Patrick Gaspard: A White House Screamathon

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Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Delighted to welcome back to the show, former political director for Barack Obama.

Speaker 1 He also was ambassador to South Africa and an informal advisor to New York City's mayor-elect. Zorn Mamdani, it's Patrick Gasbard.
How you doing, man? I'm good, man.

Speaker 1 Thank you for like putting out my hit list there. Oh, yeah.
Well, the people need to know your resume, all right? People need to know that you're legit.

Speaker 1 We have news to do, but I need to start with this. We had breakfast a couple months ago when I was in New York, and I learned that your family is a nickname for me.

Speaker 1 And I've never felt whiter in my life than hearing your family's nickname. So I do want you to share it with the people.
It requires context.

Speaker 1 You and I were on some MSNBC show with one another, and you were wearing a Christmas sweater.

Speaker 1 And my daughter looked at it and said, texted me as text and said, Dad, why are you on with Elf on a Shelf? And somehow, Elf on a Shelf has become shorthand for Tim Miller in my household ever since.

Speaker 1 So the context matters.

Speaker 1 I don't know if it does, actually. I don't know if the context helps me all that much, but whatever.
And I wore a sweater. It's not a Christmas sweater, but I wore a sweater for you.

Speaker 1 I guess I'm not looking that elven today, but maybe your daughter will disagree.

Speaker 1 This morning I told everybody I'm going to be out with El Fada Sheldon. They all got it.
Brutal. That's brutal.
Okay. Let's get on to something else brutal.

Speaker 1 The president of these United States Oval Office addressed last night. I had to suffer through it for my job.
For people who didn't, there's a lot of garland, a lot of garland in the Oval Office now.

Speaker 1 It kind of felt like a Sarasota mall Santa screaming about Joe Biden. The teleprompter was moving very fast.

Speaker 1 I think she had limited time because the networks wanted to get to the survivor season finale.

Speaker 1 The only policy announcement was that troops are going to get a thousand buck dividend, which is, you know, whatever. It's a Christmas bonus, I guess.

Speaker 1 But most of the speech was complaining about Joe Biden. The first minute he complained about how Joe Biden transgendered everybody.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 It was pretty embarrassing, I guess, was my takeaway. I was feeling embarrassed for him, but also for all of us.
What was your reaction to our president?

Speaker 1 Yeah, definitely more embarrassed for all of us than for him.

Speaker 1 The guy is absolutely shameless. And I've been thinking lately that the problem is not Donald Trump, right? The fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Speaker 1 And I keep saying, no, we have to remember that before this guy started beating Democrats, he first beat the institutional Republican Party.

Speaker 1 And there was something that happened inside of the base of that party that made them susceptible and vulnerable to this vulgar authoritarianism.

Speaker 1 And now, obviously,

Speaker 1 his spell has taken hold. across deeper pockets of the country.
But there's another interesting thing about last night, Tim. You just said you had to watch this because of your job.

Speaker 1 Vast majority of folk are not watching this stuff. They're not paying attention the way that you and I are paying attention.

Speaker 1 But last night, many were forced to because they were waiting for survivor or whatever else they wanted to watch at nine o'clock at night on TV or six o'clock on the West Coast.

Speaker 1 And all of a sudden, this figure who's kind of sort of in the pop culture all the time and sometimes they're entertained by him, he shows up and he's yelling and he's screaming at them without any of the negative charisma that he's had these last 10 years that keeps you watching all the time.

Speaker 1 It actually felt like a really bad Trump impersonator. It was humorless.
And even when he said Merry Christmas and Happy New Year at the very end, it sounded like he was putting a curse on us. So

Speaker 1 there's like something, there was something about how a mask came off last night for people who don't pay as much attention as you and I do on this that I hope is penetrating and has like some durability as people have to ask some really important questions of themselves and about the future of this country in 2026.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Two things you said that strike me.
One is I like that you said it was humorless because sometimes a lot of people on the left, myself included, like I don't really find him funny, right?

Speaker 1 It's hard to like process that other people do. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, and a lot of times his presentation, things that might come off as cruel or dumb to college-educated progressives, like code is kind of funny for regular folks.

Speaker 1 But he didn't have that i there was none of the you know kind of trumpian joie de viv last night um none none of the joking and it felt like there was a dearth of of offering a counter narrative for people who are actually going through tough times you know i i keep saying that like it was easy for him to convince a bunch of people that that the election was stolen because that didn't affect them at all right like they don't know anything about the voting machines like so you're you're creating a counter world for people that they can accept that's right.

Speaker 1 It's hard to create a counter world for people that are like, oh, the affordability crisis isn't happening when they're experiencing it every week when they go to the grocery store, you know?

Speaker 1 And just ranting 11 months in about how Joe Biden was terrible doesn't quite feel sufficient.

Speaker 1 The speech begins with, I inherited this MS, and then he does another kind of rehearsal of American carnage, right?

Speaker 1 He goes through the litany of all the things that were screwy in this country before he walked in and launched this new golden era as exemplified by all the gilding that we see behind him.

Speaker 1 You know, you made a comparison to, you know, to what that room is like. It's for me, it's more like the space that Liberace used to roll out his piano into, right? So you've got all the gilding.

Speaker 1 He's talking about the golden age that he's launched. He's talking about the American carnage in the rearview mirror.

Speaker 1 And not only is he pushing past the concerns that folks have about affordability, he does a horrible thing that Donald Trump in the past, I think, wouldn't have done when speaking to his base, right?

Speaker 1 He knows that a lot of folks voted for him because they're concerned about the economy, their concern about the crisis at the border, but they were also concerned about America's intervention overseas and the U.S.

Speaker 1 spending so much more of its time and its resources across its borders than within its borders.

Speaker 1 And Donald Trump last time looked at the American people and said, pay no attention to what you're feeling at the gas pump. Pay no attention to what you're paying at the diner and the supermarket.

Speaker 1 Foreign leaders are telling me that America is the hottest that it's ever been.

Speaker 1 So if MBS comes in here and says, hey, you guys have it really well, you should take his word for it and not the word of your unemployed kids if unemployment is now higher than it was four years ago.

Speaker 1 Pay no attention to the fact that healthcare premiums are about to skyrocket and I'm making you some weird promises about money that I'm going to throw at you that will help us overcome the interests of the health insurance markets.

Speaker 1 Pay no attention to any of that because MBS says we're doing really fine. That flies

Speaker 1 in the face of the whole MAGDA ethos. And I think this is exactly why you have figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene who are pushing away from the bar right now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the Middle Eastern fascists in the dress are saying we're the hottest ever. It's so hot right now here.
I don't know if people in Iowa are buying that. In some ways.
Like Trump is so abnormal.

Speaker 1 A lot of times the problems that he faces are very unique and opportunities, right? To other politicians, politicians, hard to kind of compare.

Speaker 1 One of those things will be the Epstein stuff as that comes out tomorrow. It will be relatively unique to Trump.
This is a pretty normal politician problem.

Speaker 1 Like people aren't happy about the economy and you got to figure out how to talk about it. Like, are you telling them, you know, to be patient?

Speaker 1 Are you telling them you got some plans that are coming in place? Are you trying to gaslight them into thinking things are great? Like a lot of politicians of both parties have gone through like that.

Speaker 1 this problem. You were in the White House as the kind of recovery, as political directors kind of recovery from the recession.

