Did Trump Blow It on the Epstein Files?

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.

Speaker 2 I'm John Lovett, Tommy Detour.

Speaker 1 On today's show, guess what? Trump actually wants to release the Epstein files. Always has.

Speaker 1 We'll talk about why the change of heart and what happens next. We also love Marjorie Taylor Greene now.
Always have. Sure.

Speaker 1 We'll get into why she's apologizing for things she said in the past and the lane she's opening for herself as the leader who can bring this divided country together. Not a joke, folks.

Speaker 3 Not a joke.

Speaker 1 Also, Trump wades into the Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes platforming debate. His affordability pivot may involve destroying Obamacare.
And finally, we'll unpack the most viral Epstein email yet.

Speaker 1 And why Love It should Find It Funny.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 That's the frame. That's true.
That's the frame.

Speaker 3 I can't wait to find out.

Speaker 1 Then you'll hear Tommy's interview with Representative Rokana about his effort to fight for the release of the Epstein files.

Speaker 1 But let's start with this week's big vote on a bill to force the Justice Department to release the Epstein files, which won a surprise endorsement Sunday night from the dog that didn't bark himself, Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 It was one of the more abrupt and dramatic flip-flops, even for Trump.

Speaker 1 It was just a few days ago that he demanded, quote, no Republican defections and sat Lauren Boebert down in the sit room with Pam Bondi and Cash Batel in an unsuccessful attempt to convince her to oppose the release of the Epstein files.

Speaker 1 As you all know, the discharge petition succeeded, and the House is scheduled to vote on the underlying bill on Tuesday, maybe as you're listening to this, potentially with a lot of Republican support, if not unanimous Republican support at this this point, which is probably why on Sunday night, Trump posted that House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files and that, quote, the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they're legally entitled to.

Speaker 1 All caps. I don't care.
Trump also mentioned in that post his new order directing the Justice Department to investigate Epstein's ties to Bill Clinton and other Democrats.

Speaker 1 He then took this messaging out for a spin in the Oval on Monday when asked whether he would sign the Epstein files bill when and if it comes to his desk, let's take a listen.

Speaker 4 Do you want to see that pass the Senate? Would you sign that bill if it gets to your desk?

Speaker 5 I do want to see.

Speaker 5 Here's what I want.

Speaker 5 We have nothing to do with Epstein, the Democrats do. All of his friends were Democrats.

Speaker 5 You look at this Reid Hoffman, you look at Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, they went to his island all the time, and many others are all Democrats.

Speaker 5 All I want is I want for people to recognize the great job that I've done on pricing, on affordability, because we brought prices way down, but they're going way lower.

Speaker 5 I believe that many of the people that we, some of the people that we mentioned, are being looked at very seriously for their relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. But they were with him all the time.

Speaker 5 I wasn't. I wasn't at all.

Speaker 5 And we'll see what happens. What I just don't want

Speaker 5 Epstein to do is detract from the great success of the Republican Party.

Speaker 2 Got a little frog in his throat.

Speaker 1 Maybe a bill.

Speaker 3 Oh.

Speaker 3 I wonder if that'll come up later.

Speaker 1 Someone asked him why he had a frog in his throat and why he lost his voice, and he said because he blew his stack at someone

Speaker 1 over a trade deal.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's very much John Edwards trying too hard, caring too much.

Speaker 2 I just care too much. It's my biggest weakness.

Speaker 3 I was yelling too much about

Speaker 3 America first.

Speaker 1 That's really funny.

Speaker 1 So what happened there, guys?

Speaker 1 You know, I know that Republicans were, more Republicans were saying they were going to vote no and the discharge petition passed, but he knew the math for the last several days.

Speaker 1 What do you think happened?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think this parade was

Speaker 3 going to happen. He can either be in front of the horses or under them.

Speaker 1 Yep. Yep.

Speaker 2 Trains coming. You hit and run over, you get in front of it, and you called a parade, right?

Speaker 3 That's right. And the other, the thing that there's a contradiction at the heart of this, which is this is a bill to force him to do something.

Speaker 3 So it doesn't really make sense to be in favor of this bill.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 he now says he's fine with Congress approving a bill to force him to do something he could do today if he wants to.

Speaker 1 And not do on the other side of it. That's the problem.
See what I'm saying? Like, I don't, I mean,

Speaker 1 what do you think happens from here?

Speaker 1 Like, now that he's ostensibly in favor of this, you know, again, it could, there's like Troy Nells, who's one of the House Republicans who just the other day was like, absolutely not, and tweeting, like, whatever you need, Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 Now he's like, oh, I'm a yes. And I think we're, and then some other one was predicting like 100% of Republicans now vote for it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, I talked to Roe Khan about this.
You'll hear it later in the show. I mean, it sounds like Roe thought that he had like 40 or 50 votes.

Speaker 2 Now it seems like everyone has a free pass to be for this bill. And now we actually might see a vote on it in the Senate, which initially John Thune had said he wouldn't do.

Speaker 2 And then I guess Donald Trump could veto it.

Speaker 2 That would make it spicy. But the problem is, I mean, like, we're hearing this kind of curious and half-hearted rhetorical support for a thing he could just do tomorrow, as you mentioned there.

Speaker 2 But I think we all need to worry about the many ways that his goons could prevent the actual release of relevant documents,

Speaker 2 including especially anything that implicates Trump's, since we know the FBI did like a control F for Trump with all these documents and has seemingly suppressed those.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, it's confusing. A, Trump is not a rational actor.
He's not behaving in a rational way in how he's been handling this.

Speaker 3 And B, like, we don't really know the value of what he's trying to hide and what parts of it he's trying to prevent the release of. So

Speaker 3 one way this goes is sometime in the next few days, either before the House can vote or after, is they promise some kind of release to make the vote moot so that it could die in the Senate and he's able to claim he's fulfilling whatever the brief is of this law

Speaker 3 without actually doing it.

Speaker 3 The other part of this is he's talking about opening up investigations.

Speaker 3 The law is very short, but it has two parts to it.

Speaker 3 One is you have to release the information to the public, except for private personal information about victims and anything pertaining to an ongoing investigation.

Speaker 3 They could use this to use an ongoing investigation to stop a bunch of this from being released.

Speaker 3 But the other part of the law would release information to Congress and doesn't have that caveat, including a list of names of people involved.

Speaker 3 But I do think we're at the point where we've gotten a lot of the names.

Speaker 3 And so now is it about whatever other details and information and materials are part of whatever we're calling the Epstein vials, whatever that may be?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think

Speaker 1 the smarter move here would have been to be for this all along and then just stonewall the release or withhold whatever they wanted to withhold.

Speaker 1 I mean, the core problem in getting the Justice Department to release the Epstein files was never necessarily a vote in Congress.

Speaker 1 It's the fact that the Justice Department under Donald Trump is deeply corrupt, and so is Donald Trump. So

Speaker 1 who are we to think that just because there is a vote in Congress to force the administration to do something, that they would just honor their word and release the Epstein files as they are charging people with all kinds of crimes that are just fucking made up.

Speaker 2 Thomas Massey, the Republican who sponsored this original bill with Rokana, said this could be a smokescreen announcing Trump got on True Social.

Speaker 2 We told Pam Bondi to start investigations into Bill Clinton and all these other Democrats. And that could be the pretext to withhold a bunch of documents.
We just don't know.

Speaker 1 One more thing on the counter investigation that he ordered into Democrats. What the hell is that? Like, do they really want us to believe that...

Speaker 1 So Pam Bondi originally, remember, with the binders that she she made for the kooks, she gave them the binders and she said, oh, I'm the whatever.

Speaker 1 And then when everyone found out that there was nothing in there and then she decided there was not going to be an investigation, what she really said was, we've done an investigation into all the Epstein files.

Speaker 1 There's no reason for charging anyone.

Speaker 1 It's all over. It's in the past.
We're all done. Now they expect us to believe that there's something new to look at between his ties with

Speaker 1 on his ties to Democrats that like they didn't know before. So now they're just going to redo the old investigation.

Speaker 2 And ironically, one of the things that came out in this House Oversight Committee tranche of emails was Jeffrey Epstein saying that Bill Clinton had never been to the island, which undercut Donald Trump's suggestion here.

Speaker 3 Also,

Speaker 3 Trump is under the impression that Democrats think about Democrats the way Republicans think about Trump. Like, we go after, you know, investigating Democrats as part of this would be fine.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Go for it.

Speaker 1 Go for it. Yeah.
It would be, but it's not,

Speaker 1 back to the corrupt point.

Speaker 3 No, no, I'm not. Of course, that's not what this is.
So the idea that, like, oh, no, Bill Clinton's involved is going to stop Democrats from caring. This has never been true.

Speaker 3 Yes, they're going to use this to go after and smear people.

Speaker 3 Especially because you've seen some people like Reid Hoffman said like, release them, release the information.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, the range of what we could get from the Justice Department

Speaker 1 with regard to this investigation is anything from like made-up charges and investigations into, or made-up charges for Democrats involved somehow, or, but like, the idea that Donald Trump is ever going to allow his Justice Department to release anything that is incriminating or even in the least embarrassing to him in the Epstein files strikes me as a bit fanciful.

Speaker 3 But that's what I mean about him not being a rational actor. Then why are you going to all this trouble?

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 I think his original position was stupid. Yeah, like that.
And he's finally belatedly come around to the smarter position.

Speaker 3 Buttonholing Lauren Boebert in the White House, alienating her, losing more Republicans along the way. Like, it doesn't really make sense.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, it also speaks to the fact that, like, you know, is he covering up something real or isn't he and just sort of flailing about because he doesn't like to be embarrassed and he doesn't like any kind of negative attention?

Speaker 1 Sort of, you know, one for that category.

Speaker 1 Because,

Speaker 1 like, it's possible he was trying to strong-arm Boebert and MTG and all the other ones because he just didn't want to lose a vote and he just didn't want to be embarrassed.

Speaker 1 And he just doesn't want any pressure on this. And he doesn't want the bad headlines.
Who knows?

Speaker 3 One argument on the other side of this as to why he's right to be afraid of what happens when it gets to the Justice Department Department according to this law, even though it is now controlled by Stooges and Goons.

Speaker 3 We are seeing leaks about what's happening with Cash Patel. There is information coming out that is not helpful to the regime.
It's not a fully controlled Department of Justice or FCC.

