Trump Defies Court Order & Deports Migrants, Lewis Black vs. Air Travel | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson

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This is the Daily Show with your host, Jordan Clever.

Speaker 3 Welcome to the Daily Show. I am Jordan Clapper.
We got so much to talk about tonight. The Trump administration deports and says no backsees.

Speaker 3 Biden's pardons might need their own pardon, and Lewis Black screams about plane safety like a Southwest passenger who got overserved. So, let's get right into it.

Speaker 3 Now, one of Trump's big promises for his second term was deporting violent immigrants from America, and he often mentioned one violent gang in particular. Trende Aragua.

Speaker 4 Remove the savage gang, Trendi Aragua. Trende Aragua.
Trendy Argua.

Speaker 3 Trende Aragua.

Speaker 3 You know, the members of that gang are like, is that us? He's talking about...

Speaker 3 Trump sounds like my grandfather ordering Chipotle.

Speaker 3 I'll take the Barbara Acora!

Speaker 3 Buenos Nachos!

Speaker 3 And over the weekend, Trump announced he was deporting hundreds of these suspected Venezuelan gang members all the way back to

Speaker 3 El Salvador. So

Speaker 3 close enough. And of course, these suspected gang members would be afforded a rigorous legal procedure, including a trial, the presentation of evidence, and all the rights of due process.

Speaker 3 I'm just fing with you.

Speaker 3 You did it, Trump.

Speaker 5 The administration invoking an obscure law, the Aliens Enemies Act of 1798, which allows the government to deport people with little to no due process and was last used to round up Japanese Americans during World War II.

Speaker 3 Last used to round up Japanese Americans during World War II.

Speaker 3 Why does Trump always have to pick the oldest, most racist laws to do what he wants to do? I'm cutting taxes under the authority of the It's Okay to Drown Italians Law of 1863.

Speaker 3 It's not just that it's archaic. Invoking that law has some big

Speaker 3 problems. One is that if you're deporting gang members but there's no due process, then you don't really know if you're deporting gang members.

Speaker 3 You're just deporting people who you think look like gang members. And if you start deporting every shady looking guy with questionable tattoos, I mean, who's going to go to jets games?

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 you know what? You know what?

Speaker 3 I'm sure Donald Trump has the cultural understanding to carefully discern who is a member of...

Speaker 3 What's that gang name again?

Speaker 4 Trendy Argua.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you guys are f ⁇ ing.

Speaker 3 There's another problem problem with invoking this law, which is it's supposed to be used in wartime. So to make this work, Trump had to pretend that we're at war with Venezuela, which we're not.

Speaker 3 Not to mention, a pretend war is an extremely complicated concept to throw at the Secretary of Defense on St. Patrick's Day.

Speaker 3 So.

Speaker 3 Man.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 So, bottom line, bottom line here.

Speaker 3 Okay, there's a lot of legal questions up in the air. So on Saturday, a federal judge decided to pump the brakes.

Speaker 6 That federal judge, in an emergency hearing Saturday, ordered any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States.

Speaker 6 Adding, this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.

Speaker 3 Oh, well,

Speaker 3 it was a good try, Donald, but the judge has ruled, and that's the way the system works. So Trump brought the Venezuelans back, gave them due process, did the whole constitution thing.

Speaker 3 I'm f with you again.

Speaker 3 He ignored the judge.

Speaker 7 The administration made a calculated decision to ignore a federal judge's directive to turn the flights around.

Speaker 3 My God, I mean, if you had told me that Donald Trump would trigger a constitutional crisis just seven weeks into his term, I would have said, that is a lot later than I thought.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 Donald showed a lot of restraint. I mean, Trump's really becoming presidential.

Speaker 3 Of course, the administration didn't just come out and say, we don't listen to judges from now on. They had the respect for the judicial branch to come up with some bullshit.

Speaker 8 The White House argued that Bosberg's written order was issued when the planes were already mid-air and that his verbal order some 40 minutes earlier did not count.

Speaker 3 It didn't count.