Speaker 1 The Great Recession was starting, but maybe going a little slower than people wanted. How did you guys think about that?

Speaker 1 It seems to me like their decision last night was like this normal presidential political decision. People are upset about the economy.
What are we going to do?

Speaker 1 We're going to announce his dividend and complain Biden. That was their answer.
I don't think that worked. How do those conversations work inside the White House?

Speaker 1 Not only did it not work, but he actually has the lessons of the Biden administration when they were telling folks that inflation was

Speaker 1 a transitory thing uh wouldn't have long-term impact uh in a way he was looking at voters uh and and and again doing that thing that you're not supposed to do i've never been one of those people who believe that the customer is always right but i do believe that the customer needs to be heard right uh in the first obama term where we're coming off of the collapse of uh the banks the collapse of the the housing market the need to bail out the auto industry which was not politically popular at all at the time but looking at all that and then you have this exceedingly exceedingly slow recovery.

Speaker 1 And by the time we get into President Obama's re-elect against Mitt Romney in 2011, 2012, we have unemployment that's near double digits, which is an astounding thing to have to face in a reelection, a historic thing that usually does not go the way of the incumbent.

Speaker 1 During that entire cycle, President Obama was disciplined enough to understand. that he had to sit in the economic pain that people were experiencing, that he had to be seen to hear it,

Speaker 1 to feel it and to be proximate uh to their experiences and then to reflect it back to them i know that we have this challenge i understand what's happening downstream i get the pressure that you're facing with uh your housing and i do know that for the first time we have first time since world war ii we have a generation of americans who believe they're not going to do at least as well as their parents did i get that and therefore here are three things i want to be able to focus on in health care in education and opportunity into the future, and what we're going to do to improve real wages and benefits.

Speaker 1 Here are the things we've got to focus on right now, but I'm hearing all this. I'm experiencing all this.
Last night, Donald Trump said, y'all are crazy.

Speaker 1 Like you had Joe Biden in office. I walked in, things were a hot mess.
And now we're the hottest game in the world. And

Speaker 1 there's this affordability thing that everyone's talking about right now, but prices are lower than they've ever been before. You're humming.
Things are happening for you.

Speaker 1 I'm about to throw a thousand bucks at every soldier in this country.

Speaker 1 And at some point in the future, when the healthcare bill comes due, you know, there's somebody I'm going to shake out of my piggy bank from the tariffs that I've collected that are going to help you.

Speaker 1 You got to trust me. Trust me to be able to do that for you, even though I'm telling you right now that I don't trust you.

Speaker 1 when you tell me that you're going through like a really difficult time in our country.

Speaker 1 So we were always clear with President Obama not to spike the football, not to like claim things that we knew were moving in the right direction.

Speaker 1 No mission accomplished, banned. You don't do that thing.

Speaker 1 And Donald Trump is doing that thing right now. You know, what's interesting about him? I will give him credit on one thing.

Speaker 1 He is so much more accessible than any other modern president we've ever had, right? There are there, you know, he lies all the blood time, but he's in the conversation.

Speaker 1 He's going on platforms. He gives open access to reporters on his plane.
When he's walking on the lawn, he'll pop into the briefing room.

Speaker 1 So there's a way that he is so accessible that a baseline of his narcissism and mendacity has been normalized for us who are attentive, who are paying attention to the news cycles.

Speaker 1 But for folks who are trying to watch Survivor last night, who are watching it to be distracted from the difficulties that they have in their lives, they don't have that same sense of accessibility.

Speaker 1 Instead, there's this weird figure that comes on who is screaming at them that things are fine and that they need to get over themselves.

Speaker 1 And they're not really sure that that's what they pick for. You mentioned it also.

Speaker 1 The other way where I think he's maybe losing his North Star with his own voters or the people that supported him is. the attention overseas.

Speaker 1 And you mentioned how last night he like uses MBS and these foreign dictators as validators and saying like they say we're doing great. So what are you complaining about?

Speaker 1 But the other thing went before the speech, there was some discussion. Tucker Carlson even said that he thought that the speech was going to be about declaring war in Venezuela.

Speaker 1 They are now focused on this potential war in South America and the Caribbean. Trump sent this bleat yesterday.
I just want to read some of it.

Speaker 1 Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America.

Speaker 1 It will only get bigger until such time as they return to the United States of America all the oil land and other assets that they previously stole from us.

Speaker 1 I'm ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela.

Speaker 1 That is a deranged statement and setting the tone for, or at least laying the table for potentially a truly crazy policy that he didn't lay the predicate for at all during the campaign.

Speaker 1 And it's unclear that even his own supporters would be in favor of. I'm going to disagree with you,

Speaker 1 Tim, that he didn't lay the predicate for this in his campaign. Donald Trump has been talking about seizing the oil assets of other countries ever since he ran in 2016.

Speaker 1 We've heard this 10,000 times from this man.

Speaker 1 And what's really fascinating for somebody like me who has, as you know, been critical of foreign policy objectives of both Democratic and Republican administrations, he's saying, like, interestingly for me, he's saying a quiet thing out loud, right?

Speaker 1 There's a way that

Speaker 1 whenever

Speaker 1 you know, a new president comes into power, we always say, you know, America's open for business again. Whatever, what happened before weakened America in the world.

Speaker 1 And now we're going to lead with our strength, but we're also going to lead with our values and our virtues, right? That's the thing that both Democratic and Republican presidents say. And, you know,

Speaker 1 I'm a proud American. Yeah, I can be as patriotic as anybody else can be.

Speaker 1 My family is originally from the global south, though, right? So I was born in the Congo of Haitian parents.

Speaker 1 And I know that there are ways that American power has been used in the world, generation after generation, that disadvantages folk from other side of the world in order to advantage Americans who need access to resources.

Speaker 1 That is a real thing in our politics that gets underexpressed. It gets overexpressed by Donald Trump in some really naked and rapacious ways where he says, this is why we're going to seize Greenland.

Speaker 1 Here's why the Germans need to do what we say on this pipeline issue. We are going to go after the oil in the Gulf.

Speaker 1 He has said this out loud repeatedly, and he's been cheered for it by the crowds who come to his rally. So I'm going to really

Speaker 1 in an effusive way, disagree with you on that.

Speaker 1 I'm sure.

Speaker 1 But I will agree with you that that is not the focal point of people who are showing up and who are voting for him because they think that this businessman, that this reality show businessman that they saw on television can get a handle on things, bring down inflation, can help them have stable jobs and access to all the benefits that they need in a secure way that assures their dignity throughout their lives and that will be building on strength.

Speaker 1 Last night, when Trump said that he's restored American strength, I was thinking about the way he's behaved in the Gulf and these extrajudicial killings off of our coast and these ridiculous, irrational tariffs.

Speaker 1 And in a real way, we should be making an argument that every single day, this man is making Americans weaker at home and abroad in ways that we need to be able to have a counter for.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I hear you. He's been talking about stealing the oil for a long time.
Incessantly. That's fair.
Incessantly. And he's never done it.
It's been another, people say it's like promises kept.

Speaker 1 You never stole any oil yet.

Speaker 1 But I also, when you listen to Marjorie Taylor Greene talk about what America First meant to her versus MAGA, and when I listen to kind of the later entrance to the Trump coalition, a lot of these guys in like the Vanisphere universe who had been Obama voters, they didn't interpret America first being we're not doing the foreign wars.

Speaker 1 We're not getting into dumb wars. And I think that there's a decent percentage of people that voted for him.