Speaker 1 People can go to court.

Speaker 1 People can go to court. And then I guess another good scenario for Trump is maybe bad things do come out, but like it drags on in a court process and lawsuits for a long time.

Speaker 1 And they don't have to worry about it for a while. But we'll see.
The latest Epstein drama has also led to Trump's biggest MAGA breakup since Elon.

Speaker 1 Marjorie Taylor Greene not getting an invite to any of the White House holiday parties this year, or maybe, maybe ever.

Speaker 1 On Friday night, Trump announced that he was withdrawing his support of MTG and will potentially back a primary challenge to the Georgia representative because as he wrote, quote, all I see wacky Marjorie do is complain, complain, complain.

Speaker 1 Trump claimed MTG was pissed he told her not to run for Senate and angry he wouldn't return her calls anymore, writing that with so many politicians and world leaders to talk to every day, quote, and an otherwise normal life to lead, I can't take a ranting lunatic's call every day.

Speaker 1 An otherwise normal life to lead is very

Speaker 1 long statement. I love it.

Speaker 1 Marge countered by posting that it was actually the Epstein files that caused the break with Trump and shared texts she sent him on Friday, urging the president to support the release of the files.

Speaker 1 She later posted that a result of Trump attacking her, she's been getting death threats and also wrote about how, quote, the political-industrial complex tells us to hate each other, fundraises off why we have to hate each other, and pits Americans against each other to the point of violence and nearing civil war.

Speaker 1 This is all so wrong.

Speaker 1 I believe in the American people more than I believe in any leader or political party, and the American people deserve so much better than how they've been treated by both sides of the aisle.

Speaker 1 That is from one Marjorie Taylor Green.

Speaker 2 The battle helm of the Republic behind that.

Speaker 1 Even though

Speaker 3 she had a slogan in there that was America first, America only, which I actually thought was just like a smart way to summarize what she's doing.

Speaker 3 Like, I was like, this is just, it's just so interesting. Anyway, go on.

Speaker 1 So, Marge went on CNN State of the Union on Sunday morning to elaborate on all this, where she did something almost no one does in politics anymore. Let's listen.

Speaker 6 We have seen these kinds of attacks or criticism from the president at other people.

Speaker 6 It's not new. And with respect, I haven't heard you speak out about it until it was directed at you.

Speaker 7 Deanna, I think that's fair criticism. And I would like to say humbly, I'm sorry for taking part in the toxic

Speaker 7 politics.

Speaker 7 It's very bad for our country. I am going, I am committed and I've been working on this a lot lately to put down the knives in politics.

Speaker 7 I really just want to see people be kind to one another and we need to figure out a new path forward.

Speaker 1 What do you guys think about Marjorie Taylor Greene's decision to join the resistance?

Speaker 2 I mean, I think I believe her. When she says she met with Epstein's victims, it moved her.
She was moved by those conversations.

Speaker 2 I mean, she was someone who dabbled famously in QAnon, which was a crazy conspiracy theory, but at its root, it was supposed to be about disclosing a powerful cabal of people that set up a pedophile ring.

Speaker 2 It turns out that's exactly what Jeffrey Epstein did.

Speaker 1 I also think that she

Speaker 2 is frustrated by Trump not living up to the MAGA that she thought she was voting for. And that is, you know, it's sort of what you were just the summary, like with America only.

Speaker 2 She wants the more isolationist version of MAGA. She has been mad about U.S.
support for Ukraine. She's mad about U.S.
military aid to Israel.

Speaker 2 She's angry about H-1B visas, Trump's Argentina bank bailout. She's been talking about that.

Speaker 2 She's talked about, she's one of the many conservatives mad about Chinese students being allowed to attend schools in the U.S.,

Speaker 2 regime change wars with Venezuela. She's been pretty consistent there.

Speaker 2 And at the same time, I also buy Trump's claim that Marjorie Taylor Greene is mad that she didn't get his endorsement in the governor's primary or senate primary or whatever she wants to run for.

Speaker 2 Like she feels like she was all in for Trump at his lowest moment and maybe he slighted her. But I mean, like bigger picture, I tend to think she is sincere.

Speaker 2 Like I think she's a random lady in Georgia who found her way into Congress and along the way has mostly said what she thinks, usually for worse for herself.

Speaker 2 And often that is like, why are we bombing the Houthis? No one in my district knows what a Houthi is, you know, shit like that. But I do think,

Speaker 2 you know, the, the, the place in that interview where she, I think, fell short was when Dana started pushing her on her relationship with Nick Fuentes.

Speaker 2 And she didn't, the, the the apology tour didn't really extend to that, which I thought was notable.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so I take like the America first, America only to be about being in favor of America first, but not a party that is beholden to Trump, which is, I think, what makes it interesting to me.

Speaker 3 Like America only, not Trump, just America.

Speaker 3 So Yeyer Rosenberg in The Atlantic wrote up some open questions for MTG, and I found it useful both because they're good questions, but also it was sort of a bracing bit of cold water about all the different ways in which she has embraced some of the most most vile and fringe ideas in politics.

Speaker 3 MDG posted this about JFK, and I quote: There was once a great president that the American people loved. He opposed Israel's nuclear program and then he was assassinated.

Speaker 3 That is from June of this year. That's five months ago.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 I am like that's the thing you'll hear from the Tucker corners of the world, too.

Speaker 3 So she does like anyone look into it.

Speaker 1 So listen, hey, just asking

Speaker 3 her first, yeah. So yeah, did Israel kill JFK? Honestly, I just learned about this conspiracy theory from MTG, but apparently it's floating around.
So like I was.

Speaker 1 If you're watching this on YouTube, the algorithm will now feed you some interesting stuff. Cool.
Yeah, there's

Speaker 3 two doors before you. But so like we had talked about this a bit last week.
So Marjorie Taylor Green just starts showing up different.

Speaker 3 She hadn't yet really done the work of acknowledging some of the words.

Speaker 1 Is it really her?

Speaker 3 Well, that's the other one thing, right? Could this be a Dave situation? For sure, we don't know. But I do think that, like,

Speaker 3 okay, we just can't be cheap dates. Like, we can be open to this, but, but she has a lot of

Speaker 3 there's a lot of ways in which we need to understand how she came to this. Like, all politicians are a mix of conviction and calculus.
Clearly, some of this is ego and sort of ambition.

Speaker 3 I do view this as someone who is a sincere creation of her self-selecting media diet from both before she was in Congress and after. But she has been in the public eye

Speaker 3 and a well-known figure with access to a great deal of not just public information, but private information as a member of Congress.

Speaker 3 And she has held pretty heinous and despicable views into the last few weeks. We don't know what views have changed.
So I feel like there's still, I want us to just be,

Speaker 3 avoid what used to be called Strange New Respect, which is whenever a Republican would start to move towards the middle, suddenly the media would sort of embrace them in their growth.

Speaker 3 And like, I want us to be able to see someone like this change, especially because I agree with you, Tommy, that like I do think she's a sincere actor,

Speaker 3 but sort of like there's still more work to do.

Speaker 2 There's a lot there. Remember when she chased David Hogg around, like called him a crisis actor.
I think it was part of that conspiracy, too.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think there's two parts of every political leader's persona. There's the policies.
that you believe, like the political beliefs that you hold.

Speaker 1 And then there's like your style and your rhetoric and how you interact and go on TV and talk about other opponents and other politicians.

Speaker 1 And I think that on the substance and on the policy, I mean, she says at the beginning of that interview with Dana that like, I still support the Trump administration and his agenda, right?

Speaker 1 Like she's very honest about that. And so she is someone who has held all these views that we're talking about.
And I don't think she's changed on many of those.

Speaker 1 Like you said, so I think she is consistent on that.

Speaker 1 I think it is clear that we were all exposed to her for the first however many years of her political career as like a bomb thrower and someone who has matched her policy views, which are extreme, with some pretty extreme and nasty rhetoric.

Speaker 1 And on that, she's trying to make a change, or at least that's what she's claiming right now in these interviews.

Speaker 1 And I think you can take, I think if you take the cynical view, that her sudden, that this is like a, that you don't really trust her sudden conversion.

Speaker 1 I think that's like totally understandable and it may be correct I'm choosing to hope it's sincere and you know and that she's open because if it's sincere then I think perhaps she's open to hearing the case for supporting other democratic policies and maybe changing her views on some of her more extreme policies or maybe not but it's like it's nice to hear someone apologize for their the their rhetoric and like that doesn't change her her views that I think are some of them are abhorrent, but I'd rather have someone with abhorrent views who's not out there chasing David Hogg around, being like really nasty, having rhetoric that potentially incites violence.

Speaker 1 Like good for her for stepping back from the brink if it holds, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Even from like a maximally cynical point of view, like if attention is everything in politics, she is doing it a smarter way now because it used to be that you could just be a bomb thrower and you say offensive things and you lob crazy accusations.

Speaker 2 Now everybody's doing that. Now Randy Fein's out there saying nuke Gaza.

Speaker 2 So from a pure like attention economy perspective, the smartest thing she can do now is buck her party and go against Trump a bit. Now, I still tend to think she's sort of just out of fucks to give.

Speaker 2 And she's saying what she thinks. And like, I don't know, she's not going to ever lose.
I don't think she's going to lose that primary in her district, no matter what.

Speaker 1 I was thinking like what you said, she's just like a random person who kind of fell into politics. Like she fell into politics and then fell down a rabbit hole with QAnon.

Speaker 1 And it's like, that is the archetype for the kind of person who suddenly one day is like, what is all this? This is a lot, you know? And who knows?

Speaker 1 Maybe she's, maybe she's still at the beginning of her journey out of the rabbit hole, but like, or maybe not. Maybe she dives right back in and maybe it's all cynical.
Maybe, you know, who knows?

Speaker 3 Yeah. I also, I do think to, to your point, John, like the relationship between style, form, and function is actually more complicated.

Speaker 3 And we've seen this, by the way, like you've seen this with people who, Republicans who turned on Trump suddenly have more moderate or even slightly to the left views on policy.

Speaker 3 Like we are not very, we're not like complete logical beings. And I do think something happens when someone

Speaker 3 sheds a kind of vitriolic style and suddenly sees their opponents as human beings. They start to perhaps hear what they have to say.
I think that's a long way from

Speaker 3 here.

