Dictatorship Threats Go Mainstream

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Welcome to Raging Moderates.

I'm Jessica Tarlov, and my guest today is Andrew Bates.

He's the former White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary, having served in various communications roles across the Biden administration.

Before that, he also served in the Obama White House and as the press secretary for the U.S.

Trade Representative.

In January, he launched his own Washington communications firm, Wolfpack Strategies.

Andrew, welcome to Raging Moderates.

I'm so excited to have you.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, no, it's a pleasure.

I feel like this was a little bit long time coming.

Text friends and now podcast friends, which is another level of intimacy, I guess.

And I wanted to start with the big story of the week.

We have now seen the text messages between Charlie Kirk's alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, and his roommate.

What do you make of the motives and where we are in this story?

When I heard the news that Charlie Kirk had been shot,

I looked for the video, like I think many people did.

And it's a horrifying image.

I have seen that his family was there.

It is something that is just antithetical to everything that we are supposed to be as a country, where free debate is something that we respect and we understand that that strengthens the entire country.

I also think while it wouldn't surprise anybody that he said things that offend me, I'm much more offended that someone would take his life because they disagree with what he thinks.

And I don't want to get too in the weeds about what they have released between the suspect and the suspect's roommate because I want to see what else comes through.

But I think that the bottom line for everybody is political violence is always horribly wrong.

And we have to call it out anytime it occurs, whoever the victim is, whoever the perpetrator is.

And I think that that's something that we have to be watchful of is whenever this happens, look for who is helping, who is trying to bring people together, who is trying to bring the temperature down, because I think that's the only responsible way to lead in that kind of a situation.

Well, we have been looking for for that.

And we have more or less only been getting that from the Democratic side in the highest ranking positions.

Of course, there are Republicans like North Carolina Senator Tom Tillis, who's been talking about it in a more peaceful way.

But he also pointed out when he had Cash Patel sitting in front of him on Wednesday that,

you know, you have Bannon's war room going with the this is war.

You have people talking about the they, right?

They did this to us.

We are at war with them from Donald Trump, J.D.

Vance, Patel, powerful figure.

You name them, Benny Johnson.

You know, I'm deeply concerned about what that portends for the country.

And it seems like they are using that almost immediately as a way to crack down on the left, and that that is going to become the mission in all of this.

Yeah, I saw what J.D.

Vance said when he guest hosted Charlie Kirk's program, and he railed against unity in it.

There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination.

And there is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers, who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father, deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words with which they disagree.

And that is the exact opposite of how you're supposed to react.

You're supposed to respect people's grief, not by exploiting them, not by trying to turn them against their fellow Americans.

I don't think that there are many people who saw that video and whose first reaction was, we need more division.

But that is what he was preaching.

And if I think back to how President Biden reacted after an assassin tried to take the life of President Trump, he said, we all need to come together.

Political violence is always wrong.

We all share bonds as Americans that we need to keep front of mind.

Or if you think about Barack Obama, after Dylan Roof shot many members of a black congregation in South Carolina, where he sang Amazing Grace and called for people to come together.

And I think that while the new cycle is volatile and many things will happen between now and then, I think that if Vance tries to run in the 2028 cycle, I think that that is a very telling moment about

what are your real convictions?

What are your real values?

Because it is an insult to every American who has been harmed by political violence, whatever their point of view was, to try and use it to fuel more anger.

and more division.

Yeah, I mean, not to play I live in conservative media devil's advocate, but the right has a list of things that they say that the Democratic Party has done to marginalize and to demean and to demonize the right.

And they would say that President Biden, how he called out MAGA Republicans and the MAGA base all the time, was part of the problem.

And they've been going back to the radicalization that happened, you know, under Barack Obama.

For instance, Megan Kelly was talking about that.

And as someone who served in the Biden administration, how would you respond to those accusations that, you know, these divisions have been fomented for a long time and that Democrats are guilty as well of demonizing an enormous subsection of the Republican Party?

