Debating the Trump Era with Abby Phillip

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

Speaker 2 You probably know Abby Phillip as the host of News Night on CNN, where she expertly and gracefully moderates what you might call boisterous panel discussions that often turn into viral moments.

Speaker 2 She's also one of the most thoughtful journalists covering Trump, or at least attempting to, right now.

Speaker 2 And on top of that, she's also out with a fascinating new book that I'm loving, A Dream Deferred, Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power, about Reverend Jackson's groundbreaking presidential campaigns in the 1980s, and importantly, what those campaigns can teach us about where the Democratic Party is today and where it needs to go.

Speaker 2 For all those reasons, I've been really eager to have her on the show, and I'm so happy I was able to get some time when she visited LA on Thursday. Here's our conversation.
Hope you enjoy.

Speaker 2 Abby, welcome to Pod Save America.

Speaker 15 Hey, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 A lot of people might know you from your job at CNN as the lead anchor and host of CNN Newsnight, but you're also the author of a brand new book, A Dream Deferred, Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power, which is now on sale.

Speaker 2 Yes. Exciting.
We'll get into that in a bit. I just want to start with some questions about your day job.
You've been covering politics for a long time now. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Since 2010, 2011?

Speaker 15 2010?

Speaker 2 2010.

Speaker 15 Yes, back. I was young.

Speaker 2 You were in the White House. Yeah, I was going to say.
So it was like, we were both young, but I was younger, actually.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, I was young enough that you had no idea who I was at that time.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, no, once I went into the White House, I didn't know who anyone was. I was just stuck in there all day.

Speaker 2 So you were a political reporter throughout the Obama administration, 2016 election, the highly functioning democracy that we've had since then.

Speaker 2 In terms of processing, analyzing, reporting the news, how does 2025 compare to everything before it?

Speaker 2 Like, do you feel like covering Trump's second term is just an acceleration of the craziness that's been building for a decade, or does it feel like something new?

Speaker 15 I think it is an acceleration of the craziness of the first term. It's like, obviously, they had a lot of time to think about this stuff.
They learned from their mistakes.

Speaker 15 And so a lot of things that are happening now are things that they wanted to do then, but they couldn't because they couldn't figure out the government. They couldn't get their act together.

Speaker 15 And now they're doing it. And also, Trump is so much more in control now than he was then.
I mean, he does not have a functional

Speaker 15 other branch of government in Congress. And so he literally can do whatever he wants.
And it shows. And so, I mean, the first time around, it was like covering a lot of hijinks.

Speaker 15 It was like a government that was just a bunch of people who wanted to do a lot of things and then they couldn't quite figure it out and something always went wrong.

Speaker 15 And it was always just this almost like a clown show.

Speaker 15 And I think this time there's, there are definitely some clown show elements still present, but they're much more organized and it's much more serious because I think they're thinking longer term.

Speaker 15 I don't think they were thinking that long term when Trump was in the office the first time because they weren't sure whether his politics were going to be lasting. And now we know.

Speaker 15 And I think now they're thinking about, okay, how do we really change this country permanently? And that's what we're operating on.

Speaker 2 I find it harder to somehow keep up with the news this time around than even last time.

Speaker 15 There's more happening, for sure.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, there's more of, and like, I think there's more of consequence happening.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Like last time, if you missed the scandal or the outrage of the day, it's like, we'll have another one, whatever, it'll pass.

Speaker 2 This time it's like, oh, well, we should cover that because that's actually going to have a real impact on people and people might not be paying attention to it.

Speaker 15 And I also think the thing I think about actually is the stuff that we're not covering.

Speaker 15 It's the stuff that's happening that we don't really have eyes on because they've gotten much better at keeping journalists sort of

Speaker 15 away from the

Speaker 15 nitty-gritty details of what's happening in the government.

Speaker 15 I think that's the stuff that kind of keeps me up at night is that we don't, I think we have less visibility now than we did before into the inner workings of the government, into even Trump's world.

Speaker 15 I find that the reporting this time around about, and I don't, I'm not a sort of day-to-day Trump reporter anymore, but the reporting that we have now about what's really going on in the White House, the deliberations, the conversations, who's influencing the president, how he's weighing in on things is much more limited than it was in the first term.

Speaker 15 And that's their consequences to that. I think we know less.
I think there's still just as much happening, if not more, but we know less about it.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Jr.: How do you feel about what's happened to the press pool in the White House? Because,

Speaker 2 you know, I just feel like there are, you know, Caroline Levitt and the staff are going to do what they do at briefings and just sort of deflect and whatever else.

Speaker 2 Trump, sometimes when you're asking him questions, you actually get some interesting answers into his insight. And I just feel like aside from Caitlin,

Speaker 2 Collins, who you work with, and a few other reporters, we're just getting so many fewer real questions when he holds, even though he's holding more press availabilities, you're getting fewer questions that are not just

Speaker 2 congratulating him.

Speaker 15 That's on purpose.

Speaker 15 Because you know that they, I mean, when they basically tried to take over the accreditation process for a, you know, a White House press pass, the goal was to fill the seats with people who were sycophants.

Speaker 15 And they have done that pretty successfully. I mean, they call it new media, but these are all just, it's all Trump media.

Speaker 15 And so that's why, I mean, I get frustrated when people are like, the media is not doing anything, but they don't realize that the nuts and bolts of who's in the room.

Speaker 15 matters and is now more controlled by the White House than it has ever been. And so it's not the fault of the day-to-day reporters who are still asking questions and are still doing their job.

Speaker 15 It's just that now the deck is stacked, like the room is packed with people that they hand-picked because of their loyalty to Trump.

Speaker 15 And that is completely shifting what comes out of these press briefings and media avails. And, you know, at the end of the day, you made the point about Trump taking questions.
I think Trump actually

Speaker 15 likes the back and forth. He doesn't mind getting the tough question from Caitlin or whatever.
And he takes them because he knows it makes for good TV.

Speaker 15 And that's probably the one thing that is still kind of allowing the system to somewhat get information out of this White House. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's obviously been a rough decade for journalism as an industry. Yeah.
Corporate consolidation, mass layoffs.

Speaker 2 Audiences now can get information from a million different sources, many of them for free, many of them not trustworthy. Trust in media is at its lowest level ever.

Speaker 2 And then Trump comes along and especially in the second term, backs up his rhetorical attacks on the press that were a hallmark of the first term with frivolous lawsuits, FCC threats, making sure his allies have influence over certain outlets.