Speaker 3 And by the way, also, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, she was not a, like, we're back to like, you know, these kids, like, she was in her 40s when she's espousing these views.

Speaker 3 All that's a way of saying, like, okay, like, these are views she held shallowly, perhaps, but it wasn't just that she was in an information environment.

Speaker 3 She was choosing to be inside of it and sinking inside of it.

Speaker 3 All that's a way of saying, like, I like want us to, it's like you have to kind of balance the need for this person to on this journey, kind of take accountability, because otherwise it won't be sincere, can't be, unless she's acknowledging the ways in which she was.

Speaker 3 not a part of the problem she described.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I guess I'm, I guess the only thing I'm getting at is like, there's this tendency to try to figure out whether we should like, you are absolved, you were not absolved, right?

Speaker 1 And it's like, as opposed to that being like, well, now she's, maybe she's persuadable. Maybe we can, maybe maybe bring her over.

Speaker 1 Like, that to me is more important than whether it's like sincere, not sincere. She did enough.
She didn't do enough. Like, you know.

Speaker 2 She's also been on this journey for a while. I mean, she gave a speech in 2021

Speaker 2 apologizing for QAnon, apologizing for some of the things she's done.

Speaker 2 She talked about the David Hogg thing. So this has been like a bit of a journey she's been on.
I think she's really, like, she was a random lady who was in a weird place on the internet.

Speaker 2 And then she got elected to Congress. And she was like, holy shit, I was wrong about a lot of stuff.
Maybe she's kind of happy.

Speaker 3 Any word, any word on it? Make sure she just she look like make her look when the boyfriend.

Speaker 1 I don't know what's happened with his career now. I know.
Yeah, that's weird. Funnily, a new opening in the White House press pool, probably.

Speaker 1 Yeah, for those who don't know, he is a White House correspondent for One American News. America.

Speaker 2 One of those ones that's just right-wing and crazy. But he posted a bunch of photos of them together, and he had his shirt off in a lot of them.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of his nips in those photos. They seem happy.

Speaker 3 You know, they seem happy. Yeah.
You know?

Speaker 1 Showed up in Brad Sherman's For You Feed, probably. Just, I mean, that's just now we're

Speaker 1 going off in another direction.

Speaker 2 By the way, I was watching Megan Kelly talk about this, and she said the real sin for Marjorie Taylor Greene was doing it on CNN. Because the one thing you never do is talk about Donald Trump on CNN.

Speaker 2 That's the kind of shit.

Speaker 1 That's trivial. That's the kind of shit I'm talking about, right? Like, that is the okay.

Speaker 1 So anyway, all this gets at a much bigger issue, which is the deepening realization among some Republicans that Trump is, in fact, a lame duck and fairly unpopular on top of that.

Speaker 1 Congressman Thomas Massey, the one Republican who's consistently been willing to buck Trump and who co-sponsored the Epstein files discharge petition with Roe,

Speaker 1 laid things out for his colleagues in an appearance on ABC on Sunday morning.

Speaker 8 The president can't protect you then.

Speaker 1 So I think we all probably want

Speaker 1 Republicans to believe what Massey said is true, that he's a lame duck and you should not have to fear him anymore. To what extent do you guys think they'll listen?

Speaker 2 I talk about this with Roe, too. I mean, Massey is sort of nodding at this bigger problem you mentioned there, which is that Trump's iron grip on Republicans has clearly slipped.

Speaker 2 We have evidence of that insofar as the Republicans willing to sign this discharge petition before Trump had his change of heart. Let's call it that.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I think

Speaker 2 Massey is just pointing out the obvious fact: like, Trump won't be around forever. I still don't think we know how long he's going to be around for.

Speaker 2 You know, the guy could decide to sit in Mar-a-Lago and be kingmaker on the internet for a decade and endorse in every primary and attack people for perceived slights and pick sides on issues and still just be a real problem.

Speaker 2 But I think what Tom Massey realizes, and Marjorie Taylor Greene realizes, is there's strength in numbers. And the more people

Speaker 2 that, you know, defections from Trump will beget more defections and

Speaker 2 we'll see more Kurds. So hopefully he's right there and people take it to heart.
Like, will there be primaries run on whether or not you voted to release the Epstein files?

Speaker 2 I'm a little more skeptical of that, but it's a bigger point, I think.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I tend to think these guys aren't long-term thinkers. I think this is a little bit of wishful thinking.

Speaker 3 And more than that, I actually think when he says Trump will be gone, but you will have voted to conceal information and protect pedophiles, it's less about saying what the future will be and more reminding them what the politics of this vote were but for Trump, that the politics of this vote, obviously, they all want to vote fucking yes on this.

Speaker 3 And the only reason they wouldn't is because Trump would pose a threat. And so I think it boils down to they'd rather be 30 duck-sized Trumps facing one Trump-sized duck.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 And that it's much less, this is a way of, that is a signal about strength in numbers than it is about some Trumpless future.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I mean, the one thing that's been true in the Trump era is that when he is on the ballot, with other Republicans, he brings a lot of them over the line and his voters come out and it helps a lot of Republicans who are otherwise unpopular.

Speaker 1 And when he's not on the ballot, they're sort of on their own. And the Republicans have actually been doing quite poorly in the last 10 years when Donald Trump's not on the ballot.

Speaker 1 And when you think about this, like he's never going to be on the ballot with Republicans again. I think they're starting to finally realize this.

Speaker 1 It was probably like an understated point when he admitted that he cannot run for a third term.

Speaker 1 Now we know why he was trying to, one reason he might have been trying to keep that out there because it did sort of save him from lame duck status.

Speaker 1 I think his last hurrah here is trying to endorse primary opponents in the upcoming midterms to the extent that that works. And I don't even know if it will.

Speaker 2 Not so good in 2022.

Speaker 1 Not so good in 2022. And we even have talked about the Indiana Republicans because he was like, you know, it was threatening them that they better gerrymander their map.

Speaker 1 mid-district in advance of the midterms. And they've basically held strong and told him to fuck off.
And, you know, he's like tweeting all these kinds of primary threats at them.

Speaker 1 And so far it's not moving them at all. One of the guys who's a Republican leader in the state legislature was swatted,

Speaker 1 which is the, it's funny because if it was a normal president that hasn't acted like an authoritarian and used like implicit threats of either losing your job or worse or violence, then we'd be like...

Speaker 1 It's like George W. Bush in the second term of

Speaker 1 his presidency when it was just like all the Republicans were just jumping ship and they didn't want anything to do with George W. Bush.
And that was it.

Speaker 1 I do think one of the things that keeps people afraid of Trump is that he has this like large apparatus in the state, the power of the state, where he like goes after people and it's kind of scary.

Speaker 1 But like, I don't know how long that lasts.

Speaker 3 Well, it also,

Speaker 3 it's a much more potent threat because once you've used it, it's really more about the next fight, right? Once Trump has called you out and swatted you and done all of this, you faced it.

Speaker 3 You're on the other side of it. Now, that is meant to, what, cajole and convince the next state over to do the redistricting, less you fall prey to the same attacks.
But, you know,

Speaker 3 he posted something awful about so Thomas Massey's wife had passed away. I don't know about that.
And he

Speaker 3 remarried and Trump posts something just so awful about like passed away last year. Yes.
And

Speaker 3 he met and married someone. Which is fine.

Speaker 2 I'm just saying like to attack him for his wife dying last year.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 3 But well, he's attacking him for getting married too quickly as if there's something shady or despicable about that without knowing the man's life. And a bunch of people.

Speaker 1 Someone attacking him, but someone who reversed the institution of marriage. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 And so a bunch of people came to Massey's defense, apart because I think people view Massey as a sincere operator as well. And also because, first of all, we've done this before.

Speaker 3 Trump has done this for so long. It just doesn't pack the same punch.
And so you go after the guy in Indiana. He's now been gone after.
He's on the other side of it. Where's your power?

Speaker 1 What happens? Well, just imagine a scenario where we do well in the midterms. Democrats do well in the midterms.

Speaker 1 And the Republicans who are left in Congress, who've kept their jobs, now see what just happened to a bunch of other Republicans. Republicans, and Donald Trump is now really a lame duck president.

Speaker 1 We're heading into the presidential election in 2028. Then I think you start seeing people jump ship.

Speaker 2 I hope so. I mean, what he did to Thomas Massey was just so unbelievably cruel.

Speaker 2 This man's wife of 35 years, they have four kids together, passes away, and you attack him on Twitter because he disagrees with you on a vote to protect pedophiles.

Speaker 2 Like, I think that was probably like scales off moment for a lot of people, just what a vicious, cruel person he was. I mean, I think, like, I hope there's more defections.

Speaker 2 I do think there's a history in the Republican Party of

Speaker 2 politicians clinging to the last guy way longer than they should. Like Reagan did it with Nixon.

Speaker 2 Nixon did it with Goldwater, all because the next person to run for president knows that the base is going to like Trump for a very long time, and they're going to want to reach those voters.

Speaker 2 So we'll see. But, you know, it would be nice if they all were just a little bit less afraid of him.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think this is why J.D. Vance is not going to have the

Speaker 1 easiest time getting the nomination. He still might, but like

Speaker 1 he's stuck because he can't be critical of Donald Trump because he's the vice president. And so he's going to have to do the,

Speaker 1 he's going to be on the view someday and they're going to say, is there anything you would have done differently? No, nothing. He's going to say, nothing comes to mind.
Nothing comes to mind.

Speaker 1 That's going to be his thing. So they very well could be a challenger of the populist right style, a Tucker Carlson or someone like that to J.D.
Vance's right.

Speaker 3 It's also just, it's just.

Speaker 1 I'm getting ahead of myself, I know.

Speaker 3 I know. There's a funny, it's

Speaker 3 a week and a half ago, two weeks ago, Trump is threatening a third term. We're kind of in this authoritarian dissent.

Speaker 3 And it is amazing how normal, a version of normal politics kind of manages to intercede. It is sort of part of the weakness, the inherent weakness in any sort of effort to

Speaker 3 accumulate so much power, which is like these are all human beings and their actual differences start to break through.

Speaker 3 Like there are democracy has self-defense mechanisms built into it, and it is been heartening to see. It doesn't mean things aren't dangerous and democracy isn't at risk, but

Speaker 3 we have some wind in our backs here.

Speaker 1 I know, but you know, it's funny, I had that same thought, and I've had it since because the elections went well.

