Two Strikes. Is Hegseth Out?

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Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

On today's show, we'll talk about the latest drama with Mike Johnson and House Republicans after their way too close for comfort win in Tuesday's Tennessee special election, as well as Donald Trump's promise to come to their rescue with a nationwide messaging blitz on affordability, the issue he calls a conjob.

We'll also talk about Trump's especially disgusting, even for him, comments about Somali immigrants and how the Pentagon Press Corps has now officially been replaced with intrepid journalists.

like Laura Loomer and Matt Gates.

Then Dan talks to Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries about Trump's pardon of Congressman Henry Quear, Mike Johnson's headaches, and lots more.

But let's start with the new developments and what is still the biggest political story of the week. Be

Hexeth is a fucking tease.

Had to do it. Had to do it.
Because he is. Because he is.
Hexeth continues to live up to the song.

A new independent investigation of Signalgate from his own Department of Defense found that his actions put American troops at risk. We'll talk more about that in a bit.

And he was defiant this week about the Pentagon's decision to murder the survivors of a September strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat.

Here's Hegseth during one of those 24-hour cabinet meetings where everyone takes turns glazing Trump while he catches a few winks. Got another use of glazing, huh?

We've only just begun striking narco boats and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean. I did not personally see survivors, but I stand because the thing was on fire.

It was exploded and fired and smoke. You can't see anything.
You got digital.

This is called the fog of war. This is what you and the press don't understand.

You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about kill everybody. I watched that first strike live.

As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I didn't stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs.

So I moved on to my next meeting. And by the way, Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.

It didn't stick around for that second strike because I had to go back to my air-conditioned office, which was much like the air-conditioned set on Fox News where I was previously employed before this job.

Like, what the fuck is that guy doing? It's his first strike on a boat, on a Venezuelan boat, and he had to go somewhere else?

What was he doing? Was he going to fucking

take some kind of Department of Defense nameplate off a door so he could put Secretary of War back on there? Like, what the fuck?

I assumed that in the room in which you watched these strikes live, you can't bring your phone. As we know, this guy's got a lot of group chats happening, and so he had to go back and check in.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, other meetings.
Okay.

On Thursday, Admiral Frank Bradley, who gave the order to kill the survivors and chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Raisin Kane, briefed members of Congress about their rationale for the second strike in a classified closed-door session that included video footage of the attack.

Republicans left the meeting largely satisfied. Tom Cotton called the strikes, quote, righteous and entirely lawful.

He also said, quote, I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States back over so they could stay in the fight.

Democrats, unsurprisingly, had a completely different take.

Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, told Greg Sargent at the New Republic, quote, this did not reduce my concerns at all or anyone else's, calling it a quote, highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight.

And here's Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, speaking to reporters after the meeting.

What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I've seen in my time in public service.

You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion with a destroyed vessel

who were killed by the United States.

So we have moved from fake news, it didn't happen, to where we always seem to end up with Trump, which is we did it and we're proud of it.

Now that Republicans in Congress seem satisfied, because it did seem like there were some cracks in the support among Republicans and some questions that Republicans in Congress had about this, but now Tom Cotton and the rest of them seem like

they are on board again with the administration's explanation. Where does the story go from here?

I think the question is going to be if and when the video is released, because based on what Congressman Himes and others have said about the video, it is quite disturbing. It is seems very, it

based only on the description, obviously we haven't seen it, of course, but it seems to completely undermine what Hexeth has said.

The argument here, because the rationale, and this is important, the rationale is that this lethal strike

was necessary because these two people on a destroyed boat were either going to re-enter the fight, we don't know what fight that is or how they would conduct it, or more ridiculously, continue the effort to deliver the drugs.

Were they going to paddle with their hands? Like, how are they going to get it? It is absolutely absurd.

If the video says what these Democrats say it says, it completely exposes the fallacy at the heart of the entire Republican argument here of Trump's defense, of Hexeth's defense, of the military's defense.

Yeah, they were trying to say that they were going to radio or somehow call for help to other,

you know, quote-unquote enemy combatants, part of this drug smuggling ring. They're heading to the United States.

They, at least Adam Smith told Greg Sargent, that in the briefing, the officials said there were no records of any kind of communication. So this is just a guess on their part.

And he also said that from what he saw in the video, that it was just like two shirtless men sitting on a capsized boat. He's like, what you would expect from survivors of wreckage like that.

And even though Adam Smith said he believed them that there were drugs originally on the boat, he said once it was hit, there is no proof that the drugs were still on the boat. But like that aside.

Even if they were, what were they going to do with the drugs? This whole, I thought about this when we first started talking about the story about the second strike.

Like the focus on the second strike, which is completely understandable because that's been the big story of the week.

It's making the first strike somehow seem like less of a war crime by comparison, but it's just as horrifying and likely just as illegal because the administration has offered no justification that the people they are murdering because they say they're part of a foreign terrorist organization that threatens the United States, they have no evidence that they are other than the existence of cocaine on their boats.

So you are part of a foreign terrorist organization that is threatening the United States, the safety and security of the United States, because you happen to be on a boat with drugs.

That is what the U.S. government has decided now with cocaine.
And that is insane. It is insane to say that people who are on boats with cocaine are enemy combatants who can be murdered by the U.S.

military with no arrest, no trial, no conviction, no due process. It's like, it's insane.
It is insane.

And that boat, even if you, that boat wasn't even headed to the fucking United States, it started to turn around when the strike hit. It had already started to turn around.

You raise a really good point here, which is it's easy to get, like once you start talking about war crimes, you start talking about this from the context of this happening within a lawful war. Right.

This is not a lawful war.

There is no justification. There is no congressional authorization.
There is no evidence. It is just murder, right?

It is pure murder under the argument of self-defense, but the argument for self-defense seems absurd. These are not people taking bombs to the United States or anything like that.

This is, you know, it's not, there was not an imminent threat to the United States that would require these people to be killed. Why couldn't they be arrested? Why couldn't we stop the boat?

How come, how come, like, if when Hegsef ever testifies or any of them testify

before Congress and it's public, like, I want someone to answer the fucking question, why the Coast Guard can't do what they always have done in the past and interdict these ships and arrest these people.

And the military could do it because they're in international waters. Of course.
Right. But yeah, that's what we've always done to stop drug trafficking issue.

We have stopped the people, seized the drugs, arrested the people, sent them back to where they came to be prosecuted, brought them to the United States to be prosecuted.

And none of that is even on the table. And it is.

The whole thing is so bizarre because it's not even clear what the end game is

other than just death for the sake of death.

I think they probably believe that it is all much like their immigration policy and the horrors they're carrying out there, that it's all about deterrence.

And that if people in Central and South America who are smuggling drugs here, that boats are getting blown up by the United States, they won't even try.

And so they think this is some kind of deterrent. And

because they think it's a deterrent, they feel like it's completely justified just murdering people left and right who they happen to believe are on boats with with drugs. That's it.

If there's one thing the war on drugs has taught us, it's that harsh penalties and deterrence work. Right.
Yeah. Oh, wait, no, no, no, that is the opposite of what happened, what has happened.

And the other one think on this, on the call, I think this is also just notable because the original order that Hag Seth signed off on said that you essentially there could be a second strike if there was some sort of hostile act.

And included, according to the story in the Wall Street Journal, among things that include a hostile act is calling back to the cartels, which is why they cited that here, even though there was no evidence of it.

A call for help being the equivalent of shooting at American troops or an act of war is an absurd proposition.

I do understand that if you, if these people were called back to the cartel and you had reason to believe that other members of the cartel were coming to the scene of the wreck

by a boat with weapons or whatever else, that you would not then, it would be risky to send American troops to rescue those shipwrecked traffickers. But there's no evidence of that.

And also, we had full surveillance on the area, so you would know where

whether there was other people coming or not. Is this this was this was just to kill people for the sake of killing people?

It is also worth repeating, as we have said a couple times in talking about this story, that this was the first strike on September 2nd. There have been many strikes since then.

There have been about 80 people that we know of killed.

