S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption

Hey everyone, this is Keri Champion, the host of Naked Sports.

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Restrictions apply. Hey, everybody.
Real quick announcement.

We got a doubleheader today.

Just finished it.

It's awesome.

Andrew Wiseman gives you everything you need to know about Trump asking his DOJ to go after

two whistleblowers from his first administration.

Just a really chilling announcement.

I needed to get Andrew on at the last minute here to make sure you guys had all the info

on that. And then we have a new guest, Patrick Gaspard, who is the ED of the DNC a while back.
He's done everything really in the Democratic Party. And I thought it was just a really great conversation.
So just to make sure to stick around for that. All right.
One other scheduling thing. I had some issues juggling a guest for tomorrow's pod because I'm flying to Coachella, as you guys know.
I'm taking three days off, not listening to the news, not reading your emails. I'm just enjoying my happy place in the desert.
And because I had a guest scheduling issue, we've got somebody sitting in tomorrow, and it's going to be great. You're in great hands.
So do not skip the podcast tomorrow. You will really enjoy it, I promise.
But I had this Catholic guilt that I was abandoning you on a Friday. Instead, I am joining Sarah for the secret podcast.
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It's going to be me and Sarah.

Let's go to thebullwark.com slash subscribe.

You can check it out.

We're going to talk about our feelings.

We're going to vibe out.

It'll be great.

And I'll be back here as usual

with Bill Kristol on Monday.

So up next, Andrew Weissman. Hello and welcome to the Bulldog Podcast.
I'm your host, Tim Miller. He's back.
He's a professor of practice at NYU Law School. He was a lead prosecutor on Bob Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
And he was chief of the fraud section at DOJ. He co-hosts the podcast Main Justice with Mary McCord.
And his sub stack is behind the headlines. You figured it out by now.
It's Andrew Wiseman. How you doing, Andrew? Good.
Good. I am always assuming when you ask that question, you're asking that sort of very limited personal scope.
Because otherwise, you could go on for a a really long time, which is actually the subject of what we're about to talk about. Yeah, extremely limited personal scope, because otherwise things are not great when you're kind of like the unofficial political prosecution correspondent of the board podcast.
It's like Donald Trump goes after a new person. I'm like, we got to get what we got to add Wiseman to the schedule for tomorrow.
Since, you know, one of these days, he might be in the barrel

on this. So, you know, to use a Roger Stone expression.
Yes. Yeah.
So I mean, you know,

you're on the list. So the TV lawyers, you know, it's kind of one of those first they came for the

TV lawyers, and I said nothing type situations possibly. So be careful.
All right. We wanted to talk particularly about the DOJ side of this, given that your experience there.
But for people who have not thought it closely, just a really quick breakdown of what happened. So we have Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs both worked for DHS in Trump 1.0.
Taylor was the chief of staff and he wrote the anonymous op-ed and then the anonymous book. Chris Krebs was in charge of cybersecurity for DHS protecting elections.
So they put out an executive order, Trump did, under the ominous headline, eradicating government betrayal. That'll put a chill down your spine, eradicating government betrayal.
The EOs revoked the security clearances for Taylor and Krebs, but they also revoked any active security clearance held by individuals and entities associated with them, including the University of Pennsylvania. I don't know why University of Pennsylvania is catching strays, I guess because Miles teaches a class there.
With both of them, Trump ordered the DOJ to investigate them. And for Krebs, the DOJ said specifically they wanted a comprehensive evaluation of all of CISA's activities.
CISA is the cybersecurity group under DHS that Krebs was heading up. So he wanted a comprehensive evaluation of all of CISA's activities over the last six years and will identify any instances where Krebs or CISA appears to be contrary to the administration's commitment to free speech.
And on top of that, Trump said that Taylor, Miles Taylor himself might be guilty of treason. So give me your thousand foot view of what you think the big takeaways are there.
Oh my God, there's so much to say, but I just want to make sure people understand because Chris Krebs is a sort of perfect example of what's going on. He was an insider in Trump 1.0.
As you said, he was tasked with making sure there would be safe and fair elections. And even though the president was saying with no proof that there was fraud in the election, he said, no, there wasn't.
There was no fraud that changed the outcome of the election. There might be low level stuff, but that was the sin.
And so the claim that the president is doing this in the name of free speech. So let's just remember that this week, the Supreme Court said that the president's violated due process.
You have a judge in DC, Trevor McFadden, saying that the administration has violated the First Amendment with respect to the Associated Press. The attack on the law firms have been struck down by three judges based on the First Amendment.
So the idea that this administration is saying, oh, we're doing this with respect to Chris Krebs saying the truth, and that is in the name of the First Amendment,

is this is, I was just reading 1984 with some of my students. And I mean, this is doublespeak.
This

is freedom is slavery. War is peace.
I mean, it's- Truth is treason. They're really just the thing on the krebs and we can get into miles too but the krebs is just particularly galling he was not a political appointee and this is something he gets into the government for expertise to protect the country to protect all of our constitutional rights to be able to go and vote in a free and fair election without any interference from from enemies foreign or domestic like that was his job.
He did his job. He protected the election.
And now he's being investigated by the government because Trump is still obsessed with advancing the lie that the election was stolen. And it's more insidious than even that because what the message is, the reason you might be thinking, well, why go after these two people? They're not exactly like household names.
This isn't the Fauci's and the Mark Milley's. The message is for the people in the administration now, this will happen to you if you don't toe the line and say what I think is the truth.
In other words, the truth is what I say it is. And if you deviate from that, this is going to happen.
So it's really a strategic use of the executive order and the Department of Justice, which has no separation now whatsoever from the White House. Yeah, let's talk about that part.
Just one quick statement on your point of how this is intentionally trying to intimidate. That is why it is so important.
And I know that there's already people gathering that folks support financially, legally, with their voice, Krebs and Miles, Chris and Miles on this. Because the message needs to be sent to future whistleblowers who are in the administration that people will have their back, that we are not going to fold in the face of this.
And so I do think that's an important element. The DOJ thing, which is really what I want to pick your brain on.
I mean, this is like totally without precedent. It's just so crazy that it's hard for me to kind of wrap my head around.
Like, what would even be the precedent for the president of the United States telling the attorney general, you should investigate this person that was mean to me? Well, the norm post Watergate is that the White House does not do that. I'm going to give you an example.
I worked on the Enron investigation, and that was under the Bush administration. And there was lots of talk about the then chairman of Enron, Ken Lay, and his ties to the administration.
There was not a single moment in that administration where the administration said what we should be doing, who we should charge, who we should not charge. It was just a given.
And we're using that as a deliberate example, because it's a Republican administration. And those are norms that Republican administrations followed.
And it is what separates us is to a rule of law country, as opposed to just a transactional country. And that is what we have become.
And it's, I think it's so important not to normalize what is happening. And's the substance of what's being done with respect to Miles and Chris,

but there's also just making sure people are aware that this is insidious,

that the White House would have this role so that they can,

I mean, they say they're doing it to counter weaponization,

but that, again, is the doublespeak. to counter weaponization, but that again is the double speak.

This is weaponization of the Department of Justice by a political actor.

Yeah, explicit, right?

Because it's a good point.

So you bring up the Nixon and the reforms happened after Nixon.