Speaker 2 What are the conversations like between you and your colleagues about the future of your profession?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 15 I mean, the truth is, I don't have a ton of conversations about this with my colleagues.

Speaker 15 I'm not joking you. I just think we're literally just working.
Just every day. Every day.
And what are we going to do?

Speaker 15 You know, we're kind of of in a place where we don't have a lot of influence over the moves that are happening above us. So all we can do is what we know how to do.

Speaker 15 I do, I think about this more broadly than in the media because the media is just one sort of cog in the capitalist system.

Speaker 15 And consolidation usually is not good for marketplaces. And I don't think it's necessarily great for the media.

Speaker 15 I think that we are in a place where a lot of consolidation needs to happen for financial reasons, but the loser is going to be the consumer of information.

Speaker 15 And it also is probably going to push more and more of those consumers to alternative media sources. And so that's just looking at the industry broadly.
That's how I see it.

Speaker 15 And can I do anything about it? No.

Speaker 15 Can I do my job? Yes.

Speaker 15 And so I'm going to do my job. And I really do think that

Speaker 15 we can sit and complain and about it all day long but we have to just be able to have enough freedom to do the day-to-day work and I still feel like I do I look at a lot of the places where there are concerns about who owns them and what kinds of corporate top-down mandates are they under

Speaker 15 places like the Washington Post, places like the Wall Street Journal, and they're doing excellent journalism. They really are.

Speaker 15 And so I just think

Speaker 15 people are going to need to make money and they are going to.

Speaker 15 But the broader themes that are going to drive what media looks like is actually the fact that there are going to be a lot of different places that people get information from.

Speaker 15 And the mainstream media consolidation that's happening right now is only going to hasten that

Speaker 15 shift.

Speaker 15 So we just have to be honest about that. And, you know, I think we all try to

Speaker 15 play in the pool of the

Speaker 15 media landscape and do what we can, but that's a shift that's inexorable. We're not going to stop that.
And it's only going to go faster and faster. Aaron Powell.

Speaker 2 I wonder if you worry about, I do, and as someone whose job relies on other journalists doing this excellent reporting, that

Speaker 2 people are going to, consumers are going to think, okay,

Speaker 2 I'm watching punditry and analysis, and am I really going to pay for

Speaker 2 original reporting?

Speaker 2 Like I worry that sort of the balance with the incentives for actual journalism and reporting, you know, have gotten to the point where punditry is easier, cheaper, and more interesting sometimes to people.

Speaker 2 Sure, but it's okay.

Speaker 15 Like, I think it's fine. We can walk and shoe gum at the same time.
You know, because I think people like to crap on, I don't know if I can curse. Can I curse? You sure can.
People like to shit on

Speaker 15 context and analysis. And you can call it punditry.
you can call it whatever you want to call it. But I think that what the marketplace is saying is that people are hungry for help understanding.

Speaker 15 Yeah, that is true. And information is everywhere.
It is ubiquitous. So it is okay and good and normal and commendable that people are saying, help me understand this.

Speaker 15 And I don't think we should be on our high horse and be like, okay, the only thing that matters is that we just keep feeding you from the fire hose. People really want to

Speaker 15 they want to comprehend this moment. And we need to be able to give people both of those things at the same time.
And yes, it is cheaper, sometimes

Speaker 15 literally and figuratively, cheaper to do it that way.

Speaker 15 You know, I mean, I think that there is so much bad that can happen when it's just like a lot of people spouting their opinions.

Speaker 15 But I also think that doing that with integrity counts.

Speaker 15 And we should not be out of the game of that and leave it to the crazies on the internet to provide this

Speaker 15 skewed so-called context. And so

Speaker 15 I think,

Speaker 15 and having done this in a lot of different parts of the media world at this point in my career, that we have to provide a whole menu of options to people who are consuming information.

Speaker 15 And it is not enough to just say, well, this is good for you. So eat your broccoli.

Speaker 15 No, like people, people want

Speaker 15 a range of things. There's nothing wrong with that.

Speaker 15 There's nothing to look down on. And context is hugely, hugely important.
That's why opinion pages exist in newspapers, because

Speaker 15 people have points of view and it helps people digest the facts. So that's my, you know, that's my little soapbox.
I just think we can't be, we just, we cannot be on this high horse about this stuff.

Speaker 15 We have to give people what they really are craving, which is both the news and the context.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I think you can make an argument that in this media environment where there's so many choices, that context and curation are like more important than ever.

Speaker 2 Because it is, it's hard, right? When you're just like scrolling through a bunch of stuff, a bunch of headlines, you don't know what's true, you don't know what's not.

Speaker 2 Like it becomes more important to have some trusted voices that you know can help you make sense of the day.

Speaker 15 And I mean, when you leave it to the crazies and they're out there, all they're doing is just sitting around and they're spinning these webs of conspiracies in which everything is just so conveniently linked together and it makes perfect sense.

Speaker 15 And I think that is so dangerous when we cede all of that space to people who have no

Speaker 15 moral compunction about just just steering people wrong. And

Speaker 15 that's, I see a lot of that happening, and that is really one of the scarier parts of where we are.

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Speaker 2 I want to ask you about your CNN Newsnight role as anchor, debate moderator, seemingly kindergarten teacher at times.

Speaker 2 First of all, I just want to say, like, you make an incredibly difficult job look easy.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 I'm not sure people fully understand like how difficult it is to moderate a contentious panel like that in a way that is, I think, fair, but still firm.

Speaker 2 And because you have to pick your moments, all while like fact-checking in real time and offering your own analysis.

Speaker 2 Is there anything in your background or experience that helped you prepare for this? And I'm just curious, like, what you do to prepare for the show every day?

Speaker 15 I don't know. I always say that I, like, I come from a really big family.
I'm one of six kids.

Speaker 15 And I'm just really used to being in the middle of a lot of chaos. Yeah.
It's just, and also a lot of people with different points of view.

Speaker 15 And I do think, I know it sounds kind of cliche, but I really do think that that helps because I've. I've always just been able to deal with a lot of different personalities.

Speaker 15 I mean, we, my siblings and I have the same two parents, but we're all all different, every single one of us. And, and you have to, I love them.
They're, they're my family.

Speaker 15 And when we sit at that table on Newsnight, I think that the goal, what I'm trying to create is this sense that we can have this debate. We can,

Speaker 15 you know, correct each other and

Speaker 15 question each other and call each other out and still sit in the breaks and not want to smack each other. Now, every once in a while, you know, people

Speaker 15 go into the breaks and they're still bickering and we're just like, okay,

Speaker 15 calm down. Yeah.
You know, but the goal is to have the ability to do that at the very least. And so, I mean, I think I'm also just not that person.

