Overtime – Episode #671: Al Franken, Kristen Soltis Anderson

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Speaker 4 Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Speaker 6 All right, here we are in overtime with a conservative poster and CNN contributor, Kristen Solkas Anderson, and the former Democratic senator from Minnesota and the host of the Al Franken podcast, Al Franken.

Speaker 5 Okay,

Speaker 6 here are what the people want to know.

Speaker 5 Al, do Americans not understand how tariffs work and who ultimately pays the price for them?

Speaker 5 Americans don't understand how tariffs work. Thank you.

Speaker 6 Question, sir.

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 5 Trump keeps saying that he put these tariffs on around,

Speaker 5 well, let's say China, and that China

Speaker 5 has

Speaker 5 paid us,

Speaker 5 sometimes he says tens of billions, sometimes hundreds of billions, sometimes trillions.

Speaker 5 Tariffs don't work that way. No.

Speaker 5 When we put a tariff, let's say, on Chinese TVs,

Speaker 5 why don't we say cars? Because that's what we're actually doing under the Biden administration. Okay.

Speaker 6 I read it today.

Speaker 5 100% tariffs on Chinese cars. That makes Chinese cars, which are very inexpensive, competitive now, or I guess not competitive now.
Not competitive with American cars. So,

Speaker 5 why doesn't it not work only for Republicans? I don't get it, because this is what Biden is doing.

Speaker 5 I don't know why he's doing that exactly,

Speaker 5 but I just want to get the concept of what a tariff is down. Let's do that.
Okay, because a lot of people think, let's say, I'm going to use a different example. I'm going to use televisions, okay?

Speaker 5 Let's say

Speaker 5 let's say Best Buy wants to buy a thousand televisions from China, Chinese television,

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 Trump or whoever has put a tariff on it of 20%,

Speaker 5 and they're $500 each. So that means $100 each tariff.
Now,

Speaker 5 according to Trump, he thinks China

Speaker 5 pays the tariff. China doesn't pay the tariff.

Speaker 5 Best Buy pays the tariff.

Speaker 5 Of Of course. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And when Best Buy pays the tariff, it has to decide whether to

Speaker 5 pass that on to

Speaker 5 the consumer or maybe cut it in half and make it...

Speaker 5 That's how tariffs work. Right.

Speaker 5 And Trump keeps saying this over and over again. And I wish this was kind of one of the things that the moderators have been asked during the thing.
Is that how tariffs work? No, no, it doesn't.

Speaker 5 And she was right saying it's a...

Speaker 5 It's a tax on the middle class, is what she was saying. But let's say it's cars.
Yes, that's it.

Speaker 5 So now it's not Best Buy paying the tariff. It's Ford and General Motors.

Speaker 5 Why doesn't it work the same way? Why isn't it a bad idea when the Democrats are doing them?

Speaker 5 I think that

Speaker 5 it. Well, I don't know electric cars very well, and I don't know what the rationale behind that is, whether they're inferior products or, but as far as I can do.
No, I think they're not inferior.

Speaker 5 I think that's why we have to protect our own makers here, because they would be

Speaker 5 damn it. Biden's wrong.

Speaker 5 There you go. Was that so hard?

Speaker 6 Let's not play team sports. Let's play play truth.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 5 What role, if any, will SNL parodies of political figures play in the election? Well, you're an alumni of SNL. That's perfect for you.

Speaker 5 Oh, okay.

Speaker 5 It will play a big role. They'll do a fake debate.
That's what we used to do all the time. We'd have,

Speaker 5 that was our big sketch of the year, and then they'll have, see, so who do they have doing, oh, Maya Rudolph will be doing

Speaker 5 Kamala, Kamala. That genius who does Trump will do Trump.

Speaker 5 I mean. I feel like it's interesting.

Speaker 7 It matters more when the politician isn't well known. Like, I don't know if SNL actually plays a big role, if it's Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, who everybody knows.

Speaker 7 But think about somebody like Sarah Palin. People actually believe that she said, I can see Russia from my house because they said it on SNL, and it's so believable.

Speaker 7 Like, people really think that happens.

Speaker 5 That's when you have power.

Speaker 6 I mean, I will show.

Speaker 5 We used to have a lovely lady, I'm still friendly with her, a Christian,

Speaker 5 and she said in 2010 something about she was a witch, or she used to be a witch, because she was running, she said that way back on politically incorrect, Christine O'Donnell.

Speaker 5 And then she was running for Congress in, I think, Delaware in 2020. The Senate, yeah.
The Senate. Okay, right.

Speaker 5 And she got the nomination. And I brought up the witch thing, and it, I mean, I felt a little bad, because she's sweet, but she shouldn't have been a senator.