Even that, it's, and that's worse, you know, in some ways, or I don't know, you don't have to actually make a judgment, but it's kind of like the whispered corruption.

Like, hey, maybe you should look into so-and- was happening before you know in the hoover era right and now this is like it's on paper we're putting out a white house press release like the that where the doj is being ordered to look into someone that's an attempt to institutionalize the corruption right that it's like you don't have to whisper about it you't have to do a furtive call to, you know, somebody in the DOJ. We're going to have cameras here.
We're going to make Gretchen Whitmer stand there and watch, and we're going to put out an executive order that's like the government should go out because it's almost an attempt to like give it a veneer of, of credibility, right? Yeah. Well, and also the normalization is nobody within the administration, obviously, pushing back.
That is a huge difference from Trump 1.0. But you don't have anybody at the Department of Justice.
Remember, Attorney General Sessions was basically canned because he understood, whatever he thought of his policies, he understood that the department is different and had to be independent. And that was his sin.
And you don't have anyone in Congress raising a ruckus about this, that this is such a fundamental challenge to what it means to be a democracy, that the department, in spite of the Attorney General during her confirmation hearing saying, mouthing the words, it's absolutely clear that's not what's going on. And how serious do you think this threat is to Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs? I mean, just like, I guess we do still have some basic elements of the rule of law in the country.
Like, you know, they can investigate, they're going to have to get a grand jury. You know, you've been like through this process.
Does this feel like a press release or does it feel like something that's a very like real threat? That's a great question. So I think that the chilling effect is real and is happening right now.
To just the process of having to hire lawyers, going through the process of defending yourself, that is a cost. In terms of the president saying that Miles Taylor engaged in treason, well, first of all, there used to be a war going on, a real war, not what he says is happening with the gang TDA invading our country.
It was a war. The deep state was engaging in a war against Trump.
That's the war. Yeah, it's obviously not treason.
I'm aware of zero facts, zero, that exist in the real world, or even in the executive orders. There's just a dearth of actual facts being alleged that would in any way constitute a crime.
So, you know, there's no factual predication, which by the way, this being the weeds, for the FBI or the Department of Justice to open a criminal case. They're supposed to have actual factual predication.
They can't just willy nilly say, you know what, we want to look at Tim because we want to see if he's done anything that is violating the attorney general and FBI guidelines. But those seem to be completely, I'm raising this, you're probably going, Oh, Andrew, you're so naive.
Because, of course, that is gone. That idea that you need factual predication to open an investigation is something that went by the wayside.
So now the investigation's open, and these guys are going to have to get lawyers, right? But then what? That's part of, I mean, I guess because this is without precedent, it's kind of hard to say, right? It depends how seriously the DOJ takes the EL. Yeah, I think that's right.
But I also feel like I think the law firms are a good example of this. Even if it goes nowhere, the chilling effect is huge.
So I don't know what the University of Pennsylvania's reaction is going to be. If Sentinel One, the company that Chris works with, they, I would assume, need their security clearance in order to do some of their work.
So this could have real consequences in the real world. And I think what the administration's counting on is the effect on other people.
So what the University of Pennsylvania will do, what companies will do, thinking, you know what, we want to keep our head down. We don't want to be on the radar screen.
So it remains to be seen just how serious it is. At the end of the day, I'm still an institutionalist.
So I still think, you know what, good luck making a criminal case on Chris Krebs. You want to have a trial on whether there was fraud in the election.
Well, the last time the courts dealt with this, you lost 60 cases on that. So that doesn't seem like a particularly fruitful avenue for bringing a criminal case when you couldn't even win a civil case.
Yeah. You mentioned the law firms.
Again, this is part of the chilling fact with the law firms. These guys going to get counsel now might be rockier than it would have been, right?

Well, that was the whole idea, which was that, you know, you sort of deter your enemies from being able to get counsel, then you bring these kinds of actions with this with respect to them so that they find it that much harder. I do think that there's still, although it's not as many as you would hope, but I still think there are lots and lots of lawyers who are reputable and believe in the profession of law and the fact that you have to zealously advocate for people.
Here's just another irony. You would think that a president who has been through four criminal cases would understand the importance and need for defense counsel.
He enjoyed

criminal defense counsel in all of his cases. He enjoyed civil counsel in all of his cases.

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Let's just talk about the law firms a little bit more broadly. The proo head of paul weiss resigned i think yesterday you posted on blue sky about how trump says he'll put the capitulating law firms to work representing the coal interests which means these firms will be performing coal bono work after being shaken down by the white house what else is kind of out there as far as the latest and this effort to go after the law firms? Well, the other thing that's sort of interesting is I don't really understand if the law firms are now going to be doing administrative work, they're going to be conflicted out of cases where they're also suing and be willing to sue the administration.
So I think that is one of the ways in which this is going to be insidious. It's not just that we're going to get, as an administration, pro bono work, but it makes it very hard to do the kind of work that they've been doing.
Many NGOs partner all the time with large law firms in bringing cases. And these, by the way, they're private entities.
They're entitled to be as political as they want to be. They can be taking all Republican causes, all Democratic causes, whatever it is, they're private entities.
So the idea that the administration is saying, oh, you're not being even-handed, who the hell are you to say that to a law firm? They don't have to be even-handed. They're not a government entity.
And so it's really insidious in so many ways as the judges who have struck down every single executive order on the law firms that's been challenged has been immediately within one day struck down as violative of the at least the first amendment if not also the fifth and sixth amendment it's a lot a lot of different parts of the constitution the judges point out that in order to have a functioning

legal system, a functioning judiciary, you have to have a functioning cadre of lawyers who are willing to take cases and zealously advocate. As I said, the president has enjoyed that in both the criminal and civil sector.
And nobody thought of saying, oh, that's unfair or wrong, or we should go after those lawyers for doing that.

That's part of our system.