Speaker 3 Is that how rulings work? You have to put it in writing, you can't just say it? Well, this is definitely not the first time that Trump has defended himself by arguing that oral doesn't count.

Speaker 3 Look it up. Look it up.

Speaker 3 Like the judge wasn't terribly impressed with that argument, so Trump's lawyers went with another response, which was, can't catch me, Forcefield!

Speaker 4 The Trump administration argued that the court no longer had jurisdiction once the planes were over international waters.

Speaker 3 Yes, okay. Apparently, the Constitution is not in effect over international waters.
That explains Carnival Cruise Line's new ship, the SS, cruel and unusual punishment.

Speaker 3 And while the Trump administration is saying that it has the right to ignore judicial orders, President Trump himself is somehow going even further.

Speaker 3 President Donald Trump just took to Truth Social and deemed this judge, responding to this decision here, calling him a radical left lunatic of a judge, a troublemaker, an agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama.

Speaker 3 He says this judge should be impeached.

Speaker 3 So there you have it. Donald Trump went from, oh, sorry, we would have listened to this judge if we had heard it in time, to actually,

Speaker 3 this lunatic judge should be impeached. And if you would have told me that that all happened in 48 hours, I would have said, wow, again, longer than I expected.

Speaker 3 Now, some of you might be thinking, Jordan, Jordan, Jordan, enough about this constitutional crisis. I want to hear about another constitutional crisis.
Well, you're in luck.

Speaker 9 Last night, the president posted on social media that said, quote, the pardons that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the unselect committee of political thugs and many others are hereby declared void, vacant, and of no further force or effect because of the fact that they were done by autopen

Speaker 3 He's voiding Joe Biden's pardons. It's not enough that he's fighting the judicial branch in the present.
He's also fighting the executive branch in the past.

Speaker 3 He's causing more problems in the multiverse than Jonathan Majors.

Speaker 3 But yes, I guess Donald Trump just found out about auto pens, which leads us to one of the most annoying events in a Trump presidency.

Speaker 3 Donald learns about something new, so we all have to learn about it too.

Speaker 11 Presidents Biden and Obama both used an auto pen device to sign official documents, a practice that is legally binding.

Speaker 4 The actual use of the auto pen dates back to Thomas Jefferson.

Speaker 4 What?

Speaker 3 Thomas Jefferson? I mean, I guess that makes sense. When you have that many secret kids, that's a lot of birthday cards you got to sign.

Speaker 3 Busy man.

Speaker 3 Now, to be fair to Trump, he's not just saying Joe Biden used an auto pen. It's something far more sinister.

Speaker 3 A conspiracy so evil that Trump took time out of his busy schedule waiting for the airplane bathroom to discuss.

Speaker 3 The whole subject of photopen, did he know what he was doing? Did he authorize it? Or is this somebody in an office, maybe a radical left lunatic, just signing whatever that person was?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 3 Good question. Did Joe Biden really sign the pardons that he said several times he signed? Or did a radical left lunatic sneak into the Oval Office and start signing whatever was in the room?

Speaker 3 Pardons, laws, doctor's notes, yearbooks. I mean did Joe Biden really want Cindy to have a great summer or was it the deep states?

Speaker 3 My favorite part of this whole story is how Trump tried to claim that he would never use an auto pen, only to remember that he actually did use an auto pen. I never used it.

Speaker 3 I mean, we may use it as an example to send some young person a letter because it's nice, you know, we get thousands and thousands of letters and letters of support for young people, for people that aren't feeling well, etc.

Speaker 3 Yeah, if I'm doing important things like pardoning January 6ers, I'll sign it myself. But for doing stupid shit like writing letters to sick kids, docu sign is fine.

Speaker 3 Either way, Trump basically just admitted that he doesn't personally sign any of the get-well letters he sends to young people who aren't feeling well.

Speaker 3 Now, obviously, that's not the important part of this story. What's important is the danger that...
Excuse me, Jordan. Jordan.

Speaker 3 Well, oh,

Speaker 3 Troy, Troyawada, everybody.