Speaker 1 Maybe not the core base, maybe not the people that have been going to the rallies hearing about stealing the oil for 10 years, but among the people that voted for him,

Speaker 1 there's a demographic that's like, wait a minute. Like, I thought you said that you were going to bring jobs back here and we're going to make the economy great.
You're going to make my life better.

Speaker 1 And now we're bombing boats in the Caribbean. Like, why? Like, we're going to do regime change in Venezuela? I don't even can't find Venezuela on a map.
Why are we doing regime change in Venezuela?

Speaker 1 You You know, I do think that sentiment is out there, and I think that he risks doing further damage to his standing by advancing us. 100%.
Completely. See, I feel better when I'm agreeing with you.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 I have a few notes here. I'll read some other interviews you've been doing.
We have a couple other disagreements. That's good.
That's healthy. That's healthy.
But I 100% agree with you.

Speaker 1 That's not the expectation that these folks have.

Speaker 1 Last night, Donald Trump is again calling himself a peace president and saying that he's created more peace in the world than we've had in the last 3,000 years.

Speaker 1 People see these bombings and they see him hanging out not with, it's interesting, this guy, this president who's accessible to you and I, folks who are paying attention to the media, he's actually not accessible to average Americans on the ground.

Speaker 1 He travels less in the country than previous presidents did, right? He's not going to Ohio. He's not showing up in Wisconsin.

Speaker 1 So folks are seeing the industrial sector jobs bleed away from their communities at a faster rate than they had been previously.

Speaker 1 They heard all of his promises about bringing the jobs back from overseas and all they see is increased conflict and these bombings.

Speaker 1 They're confused by the cruelty on immigration because they were really concerned about what they saw as a crisis at the southern border and the gates being swung wide.

Speaker 1 And they wanted that to stop, but they were not asking for the person who's been

Speaker 1 stocking the shelves in Walmart, who they've said good morning to each of the last 10 years to be disappeared from our streets.

Speaker 1 So they're just kind of confused and disoriented by the cruelty there, by the massed agents, and appreciating more and more each day that even though Donald Trump keeps pointing to these people and blaming them for everything, the Somalis are apparently responsible for everything, it's not having any material affirmative presence that's productive and constructive in their lives.

Speaker 1 What do you think he's doing?

Speaker 1 I've given up on trying to predict anything around Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 What's really interesting is that for somebody who

Speaker 1 exudes all of this, the bug stops with me which choice. Well, he doesn't seem to be very much in charge of anything, right?

Speaker 1 When he gets probed by reporters on a thing, like the other day, he was asked about his surgeon general choice. And he says, oh, I don't really know that person.

Speaker 1 I'm just trusting Bobby Kennedy's pick. Every time he gets asked about a policy or about personnel, oh, I don't really know.
It's this one, or it's this other person in my administration.

Speaker 1 I think that in many respects. I thought somebody wrote something clever about this the other day.
Was it E.J. D.
Allah?

Speaker 1 In many ways, he's kind of formed out foreign policy to Hexeth and even Stephen Miller is involved in it to a certain extent.

Speaker 1 And we have an OMB director who helped design Project 2025, who seems to be running all the domestic policy in this country.

Speaker 1 And then you have a bunch of former Fox talking heads who are in other really important policy spaces and who are just kind of hectoring the media, not being transparent to the American people and demonstrating that they're woefully unqualified for the positions that they have.

Speaker 1 I think Pete Hexa comes to mind there. So it's just astonishing.
Sure, Sean Duffy. Yeah.
Did you ever hang out with Bobby? Were you guys ever in your

Speaker 1 NGL world? Especially,

Speaker 1 I did.

Speaker 1 Darren, I wish you didn't ask me about this because it's kind of a painful, difficult thing to think about. I did.

Speaker 1 I spent a fair amount of time with him when I was director of policy and politics for SCIU, Service Employers International Union.

Speaker 1 And we, many of our members, cared about about what was happening in New York State with its ecology and our waters being polluted.

Speaker 1 And we found ourselves in extraordinary partnership with Robert Kennedy when he was helping to lead the River Keepers and he was, you know, going after polluters and litigating against them.

Speaker 1 I will never, ever forget Tim being three feet away from Robert Kennedy when he delivered one of the most extraordinary talks I ever saw.

Speaker 1 He was in a room, thousands of low-wage workers, low-wage workers, folks who are like breaking their backs to put food on the table for their kids, but who cared about environmental issues.

Speaker 1 And they gathered to hear Bobby Kennedy talk about the environment, about River Keepers, about this blessing that we had in the world that we had to protect.

Speaker 1 And he gave this 45-minute set of remarks extemporaneously, no notes in front of him, hardly a pause between paragraphs that was so inspired, that so lifted everybody up in their core and

Speaker 1 got our membership to go out there and to you know to march to advocate with their Congress members to do a thing to protect the ecology Bobby Robert Kennedy you're sounding like Olivia here right now talking about science guy

Speaker 1 you're getting starry-eyed and I spent real time around him uh in that period and and I just find this this character to be unrecognizable and you know I know some members uh of his family uh well, some of his siblings who also are incredibly pained and who have publicly said that their brother that they love dearly and who they grew up with is not the same figure who they see occupying this space.

Speaker 1 I'm really sorry to have gone off there, but

Speaker 1 it's near and dear. It's interesting.

Speaker 1 Helps you process what people see in him, you know, because I never liked him, right? So it's harder for me, I think.

Speaker 1 I appreciate that, but there. there was a special gift there and somebody who who led with values through a lot of personal pain and struggle.

Speaker 1 And And I appreciated the vulnerability that he had when he talked about addiction, when he talked about the family traumas and what it took to help him get to the other side of that.

Speaker 1 There was a real power in that. And it's a shame to see this.
The thing that sucks about this for me with him is like, he would have freedom to do all that stuff, right?

Speaker 1 Like, I mean, he would still do his crazy vaccine, you know, conspiracy stuff, but like Trump doesn't care about any of that.

Speaker 1 Like if he was in there, they could have programs that like we're going after polluters and do, you know, at least the ones who aren't donors to Trump. You know, there'd be some limits.

Speaker 1 Like he could also still do some of the good stuff, but he seems totally uninterested in any of that.

Speaker 1 He actually has a lot of runway to do that because there is a significant part of the MAGA-based, as part of the MAHA sphere of folks who are worried about health outcomes, who believe that the system is rigged against them, who want folks who are their champions fighting back and unrigging the system.

Speaker 1 There are, you know, lots of on-ramps for Bobby Kennedy in this moment to be true to some of that old car that I used to experience from him. But he seems clear to be another person now.

Speaker 1 You know, he's the bear carcass, I think, not the car. Oh, man.
Don't get me started.

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Speaker 1 All right, let's do some Zoron talk.

Speaker 1 Everybody wants to twist the lessons from his win to fit their own narrative. I like that guy.
Yeah, you like that guy. You were there early.
You were there early.

Speaker 1 You were, you know, informally, but you were helping him out when he was down at 1% in the polls and people weren't talking about him. Most of us who aren't New Yorkers had never heard of him.

Speaker 1 And so I'm interested in how you explain his ascent since you saw it from the beginning. I only have one talent in life,

Speaker 1 Tim, and that's recognizing the talent of others. So I think I'd be a good casting director.
That's pretty concerning for me. So I'm the elf and he's the mayor.