Speaker 1 Then he's clearly clearly on his heels on this Epstein stuff and affordability.

Speaker 1 And then over the weekend, when I saw like ICE arrive in Charlotte and just the brutality, and then, you know, more investigations into more Democrats he doesn't like and all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 I'm like, you know, as he becomes more unpopular and, and as his people, Stephen Miller, J.D. Vance, all the rest of them, feel it slipping away, like they will get more dangerous.

Speaker 1 And they do have a lot of power. And so I do worry about like the next turn of this where they're feeling cornered and then start just, you know, clamping down even harder.

Speaker 3 Blowing up boats in the Caribbean, potential war with Venezuela, immigration crackdown, the efforts to go after political enemies.

Speaker 3 And then on the other hand of it, you have the Comey investigation potentially falling apart. It's going to be a fucking messy slog, but it's not foretold as all.
Yeah.

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Speaker 1 Speaking of Republican defections, we also have a new development in the intramaga fight over whether or not Hitler fans are good.

Speaker 1 We've talked about how this got kicked up after Tucker Carlson invited white nationalist lunatic Nick Fuentes on his show for a softball interview where none of his most vile comments were challenged.

Speaker 1 Trump got asked about this on Sunday night. Here's what he said.

Speaker 10 We've had some great interviews with Tucker Carlson, but you can't tell him who to interview I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don't know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out.

Speaker 10 Let him, you know, people have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide.

Speaker 11 You yourself had dinner with Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago a few years ago. What role should he play in the conservative movement?

Speaker 10 Well, I didn't know he was coming, and he was with, as you know, somebody, Kanye.

Speaker 10 Meeting people, talking to people like for somebody like Tucker, that's what they do. You know, people are controversial.
Some are, some aren't.

Speaker 10 I'm not controversial, controversial, so I like it that way.

Speaker 1 That's funny.

Speaker 1 That last line was just funny.

Speaker 2 Get the word out was confusing. What did get the word out mean? Get the word out about Tucker interviewing someone?

Speaker 1 I can't tell if it was just like liberty, it's more of like a let people decide. Yeah, you decide because he's he's very big on just the interview going out as is and not complaining about it.

Speaker 1 You know, but most of that was, yeah, most of that was a defense of Tucker Bright,

Speaker 2 paging 60 minutes. Most of that was a defense of Tucker Carlson.

Speaker 2 Um, and I think just an instinctive sense that anything that like touches the stove of cancel culture against a conservative is going to be very unpopular among Republicans.

Speaker 2 Of course, we're always good with canceling Democrats, and we always will be. That's the hypocrisy here.
I do, I mean,

Speaker 2 it was weird. I mean, he was never, Trump was also never willing to admit he made a mistake, especially not to a reporter at a gaggle.

Speaker 2 So he wasn't going to be like, yeah, I probably shouldn't have dined with that neo-Nazi.

Speaker 2 I do think the way he's telling the story there is sort of how it's been told by Fuentes and others, which is like Kanye West had a dinner with Trump scheduled, and then like Nick Fuentes came, and maybe Trump didn't know who he was, or maybe he did, and he just didn't do anything about it.

Speaker 2 But it's all just very weird. But the funny thing about that is like Fuentes is shitting on Trump right now.
He's saying MAGA is dead. He's attacking him over Epsilon.

Speaker 2 He's attacking him on Iran, on Gaza. The list goes on and on.
And either Trump doesn't know that, or like J.D. Vance, he's too much of a wimp to punch back to anyone to his right.

Speaker 1 And Fuentes, in addition to just being vile and horrible, is quite a troll.

Speaker 2 And of course, posted, thank you, Mr.

Speaker 1 President, in response to that, even though he's been shitting all over him.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so

Speaker 3 2017, there's the Unite the Right rally. Heather Heyer is killed.
He goes out there and he says many sides, very fine people on both sides.

Speaker 3 In between the two statements in which he made those kinds of moral equivocations, he went out to

Speaker 3 the podium and he said, racism is evil.

Speaker 3 And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.

Speaker 3 He did that in part because there was a massive backlash to what he had said at first.

Speaker 3 And he was facing, which feels like from another era, threats of resignation from inside the White House because he was so equivocated so much in the UK.

Speaker 1 The Committee to Save America was up in arms.

Speaker 3 And a year later, Bob Wood reports that Trump considered this to be the biggest fucking mistake I've made, the worst speech I've ever given because he was conceding. So then he goes out the next day.

Speaker 3 That's actually when he makes the most famous version of the comment, which is very fine, people, on both sides. And from that moment, he has really taken this to heart that

Speaker 3 you kind of, when you are pressed by the media on these far-right figures, you don't give an inch. You say you don't know.

Speaker 3 You say

Speaker 3 you hedge, you're not familiar, but you don't concede and you don't punch these alt-right figures. You don't punch to the right, if you want to call it that.
And so I think that's what he's,

Speaker 3 just doing here. Again, it's saying where he didn't hear the question about David Duke, stand back and stand by.
Like this is what he does, right?

Speaker 3 He's sending a signal to these kinds of people that he's not going to take a swipe at them while talking to like mainstream reporters.

Speaker 1 I do think the more interesting question here is the staying power of this rift beyond Trump.

Speaker 1 I know, Tommy, you follow this closely. The impact on J.D.
Vance, on Tucker, like where this goes from here. What do you think?

Speaker 2 I think this debate is about the future of the MAGA movement. This is the whole thing.
And at least that's how Nick Fuentes is framing it.

Speaker 2 And he's saying MAGA's dead, America First is the future, and America First is how I define it, which is far more right-wing and reactionary and anti-Semitic.

Speaker 2 And basically, Fuentes, like Fuentes is calling out

Speaker 2 some real Republican hypocrisy, which is that

Speaker 2 he says, I could walk out on stage or I'll turn on my show tomorrow and say, Islam is a disgrace. We should kill all Muslims.
We should banish them from our country.

Speaker 2 And no no one in the Republican Party would bat an eye. Or I could log in and say something really, really racist, and I would face no blowback from the Republican Party.

Speaker 2 But if I say something that's anti-Semitic, I face all this blowback.

Speaker 2 And so he is observing something that is true about MAGA and what they say about cancel culture, but he's doing it in service of making the entire movement anti-Semitic, even more vile, which speaks to how dangerous he is.

Speaker 1 Right, yeah. His point is there shouldn't be an exception.

Speaker 1 Right, right.

Speaker 3 He's like,

Speaker 3 he wants the the Islamophobia applied to the Jews. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 He's like, look at Laura Loomer.

Speaker 2 She's Trump's friend. She's in the White House, right? Like she said all these vile things.
If you find and replace Islam for Judaism, why does that make me

Speaker 2 outside the pale? And like, I think that argument has a lot of purchase on the far right. And it's a scary thing.

Speaker 1 It's also wild to me that

Speaker 1 J.D. Vance has still not.
So like in 2024, in the summer of 2024, J.D. Vance was interviewed by Margaret Brennan, asked about Nick Fuentes.

Speaker 1 That was the only time he's been asked about Nick Fuentes because he had just said something horrible about Usha. And he said, oh, he's a total loser.
And that was that. But in this latest,

Speaker 1 Dust Up has said nothing. And then over the weekend,

Speaker 1 someone on Twitter I didn't recognize

Speaker 1 said something about how Tucker Carlson's son,

Speaker 1 Buckley, I believe, works for J.D. Vance as like a top staffer for J.D.
Vance. And it's like, well, JD, like somehow said, well, because of Tucker and it's Tucker's son and tried to like attack J.D.

Speaker 1 Vance via Tucker's son and whatever. And J.D.
Vance like flipped out, did one of his, like, I'm going to start doing a whole tweet thread to someone random on Twitter.

Speaker 1 And it's just wild that he, like, I understand that he came to the defense of his staffer, who he likes, but he does all this and still says nothing about Fuentes, nothing about Tucker.

Speaker 1 He's just completely just skipped this debate. Right.

Speaker 3 He went looking for a place inside of this story where he could be aggrieved without commenting on the main story itself.

Speaker 3 Pete Buddhajudge was asked about Vance in an interview and said, do you think J.D. Vance is a fascist? And Pete's answer was awesome.
It was something like, I think J.D.

Speaker 3 Vance will be a fascist if it's useful to be a fascist. It's useful for him to be something else.
He'll be something else. He'll be a Silicon Valley Democrat again if he needs to be.

Speaker 3 And I do think that just captures the man so perfectly.

Speaker 1 Pete and I talked about this when I interviewed him. And I like, I'm not sure I agree.
I feel like there's a chance that J.D. Vance has been.

Speaker 1 I don't know if he he genuinely believes at all, but I think he is now in a place where he justifies to himself that all of these views aren't really as bad as he used to think they are.

Speaker 1 Oh, I absolutely. Like, I don't think he's going back anytime soon.

Speaker 3 I don't know what going back looks like. I don't, I, you know, I, part of being such a political animal is knowing that he can't.
you can't change back. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But so he's a bit stuck and he can, like a great politician, he'll be for what he needs to be for. But I do think that that speaks to a lot of how he got to where he is.

Speaker 3 And yeah, I'm sure he has talked himself into it and how he didn't understand the deep, the deep intellectual rigor that sits just beneath the surface of MAGA.

Speaker 3 Like I know he seems to have convinced himself of that.

Speaker 1 I think he's also seen that being a class trader has worked really well for Trump. And in a way, J.D.

Speaker 1 Vance is sort of a class trader in terms of like, you know, he was in these elite circles in Silicon Valley and did all this stuff.

Speaker 1 And it's trying to say like, oh, I've seen the elite and the establishment. And let me tell you, they're really bad.
Do you guys see the Axio story on Ted Cruz? How he's

Speaker 1 he's been very critical of Tucker and Fuentes, and they're framing this as him sort of laying the groundwork for a 2028 primary run

Speaker 1 against the J.D. Vances of the world because he's going to be the pro-Israel calling out anti-Semitism candidates in the Republican Party.

Speaker 2 I would love to see Republican parties defeat the Groipers. Ted Cruz cannot be your fighter.

Speaker 1 Please choose a better fighter.

Speaker 3 He was the last, I agree, but he was the last man standing in 2016. And he actually, up until the moment he said one brave thing at the convention and then gave up on it five seconds later,

Speaker 1 he held it.