Whether you like the plaintiff or defendant, it's irrelevant. That's how it works.
I mean, this is, in some ways, Tim, it's just so hard to have this conversation because this is the kind of conversation you have with people in fourth grade. It's so basic.
And yet, you need to have it because you're seeing the kind of abuse happening from the Oval Office. Are these firms really going to do pro bono work for coal companies? And how could you possibly do that and maintain your dignity? Well, it could end up being worse than that.
I know. It's just like one just stark example.
I guess you give it to the junior partner or whatever, but it's like, this is crazy. Yeah.
Well, Tim, I think one of the things that we're not going to see is not just the work that they end up doing, the pro bono work for the administration, but the amount of work that they now are not doing. The clients that they're not taking, the cases that they're not bringing.
If you remember, one of the things that the president did is said, I want to make sure my attorney general is looking very carefully at the law firms and the lawyers who are bringing cases against us to look to see whether they're making any arguments in bad faith, because they should be investigated for that. I mean, again, all of that is to chill the idea of a law firm saying, oh, let's bring a case because we think something happened here that's wrong.
That's what the legal system is for. And by the way, as long as you're making a good faith argument, I mean, I've seen that on both sides where you think, okay, that's a pretty weak argument by one side or the other, but that's what the courts are for.
And then you'll make your argument and the judge will decide. So it's a really devious and strategic way of stacking the system.
Let me talk about one more thing, which is the rulings on immigration from the Supreme Court. Well, first, before we get to the more complicated ruling on due process, we still have, I guess, a stay on the specific case of Abrego Garcia, who is the father in Maryland that the government admitted that they wrongfully sent to El Salvador.
We're expecting another, like the Supreme Court, to do another ruling on that? Like Roberts was just kicking the can? Is that the gist of where we're at on that? Yes, on the Garcia case, the one where the government has admitted it was a mistake, but they're saying, too bad, we can't do anything about it. That is, we're waiting for the Supreme Court to say something about that.
It's got the briefs, and we're writing a decision. I think the big picture there is, I'm going to step outside my legal role.
Okay. Tim, can you imagine the conversation at the Department of Justice where someone says, oh my God, we have wrongfully deported somebody and they are in prison in a foreign country.
What should we do about it? And that the adult in the room is not saying, get that person back here immediately. Instead, the conversation is, oh, you should tell the court we can't do anything and let them sit there and rot, even though it was our mistake.
The lawlessness and cruelty combination is off the charts. Now, I'm going to be the one to say to you, it's actually even worse than that.
The adult in the room is saying, actually, we should put the person who's flagged this mistake on administrative leave. You're totally right.
Maybe we should kick kick them out of the government we're going to do nothing about the guy that's rotting in a concentration camp can't talk to his family can't talk to his lawyers but we are going to hold accountable the person that flagged our mistake you're right it's insane okay but we do expect something from the from the supreme court yeah okay the other, as is the nature of our political moment right now, Supreme Court made the 5-4 ruling on the Venezuelans that were sent to El Salvador based on the Alien Enemies Act. Like immediately, the administration declares, you know, complete and total victory because, you know, the court does not force them to deal with the men that are already there.
On the other side, everybody's like, oh, this is, you know, the worst thing. But the ruling was actually like, kind of complicated.
So why don't you just walk through people what actually, you know, happened? Sure. I actually think this is, on the whole, very good news.
It's sort of nice to end here, because we're not gonna end here, actually, because there's a bit really bad element of the on the whole very good news so okay so the the penultimate to the penultimate comment will be good news the last comment will be bad as is the prerogative of this podcast so here's my here's my effort to to good news there is a five four gendered part of this case where the five men said this should have been brought under a vehicle called habeas. And the four said, no, it's fine to have brought it the way it was under something called the Administrative Procedure Act.
That is a very technical issue. I agree with the foreign dissent about the mechanism.
and the mechanism is important because it leads to sort of what court you have to go to and where it should be. But the main issue was, did the government have to afford all of these people due process prior to moving them out of the country.
Nine justices said yes. That part is sort of getting overlooked by the sort of five-four split on the procedural issue.
And I'm not trying to say the procedural isn't important, although footnote, because the court said you had to do this under habeas, that immediately happened. People brought a habeas case in new york they brought a habeas case in texas in front of a conservative judge in texas a so-called liberal judge in new york both issued stays so yes the mechanism had to be different but the stay then went back into effect by two separate judges The stay on deporting new people based on that.
Exactly. Yeah.
Exactly. And so the main issue was that the administration, which always could have taken the normal route, which was to give people hearings.
And if you can prove that the statute applies and that these people are within the group that can be deported, if you do that at a hearing, you could deport them. But instead, they wanted to just be like, no, we're just going to take unilateral action.
And as one judge said, just scoop people off the street with no legal authority whatsoever and ship them off. And the Supreme Court, nine justices said, you can't do that.
So to me, that is sort of the part of the story that people need to lead with, which is, I mean, when do you ever have nine of these particular Supreme Court justices agreeing that due process was violated? Yeah. And so do we think that's going to be a real due process? You know, it's like, hey, we're going to give you a letter on your way to the plane type of due process.
Oh, I don't think that is going to work. I mean, it be seen exactly what's what's necessary but you know this is one where when you read the sotomayor opinion which amy barrett joined you really get the sense that this is going it has to be appropriate to the occasion and with sufficient notice to be heard here it's not clear that the authority the alien enemies act even apply.
So has to be an opportunity to litigate that what's the invasion what's the invasion of a foreign country then you also have to be able to challenge are you part of the group are you actually in this group or is it a mistake to quote one of the judges in dc and looking at, she said, you understand that Nazis were given more process before we deported them than you have afforded these people.

it remains to be seen exactly how much there is and there and frankly reasonable minds could differ but i do think we should take for now like this is a good decision saying you actually have

to do this and it protects protects everyone, not just people who are xenophobic and thinking, oh, this is just about other people and not Americans. When you don't have any process, this could apply to anyone.
Okay. I'll take that good news.
I like good news so I can get it. So the bad news I want to end on, not the bad news, but my question for you, what I think is bad news to end on is, but what about the 260 some odd people that are in Saccat right now? Because I don't really know what their recourse is based on the Supreme Court ruling.
Yeah. So this is a really good question.
So the court says under this vehicle called habeas, you have to bring the case where the body is. So if you're detained in New York, you bring it in New York.
If you're detained in Texas, you bring it in Texas. So of course, if you're in El Salvador, because they removed you, you can't bring it in El Salvador, because guess what, there's no US court there.
So you know what the default court is that you can bring a case in? DC. DC.
So all of this is going going to likely for those people who are in el salvador they will just bring their case under habeas in front of wait for it judge bozberg but that's realistic though like that they're gonna you know have a case heard like but how do you do it because it wasn't a group case like so like individuals, there are going to be 180 individual cases

going to Judge Boesberg

while these guys sit in a cell?

That doesn't seem great.

So this is another good question.

So the case that was filed in New York

because two of the people

were at the last minute pulled off the plane

because they managed to have counsel.

So those people had been pulled off the plane

and are located in New York. And the day after the Supreme Court decision came out, they filed the new habeas petition in New York on their behalves, the two people, and as a class action.
If the Southern District of New York certifies the class, which just to be clear, Judge Boesberg had done the same thing and said, I'm going to make this a class action. And this is a case kind of case where it's appropriate.
A class action is when there's really just the same legal or factual issue that's common to everyone. And here, all of the people have the issue that this law does not apply.
The law that the government is trying to use, all of the plaintiffs have the same argument, which is there is no invasion, that this group is not an invading force, is not a government entity. That's common to everyone.
And so that would be appropriate for the court to say, I'm going to apply this to everyone. So all those people in El Salvador could be part of the class in front of the New York judge.

That's a little glimmer. I'll take it.
I'll take a little glimmer. Thank you so much as always,

Andrew Weisman. Check out his podcast, Main Justice, his sub stack.
And, you know, the next

time there's really dire news about the soft autocracy in our country, we'll have you back.

So you mean tomorrow?

It's probably sooner than, well, not sooner than I wish. I love talking to you.

So we'll see you soon.

Thanks so much, Andrew Wiseman.

Up next, Patrick Gaspar.

Hey, everyone.

This is Kerry Champion, the host of Naked Sports.