And in a subsequent strike, when the first strike did not kill everyone on the boat, the survivors were picked up by the Coast Guard, not tried, not arrested, sent back to their countries where they were just let free.

So these enemy combatant terrorists who pose such a grave threat to the United States were just freed and sent back, which shows you how dangerous they really are. Or

how little evidence we had to prosecute them if we wanted to. Right.

And obviously, the president cares a great deal about drug trafficking, which is why he pardoned the former president of Honduras, who was involved in one of the big, biggest drug trafficking rings in modern history.

So he cares a lot about that.

There's just a story in the New York Post before we started recording that there's a Long Island drug dealer who was freed by Trump because, of course, had connections with the family, I think with Kushner's dad,

who was freed by Trump. They met in prison.
Yeah, probably. Freed by Trump.

Now convicted again of molesting his kid's nanny and threatening a synagogue congregant. That's the headline in the New York Post.

So again, this is an administration that cares deeply about prosecuting drug crimes. We know that.
We know that.

Did you see the reporting from the Wall Street Journal on Hegseth forcing out the commander of U.S. Southern Command back in October? I did.

There was an anecdote at the beginning of that story that talks about Heg Seth's first conversation with this.

with this commander and where Hegset basically says on the secure call, basically, when I give you an order, you do it fast and you don't ask questions.

This guy is a four-star head of the military operations in the Caribbean. Less than a year into his tenure, he leaves.

It's from the journal because they say he had concerns about the legality of the strikes.

And this is someone who, during his Senate confirmation hearing in September, argued for a more muscular approach to dismantling drug cartels and talked about how, you know, when he first started his career, he started doing sort of anti-drug trafficking operations.

So this is not like someone who wanted to crack down on the drug cartels, but for him, who was like going to be confirmed to work in the Trump administration, once he got there and heard from Hexeth, thought it was too much and was worried about it.

And the fact that he left at the height of the military buildup, and a lot of military experts say, is very, that's highly unusual and very telling.

And imagine this guy. I mean, also, this guy served his country for his entire life.
His first job is to get, his first interaction in this job is to get yelled at by a cable news host.

And then his second task is to devise war plans for seizing the Panama Canal. Oh, yeah, that's right.
And he wasn't working, he wasn't moving fast enough on that.

So that was one of the early strikes against him, according to Hexeth.

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So, in some really exquisite timing for Pete, the Pentagon Inspector General's report on SignalGate went public just as the commanders were on the hill trying to explain away the double-tap strike.

Hegseth tweeted, total exoneration case closed, which of course is not true.

The report actually said, quote, using a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send non-public DOD information through Signal risks potential compromise of sensitive DOD information, which could cause harm to DOD personnel and mission objectives.

In other words, Pete Hegseth, by running his mouth too much on signal with all of his buddies in the administration, put American troops at risk in that operation when they were bombing the Houthis.

So, in one week, we have learned that the guy who runs our military may be responsible for war crimes and put American troops in jeopardy by talking about sensitive information on an unsecured device, which, of course,

a mistake that we know our president cares about deeply. Again, it was one, you know, back in back in 2016, cared about it deeply.

Do you think that Hegseth's job is still safe because Trump just doesn't want to show weakness, doesn't want to give, doesn't want to be seen giving his opponents a win?

I do think his job is safe because in Trump world, the only mortal sin is disloyalty.

So you can be corrupt, you can be incompetent, you can be a anti-vax wackadoodle, you can be all of those things as long as you are loyal to Trump.

And so this will just,

I mean,

I guess you're right. Like if

the video is released and that causes more of an uproar, maybe there's more pressure, but I don't know. It's like

it's like every other scandal, they just like they just weather it and they don't care. They figure everyone's attention is going to go somewhere else.

And so Pete Hegseth continues to, you know, just fuck up his job as, you know, the top official overseeing the most powerful military on earth.

And also, I think Trump likes it when his

staff members, his cabinet members feel like their job is at risk or they are in trouble because that's more leverage.

Because what Trump wants is someone who's going to do whatever they say and not disagree at all, not push back at all. And Pete's Hexeth has no position, is in no position to push back on anything.

So no matter how illegal the order, no matter how absurd the request, he will do what Trump says. And that's what Trump wants at the end of the day, above all else.

Yeah, you can be, you can be as incompetent as you want. And plenty of his cabinet officials have taken him up on that.

Pam Bondi, for example, over at DOJ, I don't know if you saw just before we started recording,

the brilliant legal minds at the Department of Justice have failed to secure an indictment of Tish James 10 days after a judge threw out their first indictment.

Absolutely. They're 0 for 2.
0 for 2 on trying to indict Tesh James for mortgage fraud. They are 0-1 on trying to indict James Comey for mortgage fraud.

And wouldn't you know, we also learned today that the Government Accountability Office, which is an independent organization but under the purview of Congress, has opened an investigation into Bill Pultey, the federal housing official who spends most of his days, I guess, accusing politicians the president doesn't like of mortgage fraud so far unsuccessfully.

So

they're crushing it. It's, I mean, it's, you always just have to state it again.
It's the easiest thing to do in our criminal justice system is to indict someone.

I think it's a flaw in our system, but like the saying is you can indict a ham sandwich and they cannot, these guys cannot indict a ham sandwich. The cases are, they're too dumb.

The cases are too spurious. Their evidence is too thin and they keep failing, falling flat on their face.
Do you think they try again? I guess they can try again.

How many times can you just keep trying to indict someone over and over? Yeah, you are,

you're only freed of this when you get acquitted.

Man, they are starting to think that maybe, maybe these charges aren't on the level about the mortgage fraud. I mean, it seems possible.
All right.

Ewan Lovett already did some reaction to Tuesday's special election in Tennessee 7, where Afton Bain didn't pull off the upset, but did hold Matt Van Eps to single digits.

What was it, like nine, nine points? Nine, nine to ten. But we now have some more reaction from Republicans.
They aren't encouraged, to say the least.

Here's Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett, who's about as conservative as they come. Evangelical Christians, which I associate with, 45% of them don't go to the polls.

30% of gun owners don't go to the polls. Yeah, we got a real problem, and we better wake up.
What do you think?

You think he's speaking some wisdom there?

I listened to the full clip, and I don't think he fully understands the scope of the problem, but he is is correct that there is a problem.

So we'll give him credit for that. Yeah.
You've written a couple of message boxes about this now. What are your big takeaways from Tuesday night, now that we've all had a few days to process?

So throughout the course of the year, Republicans have dismissed the previous special elections by pointing out, somewhat correctly, that Democrats always do well because it's a low turnout special election.

So

it's not really indicative of things. And we know that because we did well in special elections in 23 and 24, and we did not win the presidency.

Then they sort of dismissed dismissed the victories in Virginia and New Jersey and elsewhere, saying these are taking place in largely blue states.

Here you have an election that took place in a deep red district, and it was not low turnout. The turnout on Tuesday night was just as high as it was on Election Day, 2022, in the last midterm.

So this is as good a dry run as we're going to get to understand how voters are interpreting the economy, Trump, backlash of the extremism, all the above. And so this is

very hard to, you can't dismiss this. And so I think the main takeaways are the Democratic base is fired up.
Afton Bain received 20% more votes than the Democrat who ran in 2022.

While Republican turnout was high for a special election, Matt Van Epps, the Republican who won, received about 9,000 less votes than Mark Reen, who was the incumbent in 2022.

So Democrat, so Democrat turnout is way up, Republican turnout not the same. We don't have exit polls here.

So we can't know for sure, like we did in Virginia and New Jersey, about how many Trump voters or Republicans voted for a Democrat.

But the math in a district this red suggests that certainly a lot of this is turnout, but some of it is also persuasion.

So there are some people who, you know, probably similar to New Jersey and Virginia who are soft Republican voters who are voted for Trump because prices or whatever else voted for a Democrat this time.

That's a very positive sign. The other thing that I think is really interesting here is the absence of Trump.

Trump did a couple of like fake teletown hauls, which is always what they do to let him say he did something.

