedy's position is absurd.

The scientific consensus around vaccines is so strong that it is impossible.

It is like being, he is like an anti-gravity or flat earth person.

Like, you can't, you can't have a conversation about it because you can't withstand one minute of scrutiny.

So, instead of testing, because like being an actual public service official and actually abiding by what he said he would do in his confirmation, what Kennedy is doing, he's avoiding having the conversation.

So, he doesn't have to test.

He doesn't have to try to defend his position and people actually know the answers because he will fail in a second.

And again, this is like, you know, going back to the pandemic.

This isn't about like vaccine mandates and you're forced to get this or that.

This is just about the availability of vaccines that have been tested, that have saved millions of lives, and people just saying, I think I want to choose that.

It's safe.

It's going to protect me.

And I'd like to choose it.

And basically, Kennedy and HHS and CDC and the government right now are going to say, no, you can't.

You can't.

Unless you can find it off market somewhere.

They know better than your doctor.

Kennedy tried to fire Menares.

He couldn't.

Trump had to do it.

So Trump, the White House said today that Trump hasn't commented on this yet, at least as of this recording, where it's Thursday afternoon.

But Caroline Levitt at the briefing said that Trump fired her.

And this guy, Jim O'Neill, who was a Kennedy advisor, is now going to be

the head of the CDC temporarily until they can find a permanent replacement.

This guy was a Peter Thiel advisor.

Cool.

And here's what he thinks of vaccines.

In January of 22, he tweeted, is Omicron Omicron the best vaccine?

Remember, CDC can redefine the word vaccine at will.

So his suggestion was if you get Omicron, that's the best kind of vaccine.

It's going to be really interesting to know whether they actually put up another person for this job.

Yeah.

I suspect they're not.

I suspect they're just going to run through whatever it is, 180 days of acting appointments until the midterms or for forever.

So unfortunately, Kennedy was also asked about the horrific mass shooting at a church in Minneapolis this week, which took the lives of two children.

I say unfortunately because it gave him a chance to say this.

We're

launching studies on

the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other

psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence.

So this is the new line.

J.D.

Vance also echoed that in a speech later on Thursday.

This is the idea that SSRIs treat people for depression, for anxiety.

And the idea here is kids are taking these, young people are taking these, and it's contributing to mental illness, even though they're prescribed to help mental illness.

It's contributing to mental illness, and that's causing mass shootings.

I would just note that in the United States America, it is much easier to buy an assault rifle than it is to get access to antidepressants.

I mean,

this is what they do, though, because there's this whole

debate debate around SSRIs, right?

And, you know, they have some downsides, some side effects, especially for people under 25, which is why the FDA has like a warning on them.

And doctors tend to monitor people, especially young people who are on them closely for the first couple weeks to make sure everything's okay.

After that, the record is...

excellent.

It has helped millions and millions of people who are on these drugs.

There is zero evidence that it contributes to mental illness or violence at all.

There are some, you know, there are some side effects.

People get off them too quickly.

You have to watch that.

So, you know, do it with the doctor.

But the idea now that we are going to blame mass shootings on antidepressants, it's just like,

and this is just one response to the horrific shooting in Minneapolis by the Republicans.

They have turned this whole thing into a culture war.

The shooter, 23 years old, took their own life.

It appears that the shooter was trans.

So they're, of course, blaming the fact that the shooter was trans on this, on the shooting.

It's said that the shooter in one video had like killed Donald Trump on the guns.

And so they're saying, oh, it was like an anti-Trump trans person that did it.

The shooter also had anti-Semitic, racist, anti-Latino, all kinds of other slurs written on the weapons.

The shooter worshipped other mass shooters, like the Christchurch right-wing shooter and other like extreme right-wing shooters, Timothy McVay, all this other crystal.

So clearly the person is just disturbed in a whole bunch of different ways that don't fit into a fucking political box, either way, which is typically the case, which is why you don't make every shooting about politics.

And this is all they can talk about now.

I mean, I've been in your office all day today, which means I've been watching more Fox News than I've watched in months.

And the Chiron all day is trans shooter.

I'm talking about this.

And trans violence.

This is their new thing.

All the mass shooters are trans now, which is just fucking horse shit.

The dialogue on this, frankly, the entire dialogue on it is so depressingly tedious, particularly after school shootings, where it's just like, it's so detached from the reality.

And it's like what the right is doing, I'm going to get to that in a second, is absolutely gross and horrendous.

But the whole conversation always is like, happens is that everyone runs and tries to find out, is this person Republican or Democrat?

Are they pro-Trump or anti-Trump?

And then we're going to make our whole case on that.

And I think that is so detached from, that's like a really a problem of the political class.

It's very detached from, I think, how real people feel about this.

Like, I think about this all the time, but just my daughter's elementary school is less than a mile from my house.

So every time I'm home during the school day and I hear a siren, my immediate instinct is that the worst thing might be happening.

Right.

Yeah.

And I think that's how every parent feels.

So you think that every time you drop your kid off at school, no matter where you live, big city, small town, it can happen anywhere.

And what it, and so just, and I think the response, everyone's response, the failure to be able to do anything about this, even though this is obviously the Republicans' fault that we have not been able to deal with guns in this country, is one reason why people are so detached and depressed about politics, because it's like, here's this thing that's happening that I worry about every single day that only happens here in the United States and we can't do anything of consequence about it.

It's very frustrating.

On the right, like what is happening here is

the way they respond to these shootings, whether it is turning into a culture war, making about trans, making about SSRIs or whatever it is, betrays the weakness of their position.

That like they're trying so hard to gaslight away from the most obvious fucking fact in the world, which is it is too easy to get guns in this country.

It's that simple because that's why it happens here.

It doesn't happen in all the other countries.

Like we don't, we are not a country that has, we don't have more mental illness than the rest of the world.

We don't have

other countries have trans people.

Other countries have mental illness.

Other countries have all the other shit.

The difference here is that you can walk into a store and you can walk out with a gun that same day.

And it's like, you know what, you fucking cowards?

Just say

we want people to have guns.

And that's it.

And we know that everyone having guns means there's going to be a bunch of mass shootings.

People are going to die.

But more important for our people to have guns to, you know, I guess defend themselves, to keep themselves armed in case the, in case the, in case there's government overreach.

Oops, I wouldn't want that, right?

And that's it.

But instead, they have to make up all these other fucking excuses and targets for people, which is just, it's disgusting.

The logical consequence of the Republican position here is that their strict reading of the Second Amendment means that they are willing to live with tragedies like this.

That is a price they believe is worth paying for

treating the Second Amendment the way they treat it.

Not the way it's been treated for most of the history of the United States, but the way it has been treated by Republicans in this moment, by the Supreme Court over the last 15 years.

And they will not own up to it, right?

Just admit it.

The other thing is that this debate has moved very quickly.

from, you know, a year ago during the campaign when it was, let's talk about the participation of trans people in sports, especially

young children.

It's moved from that to now, I mean, and there was always this contingent on the right, but now it's now it's like the Republican Party position, basically, which is being trans is just a mental illness and that it's not real.