Speaker 3 Troy.

Speaker 3 I'm Troy, Troy. Where are you right now?

Speaker 12 Jordan, I'm at the hospital for young people who aren't feeling well.

Speaker 12 And you might not think that their feelings are important, but when these sick kids found out that Trump used an auto pen on their letters, their hearts broke and they died.

Speaker 3 What?

Speaker 3 Holy shit,

Speaker 3 all the kids died?

Speaker 12 Well, no, there's still one hanging on, and he is being so brave.

Speaker 3 And, oh, okay.

Speaker 3 There he goes. That was the last one.
Okay.

Speaker 3 Are we sure it was their... their broken hearts? It wasn't whatever medical condition they were dealing with?

Speaker 12 No, a lot of them weren't even sick. Some had scrapes, some some had a tummy ache, some had that fake get-out-of-school cough, you know, with the curled tongue, the

Speaker 3 that one.

Speaker 12 But no matter what it was, when they learned about the auto pen, their hearts just stopped working. Except for one kid whose life support cord I tripped over.
That was my bad.

Speaker 3 And I said I was sorry. Okay, look.

Speaker 4 Troy, Troy, look, I don't get this.

Speaker 3 Trump has been so cruel to sick kids. He's cut cancer research and medical services.
He's threatening their health insurance. I mean, what do they love so much about Trump?

Speaker 12 Little kids just love tariffs, Jordan.

Speaker 12 I don't know, maybe some of them are racist, but

Speaker 12 the point is they're gone now. No more little Booger fingers, no more department store tantrums, no more screaming on airplanes.
You know what? I'm kind of talking myself into this.

Speaker 3 Troy, no.

Speaker 3 Troy, you're being very callous. Sorry, you're right.
You're right.

Speaker 12 Okay, some of these kids were five and six years old, so all they had at the end were their stuffed animals and their jobs at Doge.

Speaker 3 It was

Speaker 12 a real tragedy.

Speaker 3 It is. You're right.
You're right. I mean,

Speaker 3 I don't know how their families are going to live with this.

Speaker 12 Well, fortunately, President Trump sent them all letters of condolence. He got a lot of them signed pretty quickly.

Speaker 3 And oh, wait, oh, wait, families, don't open those letters.

Speaker 13 Oh, shit. Everyone's dead.

Speaker 3 Everyone's dead. Tragic stuff.
Troyana, everyone.

Speaker 3 We come back, Louis Black is grounded, so stick around.

Speaker 3 Welcome back to the Daily Show. Now, when a new story falls through the cracks, Lewis Black catches it for a segment we call Back in Black.

Speaker 3 You know, once upon a time, air travel was a pleasant experience. People got dressed up.
The food was good. And if someone put their elbow on your armrest, you could burn it with your cigarette.

Speaker 3 Of course, nowadays, travel sucks, and it's only getting worse.

Speaker 13 The recent string of horrific plane crashes are making many wonder, is it safe to fly?

Speaker 4 Scary moments at LaGuardia Airport after a Delta plane's wing struck the runway.

Speaker 3 Near miss between the Southwest Airlines plane that is landing right there and a private jet, look at that, that crosses its way.

Speaker 2 An American Airlines plane engine on fire after landing at Denver International Airport.

Speaker 7 The former president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association had this stark warning.

Speaker 4 Unfortunately, in 2025,

Speaker 4 The United States airspace system is no longer considered the gold standard around the world.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no shit.

Speaker 3 What else are you going to tell me? Alec Baldwin is no longer the gold standard in workplace safety?

Speaker 3 And look, I'm no aviation safety expert, but I'm pretty sure the plane is supposed to land right side up, not splayed on its back like it's waiting for a happy ending.

Speaker 3 Oh, Svetlana, my landing gear isn't going to tickle itself.

Speaker 3 So it's safe to say air travel is in rougher shape than RFK Jr.'s larynx.

Speaker 3 And all of these mishaps are no coincidence since America treats its air traffic controllers like crap.