Speaker 3 He held on. He still takes it.

Speaker 2 He's a great face and personality and whole vibe.

Speaker 1 I know. I know.
Good counterpoint. Strong.

Speaker 3 Thank you. But he was the last one.
He made it all the way to the, he made it further than anybody else.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, I think that, I think those days, I think it was a different time and a

Speaker 3 different moment for the Republican Party.

Speaker 1 Yeah, if I had to bet on where the energy is in the Republican primary,

Speaker 1 it would be not with Ted Cruz for sure. For sure.
Yeah. Honestly, unfortunately, as much as I detest Ted Cruz, I would rather that side win for America here.
Than the Gripers.

Speaker 1 I worry much more about the Tucker Nick Fuentes

Speaker 1 segment of this party.

Speaker 1 Believe it or not, this is supposed to be Affordability Week at the White House, which seems like one reason they're trying to push Epstein out of the news.

Speaker 1 Trump's also speaking after we record this on Monday night at a conference on affordability hosted by McDonald's. I should do the trick.

Speaker 1 Perhaps he'll talk there about his latest attempt to take credit for solving a problem that he caused.

Speaker 1 The White House announced late last week that Trump's eliminating tariffs on around 200 food items, including staples like beef, coffee, bananas, and orange juice.

Speaker 1 The problem for Trump's economic advisors is that they're still not allowed to acknowledge either mistakes or reality, especially when it comes to the economy. Here's

Speaker 1 top White House economist Kevin Hassett. really struggling through interviews with ABC's John Carl on Sunday morning and CNBC's Joe Kernan on Monday.

Speaker 13 The president claims that Thanksgiving costs are down 25%. I mean, does he know that's not true?

Speaker 14 Well, if you look at Walmart and the few places that put out their prices of the pressure.

Speaker 13 Wait a minute. I got to stop because the Walmart comparison is like non-a thing.
I mean, Walmart had a Thanksgiving package last year. They've got a Thanksgiving package this year.

Speaker 13 The one this year contains much less than what the one last year took. So that's why the price is less.

Speaker 13 If you're going to the store to buy groceries for Thanksgiving, it's going to be more expensive this year.

Speaker 15 Dude, I really, though, don't understand where you're going in the sense that Joe Biden gave us, Joe Biden gave us 20% of the price.

Speaker 1 He's not friendship. Donald Trump's not a good person.
No, no, and you're... But when you keep saying prices are falling, that's not true.
And

Speaker 1 I think you should admit that.

Speaker 1 A more precise way to say it, though, Joe, is that purchasing power has gone up. So real wages, that's W divided by P for our technical people of the audience.
Put him out everywhere.

Speaker 1 They're economic. They have a crack economic team.
We got the soybean farmer, Scott Besson out there crushing it, Kevin Hassett.

Speaker 3 It's wild. If you had to choose between, I was thinking about this.
If you had to choose one person to go out to defend the administration, would you choose Besson or would you choose Hassett?

Speaker 2 Oh, Besson all day. I think Hassett's got like this hapless chipmunk vibe.
He's always kind of like trying to laugh his way through being anything.

Speaker 1 I do think...

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is sort of like... It really kind of just highlights your out of touch.

Speaker 1 Give me the cup of tea. That was my scuffle.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, no, it was, and it was really, really good.

Speaker 1 Sorry, yeah. I thought it was like he was in the room, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, but the, uh, do you see that Hassett in that interview was asked about the labor market being soft? And he And he said that he thought the labor market was in a bit of a quiet time.

Speaker 3 He said that it was in a quiet time because of AI. And he's like, quiet, like, be very quiet.

Speaker 1 The economy is sleeping. I hate that I'm about to say this, but...

Speaker 1 A more effective messenger would be even fucking Stephen Miller than these guys because he would just scream and bowl the interviewer over. I'll kill your family.
Right.

Speaker 1 Like, you need at least a fucking America-first messenger out there to just like do the other side. But like,

Speaker 1 these two fucking.

Speaker 1 I want them out there all the time. They're great.

Speaker 2 In their defense. It is tough to walk out there and be like, isn't it great?

Speaker 9 We got rid of all these tariffs we put in place?

Speaker 2 Yeah, how awesome is this, everybody?

Speaker 3 I was banging my head against the wall. I feel so good when I stopped.

Speaker 1 That's why literally the only option is to scream over the interviewer, which neither of these two are going to do.

Speaker 1 So obviously, I think we'd all agree that they're not crushing the messaging just yet.

Speaker 1 But the best case scenario for Trump and Republicans is that they alleviate some of the tariff pain, potentially figure out a way to send out some kind of tariff dividend check to people before the midterms, which Trump again floated in the Oval on Monday, and do something on healthcare, which we'll get to in a second.

Speaker 1 And then I guess hope that people's economic reality eventually catches up with their messaging that everything's great. But I don't know.
I'm just trying to give them their best case here.

Speaker 1 But what do you guys think?

Speaker 2 Yeah, the best case is no one sees that interview, first of all. And then people feel some sort of slight decrease in prices.

Speaker 2 But I mean, I think inflation is down from the worst kind of like 9% peak of the Biden era, but it's still at around 3%, which is above the Fed's target of 2%.

Speaker 1 And it's it's quiet time in the labor market. I mean, it's a quiet, it's quiet for the labor market.

Speaker 1 But also like

Speaker 1 we make room for the robots.

Speaker 2 Oh, God. But like the real

Speaker 2 prices of goods are not going to come down in real terms. So people are not going to feel like there is relief.
There's no silver bullet for Trump when it comes to housing, for example.

Speaker 2 Even a 50-year mortgage or a 500-year mortgage is ever going to flow. I guess like he could pull together OPAC and be like, engineer some dip in gas prices, but I don't even think that's real.

Speaker 2 So at the same time, though, he's demanding a Fed rate cut. He's going for this tariff dividend idea, both of which would exacerbate inflation.

Speaker 2 So I guess the best option is better messaging that shows you care, you hear people, you're fighting for them.

Speaker 2 But instead, the message coming out of Donald Trump's mouth is like, this is all bullshit. Things are fine.
Stop talking about it.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So first of all, you have to get a tariff dividend check through Congress, or at least one would think you'd have to get it through Congress.
They could try to come up with some way around that.

Speaker 3 And so that's some deficit. The only way it makes sense is if it's deficit spending.
It's not putting more money in people's pockets if you're not putting money in people's pockets.

Speaker 3 If you're just returning the tariffs back to people, you're not lowering the cost of living.

Speaker 1 Also, you'd have to do it through a reconciliation bill next year, which again has to be revenue neutral. That has to be deficit neutral on that.
So that's not going to work.

Speaker 2 We just do it like the East Wing, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Right. But I don't know how you do it through a Republican.

Speaker 1 Scott,

Speaker 1 you run the machines. Just print the money.
Turn it on.

Speaker 3 I don't know how you get this through through a house that already feels like they were bullied into getting behind the last spending bill. They put all their money into tax cuts for the wealthy.

Speaker 3 There's just, there's no way to make it work.

Speaker 1 We're not even talking about the fact that if the Supreme Court rules against him,

Speaker 1 there's not going to be a lot of revenue to give out from the tariff.

Speaker 1 Though politically, that might save him. Or it might save him.
Maybe. I don't know.

Speaker 3 I mean, maybe it stops some of the pain. But even, let's say you even follow this to its logical end and he sends some $200 to $500 tariff check to half the country.

Speaker 3 Does that resolve the fact that people feel like their cost of living has gone up, that they've not been made better off by this?

Speaker 3 People understand that a one-time check doesn't undo what their daily experience is.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

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Speaker 1 Well, let's talk healthcare just for a minute. On January 1st, premiums will go up for 20 million people when the Affordable Care Act subsidies expire.

Speaker 1 A few weeks before that, as part of the shutdown deal, Democrats are supposed to get a vote in the Senate on whether or not to extend the ACA subsidies.

Speaker 1 But instead of just coming out in support or opposition to that extension, Trump and Republicans are reportedly trying to once again come up with an Obamacare replacement, at least for the subsidies.

Speaker 1 The Washington Post has a good rundown of the various options they're considering, but much of the discussion has focused on some version of paying the subsidies directly to people instead of the insurance companies.

Speaker 1 Right now, the subsidies go to the insurance companies, and then the insurance companies are required to pass the savings on to the consumer.

Speaker 1 This, I guess, would give them to the people, even though it would be in a health savings account, and you'd only be able to use the money for out-of-pocket costs like glasses or dental work and not actual insurance premiums.

Speaker 1 This is the general idea. Of course, different legislation could change, but this is sort of the Bill Cassidy,

Speaker 1 the doctor in the Senate from Louisiana, has sort of floated this idea.

Speaker 1 The problem here, one of the many problems, is it could cause younger, healthier people to just go without health insurance, just take their health savings account money and just walk away.

Speaker 1 And at that point, that would then cause insurance companies to raise premiums on all the older, sicker people who were left buying Affordable Care Act plans and who tend to need care the most.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, and by the way, a lot of those younger people forego insurance and they become the unlucky subset of the young people that have catastrophic health insurance costs that they can no longer afford.

Speaker 3 They have to either declare bankruptcy or in some way those costs get shifted back onto other insurance payers.

Speaker 3 Last week,

Speaker 1 there was a report

Speaker 3 that House Republicans were going to start doing whiteboard sessions where they're going to start doing some brainstorming about what to do to fix Obamacare. This is November.

Speaker 3 The premiums ostensibly go up on January 1st. This is the most fucking...
college term paper all-nighter bullshit.

Speaker 3 Like, no, you're not going to fundamentally fix the healthcare system by rushing through something in six weeks. Like, oh, you want to do health savings accounts?

Speaker 3 Like, what's your plan for catastrophic? Like, all this is fucking crazy.

Speaker 3 Like, the plan, like, 2008, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had basically a year-long debate about the exact details of their health care plan.

Speaker 3 Mandates, no mandates, how to do insurance, catastrophic care, all of it.

Speaker 3 Preexisting conditions that culminates in a year-long process to pass a bill.

Speaker 3 Like, they're trying to fucking jam some dumb thing they can think of to get around the fact that people are about to be fucked.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it seems like a bad idea.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 2 like, it is, it is very funny that, it's not funny.