Not even like, it's moved so, it's not even like, should we have gender affirming care?

Which age, this guy, no, and now it's just like kids who are allowed to be trans, the parents are doing them a disservice, the schools are doing them a disservice, and now they're going to get mental illness, and now they're going to kill people.

This is what they're saying.

It's just, it's fucking like it's, and honestly, by the way, that is not where the polling is.

Like, we've talked a lot about, this is, this is another thing where, you know, we've talked about immigration after the election, where the polling was and where it is now.

On every one of these issues, these culture issues that, you know, the consensus after the election is that, you know, Donald Trump,

you know, part of the reason he won was because of this, he has now gone so far to the other extreme, and everyone in his party has, that he is not in line with the polling on most of the shit, right?

You can have debates about trans participation in sports and you can look at the polling and be like, oh, we got some work to do.

But the idea that like trans people shouldn't exist,

that's not a majority position by any fucking stretch of the imagination.

And the way the Republicans have handled this and the way they've handled trans issues since Trump's been elected is the argument for why Democrats cannot back off on defending the rights, dignity, and humanity of trans people.

Yes.

Like you can, we can debate sports participation, you can debate the other issues, but you cannot back away on this because you have the President of the United States, you have members of one of our political parties demagoguing some of the most vulnerable people in our society and treating them as less than human.

And it is our responsibility.

It's our moral imperative to stand up for them.

And I think that that,

but this is beyond politics, but as you point out, doing that, treating humans as humans, to let people live their lives is good politics.

And again, like in a normal world, like you said, everyone who has children, people who who don't have children would just be saying, okay, two children were murdered praying in church and a whole bunch of others were injured.

And what can we do as a society about how to make sure that doesn't happen?

That's it.

Without doing all of this bullshit.

You know, and one way is maybe, maybe we can limit the availability of guns.

People still having the right to have guns, but maybe we can do something to limit the availability of guns or to make sure we do background checks or to make sure they don't get in the hands of people who are mentally ill or make sure they don't get into the hands of people who've already committed crimes.

Maybe.

So, unbelievably, all these statements from RFK aren't even his most upsetting of the week.

We're back to RFK.

This didn't get a ton of attention for some reason, but at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Kennedy gave the following update to Trump.

We're finding

interventions, certain interventions now that are clearly, almost certainly causing autism.

And we're going to be able to address those in September.

So, again, he's referencing September.

That's the meeting where they're going to reconsider some of the authorizations on these other vaccines.

Kennedy has previously said for a long time that he thinks there's a link between vaccines and autism.

There is no link.

No science, no evidence has ever shown any kind of link there.

Trump has also flirted with this idea as far back as like 2014, I think.

Bill Cassidy, the Republican senator who's, again, supposed to be a doctor.

and was very concerned about RFK's nomination, but then voted yes anyway because he just wanted to give him a chance.

He has now called for the CDC vaccine panel meeting to be postponed because of, quote, serious allegations that have been made about the meeting agenda, membership, and lack of scientific process.

And he said that if it goes forward, quote, any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy.

Would have been nice if he had weighed in on the lunatics on the panel and Kennedy by just voting no on his nomination, but here we are.

What, if anything, do you think Democrats in Congress and maybe Bill Cassidy can do here?

I think to make this this work, you would need to build a bipartisan coalition of senators, potentially members of Congress as well, who want to fix the situation of the CDC or improve the situation and hold RFK Jr.

accountable.

And so you could do this in a couple of ways.

You could, like, they control the power of the purse.

Like in whatever government funding bill we're going to discuss, there could be some specific funding, like restrictions or guidelines around how they, about how they can spend their money.

You could demand in exchange for funds more transparency, regular briefings and hearings you could uh in negotiations if you had a majority there or you had a true bipartisan coalition you could try to force new members on on the committee or a revamping of the committee get more legitimate scientists on there but it would like the question you asked question what can democrats do democrats can do very little because we have no power and we're not in a world where there is a specific HHS appropriations bill moving through Congress because the appropriations process is broken.

So this would have to be something that took place in the larger government funding discussion.

You could shut down the government over this.

Yeah, or you could

write it into the deal.

But it's just easier when you have a specific bill for a specific agency where you have more leverage.

The power of the purse is more important than when it was more powerful.

You have more leverage than if you're doing the whole thing.

But you really need Republicans here to go along.

And maybe Cassidy will do it.

Maybe there are some others who will, but you need more than just Cassidy and maybe like Collins, Murkowski.

And I don't know how Mitch McConnell is feeling about vaccines today.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess what Democrats can do then is make it a big enough issue and keep the drumbeat going so that when we get to the government funding fight, this is one of the things that becomes a sticking point in the funding.

I mean, you know, we'll talk about this, I'm sure, in the coming weeks as we get closer to the funding fight, but we are now piling up a bunch of very big problems, crises in this government that are making it, I think, easier for Democrats to say, look, we're going to fund this kind of fucking health agency.

We're going to fund this ICE agency.

We're going to fund these fucking, this tariff policy.

Like we're getting close to that, I think.

It's hard to overstate how far out of the mainstream RFK Jr.

and Trump are on vaccines.

Yeah.

Like extremely.

And just public health in general at this point, because it's definitely vaccines, but it's also, I mean, pandemic preparedness, Ebola, all the stuff that we talked about.

The polling on the coronavirus vaccine is very polarized on partisanship.

But on all the other vaccines, we are at like 90% trust.

So like they are in the far, far, far minority here.

And so I think whether it's through the government funding fight, whether it's through yelling and screaming about this, like actually drawing attention to this is important because you want this to feel so messy for Trump, who I think is like

kind of, he is vaccine skeptic, antagonist, like agnostic, sort of.

Like he sort of tried when RFK Jr.

came on board to like push back on the idea of this.

Like you want to make this really messy for the Republicans in in the Senate, the House, and the Trump White House.

Yeah, it was the maybe the most successful initiative of his first term.

Yeah, I mean, he's a operation workspeed.

He's a vaccine.

He was getting boosted all the time.

He's over 65.

He'll probably get his COVID booster.

We say a lot that this, like, you know, Dem should talk about this and make noise about this, you know, name your issue.

But I do think on this one, this is people's health, getting their kids vaccinated, making sure that their family has good medical care, can follow good medicine, and trust credible medical information coming from the government.

That's important to people.

That is one that I think resonates with people and that they're going to experience in their daily lives.

I mean, every parent at the beginning of the school year is certifying their kids' vaccines.

Yeah.

Right.

Like it's something that is very much in your life on a very frequent basis.

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You might be outbid on the perfect summer house.

Your kid might not attend your alma mater, or your yacht might be jostled by stormy waters.

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So we've all become used to the ritualistic Trump fluffing at cabinet meetings now.

Must have been some real tendinitis

after the one.

I don't want to get explicit, but where's the tendinitis?

Where do you think it is, Dan?

That's a good answer.

Three and a half hours.

Three and a half hours of Trump fluffing in the last cabinet meeting this week.

We have an excellent compilation that our producers put together.

Let's listen.