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We are back. He's a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Served in a number of key positions during the Obama administration, including as ambassador to South Africa. He also is executive director of the Democratic National Committee.
It's Patrick Gaspard. Welcome to the podcast.
First time. Tim, thank you so very much for having me on.
I love your show. Oh, thanks, man.
I appreciate that. But wanting to do it.
We have a lot of news to get to, a lot of business. And I want to hash out a little bit of the Democratic Party kind of not infighting, but strategizing maybe to use the old will ferrell line but first i just i have to pick your brain about the south africa element because i can't follow what's happening i would love for you to explain to me this obsession that this administration has with like the land theft and and i guess we're the only refugees in the world we're allowing in right now are the white africkaners from South Africa.
What's going on here? Yeah, it's bonkers. And I appreciate that you're starting there instead of the liberation from Liberation Day, which I'm sure we'll get to at some point.
We're getting to that next. But look, the South African thing is something that my friends in South Africa are struggling to understand because they are so used to dealing with American politicians, Democrats and Republicans, whose agendas are kind of transparent, that are tied to these outcomes and trade and security.
And they've been responding in a very traditional way. And it's not working because there's nothing traditional about this.
So here's the first thing I'd say. The kind of miracle of Donald Trump as president of the United States in the foreign policy space is that he's managed to collapse the daylight between foreign policy and domestic political constituency.
That's the really important thing to understand about this guy that makes him incredibly different than any president that we've ever had. I think that the only time we've ever had this kind of conflation of domestic politics with foreign policy and this kind of a way that's suffused throughout is under Eisenhower in the McCarthy era, where foreign policy was a servant to domestic politics in a way that just hasn't been since.
And so for Trump, that's an important thing to understand. And why is that relevant to the South African space? Trump's been obsessed with South Africa even before he was actually president.
He would post on social media about the rights of Africana farmers. He would lift up all these discredited myths and narratives about the oppression of that minority in the country in ways that were shocking for anyone, black or white, that had been involved or even at the margins of the anti-apartheid movement in that era where we understood clearly there is a white minority that was oppressing a black majority in South Africa.
Not the story that Trump told before or during his first presidency or in this new period. And right now, even though white South Africans make up about 7% of the total population, they control over 70% of the private land that's available in the country for farming, for business development, etc.
It's an astonishing ratio. The government has been trying to solve for that challenge when you have a population, overwhelmingly black, poor, that has experienced a political revolution and transformation in the country, but not an economic transformation.
So to get blacks more into the center of the economy, they're trying to solve for that disparity and that land challenge.

They did so by moving a piece of legislation, not without controversy in South Africa, around the reappropriation of land that is not being used. I want to be clear, this is not land that white farmers are sitting on top of, but land that's not being used, and the appropriation of that land would have to go through all kinds of bureaucratic procedures in order for the government to be able to secure it for new purposes.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who of course is a South African expat, Peter Thiel, another South African expat that's in that circle, obsessed. David Sachs.
We can't forget David. David Sachs, another one.
There are a number of men who kind of lift up this false story about the oppression of white people in south africa because i believe for trump it actually speaks to a domestic fringe political audience that has its own obsessions around a grievance politics that's tied to supremacy movements and replacement theory so all this stuff is in service of politics. He seizes on this new legislation that's passed in South Africa and says, as a result of this, we're going to blow up the trade relationship, the security relationship between the two countries.
South Africa is really reliant on the US, on USA, on the bipartisan PEPFAR program to stand up infrastructure for its health care in the country.

And that's a country that has the highest percentage of HIV AIDS positive people in the country than any other.

And South Africa also depends on a trade relationship with the U.S., something called the African Growth and Opportunity Act that I was privileged to help renegotiate