Speaker 2 It's not funny in any way, It is amazing that their solution to a very real policy and political problem is to do something that would create the worst case scenario.

Speaker 2 Basically, to send the insurance market into a death spiral that could lead to 10 to 20 million more people uninsured, especially crushing older people, working class people, people in rural areas who would have no providers anymore.

Speaker 2 You would see a wave of bankruptcies. And they're doing this in the face of a policy.

Speaker 2 If they just simply extended the ACA tax credits, it would get about 75% approval.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I'm still not sure why they're doing or what they hope to achieve here, because this is not going to pass

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 I don't think it's sort of far right enough for House Republicans, whatever it is. And so I don't know that it's actually going to, I don't know if it's going to pass.

Speaker 1 I guess they want an alternative to be able to say, this is why we didn't vote for the Democratic extension of the ACA subsidies.

Speaker 1 But that also then leaves them, again, holding the bag when premiums go up and everyone's going to blame them rightly. So

Speaker 1 I don't really know what they're trying to do here.

Speaker 3 They've painted themselves into the stupidest politics possible, which is they've now

Speaker 3 so if they do nothing, the whole bunch of people lose their health insurance subsidies.

Speaker 3 But in order to fix that problem, they have to start from the baseline we're at now, which is they have to create some kind of new replacement subsidy.

Speaker 1 The debate we've been having for literally 10 years.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 So had they left the sub had they just left the subsidies in place, they could actually have a debate that's, I think, better politics for Republicans, which is how to reform the subsidies in a way that is conservative, which is actually, like, just to be needlessly generous to these people, they have sincere objections on policy grounds to some of the ways in which Obamacare operates.

Speaker 3 Like when they talk about health savings accounts, they would prefer a system in which you have health savings accounts for routine care and something more like catastrophic care in other forms.

Speaker 3 whether insurance, risk pools, whatever it would look like. They have a different idea of what it should look like.
Fine.

Speaker 3 But they have never been able to actually put together a plan that they could all collectively get behind to actually replace Obamacare.

Speaker 3 So now they're in the worst possible situation, which they have to try to what, get Republicans to vote for some kind of middle ground between nothing and Obamacare when all of them would, when the freaks would rather just do nothing, let the whole system burn.

Speaker 3 No way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no. No way.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right. Last thing to cover here.

Speaker 1 There's so much in the Epstein files that have already been released, and we haven't had time to cover all the salacious and outrageous emails, including one from Epstein's brother Mark, that has really taken the internet by storm.

Speaker 1 Luckily for all of us, the Saturday Night Live Cold Open made an oblique reference to this. Here's James Austin Johnson playing Trump in the White House briefing room.

Speaker 12 I said I kicked Jeffrey out because he was a pedophile, but then I also said I didn't know he did anything wrong.

Speaker 12 So it's kind of hard to square that circle until you realize that Trump exists across many timelines.

Speaker 12 It's the Trump multiverse theory.

Speaker 12 We just happen to be living in the worst possible one. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to release all of the Epstein files.
This is great. Each file will be on sale for the low, low price of $800.

Speaker 12 You know, this is a beautiful one-of-a-kind printed-out screenshot in very low res

Speaker 12 of one of the many files mentioning President Trump. I just ordered the one that says, Does Putin have the photo of Trump blowing bubba?

Speaker 1 We love that one.

Speaker 1 Whatever the hell that me.

Speaker 1 So, two things to note here: One is that Mark Epstein has given a statement saying that the Bubba in question is not Bill Clinton, but in fact a private citizen who remains nameless.

Speaker 1 We don't know who that is.

Speaker 1 And two, we spent 10 minutes of our production meeting this morning trying to explain this to Love It, that you have somehow missed that this has taken the internet by storm.

Speaker 1 This is one of the most viral things that I've seen out of the... It's like, what do you mean, the big beautiful Bill? So I, I, I, nice.

Speaker 3 So so I

Speaker 3 had seen all these jokes about blowjobs and I tried like it was actually very difficult I googled you know Trump Bill Clinton blowdrop

Speaker 3 tried to search around I couldn't find the underlying Epstein email that led to all this because I somehow had missed it and then the news had moved beyond me I was a low information voter when it came to the fact that everybody was joking about Donald Trump blowing Bill Clinton you didn't see the photo that was uh trump in the I drained the swamp shirt and and then Bill Clinton shirt just said swamp.

Speaker 1 You didn't see everyone calling him Throatus?

Speaker 3 I saw that. I didn't understand why everybody was doing this.
And then everybody was texting me these jokes and I was like, ha ha ha.

Speaker 3 I am part of it. New throat coat.

Speaker 1 Candidates who blew Bill Clinton received 94.3% of the vote in the 2016 election, the highest for any American election. It's just one of the many.

Speaker 3 I hadn't seen that one.

Speaker 1 Also, I said that. Here's a tweet.
PolitiFact actually had to come.

Speaker 1 Yes. PolitiFact.
A video showing President Donald Trump patting former President Bill Clinton's crotch was generated with artificial intelligence using a 2000 still photo taken at the U.S.

Speaker 1 Open, where it just appears that his hand is near his crotch. The photographer said Trump didn't grope Clinton.
As far as he knows.

Speaker 3 More like U.S. Open Relationship.

Speaker 1 Huh?

Speaker 1 How about that?

Speaker 1 That was good. That was good.
How about that?

Speaker 2 There is one media soothsayer out there who basically predicted this whole controversy. I asked the team to pull a clip for you guys that John and John have not not seen yet.
So let's watch.

Speaker 1 Here we go.

Speaker 1 There's no video of President Trump sucking a ding-dong.

Speaker 1 And so what if there was?

Speaker 3 That's good.

Speaker 1 I never sucked any ding-dongs. But I'll tell you, if they were going to blackmail me to start World War III about one, I'd say, hey, I sucked a

Speaker 1 golf ball through a freaking garden hose.

Speaker 13 Didn't you already tell Der Spiegel that?

Speaker 1 Here we have it. Didn't you already tell Der Spiegel?

Speaker 1 Didn't you already tell Der Spiegel that?

Speaker 3 So I guess what he's saying is,

Speaker 3 in fairness, Alec Jones, he's saying there that had I been, had I performed a blowdrop and it had been secretly recorded as a means of blackmail, I would put the country first.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think the context was like bombing Syria or something.

Speaker 2 But you know.

Speaker 1 This one really just sort of just broke out of the like political junky concept. Everyone I know.
Yeah, like everyone. Like it really, it was, it's like one of the bigger things.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 one of the more viral stories.

Speaker 3 One of the more extra medium things to

Speaker 3 burst out of the news cycle, as it were.

Speaker 1 And then Trump today says, I lost my voice because I blew my stack.

Speaker 1 Do you think they had to explain it to him?

Speaker 2 I bet they took a pass on this one. You think so?

Speaker 3 I think the reason Trump is not.

Speaker 1 It's going to be hard to avoid.

Speaker 3 I think the reason Trump is not posting about South Park is everybody goes like this. And everyone decides like, you know what? He doesn't need to know that this ever happened.

Speaker 2 Yeah, who's doing the Hawk Tua briefing? Not me.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. There were a lot of Hook Tao.
There were some Hawk Tua memes as well. Oh, yeah.
Trump is Hawk Ta. Yeah, Trump is the face.

Speaker 3 Hoctua, what a time that was.

Speaker 1 The TikToks have been out of control.

Speaker 1 The AI, it's

Speaker 2 some good music, too.

Speaker 1 There's a very weird Hamilton remix.

Speaker 1 I haven't seen that. Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 You shoot yourself.

Speaker 1 Take your shot.

Speaker 1 Is that what it's about? Did I get it? No, it's not the shot.

Speaker 1 It's the one where he's cheating on his wife. That's that whole

Speaker 1 song.

Speaker 3 Ah, yes. Remixed, yeah.
Beautiful.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 good stuff. I feel like it was.

Speaker 1 You know, I was like paying attention to it all weekend. I'm like, I think that the internet needed this, right? Like, it is obviously the underlying story here is horrific.

Speaker 1 All of the stories of the Trump administration are horrific. There's some funny jokes here that everyone can kind of get behind.

Speaker 2 We deserve to make fun of the man who's suppressing these files.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Absolutely.
For sure. For sure.
Absolutely.

Speaker 3 Hey, absolutely.

Speaker 1 All right. When we come back from the break, you'll hear Tommy's conversation with Rokana about the big win on the Epstein vote and what the fuck is happening with our military pressure on Venezuela.

Speaker 1 See, another story that's not great. But a few quick announcements before we get to that.

Speaker 1 I know everyone's still celebrating our wins in the off-year election two weeks ago, but we've actually got another one to try to win.

Speaker 1 We are two weeks out from a special election in Tennessee's 7th district, which includes parts of Nashville and lots of areas to the west of it, to replace Republican Mark Greene, who stepped down.

Speaker 1 This is a Trump plus 22 district, but we have a chance here. And Republicans seem to be getting a little nervous, despite the fact that it is a Trump plus 22 district.

Speaker 1 The Democratic nominee is State Representative Afton Bain, and she's great. You can go to votesaveamerica.com to find out how to get involved, whether you live in the district.

Speaker 1 And if you don't, Votesave America will help you figure out what to tell the people in your life who might live in the district. It would be a huge pickup if we could make it happen, needless to say.

Speaker 3 And the freak out that would follow.

Speaker 1 Oh, it'd be incredible. Beautiful.

Speaker 3 Look, it's going to be hard, but man, what a beautiful thing that would be.

Speaker 1 Also, strict scrutiny is headed west for live shows in San Francisco on March 6th at the Herbst Theater and in LA on March 7th at the Palace Theater.

Speaker 1 Get your tickets now at cricket.com/slash events before they sell out. Finally, holiday merch.
It's up in the cricket store right now.

Speaker 1 Some fan favorites are back in new colors, and we have new items as well. Go get started on your shopping now at cricket.com/slash store.
When we come back, Rokana.

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Speaker 2 My guest today represents California's 17th congressional district, Congressman Kana. RoCanna, welcome back to Patsy of America.

Speaker 15 Thanks. Congrats on the Crooked Con Conference.
I'm hoping that becomes a yearly tradition.

Speaker 2 Me too. And thank you for being there.
And thank you for kicking it off with me and Ben Rhodes and Yasmin Ansari talking about foreign policy.