Speaker 15 Like, I'm all, I'm down for a good debate, but I'm not the first person who will get heated in a debate.

Speaker 15 And it just so happens that that, I think, works in this context because I'm more than happy to let them have their emotional ups and downs.

Speaker 15 And I usually try to not be at that emotional register because I just, it's not, it's not how I roll, just on a deeply human level.

Speaker 15 And, and the times when I do, when it does turn up, the dial does turn up for me are rare. And I try to keep it as rare as possible.
So I think it's just helpful that my personality is just not that.

Speaker 15 And I mean, it used to be that people would be like,

Speaker 15 oh, she's too like even-keeled or whatever. And it just so turns out that this format works for me right now.
So there you go to all my haters.

Speaker 2 Well, I was going to ask, like, are there times where in your head you're thinking, okay,

Speaker 2 maybe I should step in, or if I don't, I'm going to get shit from people. Like, how much does that enter your?

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, I, like, transparently, we've been doing this

Speaker 15 way, this version of the show for a little over a year. And at the beginning, it was, we had to play, I had to play around with it.
How much am I involved? How much am I correcting?

Speaker 15 How much am I fact-checking? Do I really want to be fact-checking all the time? Do I really want to just sit back and let them talk? Like, what is my role?

Speaker 15 And I think there's a negotiation that happens there. And, you know, there are some things that

Speaker 15 I don't fact check maybe because I don't know.

Speaker 15 It's come out of nowhere. People do bring things up out of nowhere.
And I'm just like, I've never heard that one before. And then we have to go back and be like, what was that all about?

Speaker 15 So I'm not always able to, I'm not a computer, but I am very well read and prepared for a lot of the arguments that come up. So I miss things.

Speaker 15 And, you know, people will still give me shit for missing things, but I'm a human being and we are in a live setting, right? Like we're not scripting these debates. We don't even have questions.

Speaker 2 Like people just go at it.

Speaker 15 We just, we have, we have information, we don't have questions. So we come to the, I come to the table every night with a list of

Speaker 15 you know, conversation aids, and the, but the conversation goes the way that the panelists take it. Yeah.
And

Speaker 15 I, you have to be comfortable with a certain amount of unpredictability.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 I

Speaker 15 think that I have more recently found, I think, a good balance, right?

Speaker 15 I see myself as trying to play the role of like the incredulous questioner on behalf of the people who are at home and are kind of like, do you really believe that?

Speaker 15 You know, or just that's completely illogical. Or how do you square that with this? And I think that some of these

Speaker 15 So some of the role that I play is just impressing people, just in kind of testing the argument and forcing them to defend it and forcing them to see it through its natural logical conclusion. And

Speaker 15 I think that's where I've landed so far.

Speaker 15 So far, but it's always shifting. It changes every single night.
And we are always bringing new people on who have, you know, it's always something new. And that's great.

Speaker 15 That's, that's what's nice about the show.

Speaker 2 It's funny. I think the only time I've been on a,

Speaker 2 or the last time I've been on a panel at CNN that was like a people on the left, people on the right was years ago. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I just remember watching people go at it as like it was live. And then we went to a commercial break and I was sitting next to Gloria Borger and she was like, you know, you can jump in.

Speaker 2 They like when you jump in and mix it up. And I'm just like, this is scary.
You know what happened?

Speaker 15 You know what happened? During COVID, people stopped being able to do it

Speaker 15 because everybody was in these boxes. And so the fact that we have everybody in the studio every single night is helpful.

Speaker 15 And it's for a lot of people, it's kind of a new experience. And they don't get to do it that often.
So a lot of people have to figure out how to talk to other people,

Speaker 15 like look them in the eye and say the thing and keep the same energy that they would otherwise have on social media. And I think that's part of the psychology of it too, is that

Speaker 15 you really have to be willing to, first of all, be on your feet. You have to be quick on your feet.
And you have to be ready for anything. And you have to really be listening because,

Speaker 15 you know, a lot of times people are just, they have their little talking points and they get mad at me when I'm like, I'm going to interrupt you because you're answering the question that you want to be asked.

Speaker 15 And this is not that kind of show. So

Speaker 15 that's a skill that I think we have tried to cultivate.

Speaker 15 What does it look like to actually sit in front of a person you disagree with and talk to them and challenge them and be challenged?

Speaker 15 And the people who have figured that out have done really well on our show. And I think it makes for both good television and I think it's an important thing to do.

Speaker 2 Aaron Ross Powell, I've never been a huge fan of the debate, much of it on the left about, you know, platforming certain political figures on the right or legitimizing people on the right because you go on their shows, because especially since I think most of these figures have large platforms already.

Speaker 2 But every time, you know, we've talked about this, and every time I think about like inviting a MAGA person on the show to to have that like in-person debate, the only thing that gives me pause is

Speaker 2 it's like it's hard to spend the entire time, or I don't want to spend the entire time correcting or saying that's not true, or let's fact check.

Speaker 2 And then they fact check and I fact check, and suddenly it's just like 30 minutes of a fact check. Yeah.
I hear you. And so it's like,

Speaker 2 I would love to have the debate about like deeply held beliefs that are different.

Speaker 2 Sometimes it's hard to get past the talking point.

Speaker 2 I'm with you.

Speaker 15 It happens. I I mean, there are plenty of times where we've had people on and it's like,

Speaker 2 you're just doing your thing.

Speaker 15 I'm just throwing my hands up. Like, it's just, what's the point? Because we can't have a debate unless we at least agree to agree on facts.

Speaker 15 Like, facts have to actually matter to you in order for us to have this conversation. Yeah.
Now, I also grant people that.

Speaker 15 Sometimes people have other facts that matter to them more.

Speaker 15 And that is okay. Right.

Speaker 15 But there are definitely some people who are just living in a different world.

Speaker 15 And it's really hard. And it's not, and I think that is, yeah, definitely a situation in which it is very difficult, if not impossible, to have that conversation.

Speaker 15 And so you kind of have to find the right people who are willing to kind of level with you in a,

Speaker 15 at least, at least in an open-minded way. And I would kind of argue that that's not just unique to Republicans, although I think their information silo is probably more

Speaker 15 closed off.

Speaker 15 But it's in general. Are you willing to concede something, anything,

Speaker 15 anything? And some people are not.