Mr.

President, I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor because you are really the transformational president of the American Worker, along with the American flag and President Roosevelt.

And there's only one thing I wish for, that that Nobe

finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Noble piece, this Nobel

Talked Army, And you, sir, are restoring trust to government.

I do believe we're in a revolution.

1776 was the first one.

1863 or so with Abraham Lincoln was the second.

This is the third with Donald Trump leading the way.

And we are saving America.

How do these people, like, how do they keep a straight face?

I mean,

they don't believe that.

I assume not, but I'm not so sure anymore.

I think people can convince themselves of some really crazy shit.

I want to believe that before the cabinet meeting, before he walks in, they're all doing like a bit with each other and they're like having a fun competition.

Like, okay,

who can be the best?

I don't know.

We know that Marco Rubio has got jokes, right?

That's what we've heard on the Katie Miller podcast.

So maybe Marco Rubio is sort of organizing and maybe it's like a pool.

I don't think so.

I think that they were too afraid of getting caught doing that and then being kicked out of the club.

Three and a half hours, Dan.

Three and a half hours.

Like Fox cut away.

We were, because we were watching it.

And like, and I had been in a meeting and I came back and I was looking on Twitter and I still see Aaron Rupar and ACYN sending clips around from the cabinet meeting.

I'm like, it's been three hours.

What is happening?

Yeah.

It's no substance.

No substance at the meeting.

Just total fluffing.

Like, I love my parents, but I don't think I could in public talk about them in the same way.

Like,

this is how our cabinet meetings went, right?

Yes, it's very similar.

Barack Obama would lose his mind if anyone was ever that that obsequious in his presence.

And I know everyone's like, oh, you know, everyone loved Obama, blah, blah, blah, was a cult.

But like, he got extremely uncomfortable in cabinet meetings when it seemed like people were just in any meeting.

Any meeting, but also, you know, in the cabinet meetings, the pool comes in, right?

And so in the pool, then you have like a sort of a fake cabinet meeting while the press is there and everyone gives like little reports.

Actually, we had like one person give a report.

Like each new meeting, there would be like a different cabinet member giving a quick report and then Obama would say something and then the

agenda.

The press would leave, and there'd be a real agenda.

Usually, the press would just be there for Obama's opening remarks, and then that would, and then they would leave.

And then, so here's the thing: you do a fake meeting for the press, then you do a real meeting.

They never did the real meeting in this case, they just did the fake meeting for three and a half hours.

Yeah, even the real meeting is not like, I mean, it's kind of fake, it's kind of fake, right?

But and what we say that we were, we were in the outside of the cabinet.

We were definitely in the outside.

There's the people around the table, and there's chairs all around.

And you had to give up your phone, and that was fucking brutal.

Yes, because it's like I wasn't talking.

That's for sure.

I'm going to speed through the SBA presentation here.

It's going.

Anyways, nothing like this.

So Trump's cabinet giving him the Kim Jong-un treatment.

It's clearly going to his head because here he is musing about himself as a dictator for the third time in the last few weeks.

So the line is that I'm a dictator, but I stopped crime.

So a lot of people say, you know, if that's the case, I'd rather have a dictator.

If he stops crime,

he can be whatever he wants.

Not that I don't have

the right to do anything I want to do.

I'm the president of the United States if I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities.

The statements and the sentiment are, of course, not new by now.

You know, I mean, I think it was very early on in the administration.

He tweeted that, you know, he who saves his country cannot violate any law, the Napoleon quote, or at least the quote that's attributed to Napoleon.

He seems to be saying it a lot more frequently these days.

The White House, I think, told, I think it was Politico, oh, he's just doing it to knock down all those silly dictator accusations.

He's just taking it on because it's so ridiculous.

Is that what's happening?

He seems to really enjoy the dictator part of the job.

Like it is his favorite part.

He's not really digging into the substance of policy issues.

And he really likes sending the military places, having parades in his favor, being feted by his cabinet member for three and a half hours.

And like he will say, I'm not really a dictator.

But there's no enthusiasm in that part.

All the enthusiasm is in the, look at all the things I can do.

I'm a dictator.

So yeah, I think he's like, we know know this is what he values in leadership.

These are the people around the world he admires.

It's not the Democrats.

It's the dictators.

So it shouldn't be surprising.

What's really dangerous here and what, and we're going to talk about the occupied, occupied D.C., maybe soon to be occupied Chicago and sort of the politics around crime.

But what drives me nuts about the whole debate around crime or immigration is what he's saying there, which is, I can do whatever I want if the country's in danger, right?

Same with the tweet, he who saves his country violates no law.

What he is setting up there is

whatever happens, whatever I decide to do, all I have to say is that there's an emergency in the country, that we are in danger, whether in danger from immigrants, from protesters, from

Democrats.

I don't know, we didn't even play this clip.

I forgot about it.

Stephen Miller was on Fox earlier this week.

He literally said, the Democratic Party isn't a party.

It is a domestic extremist group.

That's what Stephen Miller said.

They are setting it up so that they can do whatever they'd like with the military, with their secret police force, to anyone in the country and say, it is because there's an emergency, because the country's at risk.

I mean, this is textbook fascism.

This is how fascist regimes happen.

They fake a threat, they seize power to protect people from that fake threat, and they never give it back.

And it's just like, and we're going to look back on it and be like, well, at the time, he just said it was about fighting crime and

people want crime to go down or he said it was about immigration and people were really upset about the border.

How could it have been about this?

Some of those protesters turned violent.

Of course we wanted to bring in the troops.

So those comments were part of a longer rant about sending troops to Chicago, why it's so offensive to him that J.B.

Pritzker won't ask him to do it before he does it anyway, which it seems like he will, after he posted about Chicago on Thursday and said, quote, the people are desperate for me to, all caps, stop the crime, something that Democrats aren't capable of doing.

All caps, stay tuned.

Exclamation, exclamation, exclamation, President DJT.

Again, the Gavin tweets are the ones that are silly, right?

Those are the ones that are.

The administration has also asked for Naval Station Great Lakes, which is just north of the city, Chicago, to offer logistical logistical support for what Christine Noam is calling an ICE strike team that is on its way to Chicago.

Meanwhile, in occupied D.C., armed troops are still patrolling the streets.

The federal government has seized control of Union Station.

So that's cool.

Mayor Muriel Bowser got criticism from the D.C.

Council after saying she, quote, greatly appreciates the surge of officers and believes that crime is going down, though she did also say that the masked ICE agents are unhelpful and that the National Guard presence is unnecessary.

The New York Times reports that Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb hosted a call with other big city mayors to talk strategy around Trump's deployment, where he urged a, quote, serious on safety, serious on cost messaging strategy.

The big undercurrent in the Times story is Democrats worrying about appearing soft on crime because of their opposition to the president's military occupations of major American cities.

It's going to kill me.

Right?

Like you say the sentence and you're like, maybe it wouldn't be soft on crime.

Polls are mixed on this.

So there was a new AP poll that shows that 55% of Americans support the use of the military and guard in assisting local police.

Trump was not attached to this.