Speaker 2 It warmed my nerdy little heart to get the geek out with you guys. But we want to talk domestic politics today.

Speaker 2 So you and Republican Congressman Thomas Massey have spent the last few months gathering signatures on something called a discharge petition, which for listeners unfamiliar with kind of procedural tools in the House, basically is just a way for members like yourself to force a vote on a specific bill or issue.

Speaker 2 You recently got 218 signatures on a petition that would force a vote on the release of the Epstein files.

Speaker 2 This, despite Donald Trump reportedly whipping Republicans very hard against it, he had meetings in the situation room with members of Congress. He was calling them, haranguing them.

Speaker 2 Then on Sunday night, Trump did a total 180, and he said Republicans should support the release of the Epstein files.

Speaker 1 What did you make of this flip-flop?

Speaker 2 And then what happens next with

Speaker 2 your bill?

Speaker 15 Well, you could do math.

Speaker 15 Thomas Massey and I had over 50 Republicans ready to vote for my underlying bill. I mean, it's a Democratic bill against Donald Trump.
And that would have been a colossal embarrassment for him.

Speaker 15 So instead, he caved and he surrendered. And the real heroes, of course, are the survivors.
I mean, they've been denied justice for over a decade. I mean, what happened here is just horrific, right?

Speaker 15 I mean, you had Epstein with basically a rape island and rich and powerful men who had given all this money to politicians and cavorted with bankers, thinking the rules didn't apply to them.

Speaker 15 And these women were raped as girls or sex trafficked and over a thousand victims. And for over a decade, nothing has happened.

Speaker 15 So he realized that we had a coalition that was outraged standing with these survivors. And he saw the writing on the wall.

Speaker 2 I saw it. So what happens next, though, procedurally? I mean, will there be a vote?

Speaker 2 There's some reports that it might be Tuesday, but do you, I mean, is there a chance leadership might decide, okay, now that Trump is for this, we'll put forward our own like kind of Republican vehicle?

Speaker 1 Like, how does this work?

Speaker 15 Yeah, no, I mean, they've

Speaker 15 folded, they're doing the vote at 3.15 tomorrow. We have a press conference where the survivors are

Speaker 15 coming in

Speaker 15 at 10 in the morning in front of the Capitol. And, you know, to break a little bit of news, I've been in touch with Merkley and Murkowski's office in the Senate.

Speaker 15 They expect actually now that this will quickly go through the Senate, which would be enormous.

Speaker 15 I mean, just last week, if you had asked me, I would have said uphill battle, both in the House and the Senate.

Speaker 15 And now it looks like it's going to pass both the House and the Senate, which is a testament to why organizing matters, why survivors speaking out matter, and really why the grassroots mobilization has worked.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I should say we're recording this Monday at about noon Pacific time. So when Congressman Conno says vote tomorrow, that means Tuesday.

Speaker 2 I, too, was surprised by the change in tone coming out of the Senate. I mean, initially, John Thune, the leader, was saying he didn't think we needed a vote.
Now it sounds like there will be one.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think Donald Trump would still have to sign this bill into law, right? Is there any chance he might veto it?

Speaker 15 Well, Donald Trump, nothing is predictable. I mean, two days ago, he was unendorsing Marjorie Taylor Greene and threatening every person

Speaker 15 who voted for our bill to be unendorsed. And Matthew and I were in a panic, wondering whether we would have defections.
And then, of course, people held. And so Trump saw the numbers.

Speaker 15 I'd be surprised if he vetoes it. I do think he would sign it.
That in itself is going to be a enormous deal of the Congress and the president basically assuming accountability for these survivors.

Speaker 15 I hope, and I'm going to ask tomorrow at our press conference for him to meet the survivors. I think that's important for them.
I know it's important for them.

Speaker 15 And it's important for the country for them to be uplifted. But the challenge after that is to actually get the release of the files.

Speaker 15 You know, there's some concern that he's initiated these quote-unquote investigations, and he may use that as an excuse. to delay the release of these files.

Speaker 15 There's a concern about him being selective about the prosecutions.

Speaker 15 And both Massey and I have said from day one, we don't care if there are are Democrats or Republicans implicated, but we want it to be fair and we want to make sure that it's not done through a political partisan lens.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 2 there's this belief in the kind of the right-wing circles that Democrats don't want the Epstein files released because all of us are trying to cover up for Bill Clinton or something.

Speaker 2 It's like, absolutely not. If Bill Clinton is in these files, release all of them.
I want to see all of it.

Speaker 2 But you're making the point that Trump, he recently posted this message on Truth Social calling on the Attorney General and Pam Bondi to investigate Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, Larry Summers, a bunch of other Democrats.

Speaker 2 Over the weekend, Congressman Massey said these new investigations could be a smokescreen and a way to avoid having to release more documents. Can you explain that a little bit?

Speaker 2 Like, how could a new investigation impede the release that you're calling for?

Speaker 15 Sure.

Speaker 15 The Justice Department could say it's currently being investigated, and so it would compromise our investigation if we made these documents public.

Speaker 15 I mean, that would be a smokescreen, as Massey pointed out, but I don't put anything past the Justice Department. And the reality is that at this point, we need the information to be public.

Speaker 15 The ability to prosecute people for what happened

Speaker 15 is

Speaker 15 unlikely. I mean, we should do it if it really leads to that, but justice has been sitting on this for years.
What the survivors want is a public accountability.

Speaker 15 They don't want people sitting on the boards of companies, having buildings named after them, having scholarships being named after them, being given awards when they engage either in the rape of underage girls or in sex trafficking or in the cover-up of this.

Speaker 15 And they want a public accountability. That's what the survivors are asking for.
And so we are going to continue to push for the full release of these files and not let some

Speaker 15 partisan investigation be

Speaker 15 an excuse to prevent that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Over the weekend, I saw that Trump, he posted this bizarre message on Truth Social where he went after Congressman Massey for getting remarried.

Speaker 2 He suggested it was like he got remarried too quickly. And then he said, quote, his wife will soon find out that she's stuck with a loser, end quote.

Speaker 2 So it's my understanding that Congressman Massey got remarried after his wife passed away last year. This was his, I think, high school sweetheart, who he was married to for 30 years.

Speaker 2 They had four kids together. What did you make of that message? And have you talked to Congressman Massey about getting attacked on such like vicious personal terms like that?

Speaker 15 I have. Look, Thomas Massey has become a friend.
I've met his new wife. She's

Speaker 15 lovely. In fact, I don't think he'll mind my sharing this.
We were doing Caitlin Collins together, and she comes up to him and gives him floss and says, Massey, get that stuff out of your

Speaker 15 teeth. And I said, you know,

Speaker 15 his style has gotten better. She's dressing well.
He was devastated after his wife's loss.

Speaker 15 I know what a difficult time that was for him. I know the conversations he had with his kids.
And, you know, it's just disgusting to go after him like that.

Speaker 15 There used to be a time in Washington where the type of genuine friendship that Massey and I have was more common, where you have vigorous disagreements like we do on gun policy, like we do on tax policy, like we do on national health insurance, but you respect people's families and humanity.

Speaker 15 And Trump

Speaker 15 has no regard for that. And it just was sad.
And it's sad because they're going to be going for their honeymoon soon. And I just found the whole thing disgusting.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, like, I'm used to Tony Trump being harsh and just a mean person, but that really crossed a line in a way that I just hadn't seen before.

Speaker 2 The innuendo there, the suggestion that Thomas Massey did something. I mean, it was just disgusting.

Speaker 1 And frankly, like terrible politics.

Speaker 2 Like you're trying to earn this man's vote. You're trying to get him on your side and you're going after his family.
Like, what's wrong with him?

Speaker 15 And the thing with Massey, and if you look at how we built this coalition from day one, we never made this about Donald Trump.

Speaker 15 In fact, Thomas Massey would go out of his way to say, I don't know if there's Trump in the files or not. Like, the point is, this is about getting some justice for the survivors.

Speaker 15 And I'd go out of my way and say, look, if Donald Trump wants to meet the survivors and release the files, I'll be the first to praise him. So we actually did not make this thing about Trump.

Speaker 15 It's one of the reasons we were able to to get Marjorie Taylor Greene initially and Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace and get MAGA influencers supporting us.

Speaker 15 And so for him to take it so personally just shows his pettiness.

Speaker 15 But I do think it's a broader theme about how Democrats can approach this, which is when we identify with MAGA's concerns about a corrupt system and say, look, we hear you on some of that.

Speaker 15 And here's how we're going to work forward on that.

Speaker 15 I think we can build trust and effectiveness without making every single thing about Donald Trump.

Speaker 15 That doesn't mean we don't oppose him where he's wrong, but it means that we can earn the trust of the MAGA base by focusing on the attacks on the system rather than just the attacks on Trump.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, the interesting partner that you and Congressman Massey have identified in this effort is Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Speaker 2 She has had this sort of slow-rolling fallout with Donald Trump over the last week or two. Trump is mad at her for siding with you guys, for calling for the release of the Epstein files.

Speaker 2 He's mad at her for suggesting Trump should focus more on cost of living issues.

Speaker 2 And then Trump, you know, his counterpoint is he says Marjorie Taylor Greene is just mad that Trump wouldn't endorse her campaign or candidacy for governor of Georgia. What do you make of all this?

Speaker 2 Is this an intra-personal spat, or is there a chance that Trump could be kind of losing his iron grip on elected Republicans in Washington?

Speaker 15 There's not a chance he is losing his grip on elected leaders in Washington.

Speaker 15 Tommy, I mean, you work for President Obama.

Speaker 15 The idea that you would have had 40 Democrats vote for a discharge petition against President Obama on something that he was actively opposing would have been unthinkable.

Speaker 15 And President Obama didn't use the kind of authoritarian strong arm tactics of Donald Trump.

Speaker 15 So this is a huge blow to him that you had people willing to sign a discharge petition against his wishes, that you had probably near 100 Republicans ready to vote against him for a Democratic bill from a progressive Bay Area Democrat against his wishes.

Speaker 15 And that's really what has gotten him infuriated. That's why he unendors Marjorie Taylor Green.
Now, Marjorie Taylor Greene, until recently, would keep saying that

Speaker 15 she just realized that Trump was out of touch with his base and she was trying to get him to release these files because she understood that this was hurting him.

Speaker 15 She's trying to get him to focus on affordability because she understands that he's deviated from his message. And she's a thought-smart politician.