Speaker 2 And some people aren't because I think there's this pressure that if you concede something on live on national television, then suddenly your side is going to be like, why did you just do that?

Speaker 2 And what's wrong with you? And you gave in. And it's a real.
It's

Speaker 15 a psychological thing. It's about.
social media clout. It's about your standing in, you know, in the group.
Yeah. You know, because your standing in the group becomes the most important thing to you.

Speaker 15 Right. Because your people might not like you as much anymore.
And that, and that's, we have to come to terms with that in politics.

Speaker 15 And that is such a big thing in terms of how people are willing to show up politically is that they're so afraid of being ostracized by people in their group that they're not willing to admit when they're wrong or when something needs to change or when you know the other person might be right.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, and especially I think on the on the left now,

Speaker 2 there's another reason not to do it, which is, well, if they're going to do this, then we can't be the ones that are always saying we're wrong or we change our mind because we're in a fight against these people who are in a different kind of reality, you know?

Speaker 2 I mean, I would say, and it's sort of like,

Speaker 2 I think if you have values and beliefs and principles, they've got to be universal, like no matter what the other side does.

Speaker 15 But do you, I mean, but I thought, you know, I've been talking about this a lot lately because I feel like this has really come up. And I mean, I wonder as you are a card-carrying Democrat,

Speaker 15 do you see that happening? And do you think that's a problem? Because I think some people think that Democrats unilaterally disarm too often and leave Republicans to just do whatever they want.

Speaker 15 And then like in redistricting, for example, is an example of this. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Do I think that it's a problem? Do you think that that's bad? That Democrats are doing? Yeah.

Speaker 2 No, on that kind of thing, I'm like, that's an easy one for me just because it's like we proposed national nonpartisan gerrymandering and we couldn't get a Republican vote for it.

Speaker 2 And if Republicans want to join us, then I'm like, let's stop the race to the bottom and do no more gerrymandering and let's reverse it. But otherwise, we're not going to unilaterally disarm.

Speaker 2 I have sort of a different take on the broader

Speaker 2 Republicans are always fighting and Dems don't fight and the whole like, you know,

Speaker 2 everyone likes to bring up the Michelle Obama quote, like, you know, when they go low, we go high. And everyone's like, we can't do that ever again.
And I'm like, it's not,

Speaker 2 I just think that our

Speaker 2 political goals are different in a way, which makes it asymmetrical.

Speaker 2 Like, I think that Donald Trump and a lot of the MAGA movement would be quite happy if people were more cynical about politics and not paying as much attention.

Speaker 2 And they would get to do what they want to do.

Speaker 2 And I think that Democrats, at their best, believe that government should be a tool for people to come together across like different ideologies, races, identities, and try to figure out something together.

Speaker 2 And if you're going to believe that, it's much tougher to then go and just destroy the other side all day because we believe in a bigger community than that.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, I feel like the government shutdown debate is a little bit of that, where it's like, I mean, I was there all the years that Republicans shut the government down, even when Trump was president.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 in a way, Democrats have just, are just doing what they did and justified for all those years. However, the government is still shut down.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 15 And people are still not getting paychecks and so on and so forth.

Speaker 15 I think I don't have any answers to that, but I feel like that is the dilemma the Democrats are facing, which is do we really take on their tactics, even if people get hurt?

Speaker 2 Or do we have a

Speaker 15 higher bar for ourselves?

Speaker 2 And what has heightened that challenge for Democrats is, of course, Donald Trump and particularly how he's acting acting in the second term, right?

Speaker 2 Because I, I'm very much like, I don't want, I'm in politics so that people are helped and I don't want them to get hurt.

Speaker 2 But like, I also think that there's masked agents on the street, like arresting people who are American citizens and nothing's stopping them.

Speaker 2 And I don't, like, my view on the government shutdown was I would not have gone.

Speaker 2 I would not have made it about healthcare because healthcare to me is a policy issue that under a different Republican president or a different president,

Speaker 2 whatever,

Speaker 2 you would say, okay,

Speaker 2 we had an election, they won, this is the government, they get to do what they want. And so it's important to have a lot of people.

Speaker 2 So shutting down the policy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, shutting down the government over a typical policy fight to me is not as important, I think, or I wouldn't have done it unless it was shutting down the government over, like, you know, I think Chris Murphy has been saying this, like, why am I going to fund a government that's like destroying democracy right now?

Speaker 2 Yeah. You know, you guys can find the votes yourself.
I think that,

Speaker 15 you know,

Speaker 15 my humble opinion as an observer of politics is I actually don't think that a government shutdown over capital D democracy would have worked.

Speaker 2 I don't think it would have. I don't know that it would have.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think it would have gone way over people's heads.

Speaker 15 This is not an endorsement of a government shutdown over anything.

Speaker 2 Right, right, right.

Speaker 15 But it's just to say that the uniqueness of this one is that the underlying issue is one that is a political vulnerability for the other side, whereas the other stuff is much less so.

Speaker 2 It's true.

Speaker 2 Then if you get to the like nerdy legislative part of it, though, you say, okay, why would we make a spending deal when they're going to go back after the spending deal and just be like, well, we're going to spend whatever we want.

Speaker 2 And we're going to spend whatever we want. And we're going to shut down whatever we want, fire whoever we want.
Yeah. And it doesn't really matter.

Speaker 15 And look, I hear that. But at the same time, I mean, some deal has to be made.
I know.

Speaker 15 So

Speaker 2 it's a tough situation.

Speaker 2 Do you feel like you better understand what drives MAGA politics because of this show?

Speaker 15 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You feel like you got enough of the like.

Speaker 15 Yeah. I, I mean, I talk

Speaker 2 to,

Speaker 15 I talk to tried and true, died in the wool MAGA people every single day.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 so, yeah, I understand where they come from.

Speaker 15 I understand

Speaker 15 the

Speaker 15 information silos that they're in that make it hard to see outside of it.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 it's not that complicated. I mean, I think that they like winning.
And Trump is winning in their minds. So in a way,

Speaker 15 to me, it boils down to mostly that, because we have all shades of this sort of Trump supporter.

Speaker 15 We have people who are not really that into him, who are now, people who are not even all that into him right now, but would prefer to defend him to the alternative. You know, I see it all.

Speaker 15 And at the end of the day, the biggest thing that works for Trump is that they've figured out how to use raw political power to dominate their opposition.

Speaker 15 And turns out that's very appealing to a lot of people on the right. And they're willing to...

Speaker 15 They're willing to gloss over a lot of conduct in order to be on the team that is winning.