His only other appearance in the race was he happened to call Mike Johnson when Mike Johnson was at a press conference and Mike Johnson put him on speaker.

Classic. But interestingly enough, Trump showed up in no ads.

Not even like GO TV stuff down the stretch. And that's really, really interesting because in a...

Like this was a swing district, you understand that decision because Trump will gin up Democratic turnout more.

But here's a race that's so in a district so Republican that if you turn out every single voter, you gin up everyone, Republicans win by a lot.

And so they made a decision that

they decided not to use Trump. That was a conscious decision.
They did it for either one of two reasons. The first being they thought he wouldn't turn out voters that much.

It's interesting.

And the second is that he was so toxic to swing voters to independence that it would push more people to into Baines camp.

And there's reason to believe the latter one is certainly true because in the Gallup poll that came out recently, Trump's approval rating among independents is 25%.

On every single issue, a majority disapprove of what he is doing. And, you know, independents tend to make up in the 2022 midterms, they made up basically a third of voters.

And so if you are losing three of every four independent voters, you don't want Trump anywhere near the race.

And I think that has real implications for what the midterms look like and how Democrats can use Trump and how Republicans can't.

Do we know that it was the Van Epps campaign's decision not to have Trump come? Or did, could it also have been the case that Trump was just lazy and didn't care? I think

Trump visiting would be a relatively extreme measure for a special election.

But they didn't even use him in ads. Like he didn't record one of those word videos that you put out.
I've seen no reports of Trump robocalls at the end. He just was, they were, they, for some.

Maybe he posted. Yeah, I think he posted.
But he posted on Twitter. Like, that is, that's a fake thing to do.

That doesn't really affect like what percentage of people in the seventh district of Tennessee are seeing his tweets on like the ninth most pop most trafficked social media site.

That's where that's where he calls for Democrats to be hanged. It's not yes, yes.

I mean, not that his tweets don't matter, they do matter, but it's not a particularly effective or efficient GO TV tool.

Have you? So obviously, this is like a rough calculation, but what? It was a Trump 22 district. She lost by nine.
So that's like a

13-point swing.

Have you done the math where like if in the midterms it was a, I don't know, 10-plus point swing, like, you know, 10 and change, if you're sort of, you know, approximating it, how many seats we'd win?

Yeah. So there are four Republicans in seats Kamala Harris won right now.
There are, I think, 10 Republicans in seats that Trump won by less, by five or less.

And then there's another 14 or so that are in seats that Trump won between five and 10 points.

And so that gets you to 28 seats. Now, there are some Democrats in seats that are

down. Jared Golden's seat.
Jared Golden,

who's not running again.

Henry Quayar, Don Davis in North Carolina, who are a handful of people who are in very gerrymandered seats who have they're Democrats who are in either lean or solid Republican seats, according to the Cook political report ratings.

But the question is... None of them are in Trump like over Trump plus 10 seats, right? No, no, no, no, but they're

no, they're all, I think they're all under Trump plus 10. Um, the question, and then you have Don Bacon, who is one of those four, who's in actually a lead Democratic seat in the, in Nebraska, too.

The question will be about the size of the Democratic majority to get to something that looks like a

2018 style majority, you're going to be able to get to that to those districts who are between Trump 10 and Trump 15.

You have to put some of those in play because you're not going to win all of the Trump plus 10 ones, you know, just because of their,

you know, it depends on who our candidate depends on their candidate.

Like we actually only won, this is political report data that Amy Walter and I talked about on last Sunday's pod, but I think we won like a third of the Trump five to 10 districts in 2018.

There just were so many more. There were 19 Republicans in districts that Hillary Clinton won that time around.
And so there's just, it was a wider wider playing field.

But with a plus 13, plus 10, you could have a majority much larger than what the Republicans have.

So you mentioned that that certainly depends on the candidates that run in each party.

After the results came in on Tuesday, since the results have come in on Tuesday, I should say, there's been a lot of conversation online about whether Afton Bain was the right candidate for the district and candidate quality generally as we head into the midterms.

Would you like to weigh in?

Yeah, I think this is a really hard thing.

Instead of just posting on Twitter like Elijah, I know Elijah's weighed in. Elijah is like.

He's having a great time on Twitter. He's doing 100 retweets on that last time I looked.
That's a lot of engagement for an Elijah tweet.

He hasn't gotten that much engagement since he got into a Twitter fight with Jamie Harrison.

It is hard to say. Like, there's a counterfactual here, right? Which is...

To her credit, Afton Bain drove up Democratic turnout in Davidson County, which has Nashville in it.

She won Davidson County by 58 points, which is 20 points better than Kamala Harris did in 2024. So that's a significant gain.
That's obviously a significant gain.

It's probably fair to say that she is not the best ideological fit for a district that Trump won by 22. She was a, it had a lot of positions on defunding the police,

a lot of video about, say, how much she hates Nashville.

She was a very prominent organizer with a robust social media history and, you know, endorsed by the DSA in the primary when she ran for state rep.

Like that would, that's easily weaponizable against the Republicans. And when you have to do the math and you have to win a significant number of Trump voters, that's probably not your candidate.

Would someone else have won the seat? Probably not. I haven't looked at the other, there were four people in that primary.

Hard to know that someone else would have won. I think this debate is really hard because yes, of course you want candidates who are good fits ideologically and culturally for the district.

Like that, that seems obvious, right? You want, even though he didn't win, you want someone like John Tester running in

Montana, Jared Golden, who's obviously retiring, was an excellent fit for his district. But the question is, how do you execute that?

Do we really want folks in DC

to decide who the most electable candidate is?

You're having this, we're having the same conversation because it seems like Jasmine Crockett's going to throw her hat in the ring in the Texas Senate race in the next coming, in the coming days.

And a lot lot of people are saying well she's the least electable of the three candidates and so do you want the dscc the driple c to come in and say no this is the most electable candidate which is the exact thing that we're very pissed about happening in maine and michigan well it's not just do you want them to do it it's do you think that will be effective well that's that's my point i think there's a lot of like oh we can just move around pieces on a chessboard uh those of us who play pundits on twitter yeah and it's like yeah, I totally agree that like you want a candidate who fits the district for sure.

But what, five people ran in that primary or four people? I think four, yeah. Four? Four or five.

And she won. So she ran.
She took a chance. She ran for office.
She beat everyone else in the primary.

The voters decided, the Democratic primary voters decided they wanted her over the other candidates. And then she went on.
And so, yeah, was she the strongest candidate? Maybe not.

But like, that that was democracy. It played out.
So, like, you can talk to all the candidates who ran against her in the primary and ask them, like, why, why did you fuck up and not beat her?

If you were a more electable, more moderate candidate.

And I realized that, you know, some of the discussion online is like, well, you know, Republicans in 2010 nominated a bunch of like Tea Party doofuses and that's what cost them the Senate.

It's like, yeah, they did, but I don't know that the NRSC could have really done much about that. Well, they have.

You can try, right? Like, it's like someone can,

if people think that Colin Allred is the best candidate, say, in Texas, people can, you know, party leaders can call James Tallarico and call Jasmine Crockett and try to tell them, hey, look at the polling.

This is it. You shouldn't run.
They can try to do that, but they can't force them to do anything. They can try to put their thumb on the scale.

like they're doing in some other races, and that could easily backfire as we've predicted it might in some of those other races so you can try to do that stuff but at the end of the day it's like it's up to the voters in the district and the candidates running and as much as i

understand the concern among more moderate-minded strategists and pundits that you need a candidate to fit the district and that some candidates are either and i would say either too progressive or it's always like talked about in terms of ideology, but I don't even know if it was her ideology as much as some of the some of the things she said in the past and then chose not to really explain.

Like it's not, this wasn't, this wasn't a race that was based on her positions necessarily.

Like when I saw the clip of Catherine Rampell of MSNBC interviewing Afton Bain and asking her about some of her tweets from 2020 when she said that the Nashville Police Department should be dissolved and that, you know, good morning, especially to the 54% of Americans that believe burning down a police station is justified.