One of the biggest problems with the way the Trump administration is talking to the country is they are often treating people like they're stupid, and they are not stupid.

You see this with the Epstein files, how they were promising for years transparency on the Epstein files.

Then, once they come into power, you see the opposite, and we still have no idea

what is really in those and what is about Trump in them.

But I think that Americans are proud of the fact that we are a democracy that values debate, and they understand that there are always going to be contrasts that people who are running for office make with one another and that parties make with one another.

But what we need to do is look at the specific rhetoric rhetoric, like you're getting at.

Joe Biden would say that he disagreed with MAGA Republicans, as he put it, and

he would separate that from what he called mainstream Republicans.

And when he was walking through, what he found concerning about MAGA Republicans, it was the explicit support for violence, like how on January 6th, there were members of the Capitol Police Force who lost their lives.

That mob wanted to kill Mike Pence.

They wanted to kill Republican members of Congress.

And that goes to the core of what he was talking about: that we have to say that's not who we are.

And I remember there was a moment in the 2020 campaign after

the turmoil, after George Floyd was killed.

He would repeatedly say, by he, I mean President Biden,

we have to always reject political violence.

Protest must be peaceful.

And there were some voices, like DSA in Portland, put out a statement condemning Joe Biden for saying that violence is always unacceptable.

They had some argument that in some cases it was.

And I couldn't disagree with that more.

And I think that if you map out what are people saying about one another, it is hard to argue that what's called for now is the kind of charged rhetoric that you're seeing from the president and the vice president and their allies trying to exploit a tragedy to go after Americans who disagree with their policies.

It's literally just about one of the least American things that you can do.

Yeah, and they're getting very serious about it.

So we have this $15 billion

defamation lawsuit Donald Trump has filed against the New York Times, saying that they're virtually the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party.

We had Pam Bondi saying that we can prosecute hate speech.

She walked it back, but then Trump being Trump, he basically said, no, no, no, that's actually totally fine.

We have Deputy AG Todd Blanche threatening to use RICO against left-wing groups that even disturb the president's meals.

So, is it again sheer happenstance that individuals show up at a restaurant where the president is trying to enjoy dinner in Washington, D.C.

and accost him with vile words and vile anger, and meanwhile, he's simply trying to have dinner?

Does it mean it's just completely random that they showed up?

Maybe, maybe, but to the extent that it's part of an organized effort to inflict harm and terror and damage to the United States, there's

potential investigations there.

Where do you think all of this leads?

I don't think it's leading anywhere good when you look at the way they're acting.

Like you said, last night, I saw that exchange where Caitlin Collins was interviewing Todd Blanche, and she reminded him correctly that every American has the right to protest their government.

That is fundamental.

And every president of our lifetimes has been protested.

I don't know of anybody else whose team has tried to say that protesting them should be a crime equal in magnitude to terrorism, organized crime.

I think that that's just the kind of thing people hear it, and it makes them concerned about their rights and their right to be.

It made me concerned in that way.

I remember there were events where people were chanting, quote, fuck Joe Biden.

Joe Biden did not ever, and nor did anybody on his team, talk about that should be criminalized, that shouldn't be allowed.

Americans have the right to do that.

I went to protests of President George W.

Bush when I was in college because I disagreed with the Iraq war.

That is something every American has a fundamental right to do.

Do you see a difference?

in the way the media is handling the Trump administration versus how they interacted with the Biden administration.

You know, I've heard accusations, obviously, of acquiescing in some ways, like CBS paying that $16 million fine, kind of just to get them off their back.

And there has been a chilling effect throughout media organizations.

What's your take on how they're interacting with the administration?

To me, I think it gets at a double standard that still has to be addressed at a high level in mainstream media.

It takes me back to there was a moment in 2016 when Matt Lauer interviewed Hillary Clinton and then Donald Trump back to back, and there was a very different tone in his questioning of the two of them.

With Trump,

it was basically like, what is your favorite color balloon?

And with Hillary, it was, why did you kill all those people in Benghazi?