Speaker 15 So I think that's that's a lot of what's going on right now.

Speaker 2 Do you feel like you understand Scott Jennings politics better?

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, he's, he's a descript.

Speaker 15 He's, I can, I think what I just described accurately describes him.

Speaker 2 That, you know, because he's taken a journey. He's been, he's

Speaker 15 taken a journey, as we've talked about. I think he,

Speaker 15 as he said,

Speaker 15 he would prefer Trump over the alternative, but I also think that he has seen Trump win on the culture issues, on the economic issues, on all of that.

Speaker 15 And he's willing to give him a pass on things that maybe he's slightly queasy about privately because I think he believes that going against Trump is a bad idea because Trump keeps winning.

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Speaker 2 Okay, seamless pivot from Scott Jennings to Jesse Jackson about whom you wrote this in. So much in Tommy.

Speaker 2 So, what was your sense of Jesse Jackson and his legacy before you started writing the book? And what questions did you want to answer?

Speaker 15 My sense of him was what I think a lot of people's sense of him is, which is that he's an activist, he's

Speaker 15 a leader of the civil rights generation,

Speaker 15 and is

Speaker 15 ubiquitous, right? That he's in everything and that mostly it's just showing up. I think that was the sense that a lot of people had of him, have of him.

Speaker 15 And one of the reasons I wrote this book is because I found that this particular chapter, when he ran for president two times,

Speaker 15 is

Speaker 15 arguably one of the most significant parts of his legacy that rarely gets talked about.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 it is the part of his legacy that actually I think kind of undermines the view of him as somebody who's just sort of surface deep and only just shows up and so on and so forth.

Speaker 15 Because I do think that running, you know this, running for president is

Speaker 15 a real difficult task. And

Speaker 2 a little insane.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and it's a little crazy and it attracts a certain type of person. And Jesse Jackson certainly is in that same category of people.

Speaker 15 But for a black man in the 1980s who grew up in the segregated South, who did not have much, for him to end up on the same debate stage with all of these figures, not just Michael Dukakis, but Al Gore and Joe Biden and all these other people who later on went on to do other things.

Speaker 15 But he was on the debate stage with all of those people and holding his own on foreign policy, on economic policy, on a whole host of things. And then he comes in second place in 1988.

Speaker 15 And then it's kind of promptly forgotten about, partly because Bill Clinton, but also partly because Barack Obama.

Speaker 15 And I think that there's a lot there that is worth exploring, including explaining how we even got to Barack Obama. I think he's a huge part of that story.

Speaker 2 Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah.

Speaker 15 I mean, look, Jesse Jackson and Obama actually politically, to be honest, don't have a huge amount in common.

Speaker 15 So

Speaker 15 it's not about, it's not so much about that because I think Obama is way more centrist than Jesse Jackson was.

Speaker 15 However, I also think Jesse Jackson's sort of left-wing politics of the 80s actually became kind of centrist in the... 2010s or whatever.
And

Speaker 15 but more to the point, I mean, just from a nuts and bolts perspective, had Jesse Jackson not changed the rules of the Democratic Party to make it easier for outsider candidates to come in and run against the establishment and still rack up delegates and still get to the convention,

Speaker 15 Obama wouldn't have beaten.

Speaker 2 That's how we beat Hillary Clinton. Period.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It just wouldn't have happened. Yeah.

Speaker 2 If it was winner-take-all like the Republicans have in the primaries, we wouldn't have done it. And I mean,

Speaker 15 in a way, it's like, think about the foresight of that, because there were so many people in the 80s who were like, why run a black candidate for the presidency? You know you're not going to win.

Speaker 15 This country isn't going to do that in this moment.

Speaker 2 And they were right about that.

Speaker 15 But I also think Jesse Jackson had this sort of tactical

Speaker 15 intelligence about the value of leverage. Some of that was built up for years and years of using leverage to get concessions from private companies on diversity and all kinds of other stuff.

Speaker 15 But he understood leverage really well. And he really pushed in both of those campaigns toward

Speaker 15 getting to the convention, getting changes to the platform, getting changes to the nominating process for the Democratic Party, the nuts and bolts of how you even get a candidate, let alone what that candidate stands for.

Speaker 15 And it turns out that foresight was exactly correct because 20 years later, and this is why the book is called A Dream Deferred, is because it took 20 years for this to actually

Speaker 15 be seen, but that became the thing that allowed Barack Obama to bypass what would have been a blowout from a much more establishment candidate.

Speaker 15 It's also the thing that allowed Bernie Sanders to have as much leverage and influence as he did in 2016 and in 2020.

Speaker 15 And so there's so much about how he conducted politics, and we didn't even talk about the issues, but all of those things make him a very consequential figure who doesn't get a lot of credit for that chapter in his life.

Speaker 2 Why do you think that is on the credit that he doesn't, like, he's not,

Speaker 2 he hasn't gotten his due, I think, either, either as a civil rights leader like a John Lewis

Speaker 2 or a political leader, not only from, I think, the public, but even from like his contemporaries. Totally.
There's a lot of drama.

Speaker 15 I mean, that's the truth, is that his relationships personally, I think, are very fraught.

Speaker 15 And I get into this in the book, that, you know, when he ran for president, he did not have many endorsements, even from black elected officials. In fact, he had none in 1984.

Speaker 15 And in 1988, he had a few more. But overwhelmingly,

Speaker 15 A lot of his friends and colleagues, they endorsed the establishment Democratic candidate. And

Speaker 15 I think some of that has to do with not just just the political part of it, but also just his relationships with people.

Speaker 15 And I think also

Speaker 15 Jesse Jackson is

Speaker 15 a character.

Speaker 15 He has like real main character energy in the sense that

Speaker 15 he has a lot of personality traits that are double-edged swords. This incredible skill of connecting and oratory, and also an incredible amount of, I don't know, a desire to be in the public eye.

Speaker 15 Some people would say arrogance,

Speaker 15 ego,

Speaker 15 not unfamiliar if you know people who run for president,

Speaker 15 psychological turmoil around his father and how he grew up. And

Speaker 15 so there's all of that mixed together in this person. And so he was really polarizing.

Speaker 15 And I was talking to someone else just recently also about just the fact that he lives, he has lived as long as he has.

Speaker 15 And that contributes to it too. He is 84 years old.
And so

Speaker 15 for

Speaker 15 the last 60 something years of American history, people have known who Jesse Jackson is.