So it's like, whatever. You have tweets.
Everyone has tweets they don't like. And then she didn't explain them.
And she's like, I don't remember those tweets.

And she's like, all right, what do you think about those? Do you have a position on that? And she's like, well, I'm not really focused on that. And I'm like, you know,

Zoran Mamdani, DSA socialist, right?

had some positions and tweets in the past that he and his campaign decided that they were going to clean up, that they were going to say, no, this is the position I hold now.

I am strongly in favor of X, Y, and Z, even though I said that in the past, you know? So I like, some of this is ideology. Some of it is just like how you decide to campaign.

And so I think like that's a big thing. But regardless, I also think that moderate candidates, candidates that do fit the district,

have a responsibility to figure out how to beat some of these other candidates who they think are too progressive or too far to the left or not good fits for whatever reason.

And if the moderate candidates are either too bland or boring to gain any traction or to like beat these candidates, then who the fuck's fault is that?

Yeah, it's, I mean,

there is a world where you can,

if you, if this party apparatus were to choose, decide that they knew who the best candidate was, they can play a real role here.

And then the Republicans lost the Senate in 2010 because they nominated a bunch of knuckleheads, lost the Senate in 2012 because they lost a bunch of knuckleheads, even lost to

Indiana and Missouri in that cycle because they had terrible candidates, Todd Aiken included, there.

By 2014, they decided we're not doing that again.

And the NRSC and the Senate, the Republican version of the Senate Majority Pact, Republican Super PACs, basically nuked anyone who was not, they did not think was electable.

They shut off their access to money. They would run ads against them.
They would put pressure on them to drop out.

They would

play with the field. So like what happened in, as I understand it, what happened in Tennessee 7.
Now, obviously, no one thought this was going to be a real race.

So it's not like anyone should have been involved here. But is you had a progressive and a handful of moderates.

What the NRSC and the Republicans have done in the past is they've tried to get out the other moderate so that it's moderate versus progressive.

Now, the problem with that is, is I don't really trust the people in charge to do that correctly. And so it's sort of as we live where we have.
And I think.

I think the responsibility all of us have to talk about and write about politics is to be as honest as we can be about our assessments of the candidates and what it takes to win and have humility about what makes someone electable in 2025.

Yes.

And that it is the, I just, and also I think it's the responsibility of both sides of this debates to field candidates and support candidates that they think can win.

And it's the candidates in those campaigns' responsibility to win in these primaries.

Yeah, it just says there's this assumption that there's a bunch of people on the left in the middle who have like their puppet strength picking the people.

It's really just a bunch of local candidates deciding to run. And then maybe some DC groups get involved and support them.

But it's just, it's a much more organic process than I think the conversation about Tennessee 7

allows.

We should say that there's some breaking news before we leave the midterm map here.

The Supreme Court has permitted Texas to keep its newly redistricted GOP favorable congressional map in 2026. Kyle Cheney from Politico just tweeted this.
6-3 decision.

Kagan, Sodomayor, and Jackson dissent.

Although Kyle also points out that it's notable that Alito Thomas and Gorsuch say they view California's new map as indisputably driven by the pursuit of partisan advantage as opposed to impermissible race-based goals, which bodes very well for Newsom and California in that legal challenge.

Because partisan gerrymandering is allowed by the Supreme Court. Of course.

But it's also interesting, though, that they're saying, as opposed to impermissible race-based goals, when we know that the section two of the VRA

is very much up for grabs. So I don't know what that says about that, but that's what we got.
Yeah. And they had to make this decision now because the filing deadline is in five days, I think.
Right.

Now, I think, I don't know, with everything we've seen, like, I still think, and I know you talked to Amy Walter about this on Sunday's episode, but, you know, even with Texas keeping their gerrymandered plus-five map, I don't think Democrats are in terrible shape.

I mean, the Speaker of the Virginia House just said that he was contemplating a 10-1 Democratic-Republican map in Virginia.

How many seats does that net us? I think the map of Virginia is like 6-5 right now. Oh, wow.

Look at that.

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Ba-da-ba-pa-pa.

So Republicans aren't waiting for the midterms to knife Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, who's becoming less and less popular with some of his MAGA members.

Elise Stefanik, who's been performing the role of MAGA Attack Dog so she can get a better job. She's currently gunning for governor of New York.
Good luck with that.

Is out there calling Johnson a serial liar who's in league with the deep state and said that he wouldn't win the speakership again if the election were held today.

Nancy Mace, who seems perpetually unwell, told the New York Times, quote, I stand with Elise and is reportedly considering following Marjorie Taylor Greene into early retirement because of her anger at Johnson's treatment of Republican women.

What is all this about?

Can you tell us what all the anger at Johnson is about lately? Well, I talked to Leonard Jeffries about this and you'll hear his comments on it. But I think there are a couple things going on here.

One is Mike Johnson is a doofus.

He just, I mean, he just is. He just happened to be the least offensive person when they needed to get, desperately needed to get to 218.
And so he got the job. He is not a policy wonk.

He's not a strategist. He's just a guy.
And being just a guy in charge of the narrowest majority since the Great Depression is probably,

he's punching above his weight. He's not doing it well.

The second thing is he has, he owes his entire job to Donald Trump. And so he's always one Trump truth away from being ousted.

And so he has put Trump's interests in his own job security over the interests of the caucus. And I think you saw that most vividly during the Epstein files thing.

Basically, he made these Republicans go months of asking, answering awkward questions, being on the outs with the base, because that's what Trump wanted, even though it was bad for...

the members themselves. It was bad for the caucus, probably bad for their attempt to actually have the majority.
And then I think the last thing here is just they're all feeling the pressure, right?

They, they see these results in the elections, they see the poll numbers, they see that Trump's numbers are in the toilet, and they're all starting to look for the exits.

They figure out what's going on. They're nervous.
They don't want to lose. And so they're starting to act out.

It seems like with Elise Defonic, she's just pissed that, remember she was up for the UN job. Yep.
And then

Trump and Johnson basically told her, no, you got to stay in Congress because the number, the margin is so slim. And so we need you in Congress.
So she loses that job.

And then she's running for governor.

And her whole gubernatorial campaign is that, you know, Hokul is too tied to Mamdani. And then Trump yucks it up with Mamdani in the oval.

So it's possible that she's just pretty pissed at Mike Johnson. She's taken out her anger at Donald Trump on Mike Johnson because obviously she can't be angry at Donald Trump.
I see.

I think it's more political calculation than pure anger. You think she just looks like a,

I mean, what is the political calculation there that just helps her with the base? Well, no, I think it is. So just, I don't think she has any sincere moments in her life.

She was anti-Trump when that was good. She was pro-Trump when that was good.
And now she wants to be governor of New York.

And so like she has to, she has to seem, and she is in the worst position possible.

She is the, in the leadership of a Congress that is at its second least popular time in the history of gallop polling.

And so she's trying to separate herself, seem like an outsider, but do it without actually pissing off Trump or the base. And this is a way to do it.
Yeah, I guess.

Because the actual substance of what she's pissed about is supposedly this provision that would force the FBI to notify Congress if they ever open another investigation of a political candidate.

And so she's alleging that Mike Johnson is in league with Jamie Raskin in the deep state. Yeah.

I mean, like, it's absurd, but I think she is looking for places to distance herself from her own party without upsetting the base before a primary.

Now, I mean, it makes for interesting conversation about the drama drama with Mike Johnson, but he doesn't seem like he's in any real trouble. Like, it's a year to the midterms.

What are they going to hold the vote, a new vote for Speaker, and someone else is going to get the votes?

I mean, I could see him exiting after 2026, but I can't see him getting ousted before then, can you? No, I would be shocked if he was ousted before that. It just seems no one wants the job.

The process before was so painful. They've tolerated having this Doofus in charge for years now because they don't want to revisit that process.

I think it's highly likely if they lose the the majority, which I also think is pretty likely that he will get tossed aside then. He doesn't even really want the job.