Right.

It was just night and day.

And I think that there's been some soul searching in the almost 10 years since that time.

But if you take a step back and you diagram out how do they treat Trump in general versus how do they treat whichever Democratic opponent or opponents he is vying with at that time,

there is not equal treatment.

Trump is given much more regurgitation in coverage, including when he says things that are demonstrably untrue, when he says things that an outlet's own investigative reporting has debunked.

There was a New York Times article over the weekend, which goes to the conversation we're having about cracking down on free speech, where it went on for about 10 paragraphs covering his accusations that there was a widespread left-wing effort behind killing Charlie Kirk.

Then it whispers, after the reader has been introduced to a lot of Trump's claims, that the shooters' motives were not known fully yet.

We know that Trump is one of the most dishonest major politicians in our country's history.

I think the Washington Post fact checker got up to over 30,000 lies they caught him in.

And now the Washington Post hasn't even decided if they're going to continue having the fact checker after Glenn Kessler left.

And unequivocally, he's the most anti-First Amendment president we've had.

I mean, you mentioned he's suing the New York Times.

We had many fights with the New York Times, and we felt strongly about those.

I still do now.

We did not ever think about suing them.

And if you look at the language in his suit, it's embarrassing.

There's stuff about how there's not enough respect for his charisma.

It does read like he didn't write it himself, but he dictated it to a lawyer who then tried to take it from a truth social post and put it in something that you could actually send to a legal department at the New York Times.

But it seems like they were laughing at it as well.

Yeah, which has the effect of making making it sound even more absurd when you mix his very idiosyncratic tone with something that's softer.

But I think that there has just been a failure to identify power dynamics that's similar to what happened with law firms.

When Paul Weiss caved

as soon as Trump made that unconstitutional executive order to try and limit Americans' ability to sue their government,

you saw how the law firms who did not act with dignity and did not stand up for themselves were later treated.

And that is something that executives at media companies also need to keep in mind: that if you hand someone like that who is a bully, a lot of your own agency, you're not going to get it back.

And this is a time when we have to really think about the stakes of what is going to happen if the President of the United States tells his Department of Justice, which is acting like it is an arm of the RNC, to go after Americans just because they disagree with him.

It's truly scary stuff, and we could go on all day about it.

We're going to take a quick break.

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Welcome back.

I want to make sure that I ask you about your recent testimony.

You were...

on Capitol Hill in front of the oversight committee and they're looking into the alleged cover-up of Joe Biden's mental acuity.

How did that go?

I want to be careful that I'm respecting commitments that you make when you go into those kinds of closed-door sessions.

Of course.

So I don't want to go into

particulars.

There will be, I believe, releases around that eventually.

A report, yeah.

I think, just talking about the way the oversight committee is behaving in general, I think it says a lot that the current president is engaging in unprecedented corruption, making billions off the American people.

If you look at the way he's selling meme coin, cryptocurrency, these corrupt deals with Cotter, the fact that he accepted a $400 million luxury plane from Cotter, which funds Hamas.

You could go on and on.

The Oversight Committee has not scrutinized any of it.

And that is the most powerful person in the who is raising the costs that he promised people he would lower while he is leeching money off of American taxpayers himself and using his office to personally profit.

And it occurred to me, the oversight committee did a lot of work scrutinizing Hunter Biden.

And if Hunter Biden had done one one thousandth

of the things the Trump family does right now, every day, Sean Hannity would have a stroke on the air, right?

Like, like James Comer would never stop talking about it.

But instead, they're looking into Joe Biden's writing utensils.

And I just don't think that those priorities make sense to many people, regardless of what their political views are.

I agree with you about the priorities of the Oversight Committee, and I've spoken about that extensively online.

But there are very real implications for the future of the Democratic Party based on what happened during the Biden administration.

And we have seen that in the excerpts that have been given to the Atlantic, for instance, from Kamala's forthcoming book, 107 Days, where she says that Joe Biden's decision to run was, quote, recklessness and says that the Biden administration didn't support her.