in the Obama administration that gives South Africa access to U.S. markets in a beneficial way.
And as a result of that, they've been able to build and transport like 70,000 automobiles per year into the U.S. Companies like Volkswagen, BMW put plants in South Africa because they know that they can work through this trade relationship and contact with the US.
It's benefited South African workers, but it's also benefited American consumers, but also American workers who are on this side of the supply chain. It's been good for both sides of the Atlantic.
So it is bizarre that both on the healthcare front and on the trade front, The relationship is basically fractured over this mismaking on the oppression of white South African farmers who now have been granted this special dispensation and asylum that none of them are using because they don't have the problem that Donald Trump is describing. It's bonkers, Tim.
That's a lengthy explanation, probably a little too lengthy here, but that's what's going on. No, that was exactly what I needed.
That was the exact length that I needed. I have one final little question.
The one thing that you said that piqued my interest, Trump has been posting about this since before the first administration. Because I was under the assumption that South African cadre, you mentioned, that this is like a David Sachs, Elon Musk thing, and they got in his ear.
No, it predates. That's not true.
That's like, how did this, you know, Donald Trump was not following your trade negotiations with the South Africans. He's not reading, you know, the FT.
Like, how did he learn about this? Yeah, he's not. But you know what Donald Trump is following, and he's a savant of this.
Donald Trump, and this is an interesting thing, when when we get into the conversation of the you know what's going on with republicans and democrats it's kind of important to note that uh donald trump is a savant of the media ecosystem that we existed he understood that there is a in this era there's a way that you can take the subtext and make it the text uh and so on right-wing fringe social media, in what we used to call the dark web, which is not just the web, those loads of foment around this issue and what was happening with Afrikaners in South Africa, what had happened to white farmers in Zimbabwe, and all this stuff about how the changing population in the U.S. needed to be concerned about this, that farmers in Ohio and Iowa, etc., would start to see this kind of thing if we allowed for all the migrants to come into America to take the farm jobs, etc., and that they were going to replace white Americans in the heartland.
This was like flourishing in the web, and Donald Trump- This is like the white genocide twitter account was tweeting it at him and then he caught it yeah okay so in that run-up to 2016 election this guy was really clever at pulling together all the strands of like really dark conspiracy theories on the extreme right platforming them centering them and figuring out how to kind of do a wink and a nod to it all throughout that campaign. So that's a fever that he picked up then that persists to this day.
But you know, you asked about Elon Musk, there's an important element here for those of us who care about corruption, and a thing that we don't talk about here in the US, but that we talked about a lot in South Africa, the notion of state capture. Please understand that right as Donald Trump becomes president again, Elon Musk goes back to South Africa.
He has a meeting with the president of South Africa, Sir Raul Posa, and he tries to push on South Africa a deal around Starlink. So here you have a person who is influencing Donald Trump's direction of travel and his foreign policy, of course, blowing up the government as we know it, blowing up our soft power footprint in USAID, and basically punishing South Africa with the drawback that we have from PEPFOR, etc.
At the same time, that the same person who happens to be the richest person in the world is trying to convince the South African government that they that they should enter into a financial arrangement with him and his private enterprise starling all of this stuff gets braided together in ways that we need to do a better job of interrogating and challenging the way congressman stephen harsford for instance challenged the u.s trade rep around whether or not market manipulation was happening like we have to call this stuff out and name it for the american people to be able to recognize it. I'm glad we got into that, because the South African story is this kind of microcosm of the pernicious elements of Trumpism.
You have this kind of racism and working through the alt-right media ecosystem and having figures from the alt-right media ecosystem now being at the top of our government. And you have layered on top of that, like the corruption element and, you know, the oligarchy element.
Like it's all wrapped up in the same story. Similarly to the tariffs.
When we were taping yesterday, Trump had not yet folded on the tariffs. And a big thing I was talking about with Catherine Impel yesterday was, you know, just how bad the signs were in the bond markets and how you know the u.s economy is like looking like a third world economy of stocks you know going down and but yet interest rates still going up and you know essentially if you just listen to trump himself he basically says they got spooked like the bond markets got spooked and they got the yips i think you call yeah they.
Yeah, they got the yips. The bond market got the yips, and so Trump got the yips.
And so as a result, he pulled back most of the tariffs, not on China. Most is actually, I think I'm misnomer.
Let me correct myself. They pulled back to now there's a 10% across the board tariff, which if you had just started the administration with that, people would have been like, this is insane.
So just as a a baseline that's a very significant tax increase and then on top of that we have 124 percent tariff now in china as he enters us into a direct trade war with china but the other random tariffs you know the fiji tariff of fiji and italy right like all these other countries they pulled back so those and so markets reacted positively. You have been pointing out and others, there are a lot of signs that that process was corrupt in itself in addition to being chaotic and erratic.
So what's your kind of top line takeaway from what we saw yesterday? I saw that your interview we said yesterday with Catherine was great and spot on and touched on all the things and it is important for us to kind of reiterate now that we didn't kind of go back to the normal. And even though the markets rallied for a couple of hours yesterday, the drops are still historic and precipitous.
And economists on the left and right in the center are waking up right now to the reality that's going to take some time to recover from this. And we're back down today.
we should just mention. Again, we're taping this.
Who knows what could happen by the afternoon? Trump could try to manipulate the markets again, but as we're taping right now, the Nasdaq's down 4% again. And that's 10% thing is a misnomer because we still have 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, on auto, and huge tariffs on generic pharmaceuticals from India that's going to be hugely problematic for everybody in this country, particularly our seniors are going to be hit in a really pernicious way as a result of this.
So all that said on the economic front, really important, Tim. But let's talk about that conversation that Steve Horsford had yesterday with the trade rep, as the trade rep is clearly finding out in real time that his boss has pulled the rug out from under him as he's like defending the indefensible.
And Steve Horsford and many others say, well, what exactly is going on here? Because we know that a few hours earlier in the day, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is going on a social media platform and telling people, signaling, wink, nod, now is a really good time to like go and buy. You you know buy low because something may happen that could make the prices run in the other direction that doesn't like suggest a hint at insider trading it trumpets it like out loud clearly what this person is saying there's a psychology to to markets and all this pricing is kind of like an emotional construct and that emotion is going up and down.
And I'm capable of doing some things, as you well know, that can drive it in one direction or another. And given that the president has a circle of internal advisors in the White House and external advisors who are overwhelmingly like billionaires who are involved in trading who benefit directly from market fluctuations everything that we know about this president everything we know about a president who brings his like daughter on to be a special advisor in the first term and then she gets like this preferential deal in china for her handbags during that first term and all the other things that we could name as like obvious points of corruption.
It is next to near impossible to imagine that somebody who's turning the faucet on and off about the market isn't benefiting in some way directly from that manipulation and isn't indicating to his cohort, this is what I'm going to do 30 minutes from now or an hour from now. And therefore, you ought to make a set of trades based on this.
It is impossible to believe that of this president and those who are around him. Well, just a couple of thoughts on that.
One, again, it'll be impossible to ever confirm this, but I have pretty credible sources. I was talking to some folks yesterday when I was in New York who had credible sources saying that he did tip off friends in particular.
Unusual Wales, which is not like a liberal account, which goes after Democrats actually a lot for insider trading. It's kind of a political markets account.
And they, you know, just like I said, if you just look at the traffic, like massive buys right before the news about the pullback of the tariffs. So somebody in particular opened up a huge call on the S&P 500 that then expired in 24 hours, up 2,000% calls, which is a stock term for purchases on the S&P 500, 2,100% in one hour.
And then to your point about how you know Trump has these billionaire buddies, this is audio inside the Oval Office of Trump talking about Charles Schwab. Not the account, but the man, Charles Schwab, who's still alive.
He's a man. He's around.
He's a Trump supporter. Let me just play you one clip from that.
How is Charles Schwab? It's not just Trump. It's actually an individual.
He made $2.5 billion today, and he made $900 million. He's in financials.
If you didn't catch that, he made $2.5 billion today, Trump said, and the other guy made $900 million. This is the forgotten man, the defender of the forgotten man? Yeah, I did catch that.
I'm so happy that you kind of unpacked that so clearly for the audience. You said, Tim, that it may be impossible to prove this.
I don't think it's impossible to prove it at all. As an individual people.
No, no, no, no, no. But here's the thing.
Here's the thing. This is the same administration that recklessly used a signal chat on a national security matter to declare war and then invited a reporter on it.
You can trust that these folk have paper trails. They've got digital footprints that are a mile long everything that they're doing because in addition to being corrupt they're also incompetent and so this stuff will come out and at some point after 2026 i am confident that democrats are going to have to gavel back in their hands and in congress and that's going to compel a number of investigations around all of this stuff.
So things are going to eventually, you know, truth crushed to the earth will rise again in Wi-Fi. So we're going to find out some things.
The question is, how do we, you know, how do we litigate it? How do we narrate it in a way that folks can be repulsed by it and act accordingly? So it is a very, very real thing. And these are, you know, we're living in a moment of state capture, which I just didn't think that I'd ever be saying about the United States of America.
There's just so much happening in order to get to the Democrats a little bit. I'm just curious from your perspective, though, from all the things we've seen from the Trump administration here in the first almost three months now.
is there something that jumps out to you as the thing that's been the most alarming, like the most concerning, you know, something that you think that people should be paying the closest attention to? Tim, so I'd say this, the thing that is the most alarming to me is the thing that's also the most encouraging, strange thing to say, but the level of state capture, how the how oligarchy is working in this moment the fact that we have an unelected individual who also happens to be the wealthiest person on earth who also happens to have built his wealth along the spine of government investments from the pentagons and the department of energy etc that person is now determining budgetary outcomes for the very same departments that contract with him it's astonishing and that individual gets to pick winners or losers in the ev sector that again he personally benefits from the fact that this is happening in like you know broad daylight and the fact that this individual, Elon Musk, was allowed to just kind of hold forth in cabinet meetings and in the Oval Office in a way that, again, is not pushed into, is not interrogated from mainstream Republican leadership, is I think the most astonishing and the most shocking thing to me. I mean, the very first time that Donald Trump calls Zelensky in the Ukraine after he's elected, Elon Musk is in that conversation.
He's part of that meeting. Elon Musk, who provides, you know, Starlink resources to the Ukraine military, is making governing calls about this stuff.
So, the extent of state capture and the kind of naked transparency of it and the fact that it is not being interrogated, questioned in any way whatsoever from institutional Republicans, for me, is the most frightening, shocking thing that I worry has not become a new normal that doesn't get rolled back easily at all, irrespective of who's in office. but why i say that's the most encouraging thing uh you know through uh our c4 at the

center for american progress we've just done tons of polling and lots of research on this. And it's been extraordinary to see for people like me, who've always tried to raise the, you know, questions about big money in politics, and who've got no traction on it.
It's been astonishing to see the reaction that we're seeing from average Americans, not just from democrats but self-identified republicans as well who are saying that they are concerned about corruption in government they are concerned about who's actually in control and running things elon musk is underwater across the board in a way that says there's real salience to uh these issues uh and that i i think really matters is a consciousness that's being developed for the American people about this issue. And I think we all got to figure out as political actors the language that we need in order to create real campaigns and more momentum to push back against this stuff.
It's for patience. Yeah, no, for sure.
I agree it's a huge political opportunity and also an opportunity for the democrats to kind of take back being the reform party as opposed to like the defender of the status quo uh one last policy item i want to get your pick your brain on before we get to democratic strategy stuff and that's the thing that i found the most alarming it's got that's got my hackles up which is the immigration elements your parents are from haiti as i understand that's right i guess i should ask really quick have you have you ever eaten a household pet or is that something that happened. And, are from Haiti, as I understand.
That's right. I guess I should ask really quick.
Have you ever eaten a

household pet, or is that

something that happened?