Speaker 15 Very, very few people have that many years on the books in public life. And inevitably, that means that you are going to have people who have all kinds of different views about you.

Speaker 15 All kinds of chapters of your life are going to get forgotten. And I think that just the longevity of his life has been a part of the picture.
It's just very easy to lionize people when they

Speaker 15 leave us in an untimely fashion. Yeah, that's true.
Because it's easier. You don't have to deal with the full scope of their life.

Speaker 15 And I think in some ways he was blessed to live a long life, but I think the length of his life and the range of things that he did sometimes works against him.

Speaker 2 Your brooch made me think,

Speaker 2 I was talking to some of my old Obama colleagues

Speaker 2 today, and I'm like, what?

Speaker 2 I don't have like a real sharp memory of Obama saying a ton about Jesse Jr. There's a reason for that.

Speaker 2 Well, because what I remember is I remember that his daughter was Michelle's maid of honor at their wedding.

Speaker 2 So I was always like...

Speaker 15 And Jesse Jr., they were very close.

Speaker 15 In 2008, but before that.

Speaker 2 And then I remember towards the end of the campaign, there was a whole thing with Obama and the Hot Mike moment.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the hot mic moment where he was upset about how Obama was going to black churches and he thought he was talking down to, and I think he said, like, I want to cut his nuts out or something like that.

Speaker 2 I remember that being a thing on the campaign.

Speaker 15 Which, by the way, that's a whole thing in terms of like taking something that somebody says in a break and then publishing it.

Speaker 2 And then I remember Bill Clinton inserting him into the Democratic primary when after Obama won South Carolina and Bill Clinton was like, well, Jesse Jackson won some states too.

Speaker 2 God. That's like, I mean, that is.
But I've never seen like, I've never, I don't think I remember hearing Obama talk about him. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Well, there, there is a very important reason for that. And it's because their relationship was not great.

Speaker 15 And despite their Chicago ties and the family ties and all of that stuff, I mean,

Speaker 15 I explore this in the book and it's complicated

Speaker 15 because I think that a lot of people involved in that have a lot of regret, are kind of confused about why it turned out that way. I think people acknowledge that Jesse Jackson

Speaker 15 and some degree of resentment played a role. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 15 That Obama was,

Speaker 15 I don't know.

Speaker 15 I mean, I I think the truth is Obama allowed people, not him personally, but the fact of Obama was sort of a permission structure for people to sort of put Jesse Jackson to the side, or at least that's how he felt about it.

Speaker 15 And I do think that some of that psychologically

Speaker 15 played a role here. I mean,

Speaker 15 I talk to people on the Obama side and people on the Jesse Jackson side, people caught in the middle of the two.

Speaker 15 I think that

Speaker 15 ego, right? Jesse Jackson wants to be remembered. He wants to be honored.
He wants to be given his due. He didn't always feel like he got it from both Obama and his team.

Speaker 15 He lashed out in certain moments as a result of that. In other moments, like in the hot mic moment,

Speaker 15 He was actually saying something that other people were saying,

Speaker 15 but it was unwise for him to say it where he said it. And the fact that it became public was a huge problem.
And afterward, afterwards, you know, he gave interviews where he Jesse did, where he said,

Speaker 15 I regret that so deeply. Because the truth is, when Obama won, Jesse Jackson was

Speaker 2 elated. I know.

Speaker 2 I remember the picture of him in Grant Park with tears on his face.

Speaker 15 I mean, all of that said,

Speaker 15 when Barack Obama won, Jesse Jesse Jackson reacted the way a man who was standing feet from Dr. King when he was killed would react to a black man being elected president.
Disbelief, hope, fear, love,

Speaker 15 you know, and a little bit of regret that he wasn't able to do it, but joy that Obama was. And so those emotions were very real.
And I think he had a lot of regret.

Speaker 15 He said so, about how that relationship transpired. And

Speaker 15 I mean, your lack of the fact that you don't have a memory of Jesse Jackson being part of the Obama world is because he really wasn't there. He hardly ever went to the White House.

Speaker 15 After the fact, they're both in Chicago. They've met.

Speaker 15 I wrote about a recent, a relatively recent meeting that they had. And that meeting meant a lot to him.

Speaker 15 It meant a huge amount to him because I I think that he does live with some regret over that lost opportunity to have a relationship with the first black president, somebody who probably wouldn't be in the White House had it not been for what he first did.

Speaker 2 I also think

Speaker 2 even if they had had a close relationship,

Speaker 2 there was

Speaker 2 an effort on the campaign to not to make it a,

Speaker 2 you know, that he wasn't just the first he wouldn't just be the first black president yeah right like the history-making nature of the campaign was always intended to be a light touch yeah yeah and and unspoken and i mean like i i remember we gave the he gave the convention speech he accepted the nomination in 2008 yeah on the day of the i believe it was the 40th anniversary of the march on washington and there were a few consultants who were like and i in the first draft we had king at the end and a light touch king not like a heavy touch.

Speaker 2 And it was like, I don't know if we want to mention Martin Luther King. It's like a little, little too black.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, he is, he is about to be the first black nominee of the party.

Speaker 15 And look, I think that that's a common theme. You know, when

Speaker 15 Jesse Jackson ran in the 80s, the fact that he came out of the civil rights movement was a problem because

Speaker 15 it coded radical to a lot of white Americans. And I think,

Speaker 15 you know, the Obama Obama campaign, and I don't want to speak too much, you're part of that world, but understood that, that for some people, you know, I think for most of us, we think, wow, these people are heroes.

Speaker 15 This was such an amazing time where we pushed the country into a period of, you know, reaching its true potential. But there are a lot of people who think civil rights movement and they think radical

Speaker 15 black power activists. And it is politically very dangerous to be in that space.
And Jackson couldn't avoid it because

Speaker 15 that is the history that he came out of.

Speaker 15 And, but even at that time in 1983, when Harold Washington was running for mayor of Chicago, and Jesse Jackson was a really big part of helping make that happen, even Harold Washington had to keep him at arm's length.

Speaker 15 Because, again, like for the white Chicagoans who he needed for the general election, Jesse Jackson coded radical

Speaker 15 and civil rights rights and black power. And so even in the 80s, and he and Harold Washington were friends.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 15 He was kept at arm's length. So that was nothing new.
And the fact that

Speaker 15 that did not really change after all that time, I think it just says a lot about the country and just how you have to navigate race and how you have to navigate the people who do have ties to those movements who were seen to have been asking for too much

Speaker 15 from

Speaker 15 particularly the white power structures that, you know, especially in the 70s and the 80s controlled most of our politics.