It was not asked as a, do you support what's happening right now?

But in that same poll, 55% oppose the federal government taking control of local police.

On the other hand, voters in a new Quinnipiac poll this week oppose Trump's D.C.

deployment by 56 to 41.

And a new Reuters poll has just 36% of Americans approving of Trump's takeover, while 46% oppose.

Polls also show that D.C.

residents fucking hate it, which is also evident by the fact that the Justice Department has now failed to get multiple indictments from multiple grand juries in D.C.

for charges involving alleged assaults on federal officers, including Sandwich Guy.

Oh, sandwich guy got off.

They didn't get sandwich guy.

He's gonna, well, he's gonna get charged with a misdemeanor because they couldn't even get a fucking grand jury to indict the guy.

Really bring the lie to the idea you can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

Dan.

It's there.

It just came to you.

It just came to you.

I mean, should we take a moment right now, speaking of great sandwich jokes, to point out what's soon to be available in the Crooked Store?

Thanks, Dan.

I mean, I was shocked and disappointed by this, but you tell us.

Well, Lovett had the idea of having a t-shirt with a sandwich on it, and underneath the sandwich, it says hero, which is a name for a sandwich.

It was pointed out by Sol, our producer.

Yeah, it took a solid minute to get it.

He got there.

He did get it.

They also wanted us to wear it during the day.

It was the back of my chair.

We're going to end up on Fox anyway.

I don't need to be wearing that shirt while we do.

That's right.

Wait, we get to the Democratic section.

Then we'll be on Fox.

That's where we really shine.

I do think there's something to be said for all jokes about the sandwich guy aside.

It is extremely rare for grand juries not to indict.

Oh, yeah.

I have the status winner on Twitter, which I don't know why this is dated to 2010, but in 2010, there were 163,000 federal prosecutions and they failed to get an indictment in 11 of them so that's a 99.993 percent success race because i am because i'm not a lawyer didn't go to law school not like levitt and took the else hats and got a high score uh i looked this up the other day not about this but way back when it seemed like all of our colleagues might be getting indicted for the russia gate hoax and i was like why do grand juries turn at the bag indictments like so so many times And I didn't realize like in many cases, there's no judge there.

There's no defense attorney.

It's just the prosecutor.

The prosecutor has, they run the evidence or they present the evidence.

And they also instruct the grand jury on what the law is.

So they have enormous power here with really no sort of dissenting, opposing argument.

Yeah, the point of it is to prove to a jury that you have probable cause for the charge.

Right.

Yeah.

And the standard is obviously much, much lower.

So the fact that they couldn't get that, it does tell you that people in D.C.

might be getting, I know, D.C., extremely democratic city, but it might tell you people are getting pretty rapid

against the military takeover.

Is any on video throwing the sandwich?

Yeah.

I think the reason is he's throwing the sandwich.

It's not a felony.

Of course, you can't be throwing fucking sandwiches at police officers or federal officials, but misdemeanor, which is what he's getting charged with and not a felony, which is the way the law is supposed to work.

Back to crime.

What's your sense of where public opinion is on this?

We have talked about, I don't know if you and I have had the conversation about the DC takeover.

We've had it privately, obviously, a million times, but I don't think we've had it on Mike.

Please.

Maybe correct us.

We literally might have done it last week.

You can all correct us.

Yeah, I don't know.

But what do you think?

I mean,

I think it's worth just acknowledging that the politics of crime are complicated.

So in 2024, two-thirds of Americans told Gallup that crime was up over the previous year.

Crime was down.

And this is not a new phenomenon.

TikTok broke our brains sort of situation.

In every year since the year 2000, a majority of Americans have thought crime has gone up.

Most years, crime went down.

And it's because there's a couple of reasons for this.

One is the news,

this is a worse problem now in social media, but for the beginning, as long as there's been television, the news has led with crime.

So if there is one murder in your community, it will be on the news for like six weeks at a time.

Right.

So it never gives you an accurate, you know, the news covers the bumps, not the road.

The second is people, and the polling also shows that people are very, think of crime as a serious problem, even when statistically they have no reason to be very worried about crime.

But people's fears are not rational.

A conversation you and I have about flying all the time.

Where it's like you.

I thought you were going to say, flying too.

And also a conversation we had about inflation, right?

This is a different subject, but like, you can't be like, oh, the statistics, the economy is doing great.

And someone's like, well, actually, it's fucking expensive.

Well, if someone's saying, when someone's scared of something, you can't, like, telling them that they're more likely to die from a piano falling on their head than whatever they're worried about.

Like this is this is an ongoing frustration of Barack Obama's because remember everyone was worried that ISIS was going to come to their mall and attack them.

And it's like the odds of that are so small.

And you have all these other ways in which you could die.

Like you're, you're at risk for every time you get a car, much more at risk when you get a car etcetera.

So people's fears are irrational.

And Republicans have a strength on crime, right?

Trump.

He had a one-point advantage on crime in a poll recent that happened in 2024.

But every other issue, he's underwater.

This is an issue where he is not underwater, although there has only been limited polling on crime up until very recently.

So you hear that in Denver.

People are like, avoid his trap.

Don't fall in his trap.

He wants you to talk about crime instead of tariffs.

Well, if the president invades a U.S.

city, the United States capital, with armed military, it's kind of hard not to talk about.

So you probably find the best way to talk about it.

My view of it is that you can't make it about crime.

You can't say, like...

I have just told you the facts that crime has actually gone down and it's gone down a lot in D.C.

It's one of the largest drops in violent crime in history year over year.

But telling people that is not basically your best play here because then it does sound like you are minimizing crime.

I think you should make this be about the fact that this is a stunt.

It's a giant waste of taxpayer resources and it's happening against the wishes of the local officials and the local, most importantly, the local police.

Yeah, it's tough because if someone thinks that the presence of troops and extra cops and everything else is about, okay, well, there's more cops on the beat.

And so that seems good because most people think more cops means it's going to be safer, especially if I saw it.

And it's not just about.

But Bill Clinton ran on that promise.

Right.

And it's also not just about people.

Okay, well, you could say, like, how many people have actually experienced a crime?

It's not just about experiencing a crime, though it is about that, but it's just about like public disorder, right?

Like if you see,

if you see, if you're on a subway, if you're on a street corner, you see someone screaming and yelling at somebody, like you're like, okay, this is kind of scary, right?

And so it's about more than that.

And if, but if you think that like, that ICE is about deporting the worst of the worst, and you think about, and you think that extra cops is about bringing down crime, then you're going to say, well, this all seems fine to me.

But if you're walking around the city and suddenly they're tasing delivery drivers

and people in masks and hauling them off and throwing them in a van and you're seeing all these troops armed just in your city day after maybe maybe a couple days, it's no big deal.

Maybe a couple couple of weeks, it's no big deal, but like day after day after day.

And then you're going to be like, I don't know.

Is this really about crime?

Because this seems pretty.

And to your point about the stunt, I think everyone who saw the National Guard troops just picking up trash in DC because there was nothing really else for them to do, they probably don't think, oh, this is scary, but they probably think, yeah, this is maybe a little bit of a waste here.