Oh, man, Tim. I know

you're sympathetic, and you're empathetic

about this, but it was

extraordinarily painful to watch

good people in Springfield,

Ohio, who were being

caricatured in the most

ugly way by J.D. Vance, and Trump and Ted Cruz and so many others.
Hardworking folk who went to Springfield precisely because there's been a 20% drop in the population there the last 15 years and there were jobs that were going wanting and the Republican governor invited them into the state to you know know, kind of do their part for the community.

And they revitalized these communities and to see them attack that way was extraordinary.

So, yes, my parents are from Haiti.

I was born in the Congo because my father is somebody who stood up for the notion of democracy and free and fair elections in Haiti at a time when, you know, the Givaye regime was in at a time when the U.S. was not making good on its rhetoric of protecting democracy, but was actually supporting the dictatorship there.
And my father and hundreds of other Haitians intellectuals had to leave the country because their lives were at risk because they were fighting for democracy. I ended up teaching in the Congo.
I was born in the Congo. We eventually immigrated to the U.S.
I feel very strongly about this being a space that is inviting that America's prosperity grows because of that invitation to the most enterprising people on the planet, the hardest working people on the planet who come here to make a way when there is no way. And Republicans and Democrats alike have always leaned into that ethos and that story of America.
So it is astonishing to see green card holders who are coming back into the U.S. from work overseas and they're being strip searched at our airports.
It's astonishing to see young people who dare to use their voices in the First Amendment spirit of the U.S. being stopped in the streets and, you know, taking into custody and deported as a consequence, even though they've broken no law in the nation.
So these are shocking things to see. And even when Joe Rogan is coming out and saying, wait a second, there's something cruel and unusual and perverse about taking someone who you know is no gang member and hasn't violated the law and is here under legal protections and the asylum system, and you're shipping them off to asylum.
Even Joe Rogan is saying something is wrong with these folks so yeah that is deeply deeply deeply troubling Tim. And the other thing on this is so troubling and it's just that it's gotten less attention because that's so fucking shocking and horrific that we're doing that than that you know other other news gets pushed out but the reason I wanted to bring out Haitians is you know obviously the racist attacks on them was sicken second but now it's instituted an actual policy like the protected status you know just taking back to the first topic right africaners can come they're the only ones though people that are here venezuelans cubans now even and haitians that were given legal status that did things the right way didn't sneak across the border.
And they're losing their protected status. And why were they given protected status, Tim? Because they were either fleeing a life-changing, cataclysmic earthquake that killed 300,000 Haitians in one shell swoop, or they were fleeing political violence in Haiti, and they were able to prove that and determine that.

Or communism in the Venezuelan's case.

In the Venezuelan's case.

But I raised the Haiti thing for a reason,

not just because I'm Haitian,

but throughout Latin America.

Here's the challenge.

Right now, there is a mafia state in Haiti

where gangs have basically taken over

every aspect of governance in the country

and 90% of the weapons that are on the streets in Haiti

that are threatening citizens

And taking over every aspect of governance in the country. And 90% of the weapons that are on the streets in Haiti that are threatening citizens come from the United States.
So here we are by taking protective status from a group of people who are vulnerable precisely because of the gun industry in America and the way we kind of look the other way in our parts as a river of death flows from the U S from Florida in particular, straight into Haiti, into the hands of gang members. But we absolve ourselves of that.
And instead we send people who are here under legal protection back into a conflict zone that we have helped to create and exacerbate the conditions for. It's just what's real.

Ah, it is.

I'm sorry if you brought that up, though, because that's, I think, getting totally lost in all the other craziness.

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It's time to put your executive director of the DNC hat back on. Oh my God.
I remember that job. What are we going to do? What are we going to do? Okay.
Like there are a couple of questions, right? Like to be aggressive or to be patient, right? To, you know, me and James Carville are hashing this out. Is it roll over and play dead and let them fuck it up or go at them, you know, be in the streets, right? Like there's that element.
There's the ideological valence, right? Is it more of what Bernie and AOC are doing with fighting oligarchy or what, you know, you've seen from Ezra and some of the others who are pushing more of like, you know, we should be the party of, you know, abundance and making sure people can succeed. And these things aren't all binary, but a practical example of this,

let me get you in a little trouble as yesterday,

but how Democrats should be acting.

We have the governor of Michigan.

I know where this is going.

The governor of Michigan,

Governor Gretchen Whitmer was in the White House, I guess for a meeting with Trump about,

there's a nice storm in Michigan

and there's some defense investments they want from the,

so legitimate reasons to want to talk with the federal government. If you're the governor of Michigan, you want those investments in your state.
You need emergency help. And yet, do you need to fly to D.C.? Do you need to be in the White House? Whitmer ends up kind of getting boned, but maybe it's her own fault, in my view.
She ends up being in there while he's signing these executive orders targeting Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor. She's in the room.
So, you know, where's the balance here between Gretchen Whitmer and Janet Mills shouting them down? Let's start with Governor Whitmer and then let's go back out to your much bigger question, which I think may be the much more important one. So, on Gretchen Whitmer, if you live in Michiganigan you want your governor to be in direct conversation with the president of the united states that is always a good thing that is a necessary thing we begin there let's recognize though that one of the reasons why uh governor whitmer who i just i i i frequently love governor whitmer the reason why she was challenged by many wasn't just because of the meeting but the speech that preceded the meeting.
She gave an address where she talked about where we're at right now. And she was seen to be insufficiently critical of Donald Trump and the tariffs and all the stuff that you just delineated before in her address.
So that's a part of this where people were like, wait a second, is she kind of acquiescing to a thing here here that's part of the challenge at the end of the day even though you want your governor to be in conversation with the president you want to have clarity on who your governor is fighting for and what your governor is trying to solve for and i think that wasn't altogether clear in the engagement that the governor had i'm gonna with you, Tim. Like I'm a huge fan of the governor.

I had an opportunity during the last democratic convention to introduce her at this forum

around the care economy.

And she has been just a, just a bulwark on that issue and on new industrial policy and

fighting for democracy and a woman's right to bother you.

All the things.

So huge fan of the governors.

And she is one of the best narrators of the challenges and the opportunities that we have in the party but that being said she was caught in an awkward spot and I think that she was caught in an awkward spot because there wasn't clarity on goal mission and what you're fighting for and we need that clarity always now yeah so let's just really quick though let's interrupt for one second it's like putting the ed hat on you got politicians calling you what are you telling them to do because i'm with you there are there are plenty of other people i'll name like look everybody listens podcast knows i love jared polis i wish jared polis was i guess just not like really in his nature i wish he was like more aggressive going after trump i could go down a whole list of democrats who i like who i feel like over the last three have been tepid. And I think some of them, including Governor Whitmer, have made a calculus that the right thing to do in this moment is like, you know, demonstrate that you hear people's concerns.
Demonstrate that you understand that the party made some mistakes and that the right thing to do is to triangulate rather than to be strident in opposition. I just think that's the wrong calculus.
What is your calculus if they're calling you? So I'm going to thread that a little differently, Tim, right? So there's no doubt that I have always been kind of a partisan warrior. And I'm somebody who thinks, like Mike Tyson, that you have to get the first punch off.
And that changes everything inside of inside of the ring so I would agree with you on that and I don't think that there's this binary thing between you know being the party that lays out an art star for the future versus like fighting the proximate fight that we have in front of us right now you need to be able to do everything everywhere at once. You have to do everything except for play pasta.