Speaker 1 Just say it. Just say it.
I'll take it, I guess.

Speaker 1 So the one thing that you cannot impart on anybody in politics is comfort in their own skin, right? Zar Mandani is comfortable being Zoran Mamdani.

Speaker 1 He's clear about who he is, where he stands, what he believes in, why he's doing this, on whose behalf he hopes to be able to serve.

Speaker 1 And he's clear about the truths that he's trying to socialize in our body politic. There's just absolute clarity there that can't help but come through.
as authentic to voters.

Speaker 1 So I understood very early on that even folks who might disagree with Zorn Mamdani on one issue or another could gain a purchase on his overall value set, on the narrative, the story that he would tell attached to those values, and on his disciplined focus on a narrow band of issues that all fell under the broad rubric of affordability and how that would be resonant in their lives.

Speaker 1 I also recognized pretty early on, Tim, that he was preternaturally gifted at doing a thing that more and more politicians are going to have to become adroit at in our culture, which is he's great at holding on to his core.

Speaker 1 If he's speaking to you in a 90-second video, or if he's having a conversation with you in a 20-minute speech, or if he's engaged in a two-hour long podcast, he never swerves from like the core that animates him, and that is his superpower.

Speaker 1 And he's a happy warrior, right? So even when he's talking about our greatest challenges, there's always an affirming thing.

Speaker 1 There's always a North star that he's pointing towards and folks are able to go up that ladder with him. And so I could recognize that early on.

Speaker 1 I also knew that political reporters were overvaluing the stock of some of the other leading candidates in the field, particularly Andrew Cuomo.

Speaker 1 And I understood that Andrew Cuomo had lost the zip on his fastball, but folks just assumed that he was Andrew Cuomo.

Speaker 1 How on earth could he lose to anybody in that field, let alone a 33-year-old democratic socialist Muslim American, and yet it happened. I like that answer.
That's a good answer.

Speaker 1 That's an answer that appeals to me. Oh, my God.
We're 20 minutes in, and you finally liked the answer I gave, too. Oh, my God.
No, I said that appeals to me. And my question is, is it true?

Speaker 1 Or is it what you would say in a DSA card? Look, obviously, you worked for Obama and you're a Democrat, but you worked for Dinkins. I was the executive Democrat of the Democratic National Committee.

Speaker 1 So I was as Democrat as you can be. Yeah, right.
So you're a Democrat. But you worked for David Dinkins, an 89 DSA candidate.

Speaker 1 So you're in in touch with that you come from the left wing of the party you're not really apologetic about that

Speaker 1 and and some of your fellow i you know i in your ideological cohort if i asked them that question they would say

Speaker 1 populist economics you know rent freeze you know burn burning right you know then they would have gone immediately to ideology it would be fine like if he's comfortable in his own skin and a good speaker and all of that but he had but he had ezra klein's politics it wouldn't have worked that's what they would say you know i believe that ideology batters

Speaker 1 You can probably see the Gramsci somewhere on my shelf behind me. So I do believe that ideology really, really, really matters.

Speaker 1 However, really clear that when you're trying to get elected in a city where Donald Trump did almost 18 to 20% better in 2024 than he did in 2020, you have to recognize that.

Speaker 1 The electorate is really complicated, really diverse, has a number of things that it cares like deeply about.

Speaker 1 If you look at at the VIN diagram of consensus across the board, but you're not going to get universal agreement on all things.

Speaker 1 And at a time when we are still kind of recovering from the hangover of the pandemic, the spiritual malaise that many of our cities still have following the COVID-19 dystopia, that folks actually want to be helped to feel great about the direction.

Speaker 1 that we're on.

Speaker 1 And I thought that the leading candidate in the primary and in the general election, Andrew Cuomo, had a dystopian view of the city that was not dissimilar to the way Donald Trump describes our urban centers and this notion that I alone can solve it.

Speaker 1 And I thought that Sloan Mamdani, and again, I'm clear, ideology matters.

Speaker 1 And so they had an affirming view and a sense that there wasn't anything wrong with New York City that can't be solved by everything that's right in New York City, including that diverse, complicated electorate.

Speaker 1 So I'm a big believer that in order to be successful electorally, you have to have a set of values that people can align with.

Speaker 1 And then that has to be connected to some kind of a story of where you're trying to take people and then a clear shorthand on some policy solutions, right?

Speaker 1 So I think that there are a lot of people who are damn strategic, who are on the left, who would agree with me on all of that, plus the fact that this is a really gifted communicator, right? He's not.

Speaker 1 He's not a normie, right?

Speaker 1 He's not like you and I. Not a lunch pail.
He's got an extraordinary gift. I will say, I will say that, and here's the thing that I thought was underreported.

Speaker 1 If you pay attention to Donald Trump, when he was sitting looking at Zahn Bamdani in the Oval Office and getting peppered with questions by the press, it was interesting to hear the president lift up a thing that

Speaker 1 the mayor-elect was prepared for when he went into the Oval. Mayor-elect showed him, here are all the communities.
where you did really well.

Speaker 1 And oh, by the way, I happen to do really well in those places as well, because folks were hearing the same message from you and I, that the system is rigged against them, that there are ways to repair the economy, but it's not to do the traditional like business as usual, and that we have to center them in our outcomes.

Speaker 1 Donald Trump looked at America, he looked at the press gathered in front of him in the Oval Office and said, hey, I think that Bernie Sanders got a bad deal.

Speaker 1 There are a lot of people who support Bernie Sanders that support me as well. And let me tell you why they do.
And then he like gave his explication on it.

Speaker 1 That was the most important thing that Donald Trump said that day. It's the most important thing that he has said in a long time.

Speaker 1 It was interesting to hear Trump last night, Tim, in that bizarre scream-a-thon of a speech when he said, I came in to take on the gigantic health insurance companies.

Speaker 1 When's the last time you heard a Republican president use that kind of language, right? So both Donald Trump and Zohan Bamdani understand something about the zeitgeist that we're sitting in right now.

Speaker 1 They know that this is not necessarily a left versus right moment, but an outsider versus insider moment. And the vast majority of voters of Americas are feeling like outsiders.

Speaker 1 And they're just trying to figure out how they can make this whole game work a little better for them. I don't know if that gets at any of what you were pushing me on.
No, it does. No, it does.

Speaker 1 I guess I'm trying to explore this line. Like you said in the interview you did with a New York editorial board recently that like you

Speaker 1 defined what your role was informally as Oran was kind of helping with coalition building. And this is like a two-way street, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And it's like, there's a lot of conversation happening on the Democratic side right now. Like, how do you do this, like, going forward, right? Like, left types are like, who are our natural allies?

Speaker 1 Like, should we be getting rid of the corporatists and trying to reach out more to some mega voters? You know what I mean? Should can everybody be aligned on something?

Speaker 1 Like, people in the, there are people in the center left. They're like, how could I get some of Zoron's magic, even if my policies aren't exactly the same? Right.

Speaker 1 And it's like, that's a challenge, you know, and figuring figuring out what issues can kind of unite folks and

Speaker 1 how to do that. I'm wondering, like, how you think, like, he navigated that compared to what we're seeing from other themes.

Speaker 1 Look, I think that there's too much conversation going on in the Democratic Party

Speaker 1 that we're having amongst ourselves and not enough conversation out on the streets, on the porches, in community groups, in the VFW halls. There's not enough of that going on.