That's what I think the right argument here.

So the hard part is, like, yes, if you live in the city, you will, you have, like, you experience the disorder to the extent it exists.

You know, if you live in in a city and you like have to get, you have to get someone at Walgreens or Dwayne Reed or CVS to get, let you get deodorant every single time because they're so worried about shoplifters.

Like that, that's, that contributes to how people feel about public safety.

But most people don't live in cities or a lot of people don't live in cities.

And so they're not seeing the National Guard.

They're also not experiencing the crime.

Now, people who don't live in cities are actually oftentimes more afraid of crime.

Right.

They live in the city.

Because they watch the local news, which is about the city that they live near.

I mean, there was a time in which people were so afraid of crime that they wouldn't put sports arenas in cities.

Right.

They would put them in the suburbs because they thought people from suburbs wouldn't go in the cities because they were so afraid.

And so I just think that

the argument that Democrats should ignore this is not a real argument because it's not possible to ignore it.

You cannot be someone who is a member of the opposition party who has taken an oath to the Constitution and then say, I am just going to stay silent on the military occupation.

of one American city, possibly spreading to others, because it doesn't pull well.

So you just have to figure out how to talk about it.

And I do think

the way to do it is to sort of ally the crime trap and try to treat it as a stunt that's a waste of taxpayer resources that runs against the environment.

It's not what people in the city or the people who run the city or the people who protect the city actually want.

Also, people don't want crime, but I bet if you ask them, do you want a situation where there are these masked agents setting up vehicle checkpoints, asking for people's papers,

who look like they might be undocumented immigrants, who have brown skin,

or in some cases, just anyone.

And they're stopping the cars and they're saying, where's your papers?

I don't think people like that.

Like,

throw that in a poll because I don't think that's how people want to live in this country.

So I do think it's like, it's about framing it in a way.

And by the way, that was happening in Tennessee.

It happened in D.C.

on 14th Street.

Like, I just don't think people want to live like that either.

And there's some, like, this is incredibly dangerous.

There was a moment, you know, as you guys talked about on Tuesday, they're now carrying the National Guard's now carrying weapons in DC for no reason

that has been articulated.

But at some point,

something bad is going to happen, something Ken state level is going to happen.

And that could be the sort of thing that fundamentally changes the fabric of this country, both in how the public reacts to it and how Trump uses it.

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All right, speaking of the Democratic Party trying to figure out what to do about our descent into fascism, boy did they nail it at their at the annual summer meeting in Minneapolis this week.

So this event had everything.

Land acknowledgements, competing Gaza resolutions, worries about fundraising, polling presentations that advised ditching the phrase tough on crime for serious about safety.

Even a proposal for a new fight song, which we will get to in a bit.

No surprise that the coverage of the event, which was for some reason live-streamed, focused almost entirely on the party's internal conflicts with a heavy dose of mockery.

To be fair, the party did have some wins.

Democrats flipped a state Senate seat in Iowa this week with a 20-point overperformance, and the DNC had invested in the organizing around that race, so they took some credit for that.

But overall, the consensus seemed to be that the meeting wasn't exactly Democrats putting the party's best foot forward.

Afterwards, Democratic operative Adam Jenelson told the bulwarks Lauren Egan, quote, it would probably be better for the party as a whole if the DNC just turned the lights off and padlocked the building for the next two years.

What do you think?

I think the whole thing is maybe a microcosm of all of our problems, which is you have in Iowa this great win, right?

Like we, we know we do well in special elections.

We're actually in 2025, we're doing about five to six points better in special elections than we were doing in 2017.

So I think that like there is evidence that underneath the challenges we're having at the party establishment level, that people are doing the work and winning races.

And that's very important.

Did you see that turnout was 55% of the 2022 midterms in that district?

That's high for a special election

in the summer of 2020.

So like that, that is the positive part here.

It is the establishment of the party, which is embodied by the DNC, which is a collection of, whatever it is, 400 some party chairs, party committee people, just like the absolute establishment of the establishment that is still struggling to reckon with the moment we are in right both i mean and i will i will stipulate i've been in politics a long time the dnc has been a shit show almost for the entire time of my my career and particularly when we're in it exists to be a punching bag and a shit show like when you have the white house the dnc is a political arm of the white house and it usually is neither you don't ever really hear from it it just it raises money it organizes it does what the white house wants when you're in opposition it becomes the vessel for everyone's anger about the party even though it has so little power and so little influence.

Yeah.

Like everyone thinks the DNC like makes messaging decisions, picks candidates, can fix presidential elections and all these things.

And it's really,

it's basically in a presidential election, it's a bank account for the nominee with some organizing on the side.

Here's my big criticism of the whole event.

Why did they live stream it?

Why did they just, if you're going to have a meeting and you're going to have polling presentations and you're going to do the whole thing and just talk about shit, like just don't.

I mean, you can have, I I guess you have press there.

I don't know.

Like, they can have just, they can just have a fucking meeting.

I mean, it's open press.

Like, I get that some parts are open press.

I'm sure they've been live streaming it for 100 years, like, since live streaming was available.

Well, then, if you're going to live stream it, do we need to start with the land acknowledgement?

Is that something that we have we not learned our lesson?

First of all, and it's not like the land acknowledgement, like, do we think the land acknowledgements do anything?

Do we give back the land?

Like, we probably should.

Do we go do, maybe people should go do something to help Indigenous Americans in the country instead of just acknowledging the fact that that hundreds of years ago, something horrific happened on that land.

I don't know.

It's what are we doing?

Like it, it's very hard to

think about what we should do as a party and reverse engineer it from what is going to make it Fox and Friends.

Like I don't want us to do that.

But there does need to be a little more savvy about the whole picture that is painted, right?

Just a touch.

Just a little touch more savvy.

Like what, like, what is the story you're telling with this?

Like, there is a a world in which you could use this to, like we have a bunch of exciting candidates, like really exciting candidates.

We've had to the credit of the Senate and House, we've recruited a bunch of great candidates to run.

The Sherrod Browns, Rory Coopers, a bunch of really interesting people running for House, veterans, former like fired federal government scientists and people working in the VA.

You could highlight those people.

We're winning races instead of doing that.

Instead, The DNC, which has no real say in a lot of these issues, I know we're going to get to the Gaza resolution in a second, is putting itself in the middle of it.

And I think one challenge here is,

I don't know what the answer is, but

there was a, Ken Martin won the DNC race.

He was the most insider of insider candidates, right?

He was the chair of the Association of Democratic Party chairs.

He'd been a party chair for a long time.

He'd been a very successful party chair to his credit.

But he won the race because he had a relationship with all the other party chairs, which is a huge part of the voting block.

But it was a continuation of what the DNC had been.

I know he's trying to make changes, but like after 2024, you probably needed someone who's going to come in a little bit like Howard Dean did when he won the DNC, who's going to like knock it over and start from the beginning.

And so we're kind of making, we're not making any real wholesale changes.

We're just kind of making cosmetic changes around the edge and it's not working.

Publicly.