Speaker 4 Air traffic controllers are under tremendous stress right now. Many controllers working mandatory overtime, six-day weeks of 10-hour shifts staffing across the country is a huge and chronic problem.

Speaker 4 The country is still short, some 3,000 to 4,000 air traffic controllers.

Speaker 3 How is this possible? There are 300 million people in this country, and we can't find any more air traffic controllers. Listen, America, some of you need to help land airplanes.

Speaker 3 We can't all be TikTok influencers. And I was doing it first.

Speaker 3 What up, fam? Remember to smash that like button or I'll kill myself.

Speaker 3 Wow, 3 million likes. Jokes on you.
I'm still going to kill myself.

Speaker 3 So yes, it seems like air traffic controllers are in a wee bit of trouble. Luckily, inbred Freddie Mercury is here to help.

Speaker 4 Critics say issues could get worse with recent firings of 400 FAA staff members by Elon Musk and the Trump administration's Doge.

Speaker 3 Good God, Elon, what are you doing? How can I put this in a way you understand?

Speaker 3 You're supposed to keep the planes up here.

Speaker 3 Naturally, with all the chaos, you might be terrified to get on a plane, but there are plenty of insufferable ways to get over your fears.

Speaker 4 If you're feeling anxious on the plane, try deep breathing, meditation, and distraction with books, music, movies, or conversations with others.

Speaker 14 There's also having positive self-talk, having some reality conversations. I'm okay.
This is a plane ride. I'm almost there.

Speaker 4 I can make it. Hi, Tom, put a rubber band on your wrist.
When you start feeling phobic, or worried, or anxious, just gently snap it, and it sort of pulls you back.

Speaker 3 Who listens to him?

Speaker 3 God, that is beyond dumb. I'm sure your seatmate would love to spend seven hours listening to you snap a rubber band and mumble, I'm okay.
Snap,

Speaker 3 everything is fine, snap. No one else can smell my nervous diarrhea.
Snap, snap, snap.

Speaker 3 Personally, personally, when I'm flying, I like to ease my anxiety by screaming, there's a bird in the engine, we're all gonna die.

Speaker 3 But hey, you do you.

Speaker 3 Of course, if you're riddled with anxiety, why not distract yourself by watching my latest TikTok?

Speaker 3 There's a burn in the engine. We're all gonna die.
See in hell, fam.

Speaker 3 Jordan,

Speaker 3 Lewis Black, everyone. We come back.
Ezra Flyers are time for you around the town. Don't go away.

Speaker 3 Welcome back to the Daily Show. My guests tonight are journalists and co-authors of the new book, Abundance.

Speaker 3 Please welcome New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein and staff writer for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson.

Speaker 3 Gentlemen!

Speaker 3 Gentlemen, you're out a book about an optimistic future, about reforming America's institutions. Why delve into sci-fi?

Speaker 4 It's a good deep question.

Speaker 10 Yeah, there's a sentence in the first chapter of the book that sounds like one of the most obvious sentences ever written in any nonfiction book ever.

Speaker 10 We say, quote, to have the future that we want, America needs to build and invent more of what we need.

Speaker 10 How in the world do you have to write an entire book about the most obvious sentence you've ever heard?

Speaker 3 So you cribbed that sentence is what you said. Absolutely.
You stole it and put it up. Scott GPT wrote that sentence.
It's so easy now. And the whole the whole part of the book.

Speaker 10 And the thing is, you know, you wouldn't have to write a whole book about that sentence if you lived in a world of sanity. But we don't.

Speaker 10 We live in a world of the constitutional crises that you talked about. And we also live in a world that has affordability crises and housing crises.

Speaker 10 And a lot of these crises, unfortunately, are worst in blue states and blue cities.

Speaker 10 And so, what our book is trying to do is to redefine liberalism, the Democratic Party, for an age where the Democratic Party is incredibly unpopular, but it has to be strong and popular to take on Donald Trump.

Speaker 10 But I think we have to take a good long look in a mirror and say, why is it that we've allowed the places we have the most power to become so problematic that people are leaving and we're losing power in these places.