I can't believe I did this, but I watched several minutes of his and his wife's interview with Katie Miller.

You're a big Katie Miller fan. Well, it's like I'm always looking for content out here, right?

Just to try to help Elijah in his job. And the whole thing is a sob story about how hard the job is and how he doesn't like it.

So, so, so sad for you. Yeah, so, so hard.

Well, luckily for Johnson and all of these very anxious Republicans, Trump is reportedly planning to tear himself away from ballroom renovations and midday naps long enough to hit the road for the next year so he can sell Americans on everything he hasn't done to bring down the cost of living.

We're already getting a preview of how that's going to go. Take a listen.
It's a conjob. They say affordability.
They don't say anything else.

Everyone says, oh, this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about, affordability. The word affordability is a conjob by the Democrats.
Affordability, affordability, affordability. She had no idea.

Their prices were much higher. You think that was on the message calendar for that day?

No, I don't think so. I think that is possibly the worst message you could possibly design ever.

A new political poll has 46% of Americans and a slim plurality of Trump voters saying the cost of living is the worst they can remember where they live.

Asked whether Trump bears full responsibility for today's economy. Almost 20% of Trump voters said yes.
Obviously, a big majority of all voters said yes.

What are your thoughts on the affordability pivot? Will we even get one?

I don't think we're going to get one because when Trump hits the, if you read the Axio story that previewed his upcoming event, and Trump has been so...

I don't say lazy, the right word, but he really hasn't done any domestic travel at all as president. He really just, he does foreign trips and he renovates ballrooms.

And that's like the full extent of his duties. But if you read the story preview, it says that Trump is going to hit the road to talk about his economic accomplishments,

which is the exact wrong thing to do. He, I think.
I'm going to call it Trumponomics.

Exactly. I mean, it is, I mean, we talked about this.
There are parallels to Biden, but it's like 100 times worse than Biden at this. And Trump is going to fail at this because

to admit that prices are still high is to admit that he failed. And he can't admit failure.
He's never done it in his his eight decades on the planet, so he's not going to do it then.

So instead, he's going to go out and do what he did in those clips we just listened to, which it says, poke voters in the eye every single moment. It

has the makings of being an absolute political disaster, which I plan on enjoying.

The other big difference is Trump has like at least two very easily doable options in front of him to help with the cost of living.

He could get rid of the tariffs that everyone knows he put in place on his own and have hurt the economy and have made things in their lives more expensive. Or he could do something about the

Affordable Care Act subsidies that are about to expire and the premium hikes that are coming for 20 million Americans. And he is thus far refusing to do anything about that.

So people are going to know that there are just options that he is just saying no thank you to.

And he's just going to go around talking about the tax cuts that he passed from the big beautiful bill and then talk about how he lowered drug prices 5 000 percent you know he's he's now he's paying people to to take their drugs

the like mike johnson went out and said he was like trying to put a brave face on everything that happened on tuesday and he said well when the big beautiful bill kicks in people are going to feel better they're not he's just extending tax cuts that people already had they're not going to

i know i guess that some of the smaller tax cuts like the no tax on tips and like are going to affect some people and maybe

yeah maybe a small percentage of people will maybe see a slightly higher tax refund in the spring.

But I don't know when you've got the tariffs hitting the economy like they have been, the premium hikes, everything else. I don't really, I wouldn't count on that if I were the White House.

No, I would not. One tried and true option for Trump is to just tell everyone that the real blame for all their problems lies with immigrants.
I'm certain he'll do that.

He's already doing it this week. He put a

really disgusting new spin on this while talking about enforcement operations in Minnesota, which is home to a large population of Somali Americans. Let's listen.

We're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Elon Omar is garbage.
She's garbage. Her friends are garbage.
These aren't people that work.

These aren't people that say, let's go, come on, let's make this place great. These are people that do nothing but complain.

They come from hell.

And they complain and do nothing but bitch.

We don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.

Thank you very much, Dick.

Just really sick stuff. For people who don't know, the reason he was even talking about

the Somali community in Minnesota is because there was a

fraud charges

brought against an organization, a couple organizations, I think, that were basically

stealing taxpayer money. And I think a lot of Somali Americans in Minnesota were charged, though the ringleader, the person who ran the whole scam, was a white person.

So Republicans, right-wing media, everyone is using that case as a reason to say, you know, we've got to kick all of the Somali Americans out.

Never mind the fact that the vast majority, so Minnesota has the largest Somali community in the United States, the vast majority of Somalis in Minnesota are U.S.

citizens who've been here for over a decade, who have jobs.

Just so everyone knows, there's only a small percentage that have temporary protected status or are refugees or, you know, applying for asylum or whatever it may be.

And I don't know.

What do you think of

the tried and true tactic from Trump on this one?

Just so people know, that sound you heard at the end of the clip was J.D. Vance banging on the table in support.
Was that J.D. Vance? Yeah.
Of course.

In the past, Trump has somewhat effectively changed the subject by making these outrageous sorts of statements.

This is they're eating the dogs and they're eating the cats from 2024, you know, various attempts during

his first term where he was able to just focus people on something else through offensive, jingoistic, racist remarks.

And, you know, sometimes that would be effective.

I don't, I think that is doomed to fail this time around because single, now there is, unlike in Trump's first term where things were kind of just like proceeding to pace in life, now there is one central issue that everyone cares about and everyone's mad about, and it's cost of living.

So every time Trump is doing something that's not affecting the cost of living, he is not helping himself. You can't really distract people from the price of groceries, utilities, and housing.

You're not going to convince them that that's not a big deal and a big problem. So when you're trying to distract them, it's very, they can see the cards up your sleeve.
They know what you're doing.

And I think it's going to be incredibly ineffective. Yeah, the big problem for him here is that he's in charge.

Like, you could imagine a scenario where Biden was president, Trump's running against Biden, and he's saying, oh, you know, the reason that we still have high prices and inflation is because all these immigrants are stealing government benefits, and Biden's letting them because he let them all into the country.

And you could say, okay, I could see that unfortunately being politically effective.

But in this instance, it's like, okay, you're complaining about Somali immigrants who the authorities in Minnesota, a state mostly run by Democrats,

are, they've been charged.

Governor Wallace was like, good, people who are criminals should go to jail. I don't care what nationality they are.
I don't care where they come from. If you commit a crime, you go to jail.
And so

I don't really understand the argument there that like, oh, yeah, prices are high, costs are high, you're having a tough time. Also, I'm in charge.
I'm going to blame immigrants.

I am deporting immigrants. I am cracking down on them.
But like, what's his excuse? You know, it's just not a, it just doesn't, it doesn't work as well.

Okay, one last thing before we get to your conversation with Hakeem Jeffries.

Uh, you may remember that uh back in October, basically the entire Pentagon Press Corps, including Fox News and Newsmax, gave up their badges and walked out of the building rather than agree to a list of new rules from Hexeth that basically amounted to a ban on real reporting.

Uh, the Times announced on Thursday they're suing Hegseth over the policy.

Um, but fear not, we've got a new crop of defense reporters on the beat, including 9-11 truther Laura Loomer, ladies' man Matt Gates,

the national pulse, the post-millennial, turning point USA, Tim Cast, and the Gateway Pundit, all of whom agreed to the reporting restrictions and they're already hard at work holding DOD accountable.

Sorry, DOW.

Here's conservative influencer Cam Higby just grilling Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson, who no one even knew existed until this week. Let's listen.

What was the environment like here with the old press corps? There's a lot of talk online about us us and our level of professionalism.

I'm interested to hear what the level of professionalism was like before.

I've heard stories about ambushing people outside their offices, making a hostile work environment for everyone who works in the DOW. What was that like? Oh, it was absolutely crazy.

My first weeks here, they just waltzed in my office, rang my doorbell literally non-stop. My doorbell was going off probably every single second.

There were instances where they were hanging outside of the secretary's office trying to see who he was meeting with. In your mind, what is the purpose of the Pentagon Press Corps?