Never play pasta.

That you can't do.

But let me just say something in defense of government policy.

You know what, Tim?

There's nothing wrong with us being caught listening for once.

We haven't been caught listening.

That was a big problem.

We weren't caught listening on immigration.

We weren't caught listening on cost of living.

We weren't caught listening on a number of issues that people care profoundly about. We weren't caught listening on the housing crisis that middle-class families have been faced with for many, many years now.
So being caught listening is a good thing, but you kind of have to mobilize the lessons in a hurry. Like, all right, so what is it that we're hearing in real time? And who are the villains here in the story? and what are we doing to push back effectively against them so i do think that this is a moment for not to just be oppositional but to be definitional about where we're trying to take the country is that right though let me just challenge that for a second because i i i think that sounds good i said that to just be yeah but i'm like is that true true? Is this the moment to be definitional? Won't the moment to be definitional come in the future? Isn't this the moment to just do everything you can to make him a fail? What would Mitch McConnell be doing if this was him? He'd be like, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure this guy fails.
Mitch McConnell got lucky. Let's be honest.
Mitch McConnell said, we're going to do everything we can to make this guy fail. And they failed to do that.
Last time I checked, Barack Obama got reelected, even though unemployment was near double digits at the time. So Mitch McConnell's enterprise was a failed enterprise.
And then Republicans lucked up after that in 2016, where this savant who has this kind of negative charisma and a gift for the moment, comes in. And let's never forget, Tim, that before Donald Trump subdues Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, he had to first bring to heel institutional Republicans.
Never forget that. So this moment is not a Mitch McConnell victory or a victory for all these folks who all have been kind of had to suck it up for the extreme wing of their party.
But to your point about whether this is a Trump one, I mean, you could use Trump was never caught listening. I disagree.
So I'm going to disagree with you. Like I'm going to totally disagree.
I'm going to invite you to do a thing. Go back and watch Donald Trump's speeches in that 2016 campaign, 2015, 2016,

and to that whole room.

I lived him,

man.

I know.

But if you watch that stuff and listen to him carefully,

what did that guy always do?

He conducted focus groups in real time.

He'd come out there.

That's true.

And he would like throw six things out to his audiences.

And,

and sometimes some of those things would get booed and he would never bring

them up again.

He would like,

listen to the things that people rally towards. I guess rally towards i guess he was always on the attack though in those 100 100 there's always a clear foe that was there a clear foe in gretchen whitmer's speech yesterday no that's like i'm agreeing with you on that on that front but i am saying that this is also, as for Klein's coin,

it is also a definitional moment and you can't beat something with nothing.

And I would take us back to

what my friend,

the senator from New Jersey did

a couple of days ago

that kind of seized

the public political imagination.

But Senator Booker

stood up there for 25 hours

and he gave us a kind of moral language

for the moment that we're in.

And he ran down all that shit

Thank you. But Senator Booker stood up there for 25 hours and he gave us a kind of moral language for the moment that we're in.
And he ran down all that shit that is, you know, coming downstream from the sewer of Donald Trump. But he also kind of owned up to a number of failings and said, we didn't do our part in this way, in this way, in this way.
He kind of elucidated that and said, we've got to do better on these fronts. And he kind of pushed up some North stores on the values front and on the policy front and on substance, while also being really clear about who the bad guys and gals are in this moment.
You can do both things at once. And we got to be caught both listening, but moving into a kind of pugilistic mode on this stuff quicker, faster now.
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So the policy things, elements that you feel like maybe got out of step on, I think you mentioned was immigration and housing crisis. Are those the two things that jump out to you? Well, housing we didn't even talk about, right? It wasn't until Kamala Harris becomes the nominee.
And then around the Democratic Convention, you know, a plan is thrown up that doesn't really have an opportunity to bleed through because we weren't driving it successfully, but a plan is thrown out there. In all the polling that we were conducting in the Center for American Progress, we kept seeing that the stubborn metric in people's experiences about the economy was housing, housing, housing, whether they were rural, suburban, or urban Americans, whether they were home buyers or aspiring to buy a home or aspiring to just be able to rent reasonably in a market, housing was the thing that they were concerned about overwhelmingly.
And we weren't talking about it. We didn't have a plan for it.
Imagine for a second, Tim, that the infrastructure plan that we passed had been a housing infrastructure plan. How might Americans have viewed us differently in that moment, how might they have said, oh, they hear it, they see it, and they're responding in a way that I can vote for and I can rally for.
Great point. We were not caught listening on that and speaking to it.
And then on immigration, I think that a lot of my friends on this issue thought that we had a messaging problem and didn't recognize that we had a policy problem, actually. And we should have been saying much earlier and a much more robust way that the asylum system wasn't being broken and that not only did we need more resources at the border, but an entirely different approach on the question of asylum.
And I think we waited way too long to address that. We kept saying there was no crisis at the border.
And that's not what people were experiencing far away from the border, even in blue cities, where folks were feeling a downward pressure on public goods, more people waiting in the hospital emergency room, more kids in my kids classroom. What's going on here now? And why isn't anyone talking about it and addressing it at a time when we're feeling economically squeezed, but it feels as if we're allowing other people to jump the queue and get work rights and permissions.
So we were narrating it badly, but we had a bad set of policies there. And there's got to be a way for the broad center-left tent to take up a really different approach on immigration that, yes, speaks to our values and speaks to our history of what it means to be able to grow a prosperity in our country and improve our economic outcomes as a consequence of the growth every year we get from immigration, but speaks to the real consequences of having a broken, fractured asylum system.
And we just didn't do that well. And we had the challenge of incumbency, Tim.
Let's not forget that either. That was a real thing.
And being the incumbent at a time when there was this global inflation. One of the other items in the discourse out there on social media and what the Democrats should do is there's some consternation with, quote unquote, the groups.
You've been part of the groups. These are like the Democrats have these like public uh you know these special interest groups and almost all of them maybe not every single one almost all of them are well-intentioned you know whether it be on climate or whether it be on pro-immigrant rights groups lgbtq plus like all down the line they're all these interest groups and some uh have said in the campaign world have said maybe the politicians in the campaigns campaigns like listen to them a little too much and let them get pulled away from where maybe the middle of the country is on some of these issues towards the extremes you know particularly obviously the ones the one people mentions a lot is trans issues but or and really they kind of relate to immigrants because the Kamala Harris interview with the groups that kept coming up was the surgeries for transgender immigrants.
So I could tie both of those two groups together. So what do you think about that discourse? Two for the price of what? Yeah.
What do you think about that discourse about the groups? Here's what I think about that discourse. Here's what I think.
And Tim, you understand, of course, that I've been not only part of the groups, but I was once the president of the Open Society Foundation. So I helped to fund the groups strategically.
But here's the thing. I'm also somebody who's worked in politics.
I've worked on local city council elections. I've worked on gubernatorial elections, congressional elections.
I've worked on presidential elections. And guess what I learned about politicians, Jim? They don't listen to the groups.
You know what they listen to? Listen to polling. Overwhelmingly, politicians listen to polling.
I don't know a single politician who's ever taken a significant issue into their boat that hasn't been over-polled and over-focused. Sometimes they fill out those forms.
I've been on this. We had the groups on the right too back when I was looking for a job.
You know, you guys send a thing that's like, oh, do you have, you know, know especially in a primary like in order to get our endorsement well but but but tim you know primary audiences are polled as well and if a group is asking you to fill out a form that you think puts you at cross purposes with your primary audience that you've polled you're not gonna fill out the thing you just won't you just don't do it but if you're reading polling that says you know what there's a constituency for this and that constituency is animated around this in ways that could be to my benefit or to my detriment as a political actor but yeah i may check the box in this thing so let's let's not like make a distinction between the blob of the groups and the instinct that politicians have around survival around their own success that's heavily overwhelmingly driven by polling and the information they get from their consultants on these things that's that's the first thing that i will say to you we also had these moments where the overton window like gets blown open in a particular way as it did on criminal justice reform for instance uh in amer America following George Floyd, and politicians and other civil society actors and the media itself then make a set of decisions about what they are going to invest in, cover, lift up based on that Overton window, then Overton window can blow shut in a hurry on you. And in American history, there's always the backlash to the backlash.
And some politicians are nimble enough to be out in front of that and others aren't.