Speaker 3 Now the book is essentially it's written to the left. as sort of a credo as to what we should be looking forward to.
What is this idea of abundance?

Speaker 3 In a nutshell, what are we talking about?

Speaker 4 So for a long time, the left has looked for what it could subsidize, right? If we don't have enough health care insurance, can we give you a health care voucher? That's Obamacare.

Speaker 4 Can we give you food stamps to get food, Pell Grants to get higher education, rental vouchers to get housing?

Speaker 4 Then you look at places where liberals govern, and a lot of it doesn't work because we don't have enough of the core thing.

Speaker 4 If you give people a bunch of rental vouchers in New York City, in San Francisco, what often happens is that they can't get housing because there isn't enough of it or the price goes up.

Speaker 4 Higher education has a similar dynamic. Healthcare has some dynamics like that.
You gotta at a certain point focus on building enough of the things you need. Housing is a big one.
I'm from California.

Speaker 4 I'm from Irvine, California, down south from Los Angeles. I lived in San Francisco during much of the writing of the book.
This is a solved problem. We know how to build apartment buildings.

Speaker 4 We know how to build homes. We just don't let people do it.
And the result is that California, New York, Illinois are losing hundreds of thousands of people a year.

Speaker 4 So many that by 2030, after the census, where we reapportion political power based on population, after that, if all goes as it's been going, a Democrat who won every state Kamala Harris won and also won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin still wouldn't win the presidency because blue states would have lost so much power by driving out working-class families to red states.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, you got to fix this stuff.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and maybe I want to tweak that optimistic look at the future.

Speaker 3 But you speak about this. You talk a lot about the regulations in places like California, in places like New York.
Is the answer to make California look more like Texas?

Speaker 3 Is that what we're talking about?

Speaker 10 Sometimes I think absolutely the answer is to make California look more like Texas.

Speaker 10 I mean, sometimes if the problem is that a city has too many regulations and too much zoning and too many rules that get in the way of accessing the most basic technology of putting up sticks and adding an elevator, then yeah, you take away the bad rules that are getting in the way of adding housing supply where you have to just add more damn houses.

Speaker 10 It doesn't mean though that we're Texas Republicans. And I think it's important to say that neither is Donald Trump in a weird way.

Speaker 10 Like Trump was elected because of an affordability crisis in this country. He was elected because of inflation.
And the biggest part of inflation, the biggest part of anybody's budget, is housing.

Speaker 10 Trump could have been elected and said, I'm a Texas Republican and my first order of business is going to be to make it easier to build houses in America. What does he do instead?

Speaker 10 He slaps a tariff on lumber from Canada and drywall material from Mexico. Guess what's really, really hard to build if you have no wood and you also have no drywall material?

Speaker 10 It turns out to be houses. So the first thing he does is make it harder to build the thing we need to solve the affordability crisis.

Speaker 10 Donald Trump does not understand how to fix the problems that ironically led to his election.

Speaker 10 That's where Democrats need to stand up and say, we're going to build an opposition movement that fixes people's problems by understanding people's problems.

Speaker 3 Now, how much is...

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 3 You're building an argument for building, for coming together. Obviously, you're writing this book before this past election.

Speaker 3 And there's times where I'm hearing about this vision of if we can get people together to get on the same page,

Speaker 3 we can fix big issues like the housing crisis, like the environment. It feels like we're talking about like we can make this Titanic run beautifully.
But then the election hits and we hit the iceberg.

Speaker 3 So how much of this is still applicable to a democratic movement that feels very hobbled right now?

Speaker 4 I gotta say, man, the thing that surprised me least in the election was the blue shift.

Speaker 3 to Trump. Yeah.
Right?

Speaker 4 That blue cities and blue states had the biggest shift to the right.

Speaker 12 Because this was an affordability election.

Speaker 4 And we're actually, I think, just generally in a new age in American politics. For a very long time after the financial crisis, the problem the economy had was demand.