Because it seems to me that a lot of people online, including the former Press Corps who have been tweeting at me, that the purpose of the Press Corps is just to gather classified information and release it to the public.

It seems like that's, if you're an American journalist, I mean you're not a Chinese spy.

Holding us accountable, I think, is very important, but also communicating to the American people all of the work we're doing and all of the work that our warfighters are doing every single day.

That is the role of the Press Corps is to communicate to the American people all the wonderful things that the government is doing.

I mean, it's one of the most honest things any Trump flak has ever said.

I just, like, thank God, her poor ears having to hear her doorbell ring from these reporters that just, they were trying to reach her. She is the press secretary.

That is the job of the press secretary to talk to reporters. Am I right? Those reporters hanging outside trying to.
see who Pete Hexeth is meeting with in public spaces in the Pentagon.

A bunch of fucking Chinese spies right there trying to suss out a meeting at the Pentagon. I mean, this whole thing was so comical.
These people were so embarrassing.

You know, I think it was Cam Pigby, one of them tweeted. I just had a great off-the-record conversation with

John Conrad. John Conrad, right? I had a great off-the-record conversation with Pete Hegseth.
He said great things. He says, Hegseth answered my questions.

It's off-the-record, so no details, but I am very pleased with his leadership. It's so good.
And then he works for he work.

He works for the world's top maritime news website. And then in his bio, it says blacklisted by Wikipedia.
So you know it's good.

And then

they all took, everyone's mad at the Washington Post because they wrote the original story about the second strike.

All these people took pictures at different desks saying that they were at the Washington Post desk. But they couldn't even figure it.
They couldn't even suss that out.

So it's like Dan Lamothe, the Pentagon reporter for the Post who wrote the original story, he tweeted out pictures of all of them at the various desks saying, I'm at the Washington Post desk saying, you have to figure this out amongst yourselves.

This isn't really important, but do you think there are other maritime news websites that aren't the top maritime news website? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

There's number two, number three, number four. I think you are dramatically underestimating the vibrant maritime press that exists.
I mean,

to be honest, there's a lot going on in the Caribbean right now that someone could be. Maybe Crooked should have a maritime reporter.

You know what?

Let's send

Put Elijah on a boat. Get him off Twitter for a little bit.
Get him on a boat. Get him to a single story.
Honestly,

this is a great idea. Elijah,

you're going to the Caribbean. Okay, when we come back from the break, you'll hear Dan's conversation with leader Jeffries.
But two quick things before we get to that.

Strict scrutiny is coming to the West Coast. Join Kate, Melissa, and Leah in San Francisco on March 6th at the Herbst Theater, and in Los Angeles on March 7th at the Palace Theater.

Grab your tickets before they sell out at Crooked.com/slash events. Also, go get your holiday shopping done with a visit to the Crooked Store.

I know a lot of you are looking for the right Epstein Files-related Christmas present.

May I humbly suggest, I don't even know what I have not read this copy, as always. May I humbly suggest our release the naughty list sweatshirt.

We got ornaments, too.

We decorated our Christmas tree. This weekend and we were unpacking the boxes, and I found the offline ornament from a few years ago.
That's a good one. I like that one.

I was like, what is, oh, this is from John's other podcast. That's what this is.
Anyway, go check out offline.

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While the Who's of Whoville laughed and made cheery, the Grinch hatched a plot to make their season more dreary. Del Pickles seasoning on fries, mitted Argyle stockings.

That'll sure make for a shocking unboxing. The new Grinch Wheel now at McDonald's.
As participating McDonald's while supplies last.

Joining us now is House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Leader Jeffries, welcome back to Pod Save America.
Great to be with you.

Let's start with some good news, because that's what we need these days.

But so on Tuesday night, Democrats, although we didn't win, had a very good night in the special election in the Tennessee's 7th district, where

Democrats outperformed Kamala Harris's Harris's performance there by 13 points. I take it you see that election as a positive sign in your quest to retake the majority.

And why do you think the Democrats did so well? Well, I think it's another positive sign on the trajectory that we've seen from the very beginning of this year.

The first special election of this year took place in late January. a state senate seat in Iowa that Donald Trump had just won the previous November by 21 points.
Democrats won it by four.

That was a 25-point overperformance. We flipped that state Senate seat and we've been winning special election after special election after special election ever since.

And if we've failed to win, we've overperformed dramatically, as we just saw in Tennessee.

And of course, during the off-year elections that occurred in early November, we saw decisive Democratic victories all across the country in New Jersey, in New York, in Virginia, in Pennsylvania, in Georgia, in Mississippi, and of course, in California with Prop 50 up and down the ballot at all points in between.

I think that the thing that unites these consistent Democratic victories or if we fall just short, our dramatic overperformance numbers are that the American people are tired of the extremism that they've seen from Donald Trump, the failure to do anything meaningful to make their life better, and Democrats, of course, leaning in aggressively and consistently on two messages.

Affordability. We're working hard to drive down the high cost of living, which is out of control.
And health care.

We want to fix our broken health care system and, of course, deal with the Republican health care crisis that's crushing the American people.

So affordability was a big part of this campaign. It was Democrat, the central focus of Afton Bain's message to Democrat in that race.

In New Jersey and Virginia, where Democrats did well earlier this month, the Democrats not just ran on saying prices were too high, but because they were governors, had specific proposals about what they would do to lower prices.

You know, Mikey Sherrell, the governor elected New Jersey, talked about freezing utility rates. As you think about 2026 and the midterms, do Democrats need to have some specific proposals about

what we would do to lower costs, not just what Trump has failed to do to lower costs? Yeah, I think that is going to be important as we pivot from 2025 to 2026.

And listen, there are a variety of different ideas that we've already begun to articulate. We need to repeal the Trump tariffs.

These tariffs have actually increased costs on everyday Americans by thousands of dollars per year. That's both groceries and it's goods.

And the American people are feeling it right now in a significant way.

Congress needs to reassert its authority in this area because Donald Trump has usurped the congressional power over tariffs, claimed some emergency authority, and as a result, he's adversely impacting the American people.

So one of the first things that Congress can do is to repeal the Trump tariffs. It's absolutely essential if the Supreme Court doesn't beat us to it.

I think with respect to health care, and when people talk about the affordability crisis, the three things that I hear the most from folks as I travel across the country, it's housing, it's health care, and of course, it's groceries, goods, utilities.

And in terms of health care, one of the more immediate things that we need to do right now is to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits because the failure to renew them is actually going to result in tens of millions of people experiencing dramatically increased health care costs.

We're talking about $1,000 or $2,000 per month in some instances. This is unaffordable for working-class Americans, middle-class Americans, and everyday Americans.

It's a big difference between what Democrats are all about and what Republicans are all about.

I think on housing, we need to use the tax code to both incentivize increased production to deal with the supply problem that we have.

And if you increase the supply of housing, you bring down housing costs, both on the rental side and on the home ownership side.

But also, I think, use the tax code to incentivize and make it easier for first-time home buyers to be able to purchase a home and get their piece of the American dream.

This was done previously under President Barack Obama, as you know, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, and it was successful, I think we need to look at that type of initiative.

What Republicans have done is use the tax code to provide massive tax breaks to their billionaire donors while leaving everyday Americans behind.

Could you see the Democratic leadership putting together an equivalent of what the Democrats did in 2006, which was a six for six, like a set of policy ideas that would be that most Democratic candidates, whether incumbents or challengers, could run on?

Is that one of the things you guys in your leadership team are thinking about? Yeah, it's definitely under discussion, and we've been in conversation about that.

Initially, we wanted to make sure that we just articulated a framework around three different issues, the economy, affordability, issue one, issue two, health care, and issue three, corruption.

And to make clear to the American people, listen, what we'll focus on is House Democrats are driving down the high cost of living because America is too expensive.

We're focused on fixing our broken health care system, which Republicans are destroying, largest cut to Medicaid in American history, hospitals, nursing homes, community-based health clinics closing all across America because of their one big ugly bill.

Their refusal to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. That's a disaster.