Speaker 1 There are too many people who are spending all their time spinning out their white papers and who are getting into fights on social media with one another.

Speaker 1 And not a single one of them is going and knocking on a door in West Virginia, which is the only way you got to actually figure out what the sweet spot is in aligning with where people are at and figuring out how to communicate better.

Speaker 1 Zoran impressed me really early on in this contest because

Speaker 1 Immediately after Kamala Harris loses to Donald Trump, he's not out there doing scrolling. He's not sending out, you know, a thousand

Speaker 1 social media posts with his hot take of the moment, over-intellectualizing anything.

Speaker 1 Instead, he immediately went on the ground with a microphone to have conversations with people in communities that in the past in New York had voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic ticket, who leaned towards Donald Trump this time.

Speaker 1 So he went into communities where Trump overperformed his previous baseline. He said, who'd you vote for?

Speaker 1 And he had a lot of voters of color on camera telling him, I voted for Donald Trump and here's why I voted for Donald Trump. The other side isn't listening.
They can't hear us.

Speaker 1 Here's what I'm going through in my life. Here's what we're experiencing with college tuition.
Here's what's happening with the kid who still lives in my basement and can't go off and start a family.

Speaker 1 Here's the mental health and drug addiction trauma we're facing. No one seems to hear us.
And so I wanted to vote for somebody who would disrupt things a little. He goes out.

Speaker 1 He has all of those conversations. And then you know what he does to him?

Speaker 1 He ignores all the polling that says to him and all the consultants that say to him, people just care about law and order and security issues. And you have to go and talk about that.

Speaker 1 And he said, no, every conversation that I'm having with normal people on the street tells me there's an affordability crisis that's overwhelming their lives, that's flattening their lives, that's taking away their dignity.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to find ways to talk about that, that reflects that back to them and then offer solutions. That's what he did.

Speaker 1 And I think that if our good Democrats who are sitting in New York, in California, in Texas, in Ohio, in Washington, D.C., if they would just get on the ground and just go and have conversation after conversation after conversation, we're more likely to figure out how to build durable majorities into the future.

Speaker 1 And not just with fan voice. This is it.
Not just fan voice. He went out there and talked to regular people to vote for Trump.
100%. I mean, Zahn didn't hesitate to go on Fox News.

Speaker 1 He went to the New York Post and, you know, people like me were like, you know, they're never going to endorse you.

Speaker 1 He said, yeah, but I want to have a conversation with them and I might learn something.

Speaker 1 go figure or you might neutralize them a little bit or you might find areas where you just agree i don't you know it's like it's flattening everybody is not helping that's right

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Speaker 1 Here's my other nazaring thing I just wanted to pick your brain on because I'm about to give two thoughts that might seem like they're in contradiction, but I don't think they are.

Speaker 1 are and i want to hear you've ever done that too

Speaker 1 i'm pretty you know people know where i'm coming from it's that you're not getting bullshit but i'm trying to process this all myself i think that the israel issue really helped him even though he his best answer was probably about how he's not focused on what's happening in foreign countries and how he's going to stay in new york on that debate stage but just like it gave him credibility with people who were upset and felt like that the democratic party wasn't speaking with moral clarity on the issue and i think it was kind of like a like an entry point for people you know into his other stuff simultaneously to that, I think maybe the only bad answer he gave on the whole campaign was on this podcast when I asked him about globalizing the Intifada and he kind of did a long hem and haw on how to talk about that.

Speaker 1 And I wonder what you make of that, like

Speaker 1 of both points of that. Is it possible that that could be right, right? Like that like it will be important to get credibility of the democratic base to have moral clarity on what happened in Gaza.

Speaker 1 And also to,

Speaker 1 when you're talking about that issue, you got to be a little careful about not coming off in a way that allows people to demonize you or makes people feel like you're just being discriminatory or not serious enough about the threats facing Jewish people.

Speaker 1 I need to be careful here myself because apparently the Bulgwork is the podcast that launches a thousand counter debates. I think

Speaker 1 I would say it's funny. Just really quick, a quick pause.
I thought he was so good on the podcast.

Speaker 1 And in your world and coalition building, he came in and he's like, he knew what I wanted to, you know, he knew the areas of our agreement.

Speaker 1 He's like, I want to talk about cutting red tape on the halal trucks and I'm going to talk about making government work and I'm going to vibe out.

Speaker 1 So like he is good at that, you know, but only thing people talked about was the Intifadancer. Unfortunately, that happens.
Which is how politics works, right? So I'd say a couple of things.

Speaker 1 One, I've often compared Husan's position on Gaza and the permission structure it created in the Democratic primary in New York.

Speaker 1 to Barack Obama's position on the Iraq war resolution in 2007 into 2008.

Speaker 1 Barack Obama was on stage with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden Biden and John Edwards and all these other folks who had given Bush a blank check.

Speaker 1 And Democratic primary voters were pissed off about that. They were angry at the results of it.

Speaker 1 And folks were seen to be doubling down, which made it impossible for voters to hear them on health care, on the economy, on social justice and the social contract.

Speaker 1 Barack Obama could get to first base against Hillary Clinton because he had a moral clarity.

Speaker 1 on Iraq in that moment that was deeply resonant with voters in Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire, et cetera.

Speaker 1 Zahra Mamdani had a moral clarity on an issue that folks were like, you know, staring at their screens on every day, whether they were getting their news from CNN or getting their information from TikTok.

Speaker 1 They saw a set of atrocities that they were absolutely appalled by and understood that their government, Democrats and Republicans, were making them complicit in what they were seeing on that screen because of our continued partnership with the Netanyahu regime.

Speaker 1 And they were appalled by that. And they heard a candidate who had absolute clarity, who knew what he believed the American people and Yorkers wanted from their government in that moment.

Speaker 1 So yes, I agree with you that folks are not going to hear him on affordability in this moment that we're in if he is seen as illegitimate on a profound moral quandary that we found ourselves in.

Speaker 1 That's number one. Number two, on the conversation that he had with you, Tim, I thought he was phenomenal.

Speaker 1 And eventually, I think it was about a week or so, I can't remember the timeline anymore, but I think it was was about a week after he was on with you, where he used the phrase that he would discourage folks from using that language if they cared about peaceful outcomes in the region, because he had spoken to a lot of folks who lived through not the first intifada, but the second intifada.

Speaker 1 And he appreciated the absolute terror of the second intifada in ways that he wanted to be clear. He would never endorse it.
And he wanted to discourage people from using language.

Speaker 1 that would kind of invite that level of incitement. I think he could have answered cleaner, in a a cleaner and more direct way when he was on with you.

Speaker 1 But he's, you know, he's acknowledged that as well. And it was, as you said, like the one moment where he didn't communicate as clearly as he usually does.
People shouldn't be scared to come on.

Speaker 1 You know, that happens.

Speaker 1 But I want to be able to do that. I think it was good, actually, for him.
I thought so too. But here's the problem with that.
And I'm going to name names here now. I thought it was.

Speaker 1 unfortunate that people like uh senator gillibrand uh from new york and other democrats used that one moment to kind of cast this one blanket on Mamdani and conveniently kind of attack him instead of attacking the American foreign policy that made it possible for, you know, billions of dollars in American resources to go towards the starvation of communities, the bombing of children, bombing of hospitals, and a set of measures that made, I thought, Israel less safe and was responsible for eradicating Palestinian populations.