Speaker 15 She sees that he is disconnected from a MAGA base. I think this has elevated her among some of those voters, but it was not personal.

Speaker 15 Like, do I think she may be upset about Trump and the Georgia race? Maybe, but no one makes a decision that big

Speaker 15 on risking a president's wrath because of some endorsement in a race. This was a much bigger issue about her feeling that Trump was no longer connected to the base that

Speaker 15 she felt

Speaker 15 gave him his rise.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, the other area that really is standing out to me of where Trump seems disconnected from his base is on foreign policy.

Speaker 2 Again, he ran an America first, not necessarily fully isolationist, but certainly anti-regime change wars.

Speaker 2 But that is exactly what it seems like his administration is setting up in Venezuela right now. So for folks who haven't followed this, we have seen over the last few weeks this massive massive U.S.

Speaker 2 military buildup in the Caribbean. There was a report by CSIS recently that said between 10 and 15 percent of all deployed U.S.

Speaker 2 Navy assets are in the Southcom area of responsibility, so Central and South America.

Speaker 2 Those military assets are being used to blow up boats that are alleged to be part of drug trafficking efforts in the Caribbean and in the Pacific.

Speaker 2 And the administration is also doing all this saber-rattling about a regime change operation in Venezuela proper.

Speaker 2 I mean, to depose Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, who is a bad guy who stole the last election, but still, I mean, this is the kind of thing Trump ran against.

Speaker 2 Let's just start there. I mean, how concerned are you, Congressman, about the U.S.
launching some sort of invasion or attack on Venezuela?

Speaker 2 And what do you think the Congress could or should be doing to prevent it?

Speaker 15 I'm very concerned. I mean, Marco Rubio is itching for a regime change war in Venezuela, either through covert means or by actually a kinetic conflict.
And he makes no secret about it.

Speaker 15 The reality is that would entangle the United States in another conflict like we got entangled in Iraq or for 20 years in Afghanistan or in Libya.

Speaker 15 This is exactly what the American public has been voting against. They've been voting against this from Howard Dean to Barack Obama to Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump.
They don't want these wars.

Speaker 15 And it's not just a sense that we rather focus on our country than bad wars overseas. I think that's actually not giving some of Trump's voters enough credit.

Speaker 15 When you talk to them, they actually say, yeah, we don't want to be killing people unnecessarily. We don't want like it that both people are being killed off of Venezuela.
We're the good guys.

Speaker 15 We don't want that blood on our hands. And there is a kind of moral simplicity.

Speaker 15 to people who are not part of the beltway and they're they're they're horrified by it some of them were horrified with what was going on in gaza and that's why donald trump when he he ran, kept saying, I'll be for peace and I'm going to bring peace.

Speaker 2 Just to follow up on that, Congressman, I mean, so the Wall Street Journal reported that there was a classified Justice Department briefing authorizing these strikes on the drug smuggling boats, alleged drug smuggling boats, that described fentanyl as a chemical weapons threat.

Speaker 2 This was reportedly part of a longer briefing to justify these strikes that have now killed more than 80 people. That number might be even higher.
It strikes me as crazy for a few reasons.

Speaker 2 I mean, first of all, fentanyl is not coming from Venezuela. as we've said many times.
Fentanyl is chemicals from China are shipped to Mexico, and there fentanyl is produced and smuggled into the U.S.

Speaker 2 But also, second, I mean, like under international law, under like the, you know, the Chemical Weapons Convention, that usually is focused on chemical weapons like mustard gas or nerve agents or VX gas or Novachalk, like chemicals that you would use to kill someone, not one an addict might voluntarily ingest or someone who needed pain relief might ingest in a hospital setting.

Speaker 2 What did did you make of that report and just sort of the broader legal justification in air quotes for these strikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela?

Speaker 15 There is no legal justification. That's why Admiral Mosley resigned.
That's why the Colombian president is saying you've killed fishermen and we don't have a clear response.

Speaker 15 You have Republicans who have said that the fentanyl excuse is totally ridiculous. They know it's narcotics that are actually being created.

Speaker 15 And you've had Republicans who said that in this country, we don't have the capital punishment for narcotics.

Speaker 15 Whatever else you may think, we don't just have a capital punishment and you have due process.

Speaker 15 And right now you have an American government in our names, Tommy, and in your and my names, killing people based on

Speaker 15 who they think is a

Speaker 15 criminal. I mean, and there was a Republican senator who said to me that he was with the vice president and with the Secretary of Defense, and it's like a video game for them.

Speaker 15 They view these people as animals.

Speaker 15 It should send chills down the spine of any American of what they're doing in our name, because at the end of the day, they're not going to say, well, you know, Donald Trump was a president, RoConna didn't support.

Speaker 15 They're going to say the Americans are killing our families. And it is.
It is outrageous.

Speaker 15 And I'm telling you, there are Republicans on armed services where I serve who are horrified with what's going on and are starting to push back.

Speaker 2 I'm glad they're pushing back.

Speaker 2 I mean, it does just seem like, as you said, extrajudicial murder with no legal authorization, with no clarity that the people that we are bombing are even involved in the drug trade or in any way connected with cartels.

Speaker 2 They're certainly not high-level cartel members, right? I mean, the senior boss of a cartel is not jumping on a boat and driving thousands of miles to traffic drugs in the United States. And

Speaker 2 it seems like the people that are involved in this could have some real legal problems going forward when there is a new administration.

Speaker 15 Absolutely. I mean, I do think they will have a

Speaker 15 legal challenge when there is a new administration. And I think the heartening thing to me,

Speaker 15 seeing some Republicans starting to speak out, is,

Speaker 15 you know, this sense that America should care about human rights and should care about not killing people overseas. It's not just a left thing.

Speaker 15 It turns out there are a lot of decent Americans who don't like that. There are a lot of decent Americans who have have been upset with the direction of our foreign policy.

Speaker 15 And it's been surprising to me when I've spoken out on Venezuela, when I've spoken out on Epstein, you know, I've had people on the right, like Rasmussen or others say, you know, that I'm speaking in a way that the MAGA base agrees with on these issues.

Speaker 15 And that should give us hope that we could actually have a moral

Speaker 15 call to foreign policy. You're not going to win everyone, but that you can build a governing majority in this country around around some of these principles.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I agree with you. And I also think there is a real growing anger at Donald Trump for not living up to the ideals that he campaigned on.
You saw it around the Iran strikes.

Speaker 2 You're seeing it with Venezuela. If there is this regime change operation, I think there's going to be a lot of people in MAGA who said, I did not vote for this.
We got to make a big change here.

Speaker 2 Final question for you. So, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is at the White House this week.

Speaker 2 He, look, we could go through all his various human rights challenges, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, all the reasons that I would prefer this man not be in the White House.

Speaker 2 But bigger picture, I mean, the Trump administration is reportedly considering offering the Saudis like a NATO-like Article 5-like security guarantee. There's also all these reports that the U.S.

Speaker 2 might sell the Saudis F-35 fighter jets, even though the U.S. intelligence community is concerned that the Saudis could pass that technology along to the Chinese.
My question on both is just why?

Speaker 2 Why is either of those steps in the U.S. interests at all, in your opinion, or if you disagree?

Speaker 15 It's not, but Kushner has all this monetary deal in Saudi Arabia. I mean, he raised almost $2 billion there.
The Trump family is connected there.

Speaker 15 Look, my first, as a young member of Congress, my first real impact was working with Bernie Sanders to pass the War Powers Resolution to stop the refueling of Saudi planes, which were bombing Yemen.

Speaker 15 That was one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. It was of the order of what happened in Gaza.
It was horrific.

Speaker 15 And you still have NBS, who not only presided over the killing of Khashoggi, but who presided over

Speaker 15 Yemen's mass bombing in charge. Why we would want to give these

Speaker 15 a government like that weapons, and there's even talk of giving them nuclear technology,

Speaker 15 is

Speaker 15 makes no strategic sense. And by the way, the last thing you would want in the Middle East is to be arming Saudi Arabia and having an arms race with Iran.

Speaker 15 That is not in any nation's interest in the Middle East or our interest. So I happen to think it's just financial and cultural ties that

Speaker 15 the Trump family has with Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 15 And it's not in America's interest.

Speaker 2 Yeah, agreed. It's just stunning to me.
I lied. This is my actual last question, just because I know you actually deeply care about these issues.

Speaker 2 Speaking of humanitarian disasters, I mean, there is a massacre happening now in Sudan in the Darfur region that that is being compared to the early days of the Rwandan genocide.

Speaker 2 It is this group called the RSF, which is one half of a civil war that's been fought in Sudan over the last two and a half years.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of reporting about how the United Arab Emirates has been feeding arms into this conflict, specifically to the RSF, that's making it worse.

Speaker 2 And it's culminated the last couple of weeks in the takeover by the RSF of this city called El-Fasher, where, you know, at the time, like 250,000 civilians were seeking shelter, basically, and after being under siege for 18 months.

Speaker 2 It's hard for me to like read about this stuff every week and just see the total kind of lack of action, either through the international community or by the U.S.

Speaker 2 Is there anything happening in Congress? Are you hearing anything from the administration that they might do something to try to stop this conflict? I mean, Donald Trump wants the Nobel Prize.

Speaker 2 He wants all this credit for ending wars. I mean, this seems like a very live war that he could step in and end with one phone call to the Emiratis if he wanted to.

Speaker 15 He really could. I mean, Sarah Jacobs has been very strong on this issue.
She has introduced resolutions to stop the UAE from arming

Speaker 15 that group. And it's not taking sides in who's right in a civil war.
It's simply saying we can have external countries escalate it. Obviously, the conflict there is a legacy of colonialism that

Speaker 15 created these divisions. But what the United States can do now is to say to the UAE, stop, don't

Speaker 15 escalate the situation. And Sarah Jacobs' resolution calls for that.
It should get a vote in the Congress, but we also should continue to put pressure on Trump.

Speaker 15 This is something he could stop, especially given his relationship with UAE, where he has put data centers and where he has

Speaker 15 enmeshed with cryptocurrency.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's absolutely right.

Speaker 2 Well, Congressman Connor, thanks for your work on getting this discharge petition passed, getting the the release of these Epstein files and everything else. Really appreciate your time.

Speaker 15 Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 That's our show for today. Thanks to Rokana for coming on.

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