And given how little power and little authority the groups actually have in America and how most of them are like under budgeted, they can barely hold their staffs together. I am challenged to accept a story, this overly simplified story, that these powerful political actors who are usually dismissive of groups when they're in meetings with them, etc., are somehow just completely surrendering their political fates to the groups.
And that's why they're in the pickle that they're in. I accept that.
I do say as an immigrant to the Democratic coalition broadly here, being opposed to Trump, I will say the Democratic groups are a little meaner to Democratic candidates than Republican groups are to Republican candidates. So there is a little bit of that.
I don't think I've ever seen a meaner movement than the Tea Party movement. Meaner is wrong.
I just meant like more critical of the politicians that are closer aligned. Tim, the single most important election that's happened in America in the last 30 years outside of a presidential election was the 2014 midterm loss of Eric Cantor, who was the majority leader in the House, who was to the right of Attila the Hun last I checked.
But he was defeated. Not anymore.
He was defeated by someone who was to the right of him who had significantly less resources than he had. And it was because of the attacks from right-wing groups.
Right-wing groups. That was bad, though.
We wish we had Eric Cantor. I bet Eric Cantor voted for Kamala.
We should find him compared to David Brath. But let's be clear that Eric Cantor, and this is the punchline here.

Eric Cantor was using his resources to move in the direction of the group view because that was the direction of the primary audience that he had in his state. That's the punchline there.
It's the important thing. That election is important because it conditions a particular kind of behavior amongst institutional Republicans who then surrender to the Frankenstein monster that they have built in their basement and let loose in the world.
That's what leads to the Trump moment, et cetera, et cetera. But let's not forget that Eric Cantor was actually moving in the direction of his primary audience and where the groups were just not quickly and nimbly enough.
I'm not saying, but I'm saying that this is a little is a little overstated as a moderate as like kind of an institutionalist like i have my instinct is to be hostile towards the like efforts to move the politicians towards the extremes but you make it you make a compelling honestly defense the politicians move to the extremes if they feel that's where their base are the groups are important in in creating accountability and a and a sense of civil society uh in our country that we can't lose sight of even though you are right to have a critique about how strategic they are and whether or now there are some extremes there your your critique i i take us right but you know i'm a thomas paine guy so i'm always going to believe in the to believe in the need and the necessity of civil society organism that can build accountability and that can, in a way, help to localize our national politics. Last topic within the Democratic coalition, I just want to pick your brain on.
We're kind of over, so maybe we can have a longer conversation another day. But you're thinking about this, I'm sure, at Center for American Progress.
The Democrats have lost ground with working class black and brown voters. And so if you have candidates coming to you guys or at SAF or you're doing research, what are one or two things that jump out to you as something that'd be useful for Democrats to think about to kind of regain some traction in that demo? First thing we got to do is lose the mythology of what the workforce actually looks like and what the growing parts of the economy are.
When you talk about working class black and brown folk, they are overwhelmingly people who are in the service economy, people who are in spaces like healthcare, which is the fastest growing part of our economy and cities and states around this country. And being able to speak directly and pointedly about those types of jobs instead of constantly mythologizing hard hat jobs as a working class job, which are very few and far between, and that's not the growing parts of the economy.
Got to recognize that the folks who are working in Amazon warehouses, for instance, those are not hard hat jobs in the way that they are taken up in the popular political narrative. Those are part of the service economy.
That's not becoming the information economy. Got to recognize that and speak to that and got to speak directly to not, you know, we, we spend a lot of time right now talking about, um, cost of living.
We actually don't spend any time at all talking about the bottoming out of wages in America, right? I don't want you to talk about the price of eggs. I want you to help figure out how I'm going to have like dignity in the workplace.
It's going to enable me to earn enough to buy a home, right? Or to like, you know, create a community. So we're actually not talking about the shocking income disparities, the downward pressure on wages, the fact that we just have not grown really in any meaningful way in the last 25 years in our country, and figuring out how we are pushing into this notion of collective organizing, collective bargaining, that's working out for not just union members, but non-union workers in the service

economy is like a thing that is lacking in our politics that we have to find like simple

and organic ways to introduce to our political platform work.

That's really smart. That's not all where I thought you might go with that.
So that's good.

I like being, I like getting my brain working, thinking about it new ways.

Oh my God. I appreciate it very much.
You've earned a spot back, Patrick. So that's good.
I like getting my brain working, thinking about it new ways. Oh my God.

I appreciate it very much.

You've earned a spot back, Patrick.

So we'll be talking again soon.

Thank you, brother.

So thank you so much.

So good to do this.

Everybody else,

as I mentioned at the top,

you'll be back here tomorrow

with I think the first guest host

I've ever had.

I get a day off.

One day off.

So special thanks to Andrew Wiseman,

to Patrick Gaspar,

and I will see youall back here on Monday.

Peace.

We're vodka and rappers United and strong

We're here to talk about South Africa

We don't like what's going on

It's time for some justice

It's time for some justice, it's time for the truth

If we have launched, there's only one thing we can do

We got to say, I ain't gonna play some city

I ain't gonna play some city Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah bed I wanna say I Ah, ah, ah Ain't gonna be some city Oh, yeah Don't let me out Ah, ah, ah Ain't gonna be some city Ah, ah, ah I'm a government down drug We're going all the way, yeah It's broken, all weekend Instructors engage me, they keep trying to explain Me, white people are dying, let's give me hope Well this fire to throw the team ain't nothing but a joke I ain't gonna play some shit to me, yeah I ain't gonna play, cause. I ain't gonna play.

I ain't gonna play some city.

I ain't gonna play some city.

I ain't gonna play.

Don't wanna play or wanna play.

Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, yeah.

The Borg Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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