Speaker 5 But, like, we brought it up on this show. A week later, there was Kristen Wieg on a broom

Speaker 5 doing,

Speaker 5 it had passed to that level where she was the witch flying in on the broom. I mean, it can move that fast.
And to my point about George Clooney, I know,

Speaker 5 but and Taylor Swift, I do think this really does affect the culture because I think that's where people get their. Why did

Speaker 5 Taylor Swift really is registering

Speaker 5 tons and tons of people, which could easily, easily make the difference in this election? And they will do whatever she says. I mean, Trump is a cult, and she's a cult.

Speaker 5 It is.

Speaker 6 It's just a better cult.

Speaker 5 Kristen, who are the feral 25-year-olds making Kamala Harris go viral on TikTok?

Speaker 5 Do you know what that means, Feral 25-year-old?

Speaker 7 So what I think this means is that she has, or her campaign has leaned into the way that she has gone viral online with like memes that most people have never heard of, but like a very small subset of very engaged activists online have.

Speaker 7 And it has made Kamala Harris go from

Speaker 7 if Joe Biden steps out, is it really going to be her? to oh, she's really cool and Democrats are really excited about her.

Speaker 7 And in a way, like it is, she's trying to capture some of that same kind of energy that Democrats had when Barack Obama first came on the scene and was getting young people to organize online in support of him.

Speaker 7 And it was dismissed a little bit at first and then turned out to be really important and decisive. So she's doing that again.

Speaker 7 And what's different and helpful to her this time is in 2019, arguably her campaign staff was too online.

Speaker 7 They were too intent on trying to win over very online political activists who had really far-left preferences to go down rabbit holes on issues nobody cared about.

Speaker 7 And this time around, being too online actually means doing things that are reaching people who are not watching traditional political news at all. And that's a difference that's really important.

Speaker 7 It means that instead of getting your message in front of the people that already believe, it's getting your message in front of people that may have thought politics had nothing for them, but hey, she seems cool, maybe it's worth voting for.

Speaker 5 All right.

Speaker 6 I feel like the Democrats have been smart.

Speaker 5 I mean, getting rid of Biden, getting her in quickly, I feel like they're usually the party that you're like, oh, God.

Speaker 5 And this time I feel like they're playing everything pretty smart. You would agree, Al?

Speaker 5 Yeah, and that debate, really, I mean, they prepared her and she prepared herself

Speaker 5 remarkably well, and she performed great. It's one of those

Speaker 5 like I said, it's already in the bag.

Speaker 5 Do you think there's a if Trump sees he's losing, and I see the polls, he's way down now, do you think there's a word

Speaker 5 since the debate? Yeah, since the debate? Yes. What do you think he went up?

Speaker 5 No, no. I would think he'd go down, but I didn't know that they'd have

Speaker 5 a debate that

Speaker 5 was

Speaker 5 a poll this quickly is.

Speaker 7 Of of course it was tuesday it's friday but there's going to be a lot that will come out over the weekend yeah anyway

Speaker 5 okay but

Speaker 5 do you think there's a world where he sees like a month before the election that he's losing and he switches out vans

Speaker 5 no he you don't think he no no rfk no

Speaker 7 no no universe

Speaker 7 i'm just just throwing it out there you don't think he would ever do that so speaking of snl i want to remind you i remember in 2016 Lynn Manuel Miranda guest hosted SNL, and it was the weekend after all the Access Hollywood stuff came out.

Speaker 7 And he started singing that song from Hamilton, Never Gonna Be President Now, pointing at Trump's picture in 30 Rock because Trump had hosted SNL.

Speaker 7 Everyone thought the election was done at that point, and it wasn't.

Speaker 5 But everybody in that audience is already going to vote for the Democrat. It's a super woke show with a super woke audience.
And the people who aren't that woke.

Speaker 7 That, like, oh, there's no way he can survive this thing. I just, I remember

Speaker 5 who don't feel that way watch that show for the comedy, and they see that, and they go, oh, fuck you.

Speaker 5 Fuck you, you smart.

Speaker 5 Also,

Speaker 5 Comey happened.

Speaker 5 Also, Comey happened.

Speaker 5 Yes, James Comey put out a letter 11 days before the election. And that's

Speaker 5 happened. And that's how close these things are.

Speaker 5 And.

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 5 So, okay, here's one. Do you think it was a good idea for Joe Biden to put on a MAGA hat? Okay, if you missed this story.

Speaker 5 I think this happened

Speaker 5 at the World Trade Center site, right?

Speaker 7 Yeah, it was like a hat exchange.

Speaker 7 I actually think it was okay. It was essentially like after a soccer match when the players trade jerseys.

Speaker 7 It was kind of like that, and he was trying to make a nice gesture.

Speaker 5 I know, but it just showed it's good we got rid of him.

Speaker 5 It's a dumb thing to do because it's not a soccer match. Was he trading hats? I mean, just you don't put on a MAGA hat.
What kind of hat did he have?

Speaker 5 I don't know, but it's like, it's like it would be like drawing a penis on my own forehead, you know?

Speaker 5 It's just a dumb idea. All right, we gotta go.
Thank you very much.

Speaker 4 Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Ma every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com.