Like, I mean, we did.

That's the thing.

And it's the public aspect that's the tough part, right?

Because I think that Ken Martin would say and did say to me when I interviewed him, it's like, you know, he's been investing and organizing and doing all this stuff.

And, you you know, that's why they took credit for the Iowa thing and good for them.

And he is an organizer at heart.

There is a larger problem with the DNC and just the party in general.

It's like Ken Martin is not going to be able to fix.

Yes.

The DNC is an embodiment of the party's larger problems.

Yes.

And

it doesn't seem like they really dug into those that much or at least made a lot of progress,

you know, projecting an image of the party that has learned anything from the last defeat.

Right.

I think that's the bigger thing is you can't expect the DNC to solve the problem.

You can't expect them at the 20 August 2025 annual summer meeting, I guess it is, to have like figured everything else out.

But there was probably a way to be a little more deliberate in the public presentation of what the party was doing.

For example, I'm just thinking of this now, like, so that that candidate who just won in Iowa, invite that person to come speak there.

It's some of the recruits that we have that are exciting candidates in some of these swing districts.

Invite them to come.

I bet they wouldn't come.

That's the problem.

Yes.

But I mean, I think this is.

Yeah, I know you're right.

We're going to get to this, the other convention idea going on, but one of the challenges is if you're Roy Cooper or Sherrod Brown, you don't want to be

there.

You don't have that.

Yeah.

You don't have the taint of the DNC being on you.

Yeah, that makes sense.

While all this was going on, Gavin Newsom did a big live interview with Politico where he did not mince words.

I think we have some tape.

This guy doesn't believe in free, fair elections.

He tried to wreck this country.

Were you there January 6th?

Tried to light democracy on fire.

He dialed for 11, almost 12,000 votes.

Now he's doing it in plain sight.

And people say, Oh, just Trump being Trump.

You think he's joking about 2028?

You think when he brings foreign leaders to the Oval Office and he goes to the White House store, have you seen this?

Anyone?

Is it just me?

And he shows on the 2028 hats, he's not being serious.

Wake up.

You will lose your country.

I mean, that's one way to do it.

Yeah.

Right?

Now,

I caught a couple lines from Ken Martin's speech.

And, you know, he was doing the like, we got to fight fire with fire thing.

And he was trying to, you know, be tough like Gavin.

But again, that's one person in a whole meeting that gets.

It's not that the people there don't want to fight.

No, it's, yeah, it's not that.

It's just it looks too.

Like, like, I kind of like, we're hammering on them.

And I'm not trying to defend them in any way, shape, or form, but there was no way this was going to go well.

Right.

There was just absolutely no way because

there's ways it could have gone better.

It could have gone better, but it's just Democrats are mad at Democrats right now.

So it's one that, like, if you have a great meeting and the Republicans are going to shit on it no matter what the meeting is, but if Democrats are mad at the party, as they have every right to be right now, then it's, you just create this,

you're pleasing no one with anything you do.

I do think and wish very much that more Democrats would find their own inner Gavin Newsom.

And what I mean by that is not

just do exactly what he's doing and then try to do the tweets that his office is doing and then say the same things that he's like, like do, find your, find what's making you upset and what's really bothering you and where you think the country should go.

And like go say that more and be less caught.

I mean, we've talked about this, but like be less cautious.

And again, I'm not even saying that like, you know, Gavin Newsom is going to be our best nominee, right?

Like I'm not, I'm just saying in this moment, in the summer of 2025, there should be more Democrats sounding like that.

I think the, I wrote about this in my newsletter of the message box this week, but there is a fundamental divide in the Democratic Party.

And we have divides on every issue.

Like, as I wrote, we're divided over Ezra Klein's writings.

Okay.

Like, we can't.

We're about to talk about Gaza.

Yeah.

Like,

so we're divided on everything.

But I really do believe that the big fundamental divide in the party, and Alyssa Slotkin has talked about this a lot, which is people who think Trump is an existential threat to democracy, which Gavin Newsom does.

And a lot of people who think that Trump is very, very bad, but survivable, that our goal here is to just make it to 2026 and then make it to 2028.

And that if you are in the Gavin Newsom camp, you need to think outside the box.

You have to be willing to embrace high-risk strategies that push the envelopes, are willing to run over norms or previous or previously held positions.

And if you're in the latter camp where I think Chuck Schumer is, I think Richard Whitmer is,

you just think very differently.

And I think more people should be in the Gavin Newsom camp.

I am in the Gavin Newsome camp.

But I've really found that to be the way to understand how people think about things because the DNC meeting is, even if people use the public rhetoric that sounds a version of what Gavin Newsom says, the way that they keep doing things the same way suggests that they are in the this is bad but survivable camp.

Yes.

And I'll give you an example of why this is not ideological necessarily or even old versus young or even are you going to go hard at Trump or not?

Bernie Sanders.

Bernie sanders has been acting now for several years like he believes that we're in an existential emergency he hits donald trump whenever he can but he also has his bernie thing right he he believes that the oligarchy is the problem and and he's very economically populous he's been consistent about this for his whole career but he's out there pulling huge crowds probably the most popular politician in the party and um and he's acting like this is an existential threat right completely different could not be more different than gavin noosom in a whole bunch of different ways it's it is interesting like we we can, I could do a whole podcast on this, but like Bernie Sanders, I'm interpreting this, but believes that Donald Trump is the symptom of the larger problem he's been talking about for years, which is the oligarchy, an unfair economy, a rigged economy.

And Newsom, who I think doesn't necessarily disagree with Bernie on some of the things about the economy, thinks Trump is the problem.

And like Alyssa Slackin, right?

Who you just mentioned.

You know, former, former CIA.

Yeah.

She's in that camp too.

So it's like, it's all kinds of people.

But and then, and then I, what the people I really worry about, I don't know if I'm just going to name, I'm not going to name names here, but.

No, please do.

Well, because I can't think all of them, but the people who I think believe we're in an existential crisis, but do not sound like it.

You know, like some people have thought about it and are like, I think this is survivable and I'm just going to act that way.

There's some people who they just don't, they can't get themselves there, you know?

They can't get emotional about it.

And I don't want emotional, but like they don't, they don't have the passion.

They don't have the fire in the belly.

And they're just sort of, you know, very just analytically talking about it.

I'm like, what?

What are you doing?

I think it's a poverty of imagination.

Yes.

I think it is very, very hard.

I think this is, you guys talked about why everyone's shrugging about what's going on.

I think it's very, very hard to imagine what is happening to America actually happening here because it was impossible to imagine just a year ago.

The idea that you would have a politicized law enforcement agency, law enforcement agencies that would be prosecuting people's political opponents, that you would have military marching in the streets.

Like that seemed the idea that democracy could crumble.

Like we believed it could last forever.

We've believed that for a very long time now.

And certainly believe that the only thing that could stop it would be a foreign power and not something internal.

And so, I think for a lot of politicians, particularly ones who've been around a long time, there are exceptions like Bernie, it just cannot fathom this is actually happening and are unable to think about it in real ways, talk about it in real ways, think about it in real ways, and then embrace the solutions that are proportionate to the threat.