And they thought that, you know, if her light was bright, then his was dimmed.

What's your reaction to that?

I did read the Atlantic excerpt.

I would want to take a look at her full book before I myself form an opinion about it.

But was that your impression from working in the administration that Kamala was not uplifted?

No.

No, there are a number of things in the excerpt that I disagree with,

including a part where it says that it was, I think, quote, next to impossible to get the press team to defend her.

I spent many hours of my life working shoulder to shoulder with her team doing that, and I'm proud that I did.

But my overall reaction, I remember I got asked by reporters that day, what do you think about this?

And I said to them, I think the Democrats have won 42, 43 special elections since November because we are doing an effective job of holding Trump accountable for breaking his economic promises.

And I think that if we look back at 24,

it is best to try and look for things that are actionable going forward.

What are lessons we can take away?

And to me, and I don't think I'm alone in this, the biggest things we need to confront are: one, inflation is a uniquely difficult political problem if you are the party in power when it occurs.

That is why I think 85%

of incumbent governments, parties lost around the world during the same time period.

But there's also a reckoning that needs to happen about the way that we deal with culture.

as Democrats and the way that we are open about ourselves and the way that we relate to people and that we show we're listening to what their priorities are because i i do think there are a lot of americans who feel like we haven't done enough to make sure that the pathway to the middle class is restored and and that's something that i that i think is important to keep in any conversation about 24.

Yeah, you see that in the candidates who are running,

you know, in the midterms, we saw that here.

I'm in New York City with Mom Donnie and how he was able to pull off that primary win.

Another big focus has been recruiting more veteran candidates on the Democratic side, you know, reliving the 2018 camo wave, and then also more candidates who speak openly about their faith.

So people like James Tallarico in Texas, who we've had on the podcast, and also Roy Cooper in North Carolina, who, you know, before announcing said, I prayed on it.

What are your thoughts about the current crop of candidates and how are you feeling about the midterms?

I think that's a very very good point about being open about faith.

I had gone to a retreat that the Think Tank Third Way hosted in February.

Yeah.

And they had a good presentation that the pollster Molly Murphy did about growing divides between Democrats and working people.

And something that really stuck with me was they compared how certain predominantly white progressive voters responded to one idea and then working people across racial lines responded to the same idea.

And it was, religion is an important part of my life.

And among the white progressive sampled, the percent was low.

But across the board with working people, it was very high.

And there was a similar finding with the proposition that America is the greatest country in the world.

Like you mentioned, Roy Cooper.

I thought it was meaningful that he opened by saying, I have prayed on it and I have decided that I'm going to run.

I think that more Democrats should be open that that's an important part of our lives.

It's an important part of my life.

I was raised as a Moravian in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

And I think that by far most Democrats, especially if you think about the folks who've run for president, you know, like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, I think they have been open that faith is an important driver for them, a motivator, that it's where values come from.

But there have been elements of the larger democratic community that do make it sound as though we look down on people of faith.

And that's something that I think has to change.

And I also think, you know, you mentioned Tallarico.

There's been, I think, a very constructive and very meaningful way that people have responded to the Kirk assassination by talking about their faith as something that shows them why that is so abhorrent and that is also something that informs why they want people to come together now.

It can be a healing force in times like this and it transcends political boundaries.

I remember feeling proud when Joe Biden would speak at churches.

He was able to remember the words to, you know, he will raise you up on eagle's wings, which is a famous hymn,

something that shows how important his faith is to him, how seriously he takes it.

And that is something that helps us relate to other people and it shouldn't be diminished.

No, I've always noticed that I'm not a particularly religious person, a reform Jew, but when you hear also people talking about their faith where you don't expect it from them, like Elizabeth Warren always sticks out to me as someone who's such an avatar for the progressive left and doesn't necessarily talk about it that often.

I'm always struck by by it when she does.

And I think, you know, more of this, because it is great connective tissue.