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Speaker 2 The other

Speaker 2 reaction I had

Speaker 2 coming through the book was just this feeling of frustration and anger that there aren't many potential Democratic candidates today who have the ability, I think, like Jackson did, to speak from a place of passion and moral conviction about

Speaker 2 social and economic injustice, while also very explicitly trying to build a multiracial working class coalition, going everywhere, talking to everyone, campaigning in pretty creative ways.

Speaker 2 Did any of that jump out at you when you were?

Speaker 15 That's the thing.

Speaker 15 I mean, that's the thing that you come away from this. You know,

Speaker 15 when you really

Speaker 15 dig into how that campaign unfolded, his

Speaker 15 unpredictability, his ability to kind of capture the moment, to be creative, to, but also to speak to people in a certain way.

Speaker 15 I just think that the last few campaigns that I've covered, especially candidates who have run for president in the Democratic Party, they substitute reaching people on a soul level for a laundry list of policies.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 I cannot for the life of me understand

Speaker 15 why anybody would think that that's a good substitute.

Speaker 15 It's not a good substitute.

Speaker 2 I think it's because it codes

Speaker 2 if you don't, if you talk about morals and you're passionate, it codes like too progressive.

Speaker 2 And then if you talk, give you your laundry list, then it's like your laundry list of policies that poll well. And so then you can code more moderate.
But like, I think it's a false choice.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it is a false choice.

Speaker 15 I mean, but also like, I don't know, politics is the art of persuasion. Yeah.
And you have to move people. You have to reach them.

Speaker 2 And we're moved by stories and emotion.

Speaker 15 Yeah, exactly. You got to tell a story.
And I do think that that is a lost art, or it's increasingly so a lost art.

Speaker 15 I don't know what kind of, you know, candidate school some people need to be put through, but I just think there's definitely a rise of the sort of dominant Democratic candidate that doesn't know how to reach people on an emotional level.

Speaker 15 And but also, but to be fair, to be fair,

Speaker 15 Jesse Jackson was running in the 80s. He was running against those types of like almost technocratic candidates, right? And that's one of the, one of the reasons that they lost spectacularly.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 against Ronald Reagan, who was very much not that, who actually was the sort of like, how do you move people kind of

Speaker 15 kind of figure on the right. And so it is such an, to me, it's such an important takeaway from Jesse Jackson is that some of it's a skill, you can't really teach it.

Speaker 15 But selecting for that in candidates, I think can be really important because,

Speaker 15 you know,

Speaker 15 if you have a candidate who can speak to people, who can understand

Speaker 15 how to craft an argument that addresses the practical day-to-day needs, economic needs, safety, you know, education, people's futures, who can actually speak to them on that level, that

Speaker 15 probably should be the price to entry, and it's not really anymore.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 15 And,

Speaker 15 you know, I mean,

Speaker 15 in this moment, you have to ask the question, okay, there are probably some Democrats who do this,

Speaker 15 but

Speaker 15 the Democratic Party doesn't know what to do with them.

Speaker 2 Maybe it's,

Speaker 15 you know, and that's, that's, they have to figure that out. But I, but, but one of the one thing I will say is that Jesse Jackson had this base that was so energized.
It was a lot of young people.

Speaker 15 It was a lot of disaffected voters. It was a lot of new voters.

Speaker 15 And he brought them into the political process. And then the party was kind of like,

Speaker 15 we don't really need them. It just wasn't a priority to sort of bring those people fully into the process, even while he lost the primary, into the general election.

Speaker 15 And I think that is a sort of lesson, right? That it can be a mistake, even if you don't endorse the sort of

Speaker 15 left-wing politics of a certain candidate. What do you do with their people?

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 15 What do you do with their people? And the failure to do anything with Jesse Jackson's people, I think, really hurt Democrats.

Speaker 2 We've had that problem over time. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But it's also like it's the reason that he has those people is not just because of his issue positions, though that's a big part of it, but it's also because of something unique that he had.

Speaker 2 And I think that that's part of what we are missing. I mean, just like, and you write about this, that, you know, he campaigned with poor white people.
And farmers. And literally went places

Speaker 2 where you would not think that Jesse Jackson would go. And his rhetoric.
I mean, what I

Speaker 2 went back and read his 1984 speech at the convention because that was always one of my favorite speeches.

Speaker 2 It's funny, it made me go back to when I was when I was first in politics and I first loved speeches. I would go to this website, AmericanRhetoric.com, and they ranked the 100th

Speaker 2 resource. And so I went back there last night because I was looking at Jesse's 1984 speech again, and it's like his speech, Mario Cuomo's speech at the convention, Lyndon Johnson's We Shall Overcome.

Speaker 2 King, obviously, I have a like when you look at those top 10 speeches, they are all speeches that are like powerful, telling a story, like really just like searing in a way, but also like well constructed.

Speaker 2 Like Jesse Jackson, for all the, well, he's on the left and the politics and maybe he's radical, like he was

Speaker 2 constructing a pretty persuasive argument and trying to reach people who were not with him.

Speaker 15 Absolutely. And that's part of the misconception about.
about his candidacy was that he spent a lot of time in places that Democrats don't go anymore.

Speaker 15 You know, he was at FarmAid with Willie Nelson talking talking to a sea of white people

Speaker 15 about progressive politics.

Speaker 2 And this is like what's like RFK's campaign, too.

Speaker 2 We used to have candidates like that.

Speaker 15 He was with farmers between the two campaigns, between 84 and 88, with farmers whose farms were being foreclosed, rallying with them. He was going down to the deep south, back to Selma,

Speaker 15 and talking to the guy who, you know, 15, 20 years earlier had been on the bridge beating the civil rights protesters.

Speaker 15 So he went places that I think even today, you don't see a lot of Democratic candidates willing to go to, trying to persuade people who normally wouldn't be inclined to talk to him and actually succeeding in large part.

Speaker 15 And then those speeches, both the 84

Speaker 15 convention speech and the 88 convention speech are

Speaker 15 very good speeches. They are arguably some of the best ever to be delivered at a political convention.

Speaker 15 And they also, when you read them, you're like, oh yeah, he's talking about hollowed out factory towns and steel workers who need to go back, get back to work and how we need to stop being engaged in foreign wars and spend the money on bridges and roads at home.

Speaker 15 And it's like, wait, who does that sound like? I know. I know.
And that's,

Speaker 15 I mean, that's not.