Yeah, that's well said.

And I, and

there's, there's just a lot of, there's a lot of trying, like, almost like trying on a costume.

Well, that's the fake bullshit.

It's the fake bullshit.

You get a lot.

I've said this before, like a lot more of them are swearing.

Like they think if they swear a little bit, they drop a few fucks, then suddenly everyone's going to be like, oh, they're tough now.

I'm for the swearing.

I think it's fine.

I'm only for the swearing if you swear normally.

If this is how you talk.

You know, unfortunately, this is how we do it.

I wish I swore less on this, but like this is how we talk.

And if that's how you really talk, then like, go do it.

But some of the, some of them drop it mid-conversation.

You're just like, where'd that come from?

I've never met a politician who didn't swear a a lot i would say never once in my life yeah so again maybe joe lieberman would be the exception i like the gavin tweets but like do find your own thing oh yeah that's just don't do your gavin tweets the people doing the other democrats doing the gavin tweets is embarrassing you need your own shtick just yeah figure out your own shtick that's all

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So as I mentioned, the DNC also, we got off topic.

The DNC also debated two competing resolutions about how to respond to the war in Gaza, with one resolution calling for a complete arms embargo and the other, supported by Ken Martin, calling for a more moderate middle course.

After a lot of debate, Martin ended up pulling his resolution and kicking the issue down to a task force of stakeholders.

Okay.

Again, don't want to beat up on the meeting here, but maybe this is a chance to talk about, in general, you think the party can get its shit together on this before 2026.

It is the question of whether the party will be able to catch up to public opinion, not just within the Democratic base, but within the entire country around military, offensive military aid to Israel during what's happening in Gaza.

Yeah.

That's the question.

Also, side note, we don't need committees doing resolutions.

Like, like, what is the DNC resolution going to do?

I know.

I know.

I don't.

It's like we can have a larger discussion about the party platform in the presidential election year.

Like, there's some real questions about how useful that is, but that at least has some, you're putting on paper what theoretically the nominee believes in.

So then you can hold them accountable to that point.

But the mid-year, like just the opinion of the Democratic Party is this.

Like, this that, I don't know that, like, I think there's a real effort that should be done to try to move the other half of the Democratic caucus to be where we think they should be on this vote.

I don't think a DNC resolution is meaningful in that task.

And I will say, because I'm not going to make the moral case for this again, and especially because the people in the other side of the party who

are still singing the same tune about Israel, you know, they'll say, oh,

I get that this is emotional, but, you know,

we got to we got to seem like we're on the side of Israel.

That's where the American people are.

That's not where the American people are.

Look at the polls.

If you think that that's where they are, those are old polls.

And it's not just Democrats.

First of all, that Quinnipiek poll, like if you ask what, if Democrats, if you ask just Democrats if they believe that we should end weapons sales to Israel, it is like, it was like 70%.

I mean, it was.

overwhelming.

But the overall number, including independents, and of of course Republicans are still for it, but like the overall number I think was like, I don't know, it's like 56, 57 for ending weapon sales.

Like it's a majority opinion.

I mean, you asked people if they have proof of how Israel's conducting the war in Gaza, the numbers are even more devastating.

If you ask people who they sympathize with more, the Israelis or the Palestinians, it's now the Palestinians, which is also a huge shift from October 7th.

I mean,

the reason I'm just bringing up the polling is not because that's how I think we should talk about it, but to those people in the Democratic Party who think this is a polling issue, it is not.

I think that there is a lot of parallels in terms of the politics.

I'm only talking about the politics.

With Iraq.

With Iraq.

I know.

I've got it.

Because

there are people who know what the right thing to do is, but because of an outdated view of politics, are afraid to do it.

And those people, especially if they're running for president, are eventually going to get to where they have where everyone else is, but you're going to be late.

Yeah.

And you're going to be

inauthentic.

You're going to seem fake with it.

Because it is.

You know?

I mean i'm sure there's some people gonna be like wow it of course you could have this conversion where you're like wow i fucked up and this is horrible and netanyahu clearly is never going to end this war and just wants to fucking bulldoze gaza and doesn't give a shit what happens to people and whatever else yeah you could come around to that but a lot of people are just going to they're going to look exactly like what it is which is oh this is where the base is and i want to win and so i'm going to now pretend this whole time that i was actually yeah there were moments to do like obviously incredibly great credit to the people um

who were very critical when the democrats were very critical when Biden was president.

Like, like that is the right thing to do, but not easy to do it against your president, particularly in an election year.

But with Trump as president and with the way things have changed, particularly with the famine in Gaza, the moment is

months ago.

And so, like, that is an actual change of facts on the ground that could cause you to change your opinion.

But the more you wait, the more you're going to look like you're playing politics here.

Yeah.

See, Jake Sullivan,

Biden's former national security advisor, was talking to our pal Tim Miller on the Bulwark podcast and said that he's advised Democrats that they should oppose weapon sales.

Like, that's Jake,

who was in the Biden administration.

Who is the person in charge of implementing the HugBee strategy?

So, like, if you're, what are you doing?

If you're, you know, I just don't understand.

So, Axios reported on Wednesday that senior Democratic officials now want to host a mini-convention ahead of the 2026 midterms.

I'm now laughing at this because of the conversation we have to start,

where they can showcase candidates and emerging party leaders not to be outdone the next morning.

Trump posted that the Republican Party might host a convention of their own before the midterms.

That, to me, was the only evidence that maybe this is a good idea.

What do you think?

In theory, I understand the idea is that Democrats need opportunities to get attention.

And having another convention, particularly if you did a big one, right?

Like you're not filling the...

Where did we go to the convention?

Where was it?

Chicago.

Chicago.

You're not filling the United States.

It's okay.

We We all want to forget it.

It was like, I know we went to Milwaukee for a week.

I know we went to Chicago for a week.

We're still waiting for Taylor Swift to come out on stage.

Just get Leon Pettette.

Leon Pennett instead, yeah.

Like, so the idea of doing a big event and having like good speakers, and you'd have to get like Kamala Harris would speak there, and maybe you'd get a Barack Obama.

Like, you would need to draw real attention to get real people to do it.

Like, that is intriguing.

Joe Biden.

Your face is so good.

That was so worth it.

That's an option.

I mean, mean, it's an option.

I mean, I actually would say that I'm sure that the people who would attend the Democratic convention would be very excited to get from Joe Biden.

You and I were in the audience for his speech in Chicago, apparently, which is where that was.

Let's keep going.

But it does,

I'm not sure

we could execute it in the right way.

It would be my concern.

Like, I understand the idea in theory, but

if you do it and then you just have another giant fight over a Gaza resolution, or the other thing you would see is the most most prominent Senate candidates don't show up because they don't want to be there for it.

So it's like you're doing this convention and Sherrod Brown doesn't come to Norway.

Cooper doesn't come and Graham Plattner, if he's a nominee in Maine doesn't come and maybe John Ossoff is busy that week, then it, then it's, it's embarrassing for the party.