Speaker 1 So instead of focusing on the policy, folks started parsing Zahr and Mamdani's language because that was easier and convenient. Or barely even parsing, misconstruing.
I don't think

Speaker 1 Juma had even listened. I don't think she even listened to the interview, basically, based on how she described what he said.

Speaker 1 You know, like it was, again, I kept telling because people kept asking me about it. And I could be like, it was a bad answer.

Speaker 1 And by the way, Brad Lander had been given the same question a week before and gave an answer really that was really eloquent.

Speaker 1 So like he probably should have been able to answer it because he just heard Brad Lander on the same stage give like a like the answer basically you just gave about how the second thought is horrible.

Speaker 1 And you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And that's why he doesn't use that.

Speaker 1 And it it's got to be interesting to see how this plays out in the congressional campaign between Brad Lander who is my candidate and incumbent Dan Goldman in Brooklyn yeah we've had Goldman on I don't know maybe I should have both of them on and hash that out

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Speaker 1 All right, you said you're the cast director? Is that what you said? You know, I'm a decent casting director. I can be pretty good at that.
That's the only thing, it's the only thing I'm good at.

Speaker 1 Like, seriously. There's somebody you might have heard of, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 She was goofing off a little bit, but I want to play it because it's an interesting question on the casting director director question.

Speaker 1 There was a poll that was put out there by my guy, Laksha Jane, I think it's really good over its foot ticket. And, you know, they're just kind of curious.

Speaker 1 They're testing like Newsom versus Vance and AOC versus Vance and seeing how things are right now. Obviously, it's silly at some level, this way out, but it was AOC was up 51 and Vance was a 49.

Speaker 1 Pablo Menriquez, I hope I'm a big fan of his work as well, migrant insider, caught her on the way to the car outside the Capitol and asked her about the poll. And I just want to play this for you.

Speaker 1 Do you think that you'll beat that you could beat J.D. Vance in a head-to-head race for president, as polling suggests in 2028?

Speaker 9 Listen, these polls, like three years out, are, you know, they are what they are, but let the record show,

Speaker 9 I will stomp him.

Speaker 1 I will stomp him.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Congresswoman. Have a little fun with it.
How did you cast her?

Speaker 1 Is she ready? You know, AOC understands how wrestling works, and she understands that wrestling is popular media now, and popular media is politics now. So that's just a great quote.

Speaker 1 And one can imagine her stomping JD Vance.

Speaker 1 I'm putting my money on AOC in that fight every day of the week. Here's what I'm not going to do, Tim.

Speaker 1 As somebody who can, you know, remember when Republicans were on the outside looking in 2012, they're writing all these memos about how they're not going to be in the White House for another 20, 30 years unless they come back to the middle on immigration, on civil rights, on women's.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I wrote the memo. Okay, all right.
I was just saying,

Speaker 1 I didn't want to call you out, but there's that.

Speaker 1 But I've learned and grown, okay? I've learned and grown. That's life.

Speaker 1 And then a few short years later, we're in the Trump era that seems locked into the future and has taken over our culture entirely. Nobody took Donald Trump seriously as a candidate then.

Speaker 1 I remember that there was this

Speaker 1 junior senator from Illinois with a name that no one could pronounce, who everyone thought maybe could run for president 20 years

Speaker 1 after his speech in 2004. And at a time when Democrats were crestfallen following the loss of John Kerry, again, thought they were going to be in the wilderness forever.

Speaker 1 And this junior senator becomes president and is seen as a transformational figure in American history.

Speaker 1 We are so far away from being able to project who can be successful and who won't be in 2028. You and I can't even imagine what that campaign is actually going to get litigated on.

Speaker 1 Let's turn the corner on 2026 and see where Americans are at with the economy, in the broader culture, what AI is doing to how we communicate with one another, and see if there's somebody who emerges who has a talent for taking advantage of the new modes of communication.

Speaker 1 Then

Speaker 1 I'm an unapologetic, huge AOC fan, and I would ask your readers.

Speaker 1 to pay some attention to the op-ed that she and Senator Tina Smith co-authored in the New York Times about six months ago about social housing in America to alleviate the affordability in housing crisis.

Speaker 1 It shows a thoughtfulness there and an engagement with in the space of ideas that's going to be really essential for all of us to get past this MAGA moment.

Speaker 1 We'll put it in the show notes for people that want to access that easily. Yeah,

Speaker 1 here's another thing that I think we're really aligned on.

Speaker 1 And who knows in the end of the day, like who knows what the future holds and, you know, which candidate will send a thrill up your leg versus mine or whatever.

Speaker 1 The one thing, just based on this conversation and others that we've had, is I just,

Speaker 1 the Democrats have been way too inside the box since that 2008 moment with Barack Obama

Speaker 1 and way too caught up in, as you mentioned, these social media battles between the one faction versus the other faction.

Speaker 1 And it's like, what is needed right now is to, is, like you're saying, go listen to people, go out and talk, go see what is resonating, you know, what you can talk about that inspires people and talk about it.

Speaker 1 And it doesn't, you don't have to fit the Obama faction or the Bernie faction or whatever. It can be something new.

Speaker 1 You can come up with something new that is an amalgamation of a bunch of different like things, like a little good ideas from here and there. And like, that's the thing that worries me right now.

Speaker 1 I still continue to see a limited amount of creative thinking. There are a couple of examples out there of people doing some different stuff, but how do you react to that?

Speaker 1 I believe in an all of the above approach right now.

Speaker 1 Let's go and test a bunch of things, try a bunch of things, but make sure that all that testing and all that trying is proximate to actual normal people.

Speaker 1 Go on out there, try a bunch of different things, test a bunch of different things, but make sure that in the trying and testing, you're not just yelling at each other on social media, but you're getting down on the ground and you're listening to people and interrogating your own assumptions through their lived experiences.

Speaker 1 I've spent some time with Graham Plattner, the Senate candidate in Maine, who, of course, has

Speaker 1 had a number of interesting controversies, let's say. But in the time that I've spent with him,

Speaker 1 I find that he can be incredibly unassuming, incredibly vulnerable, and he's really clear that the folks that he's listening to on the ground are paying no attention to like the broader conversation of controversies and instead are insisting that he and others take the best practices from the things that they like about Barack Obama, the things that they like about Donald Trump, the things they appreciated about Joe Biden's empathetic investments in working people and to apply them in ways that could help them make some ground because they feel as if they've been losing ground for a generation.

Speaker 1 Sure, I hear you on that.

Speaker 1 He's interesting. He's doing things different.
We and Favreau hash this out a little bit. It'll be interesting to watch.

Speaker 1 Maybe we'll check back in on what's happened with Graham Plattner next spring and see what we think about it. But it's worth watching.

Speaker 1 I'd be super excited about Graham Plattner if he was running in Florida or Texas or, you know what I mean? Or one of these other, like one of these red states.

Speaker 1 Just be like, let's see if something like this works. Like, try it.
The Maine race is so important for the Senate.

Speaker 1 Like, that's the one thing that I'm like, is this the one where I want to try out a new guy with the weird tattoo? You know what, Tim? You know what?

Speaker 1 That's a decision for the primary voters in Maine to make. It is.
It is.

Speaker 1 I'm a little fatigued by my friends who are discouraging of primaries.

Speaker 1 Let the flowers bloom. Let's have the debate.
Let's litigate all this stuff.

Speaker 1 The voters are going to decide who they think is the best, the strongest candidate to emerge to carry the case into general elections and beyond.