They're attacking the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institute of Health, making it harder for people to get vaccines, including children. It's an all-out assault.

on the healthcare of the American people. We need to fix our broken health care system.

And then third, deal with the corruption that exists in the Congress, in the courts, and of course with the administration, the most corrupt presidential administration in American history.

Now that we've got a framework of the issues that we want to work on,

economy, health care, corruption, I think the logical next step for us is to begin to articulate to the American people some more concrete ideas as to what a Democratic majority in the House would look like.

On the Obamacare tax credits, you know, you, Senator Schumer is reportedly going to propose a three-year clean extension and try to force a vote on that. You guys have been pushing that.

Where does that stand? And are you open to negotiating with the Republicans on it? Or is the three-year extension your bottom, clean extension, your bottom line?

Well, our view is that the most urgent and important thing that we can do right now is to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits.

And the legislation and the path to getting something toward an up or down vote in the House right now runs through the House Democratic proposal and our discharge petition.

All 214 Democrats support that discharge petition, which means, as you know, Dan, that all we need are four Republicans. There are 219 of them.

Dozens of them have said

that they know we need to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. All we need are four to join us.
And then, of course, in the Senate, let's see what happens next week. Now,

months have gone by, and we've repeatedly said to our Republican colleagues, we are willing to work together to find a bipartisan path forward, find some common ground, but we have to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits on a multi-year basis.

And Republicans have talked a lot and done nothing. So

I think time is running out to do anything other than a straight extension.

But, you know, when we return to Washington next week, If there are traditional Republicans who put a proposal forward in good faith, we'll certainly evaluate it, but their leadership has shown no interest in doing anything, which is why we launched the discharge petition and are working hard to get four House Republicans to join us.

The other big news happening on Capitol Hill today is the Trump administration briefed senior members of Congress, Intel, the Armed Services Committee leaders about this very controversial boat strike in Venezuela that involved a second strike that killed two survivors.

I understand they showed the video.

Have you been briefed on that by your team? And what's your reaction to where this stands right now?

Yeah, I haven't had the opportunity to go down to the SCIF to view the video during the time that the Admiral was there, but individuals who have seen the video have made clear it's very disturbing and certainly demands further investigation, which is what I expect

will take place. Pete Hegseth clearly is a disgrace.
I called for his resignation months ago. And

the sooner he's gone, the better off for the American people. And I think the American people increasingly know that.
The question for us is,

you know, why

is it that we have a president who claims

to want to stop the flow of narcotics into this country, is engaging in what appears to be extrajudicial killings. We've yet to see any authority authority or evidence presented to the Congress,

either in a public way or in a secure location, to justify the strikes that have taken place, including this horrific one.

And yet, at the same period of time, Donald Trump pardons one of the biggest narco

traffickers, narco-terrorists, the former Honduran president,

in the world.

And so

it's very unfortunate that the administration can't really be taken seriously here.

And now we've seen efforts by them to obfuscate the fact that

the Bucks should stop with the leadership. And that certainly means the so-called Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.

Earlier in this, sort of as reporting came out about this with the Big Washington Post story and some subsequent reporting, there seemed to be

an appetite, at least in the Senate, but maybe in the House too, for bipartisan investigations into this, bipartisan oversight in the way in which Congress used to operate before these Republicans got in charge.

Do you see any chance of that in the House? Or was this briefing probably enough to get sort of the lemmings back in line?

You know, well, I got to be honest that I'm very skeptical of the Republican willingness to actually act like a separate and co-equal branch of government because what we've seen from the very beginning beginning of Donald Trump's time in office is that they're just sycophants.

And when he says jump, they say how high. They're nothing more than reckless rubber stamps for his extreme agenda.

But it has been interesting to see Republicans certainly in the Senate and even Mike Rogers who issued a

strong statement.

calling for an investigation and then followed it up by opening up the investigation and demanding that the Admiral come to Capitol Hill as part of the process of that ongoing investigation.

So now it remains to be seen when Donald Trump cracks the whip what's going to happen. But this issue is now broken into the public domain and it's going to be hard

for them to try to

misdirect the attention of the American people at this point because it's horrific.

what has occurred. And as you know, the American people overwhelmingly are not interested in another foreign war.
It's deeply unpopular, including with elements of Donald Trump's MAGA base.

So I think it may be the case that some Republicans are both repulsed by Pete Hegseth

and also understand

that parts of their base aren't necessarily interested in the path that Donald Trump seems to be dragging us down as it relates to Venezuela and the possibility of another failed foreign war.

I assume that if the Republicans, if there's no bipartisan oversight of this, the Republicans do not do their duty here, that this would be a ripe line of investigation for a Democratic majority in 2027.

Yeah, there's no doubt about it. But listen, the line is also very long.
I mean, we've got an out-of-control Homeland Security Secretary, an out-of-control

Attorney General, you know, an out-of-control Secretary of Health and Human Services, all doing great harm to the American people, to due process, to the rule of law, to law-abiding immigrant families and communities because of what has been unleashed by ICE in the Department of Homeland Security in ways that are turning off the American people significantly.

And then, of course, we've got the most unqualified so-called Secretary of Defense in American history. And so, from an oversight standpoint, there's going to be a lot to do.
Yes, I can imagine.

And we are prepared to do it all. Going Going back to the Tennessee election for a second, the Democrat did overperform by 13 points.

That's a few points less than Democrats have traditionally have been performing in these congressional special elections this year, about five points.

Part of the discourse that happened afterwards among a lot of sort of political strategists and pundits was the candidate, the nominee, who I think ran a vigorous race in terms of turning out the base, particularly in Davidson County, where Nashville is, but

was... probably not the best ideological fit for the district.

She was quite liberal, endorsed by the DSA, you know, had been a very active organizer who had a lot of videos that the Republicans sort of weaponized.

I don't know that another candidate would have won that race. I'm not arguing that.
But as you think about

2026, to win the majority, and especially win a sustainable majority where you actually have a margin for error, you're going to have to win districts that Trump won by five, six, seven, eight, nine, sometimes more than 10 points.

How are you thinking about candidate selection there? And are you and the DCCC planning on on getting involved to sort of ensure that the candidates that you think are the best fit would be nominated?

Well, it's certainly the case that we want to make sure that there are Democrats whose life experiences and whose perspectives match the districts that they're hoping to represent.

That's the reality all across the country. And that will differ from place to place.
In the deep south, it differs from the Midwest. In the Midwest, it may differ from the coast

in terms of the type of candidate, the type of life experiences, the type of perspective.

We've got to make sure that they're authentic, of course, that they're communicating on the issues that matter,

as was done in Tennessee in terms of speaking aggressively to the issue of affordability,

but that, you know, there's a sense that they can connect to the broadest possible swath of the electorate. And there are always two things that have to be done, as you know, to win these elections.

Energize the base and then move swing voters who can go either way in your direction.

And we certainly, I think, are going to make sure that there are as many candidates who are able to do both as possible.

Everybody at Capitol Hill, whether you're a progressive or a blue dog or a new Dem, knows

To win these tough seats, you got to do both things.

Energize the base and move swing voters in your direction.

Now, a lot of that has to do with speaking to the issues that matter authentically around driving down the high cost of living and, of course, addressing the health care crisis that exists in America and just generally wanting to make life better for the American people.

But,

you know, I think what was successful for us in 2018, And there were new Dems and there were blue dogs and there were progressives like Katie Porter who won swing districts.

But what they had in common was that they spoke authentically. They were from their communities.

They had a real close, authentic, affectionate relationship that was developed with the people that they were hoping to represent. And they had life experiences

that

made clear to folks that, you know what, I'm not a career politician.

I'm interested in serving the people.

Your counterpart, Speaker Mike Johnson, has been having a tough week. It seems like chaos is breaking out across the Capitol.
You have members of his own leadership team attacking him.

There were brief fears that there's going to be

members just retiring left and right, even further narrowing his incredibly narrow majority.

I don't know how much scuttlebutt you're picking up or what you're able to observe on the floor, but what is happening over there in the Republican caucus right now?