Yeah, because then you're getting, it's like a speech from Chuck Schumer, speech from Hakeem Jeffries, and then now we're looking for, now we're looking for more people to fill this, this, this speech roles, and it's like, quick, where's Kerry Washington?

And, and where's all this, where's all the select, it's just like, I, I don't, I don't, it gives me the yeah, I understand.

At first, I was like, you know what?

We need, we need to get attention.

This is, I, my first instinct was like, oh, yeah, a good idea to get attention.

And then having watched the summer meeting and talk about this, I'm like, I just, I, I think the execution is quite difficult.

The Royalists are definitely going to do this.

Yeah.

Because Trump will make it.

And then we're going to...

Trump probably did it to goad us into doing it.

No, no, he wants to, like, he wants to do it because he wants another party celebrating him.

But well, and I think it's to his advantage.

Yeah, because I think his big issue for the midterms is the people who turned out for him don't turn out for Republican candidates.

And so, if he can attach himself to the midterms in people's minds, then he can tell everyone, hey,

get out for me.

Don't forget about these candidates.

It's a double-edged sword for sure, but

he's probably going to get all the downsides of the anti-Trump fervor anyway.

So, a moment where he could

like high-profile moment where he can communicate to his voters that this is, the people who didn't turn out to turn out for this is probably to his advantage.

So, if he does it, then we'll probably have to do it.

Or one place we could just do it is CrookedCon.

Oh, is there a place where?

Do you know we're having a...

Have you heard?

I'm aware.

November 6th and 7th.

Is there a website you can go to?

Yes, crookedcon.com.

I got it.

I did it.

Was that an intentional tongue twister?

Yeah, I don't know.

Was it a prank from the marketing team on you?

Yes, I think most things are.

All right, Dan, as promised.

Just to close up the meeting section, it did include a fight song, which no DNC meeting is complete without.

Semaphore's Dave Weigel reported that someone from Act Blue not only shared the song, but recommended that the party adopt it and in in multiple sessions, put the lyrics up on a presentation so the attendees could sing along.

Did they incessantly text it to everyone?

I apologize for doing this, but I do need you to read the lyrics.

I can't read the lyrics.

I do this from off the doom.

I don't have a laptop, so you'll have to do it.

Fuck.

D-E-M-S, we rise, stronger together, blue skies.

Lift your voice.

We're bold and true.

Onward, Democrats.

We

shine

blue.

Woo!

The thing that is so funny about this, other than the fact that someone thought we needed a fight song.

Yes.

And that it has a blue sky reference?

Yes.

A little on the nose.

It's the use of the term stronger together, which is the failure of every Democratic messaging process ever.

No matter how bad it is, no matter how many Yahoos are involved, it ends up with some version of Stronger Together.

Everything is perfect about it.

The only thing I am disappointed in is that we can't hear it.

Like, is there a melody it goes to?

That's what I want to know.

I asked Dave Weigel on Twitter, but he does not respond.

If anyone has,

the person from Act Blue, I don't know who it was, but whoever can give us a melody to this, I just, I want to be singing it, you know, because I want to practice for this midterm convention in Crooked Con and whatever else.

You heard it here first that if someone can find the melody for this, Jon Favreau will sing it solo.

Can you play it on the piano?

If you learn to play it on the piano, it will become our new theme song to Pod Save America.

That's ridiculous.

I think you should perform it at

CricketCon or the wedding birthday

celebration, whatever, of whichever Vote Save American volunteer knocks the most doors.

Oh, that's a good one.

Jon Favreau will come to your gathering.

This is now.

This is now this.

If that is not up on votesaveamerica.com, by the time this episode comes out on Friday morning, it's a failure of the political team.

Come up with the melody, everyone.

All right, last thing before we go, we have to talk about one more piece of news.

Taylor Swift's engagement to Travis Kelsey.

This is the first time hearing of this.

I was in a meeting.

I was off my phone for an hour.

I come back outside.

There's like 40 texts on my, most of them from my wife.

I was going to say.

And all of the text chains I'm on with her and other Taylor Swift fans.

It was wild.

So what I was doing when this came out?

What?

I was talking to Caroline Reston on Polar Coaster, and no one interrupted the show to tell her.

About hunting Wives.

We were talking about Hunting Wives at the time.

Which I hate watched and now can't wait for the second season.

If you want to hear my take,

if you want to hear my take on Hunting Wives, subscribe, become a friend of the pod.

Crew.com slash friends.

There you go.

Anyway, most of the world offered their congratulations.

A nice little moment here in our broader descent into fascism.

Even Donald Trump was

gracious about it.

But then Charlie Kirk, you know Charlie Kirk.

Familiar vaguely with him.

He recently called us a group of low-T complainers and whiners.

Oh, I thought that was he just referred to Tuesday pod.

It's true.

He had this advice for the happy couple.

Maybe one of the reasons why Taylor Swift has been so

just kind of annoyingly liberal

over the last couple of years is that she's not yet married and she doesn't have children.

Taylor Swift might go from a cat lady to a J.D.

Vance supporter.

And I think we should celebrate that.

It's a great chance for Taylor Swift now to get married and have a ton of children.

You can certainly afford it, Taylor.

This is something that I hope will make Taylor Swift more conservative.

Engage in reality more and get outside of the abstract clouds.

Reject feminism.

Submit to your husband, Taylor.

You're not in charge.

What a...

What a lucky woman who got to submit to that penis with a hairpiece.

That is a.

She is.

She is one lucky lady.

She taught, you know,

there's clips of Charlie Kirk's wife talking about how I love submitting to Charlie.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

You are deep in the internet.

I mean,

that's why I get straight fives on Terminally Online all the time.

So that's interesting, huh?

That's...

It seems like he was purposely trolling.

No, I think that's his legitimate, sincere belief.

Yeah,

he does think birth control makes women women crazy.

He said that before.

I mean, he's a real, he's a real piece of work.

Yeah, he's not great.

He's a real piece of work.

That's the kind of person you want being a close advisor to the president of the United States.

Also, it's like fucking Taylor Swift is like worth more money than a million Charlie Kirks put together.

And probably more people go to one of her shows than have ever listened to Charlie Kirk.

That's possible.

Just like, what?

Okay, man.

Good luck.

Good luck.

Again, lucky lady married to Charlie Kirk.

All right.

New Crooked Merch just dropped.

Check out Crooket.com slash store to see the latest.

Who knows?

Who knows?

Maybe you'll find the Hero t-shirts.

And they released the Epstein Files doormat.

There may be an Epstein Files doormat in there as well.

Again, got to go to the design meetings more.

More at once.

That's where Lovett is right now, probably.

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That's our show for today.

We'll be back on Tuesday with a special episode for Labor Day, which will be marking our thousandth episode.

Wow.

I know.

That's

a little behind the scenes.

That's why Dan's here, guys.

It's for the first time.

We're gone down for the thousandth episode.

It's a very, very, very important

Big deal.

That's what we're celebrating, I guess.

We're going to be answering lots of great listener questions for the occasion, so check it out.

And everyone, have a great holiday weekend.

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