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Speaker 1 All right. You mentioned earlier you're born in the Congo.
A few questions for you related to that. So are you scared of ice? Are you looking around your shoulder there in New York? You worried

Speaker 1 they're going to be denaturalizing? No, you're you're I understand you're a citizen, but they're you know

Speaker 1 you're kind of sort of making a joke, but you and I have had this conversation in person before.

Speaker 1 I will tell you, so born in the Congo, my family's from Haiti, and my mother and my and all my aunties tim when i come on shows like this now they immediately send me text messages and they say you can't do this you have to be careful this is frightening because those are people who grew up under authoritarianism and they know it when they see it and they see donald trump's behavior they see how powerful people and institutions are bowing you know bowing down before him and they see the retribution against powerful people like the Attorney General of New York State, Tish James, or the former FBI director.

Speaker 1 He's using every power in the government. He's weaponizing the IRS, weaponizing the FBI, DOJ, et cetera, in a way that frightens people in my life who've had to flee authoritarianism.
So I appreciate

Speaker 1 the attempt at humor, but it is a real thing. Sometimes things are so bad, the only way to deal with it.
I can't imagine being a Somali American in Minnesota right now, right?

Speaker 1 Where the most powerful person on the planet has called your community garbage and says you need to be deported. What's going to happen to Somali school kids in Minnesota?

Speaker 1 How are they going to be treated?

Speaker 1 I'm thinking about the Haitian refugees who were invited into Ohio by the Republican governor to fill jobs that were going wanting, who were then attacked by Donald Trump and J.D.

Speaker 1 Vance and Marco Ruby and all these folks in a way that scares folks from going to school, from reporting crime in their community because they think that they're the ones who will get taken away.

Speaker 1 This stuff has downward pressure all through our community. So, if you ask me if I'm, you know, anxious, I'm damn anxious for all of us right now.
Yeah, I mean, you know how hard this stuff hits me.

Speaker 1 So, you know, sometimes my high school team comes out and I got to make sarcastic jokes about it to deal with it.

Speaker 1 Because that degree of terror, really, that is, that is rolling through these communities is real.

Speaker 1 And I appreciate you mentioning, I want to talk about some of the African stuff, but you mentioned the Haitians. And so we should talk about that.

Speaker 1 You know, and just used and disposed for this joke about the dogs and the cats and the eating, you know, and it's just like, it's like nobody even thought it was real. They made it up.

Speaker 1 It's a racist joke about real people, have real suffering, real consequences. And now no effort to like make Springfield better.

Speaker 1 It's not like they're spending a lot of time in Springfield, bringing jobs or bringing new people in Springfield. The only thing they've done is terrorize people.

Speaker 1 Folks now maybe having to, you know, something getting kicked out, not knowing what their status is, not knowing what to do.

Speaker 1 You know, I was talking to somebody, you know, who has an employee that like, they don't know what to do. They don't, they've been here since they were a kid.
You know, they're in their 50s now.

Speaker 1 They don't know how to go back to their own. You know, they're like, should I turn myself in and take the $1,000? But I don't know what I would do if I go back to the country.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's truly horrifying. It's creating fear in those communities for sure, Tim, but it's also doing something else.
It is kind of...

Speaker 1 denigrating the very voters who Donald Trump is supposed to be speaking for.

Speaker 1 A couple of years ago, I was down at the border in Del Rio, Texas, after those images popped up on CNN of border agents on horseback who were chasing Haitian migrants and using the, you know, just was dehumanizing.

Speaker 1 And I went there to bring support to those communities.

Speaker 1 And I found the American citizens at the border who did not agree with Joe Biden's immigration policies, who were collecting clothes, who were putting food together, and who were figuring out how to help take care of folks who they understood were coming here to try to live their best American lives here in our states.

Speaker 1 Even though they disagreed with Biden's policies, they were able to extend grace to other human beings who they knew were vulnerable and who had the best intentions for their families and who were not the criminals that Donald Trump depicts them as.

Speaker 1 There's something denigrating and degrading about what Trump is saying about the humanity of his very voters, who I think have a tremendous more grace and soulfulness than their president has.

Speaker 1 And we're going to have to figure this stuff out on the other side and appreciate Donald Trump is not the issue. He's not the problem.

Speaker 1 He is a symptom of a profound and pronounced lack of sympathy, lack of empathy that we have generally in our nation right now, and an inability to talk to one another instead of shouting at each other on these ridiculous platforms that other people are benefiting from.

Speaker 1 We got to figure out how we break through so that we can build durable, reasonable majorities for change in 2028 and beyond. The cyclical thing is going to happen in the midterms, Tim.

Speaker 1 I'm pretty confident that Hakeem Jeffries is going to be Speaker of the House because of the hard work that folks are going to do on the ground and the smart communication that we'll get and all the money that's going to be spent in politics.

Speaker 1 But in many ways, it's a cyclical turn. Nothing cyclical is guaranteed in 2028 if we don't have much harder conversations with average folk about what their aspirations are.

Speaker 1 I want to talk about that durable problem, though, and this lack of empathy and where we might end up in one area in particular, though, which is, and you did some work with PEPFAR, and I've done a bunch of other work in Africa and the global south.

Speaker 1 Like, this feels irreversible. And obviously, lives have been lost.
That's irreversible. But on top of that, it's like

Speaker 1 hard to imagine

Speaker 1 what

Speaker 1 a democratic person wanting to use political capital on trying to rebuild all of the

Speaker 1 effort you know all the infrastructure that goes into that anyway i mean since you've had a first-hand perspective i'm just wondering what you're you think about it well this is why i love being on your show because you're going to cover all all the important ground we don't talk about this stuff enough it's not irreversible all the damage that was done to us aid was unimaginable in the first place and yet it happened and so it may seem irreversible now but if we can figure out a way to make common cause with a lot of conservatives who have supported things like PEPFAR in the past.

Speaker 1 I think we can get to the other side of this and reconstitute what it means to have a partnership with a lot of government, a lot of communities in the global south that are faster growing than most other places in the world.

Speaker 1 Africa is like the fastest growing continent, and we know that outcomes in South Africa, in Kenya, and Nigeria are going to have consequences, either positive or negative for us, depending on how we partner and how we attend to that stuff.

Speaker 1 I think that there's space here to make common cause with enough folk who care about these issues that we can fix this stuff.

Speaker 1 I was asked some months ago to sign a petition to push back against what was being done at the U.S. Institute for Peace.

Speaker 1 And I said to my friends, then, I'm not going to sign this petition because, you know what?

Speaker 1 I disagree, obviously, with everything that Elon Musk and Donald Trump have done to USIP and they're taking over the building and sticking Donald Trump's name on it.

Speaker 1 But I'm not signing any petition that's not part of helping to build a new narrative around what these institutions actually mean in the world and what they mean for the American people.

Speaker 1 I don't want to restore us to what we had before because these things were not exactly working as well as they should have and delivering in the way, in the manner that

Speaker 1 we expect with our tax dollars and with our values.

Speaker 1 So let's figure out the new common story that we're telling here, helping folks appreciate what these investments, what these partnerships mean, how they benefit directly from them, how we don't get through the pandemic crisis, for instance, if not for the enormous investments that we had made in helping to create a scaffolding around global health institutions over the last 20 years that finally benefited Americans directly in that moment.

Speaker 1 We got to tell the story better,

Speaker 1 and then I'm going to be ready to fight for those institutions to be rebranded and rebuilt. It's not impossible.