Speaker 15 That's not to say that Jesse Jackson and Donald Trump have anything policy-wise in common, except that they understand

Speaker 15 that

Speaker 15 you have to talk to people about their actual lives in really concrete ways and paint a picture for them of their existing life and then the version of it that you're arguing you can change.

Speaker 15 And I think he really understood that well. And I think Trump understands that really well.
That's why, you know, it's been really hard, I think, for Democrats to respond to Trump, because

Speaker 15 I think he's kind of stolen some of their messaging on some key issues. And figuring out how to out how to get that back is going to be part of the task ahead.

Speaker 2 It's become such a cliche in politics to like meet people where they are, but I kind of want some Democratic candidate to take that literally and like launch their presidential campaign by going to West Virginia, going to Mississippi, going to these places that are going to have like no electoral value to

Speaker 2 the Democratic nominee.

Speaker 15 Jackson was in West Virginia. He was in all those places.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 don't set up an event where it seems like it's all artificial and you have your advanced. You just like go talk.
You know, we're in a national environment. Someone's going to film it anyway.

Speaker 2 It's going to end up on social media. I mean, Trump did a little of this in 24, where we were like, why is he going to Madison Square Garden? Why is he going here?

Speaker 2 And part of it was just the message that the place sent.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, Jesse Jackson launched his campaign

Speaker 15 in 88 in this small Iowa town

Speaker 15 called Greenville. He had gone there like the year before and was invited by locals and went to this church.
And it was like, I think it was like Super Bowl Sunday or something.

Speaker 15 And a thousand people showed up. And then so he really had a connection to this place.
It was literally a small town, a tiny, tiny town. And there was nothing there.

Speaker 15 It was so close, it's close to Missouri. So then when he announces his campaign, all these farmers from across the border come just to hear him.

Speaker 15 And it's this kind of like, they're in this old, this barn area and they've got people on tractors and it's that kind of vibe. And

Speaker 15 here he was, this candidate that everybody was like, well, that's the black candidate. And he doesn't launch in Des Moines.
He doesn't launch in one of the bigger Iowa cities. He goes to the country,

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 15 where

Speaker 15 there are really only white people.

Speaker 15 And there are a lot of farmers and there are a lot of people who otherwise have no reason to be interested in his message and drew a big crowd and launched his campaign there.

Speaker 15 And that was symbolic, not just for the press, but for himself, because I think

Speaker 15 it was important to him that people saw that

Speaker 15 he envisioned his campaign as encompassing more than just...

Speaker 15 people who looked like him. He really did believe that the message that he had had resonance with those people too.

Speaker 15 And they did, more so than I think people recognize, because it just doesn't get remembered.

Speaker 15 I mean, in the book, there's this great photo that I am obsessed with because it's like Jesse Jackson and he's standing, I think he's on a tractor. And there's like a young boy,

Speaker 15 like a young white boy in the photo standing next to him. But then all these men, farmers, with sacks of brown paper bags on their heads with their eyes cut out.

Speaker 15 And they had the sacks on their heads because their farms were being foreclosed on. They were protesting against that.
And they were hiding from the people foreclosing their farms.

Speaker 15 But they wanted to show up at this Jesse Jackson rally. And I tell the story in the book about how he did this rally with them.
And then they went to a church down the street.

Speaker 15 And the farmers sat with the sacks on their heads in the front row and the pews of the church, listening to Jesse Jackson give this like stem winder of a speech in a church.

Speaker 15 And it is, it's the story of this candidate who was so different from everything else that was going on. But I think part of it was the media environment.
We didn't have, there was no internet.

Speaker 15 So a lot of that never really broke through. You know, I mean, some of those stories.

Speaker 2 You probably would have done much better in a, yeah, in an intent in an attention environment like we have today.

Speaker 15 Yeah. I mean, some of those stories were not even reported on.
I had, I was, I talked to some people who were there, which is how I was able to write about it. But in the newspapers,

Speaker 15 it wasn't.

Speaker 15 People weren't writing articles about Jesse Jackson talking to farmers all that often.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 15 And you imagine what would have happened if they did.

Speaker 2 What a quintessential American scene, though.

Speaker 2 Just the church and the, I mean, just it's

Speaker 2 a good version of an American scene, in my view. Yeah.
I mean,

Speaker 15 the brown paper sacks could be a lot of different things.

Speaker 2 It could be very nefarious.

Speaker 15 But in that case,

Speaker 15 it was not.

Speaker 15 But it just tells the story of also those people,

Speaker 15 they're just

Speaker 15 They were the type of people who their family and friends would have not wanted to see them at a Jesse Jackson rally.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 15 But they showed up anyway because he was the only candidate talking to them, the only one. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Last question, I'll let you go.

Speaker 2 How did you find the time to write this book?

Speaker 2 I think you were like a new mom when you were when you were starting to write it and you still had your day job.

Speaker 15 I was pregnant with my

Speaker 15 one and only daughter when I

Speaker 15 started it. When I started it.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 And I and I just started anchoring my first show, Inside Politics, when I started this. So, I mean, bad timing, I will concede.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it took a while. It took a while.

Speaker 15 But I also think, you know, part of it was

Speaker 15 in writing this book, I kept struggling with, how does the story end? Like, what's the conclusion about today's politics?

Speaker 15 And because every.

Speaker 15 Every four years, right, something

Speaker 15 massive happens in our politics. You know, in 2020, when I first started writing the book, Biden had won.

Speaker 15 Then in 2024, Biden loses.

Speaker 15 So like, where are we going? And I think that's still kind of unclear. But I think one thing that is not unclear is that this fight for the working class American is well underway.

Speaker 15 And that is the pitched battle that both parties are in right now.

Speaker 15 And I think that's what this book is about. How do you reach those people?

Speaker 15 And if you are a Democrat, how do you reach those people while also not abandoning the coalition of voters that makes up the Democratic Party?

Speaker 15 And I think that is where there are so many lessons from Jesse Jackson. But I also just, I mean,

Speaker 15 it's as a writer, sometimes you want to be able to say, well, this is what you do with this information. And I think the answer is actually

Speaker 15 that it's TBD because we're still in the middle of this.

Speaker 15 very important consequential conversation about the future of economic populism and political populism in this country.

Speaker 2 Yes. And we have been for several decades.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But this is an important part of it, of that discussion.
Abby, thank you so much for joining. The book is A Dream Defer, Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power.
It's fantastic.

Speaker 2 Everyone go pick it up. Thanks.

Speaker 15 Thank you.

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