Yeah, I mean, it's a GOP civil war that is raging. The bottom line is they can't stand each other.
And a lot of them hate Mike Johnson. We have that in common.

This is somebody who apparently has repeatedly lied to them.

And we know he's repeatedly lied to the American people.

And they're falling apart over there. They have no affirmative agenda.
They've done nothing to make life better for the American people.

And I think we kind of reached the boiling point to some degree.

this week because again, you've got them not doing a damn thing to even pretend like they care about dealing with the high cost of living or addressing the fact that the Affordable Care Act tax credits are going to expire in just a few weeks.

And I think a lot of Republicans like Elise Stefanik, who I've never really agreed with on any other issue before, but clearly she can't stand him at this point,

and you know, believes that they're rudderless. And then you've got a group of other people who are like,

why have we continued continued to castrate our majority and not even pretend as if we are a separate and co-equal branch of government?

And I think as Donald Trump's approval ratings continue to speed rapidly toward the basement, he's at 36 in Gallup.

Maybe it, in fact, is the case that some House Republicans are like, yeah, do we have to agree with him on every single thing?

Can't we find some space, particularly now that we're heading into an election cycle that looks increasingly difficult for us.

So it's going to be very interesting to see how things unfold in the next week or so. They already have such a narrow majority, and this I think was underappreciated heading into this

year, that it was a tough cycle, and it's very bitter for all of us to have to absorb that we're dealing with this guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue again.

And that, of course, we fell just short in the House of Representatives.

But the reality is that when Donald Trump came into office in 2017, he just lost the popular vote, but he walked into a Congress with a majority of 241 House Republicans and only 194 Democrats.

This time around, Donald Trump wins the popular vote. and unfortunately does better directionally in every single state in the union.

And yet he doesn't walk into Congress with a big majority. He walks into Congress with the narrowest majority that any party has had since the Great Depression.
220 House Republicans, 215 Democrats.

And so things are very fragile for them.

And that is also why we're starting to see the cracks really emerge because just a handful of Republicans who express dissent can collapse the whole situation.

Last question for you, Leader Jeffries. You brought up, you talked about how corruption is part of the message.
You brought up Trump's pardon of the narco, the drug trafficker.

I want to talk to you a little bit about the Trump's pardon of your Democratic colleague, Congressman Queyar, who serves in one of the most endangered districts in the country.

You told CNN you thought that was probably the right outcome. Is that really the right outcome here, or should it have been better to go through the actual court process? Yeah, here's what I thought.

You know, know, what Donald Trump has done in other instances is actually pardon people after the fact who've already been convicted by a jury of his or her peers in a court of law.

That's completely and totally unacceptable.

Now, I don't know why Donald Trump actually decided to go down this road, but it is my view that the charges that have been brought against Queyar, and he's innocent until proven guilty,

and whether you're a member of Congress or an everyday American taxpayer, hardworking American taxpayer, you are entitled to that presumption that the charges that had been filed to me

read as very thin.

Now, there may be members of the Department of Justice who brought this case who take a different perspective, and that's certainly fair for them to take that perspective.

But what we've also seen is that these type of cases have repeatedly been thrown out by the Supreme Court. Now this has happened over and over and over again

by people on the Supreme Court who don't otherwise agree with each other. Literally 8090 decisions.

Everyone from Contanji Brown Jackson to Elena Kagan to Sonia Sodomayar joining with John Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh and others, repeatedly throwing out these very cases.

And so that's the perspective that I articulated.

And it wasn't just based on the specific facts connected to that case that was brought, but the pattern that has repeatedly appeared over and over and over again, ultimately resulting in public servants being exonerated by the Supreme Court, whether they were Democrats or Republicans.

But I mean, so I'd say a couple of things here. One is, yeah, everyone, you're exactly right, is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
There will never be an opportunity to prove someone guilty here.

But it's also in many of these cases, unless I, you know, as you say,

he's presumed innocent right now. But many of these cases, it's not that the conduct was actually

not corrupt.

I'm not talking about this specific case involving Representative Quayar, but in the cases that have been thrown out by the Supreme Court and other courts, it's that the Supreme Court has just raised the threshold of what an actual crime of bribery is is so high that it's hard to meet.

And so under this current threshold, you're getting, there's a lot of corruption that's happening that is not criminal.

Having said that, I think the question here is, you know, I'm not a legal scholar. I can't argue that case, so I won't.

But from the political perspective here, like corruption is one of your...

the three pillars, as it absolutely should be. I 100% agree this is the most corrupt administration in history, more corrupt than Nixon.

And there's nothing that better embodies that corruption than Trump's pardon process, where he's just doling out pardons to crypto people who have given his family money, to people doing business deals with his son, to this, you know, these drug traffickers.

Do you think it makes it harder for Democrats to run against those pardons or criticize those pardons when the one pardon we're okay with is the one that happens to be for one, someone on our side?

Well, there actually, I think, have probably been a few other pardons that he's issued in the criminal justice area related to people, African Americans largely. largely.

And a lot of this happened during the first Trump administration.

And I, of course, worked with some parts of the administration to enact the First STEP Act, the largest, most successful criminal justice reform legislation to merge through Congress

in a century. And it, in fact, has resulted in tens of thousands of people being released.

from incarceration because of the failed war on drugs that we've finally begun to turn around in some way, shape, or form, we still got a lot of work to do to deal with mass incarceration and particularly its impact on black and brown communities.

So

I take your point, you know, more broadly on the corruption issue. I think that our view on corruption is that we've got to clean up the mess in every single institution.

So that means the Congress, that means the courts, and that certainly means the administration. Now,

in that vein,

I think the one piece of legislation that we've united behind as House Democrats and Senate Democrats is that we have to prohibit congressional stock trading.

And that you're right, if we're going to go after corruption, we should go after it wherever we find it, which is why out of the gate, our view is we need to ban congressional stock trading.

It should not happen. There's no justification for it.

It also shouldn't happen in terms of judges or justices who get to decide cases before them where they may actually have a financial interest connected to stock that they own.

And it also should never happen with the administration, Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, president, vice president, cabinet secretaries.

It's insane that Donald Trump has actually most recently purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars, in Warner Brothers stock at the same time his administration is deciding on a potential merger that would be a financial boon to the company and therefore any stockholders.

But

on this issue, the corruption issue, we've intentionally decided to start by addressing the mess that exists in our own house.

And that's why we've led, to your point, to make sure that we maintain the high ground on banning congressional stock trading.

And will you guys sign the discharge petition that a Republican representative has put forward to try to bring this to a vote?

Yeah, so I am scheduled to talk with a few of the leaders on that issue over the weekend, and that includes, you know, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of course, Pramila Giapol, Joe Morelli, Seth Magazina, whose legislation is connected to the bill that may be discharged, to figure out what path we want to take and whether Republicans are serious.

Part of the challenge that we have here is Mike Johnson immediately said,

We're not bringing that bill to the floor of the House of Representatives. And so

we haven't had the opportunity to even talk to our Republican colleagues about, okay, what's the strategy?

We can try to discharge this bill, but then are they going to stick with us when Mike Johnson erects these other procedural obstacles that he could erect to try to prevent the bill from getting an up or down vote?

So we just want to make sure that we've got reliable, at least I want to make sure we've got reliable partners on the other side of the aisle so we can see this through and make a clear promise to the American people that we're going to deliver it.

Now, I can guarantee you: when House Democrats take back control of the majority, if this issue is not resolved, we are going to resolve it and make sure that we ban congressional stock trading and then move on to the other aspects of corruption that exist in the other branches of government.

But we're going to start by making sure we address the challenges that we have in our own house. Leader Jeffries, thank you so much for joining us, and we'll talk to you again soon.

Thanks so much, man.

That's our show for today. Thanks to Hakeem Jeffries for coming on.
Alex Wagner will be back in the feed on Sunday with a discussion with The Atlantic's Michael Shearer about the rise of RFK Jr.

Check it out. Bye, everyone.
Bye, everyone.

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