Speaker 1 I'll tell you, I remember people like me, people like me who were critical of conservatives who came into the USAID space, the PEPFAR space, who are using the language of charity and the framework of charity instead of the framework of a partnership that we thought was necessary.

Speaker 1 I found some of it to be a little patronizing, a little condescending, but you know what?

Speaker 1 I'd rather have that frame than no frame whatsoever and no investment whatsoever and no partnership whatsoever. So I'm going to have to figure out,

Speaker 1 if I'm an Africanist, the way that I am an Americanist, I got to figure out how I have have conversations with conservative ministers and their congregations and their social

Speaker 1 health and help groups to figure out how we partner better in the Caribbean, in Latin America, in sub-Saharan Africa, in ways that will benefit folks who are in those countries, but Americans themselves.

Speaker 1 Man. I'm not giving up on it.
I could do a whole other hour on that.

Speaker 1 We're going to leave it there. That was a note of optimism.
Some of us blew it.

Speaker 1 I caught myself as one who got it wrong in those periods when Democrats were in power and we thought we didn't have to have the conversation even about these issues.

Speaker 1 And we should have been debating them in a robust way.

Speaker 1 And I don't think we would be where we are today, where these institutions and this investment has no constituency, no political constituency in America.

Speaker 1 I lied, I have one more question for you because it's something that I'm grappling with now. I'm going to make a parallel.
I was watching this morning this debate happening and it's a MAGA debate.

Speaker 1 And there's this debate right now where, you know, on the right, you have this huge push for like, we need to respect heritage Americans only, you know, and like, we care when you got here.

Speaker 1 And, you know, it's all part of the new kind of blood and soil nativism. And within that debate, Ben Shapiro was in there and he was saying, like, no, actually, that's not right.
That's not America.

Speaker 1 Like, America is a creedal nation and we have these fundamental beliefs. Now, I think Ben Shapiro's behavior has been awful the last 10 years.

Speaker 1 He saw Trump clearly, like I did in 2015, and has gone along with it.

Speaker 1 That said, I was like, you know, it's better to have somebody in this space saying that, you know, than the alternative. And

Speaker 1 I pointed that out on social media and I've had some of my lefty friends push back on me on that and talk about how awful he is. I'm like, I agree, he's awful.

Speaker 1 But like, that's a question that we're all going to have, right?

Speaker 1 Like you're saying you look back on this and you say, well, God, I think some of the evangelicals that supported aid, you know into africa were doing so in a way that was maybe condescending and not helpful and whatever but like that's preferable to people who say

Speaker 1 f everyone in the shithole countries you know what i mean and so how do you think about that going forward like i think it's going to be tough to repair all this stuff until i have to sit at tables with people again I respected what you said about Ben Shapiro.

Speaker 1 I did not respect when you attacked Perila Jayapal, but I did.

Speaker 1 You did say a lot.

Speaker 1 What did I neglect?

Speaker 1 I can take it. She had a critique about a broad approach on language, and you quote-tweeted her in a way that seemed kind of unnecessarily, egregiously punching down.

Speaker 1 But I don't want to focus on that. It's more important, I think, to focus on your Ben Shapiro point, which I respected.

Speaker 1 I actually think that we have to recognize that this is not just a left versus right moment. This is not a Democrats versus Republican moment.

Speaker 1 If we really do believe that there's an existential threat to our democracy, we got to look for defectors.

Speaker 1 We got to be willing to be in conversation with people who perhaps can be persuaded towards their better selves, towards our better selves, if we're going to engage them meaningfully at times when they reject something that Donald Trump does, when he attacks Rob Reiner after Rob Reiner has been murdered, or attack his attack on birthright citizenship, or who are willing to say, you know what, there's something gross about the way these tech companies seem to be, you know, giving Donald Trump like a big check, and then he endorses everything they want in the regulatory framework.

Speaker 1 So, anyone who's pushing back against the corruption, the cruelty, the crassness, we have to find ways,

Speaker 1 the unconstitutionality of much of what he's doing. We got to find ways to be in conversation with those folks and to honor those defections, even while we robustly

Speaker 1 disagree with

Speaker 1 their journey. I have massive problems with Ben Shapiro, but I ought to be able to say, you know what, on this issue, he's not wrong,

Speaker 1 and we welcome him engaging on this and seeming to be thoughtful on it. I've got no problem doing that.
It doesn't make me weaker in some way. Doesn't make you dirty? No, not even a little bit.

Speaker 1 Not even a little bit, man. We are at an existential crisis.
We have a president of the United States who's engaged in extrajudicial murders off off the coast of this country.

Speaker 1 We have, you know, I have this old-fashioned notion that the state must always show itself.

Speaker 1 And here, the state is not showing itself, or we have massed agents who are running through Main Street USA and picking people up and disappearing them. Come on.

Speaker 1 We have a president who is holding hostage the academic freedom that we have always honored in the highest institutions in the world, in our colleges and universities.

Speaker 1 We have irrational tariff policy that's making enemies of traditional allies. We seem to be negotiating peace settlements in the Ukraine that benefits those who attack the Ukraine.

Speaker 1 I could go on and on and on. This is an existential moment that we're in.

Speaker 1 And so I have to find ways to get into conversation with folks who I have not been in lockstep on or people who I believe have said and done reprehensible things that I violently disagree with.

Speaker 1 We got to save this

Speaker 1 little nation of ours. We got to.
I appreciate your wisdom always. And if I, you know, if I'm popping off on something and it's a miss, you just text me, okay?

Speaker 1 I'm not, none of us are batting 100 out here. All right.
I always appreciate your feedback.

Speaker 1 I'm always willing to admit the mistakes that I make every single day. And I only called that one out because I deserve to know.
That's good. That's good.
You keep me in check, okay?

Speaker 1 We need that around here. Tyr Gressford, we'll be doing this again in 2026.
I always appreciate you. Have a wonderful holiday with your family.
I appreciate you.

Speaker 1 Get yourself a little elf on your shelf.

Speaker 1 Represent me in the house.

Speaker 1 We'll catch you soon. All right.
Appreciate you and the bulwarks Ed. All right.
Everybody else, we'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the podcast. See y'all then.
Peace.

Speaker 1 this was not for sale.

Speaker 1 I was born to fight, hey.

Speaker 1 He said I ain't been knocked down yet.

Speaker 1 I was born to fight.

Speaker 1 And till he wandered to his bed.

Speaker 1 Ain't no man, no woman, no beast of art that can feed me. Till I'm on the fight.

Speaker 1 They're trying to dig into my soul

Speaker 1 Take away the spirit of my God

Speaker 1 Trying to take control

Speaker 1 Monitor my every thought

Speaker 1 And I know, I know I won't let down my God

Speaker 1 I hung on the fire

Speaker 1 I said I ain't been knocked down yet.

Speaker 1 I hung on the fight, yeah.

Speaker 1 I tell him I'm the curious bed.

Speaker 1 Ain't no man, no woman, no piece of art that can beat me around

Speaker 1 for

Speaker 1 the fight.

Speaker 1 The Bullard podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 1 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding.

Speaker 11 Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard, but then we found out she had something called agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult.

Speaker 11 So we asked her doctor for more help.

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Speaker 11 I'm glad her doctor recommended Rexulte.

Speaker 10 Talk to your loved ones, doctor. Moments matter.

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