And I totally agree with you about the feeling in the wake of Charlie Kirk's awful assassination that I've been heartened to see so many people finding answers and community in their faith.

And it's something obviously Charlie and Erica Kirk felt very strongly about and Erica continues to after his passing.

And I think it should be much more featured, you know, this narrative that we're godless traitors to the country when lots of veterans serving in the party and lots of religious people who perhaps have just been hiding it because of fear of, you know, being attacked by the left or seeming out of touch with where the party, quote unquote, is.

I mean, you mentioned the unity message from JD Vance.

I should say the un-unity message.

I don't know how you would even say it, but it seems like that is going to be very important on the Democratic side.

The right is going to do what the right is going to do.

And I'm scared about that.

But there is an opportunity

for someone to kind of rise up and bring us together.

And that's something that we needed in 2020 during the COVID period, which Biden was able to provide.

And also Barack Obama coming after, you know, a tumultuous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Great Recession, et cetera.

How important do you think getting back to that core messaging around unity will be?

And do you see any candidates that you think could take that mantle or potential candidates?

I guess no one's declared, but everyone's running.

I think it's one of the most important things that people need to show they care about.

Like I,

the first presidential campaign I was involved with was Obama in 2008.

I took some time off from NC State to be an intern on that campaign.

And it was his 2004 Democratic Convention speech where he talked about there are not red states and blue states.

We are one people.

We share one story.

That, to me, always showed a lot about who he really was and why that was somebody who I wanted to be in charge.

And 2028 is not going to be 2008.

It's a very different time period.

But I do think there are some parallels between traumas the country experienced in the lead up to 2008 that made that kind of message connect so well

what we are going through now and have in recent memory.

You mentioned COVID.

I think that there is still an overhang that hurts the country's morale from a lot of what we went through during COVID.

As people, we're not built to be isolated.

And of course, there were responsible ways that we needed to isolate ourselves for a period of COVID, but that is emotionally very painful.

And a lot of families are still dealing with the impact it had on children during that time.

You missed out on school and important

milestones in life, the graduations.

But I think that people are very tired of the kind of bitterness that especially social media encourages.

Like if there's any major industry right now that has a lot to answer for, it is social media companies who profit more,

the angrier and more fearful and more divided their customers are.

That's something that we have to think about in a serious way as a country.

I think that that's something that people would find relieving after this kind of a period.

I hope that people will trust it.

My anxiety is that folks will feel like they've heard this before, and it's just what people say during election times, and then it's all warring with each other that can unfortunately turn violent, as we saw with Charlie Kirk's assassination, and that we're on a very dangerous path.

But I remain hopeful and optimistic, I guess, that it could be possible.

What's one thing that makes you rage and one thing you think we should all calm down about?

That is a good question.

I mean, we actually talked about the main thing that makes me angry, which is that when people run for president,

the amount of power the job has does not depend on who's there.

It is the same office.

And when folks like Trump are treated differently because they do things that are novel

or they can entertain some folks in the press in the way a horror movie is entertaining,

I do not think that the bar should be lowered for how much of their message you then broadcast out to the public without challenge.

Like that is something that makes me angry.

And that's like a nerdy thing for me to spend a lot of time thinking about, But that is something I care about a lot.

Occupational hazard, also.

Right.

That you would care about it.

Yeah.

Like I chose the field because I do care about it.

That is something that makes me angry.

But I think that something that makes me feel better is that there are signs in the culture that people want to move past the kind of bitterness that has really defined the last 10 years in politics, at least.

Like the Superman movie, I thought had a very good message about how we should be compassionate toward one another and we should not reward envy or people that want to divide us.

And I saw the box office numbers were very high.

And I've seen other kinds of indications like that.

I mean, someone was talking about how the algorithm often cuts in the opposite direction of how normal everyday Americans show people grace in their day-to-day life.

So that is something that encourages me.

Yeah, if you go outside and you actually interact with people, they're a lot nicer than they appear on social media for sure.

I like that one for a positive note to end on.

Andrew Bates, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you for having me.