Speaker 4 We didn't have enough demand, we didn't have enough jobs, we didn't have high enough wages, and everybody on both sides talked endlessly about demand.

Speaker 4 And in the background, for a long time, for decades, there had been this building affordability crisis in health care, in housing, in education, in child care, in elder care.

Speaker 4 And nobody was really doing anything about it. And then the pandemic hit, and inflation hit, and the entire like Sauron's eye of American politics moved to prices.

Speaker 4 And inflation calmed in parts, right? It's not going up the way it was, although we'll see how the tariffs go.

Speaker 4 But the affordability crisis then was in full view and it gotten worse and it had gotten worse. And so we're in this era where people are going to have to figure out how to solve this.

Speaker 4 And yeah, this was a bad election. Like we are in a bad place.
Everything you, I was like having trouble deciding during your monologue, should I laugh?

Speaker 3 Right?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 3 Like this stuff. stuff is.
This is.

Speaker 3 Ezra,

Speaker 3 this is the problem with liberals today. They're watching a comedy show being like, should I laugh? Should I think about it? How do I feel? Let me run some focus groups.
What do you feel, Ezra?

Speaker 4 I have felt like disgusted these last weeks. This has been the worst time I can remember in American politics.

Speaker 4 And the problem that liberals keep running into is they keep trying to beat Donald Trump, not based on what he does to people's lives, but what he does to people's institutions.

Speaker 4 And if the Democratic Party is going to win, if it's going to beat the populist right, which is coming up again and again, not just here, but in other countries, you have to have answers to the problems people face in their lives.

Speaker 4 Not answers to the abstract questions of politics.

Speaker 4 Not answers to who is on the side of democracy, but answers to whose states are better governed. Which places do you want to live? Who has something to say about what is making your Tuesday hard?

Speaker 3 Now, it's interesting you talk about messaging. I get to the the end of the book and you bring up Operation Warp Speed and I'm like, oh, I forgot about Operation Warp Speed.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so did everybody else.

Speaker 10 I mean the thing about Operation Warp Speed is like you have a program that by some accounts saved 10 to 20 million lives around the world by inventing and accelerating the distribution of mRNA vaccines and yet nobody talks about it.

Speaker 10 Nobody talks about it. I think the Democrats don't talk about it because it's kind of awkward to give credit to a program that was initiated under Donald Trump.

Speaker 10 But the weirdest thing of all is that Donald Trump doesn't talk about it. In fact, he's one of the biggest skeptics of mRNA science right now.
So it really is bizarre.

Speaker 10 Like, imagine if we landed a man on the moon and nobody talked about the Apollo program because it just wasn't something that either party could bring up.

Speaker 10 We saved even more lives with Operation Warp Speed than we saved with the Apollo program, and no one talks about it.

Speaker 10 I think it's important to take really, really clear lessons from what Operation Warp Speed did. We set a very clear goal.

Speaker 10 We said in 10 months we're going to develop a therapy that saves people's lives. We're going to get it to everybody if they want it.

Speaker 10 And we're going to make the cost of this world-saving therapeutic, maybe the best medicine in the world, $0.00.

Speaker 10 We set a goal. We identified what the bottlenecks were going to be.
We took away the bottlenecks that existed, and we met the goal. Frankly, that's how government should work more often.

Speaker 10 We should have mayors and governors saying,

Speaker 10 we're going to set a goal for housing supply. I want to add 100,000 units, and I'm not going to let anybody tell me no.

Speaker 10 I care about climate change, so I'm going to add this amount of energy that we're going to create from solar and wind and geothermal, and I'm not going to let anybody tell me no.

Speaker 10 But for some reason, outside of a crisis, we don't have this kind of outcome-oriented politics. This book is about putting outcomes over processes.

Speaker 10 It's about setting a North Star with a big, bold, beautiful sci-fi vision in the first three pages of the book and saying, we can do this, but in order to do it, we have to get out of our own way.

Speaker 3 But you're talking about long-term visions.

Speaker 3 You mentioned having this lens of abundance, it's sort of what you're proposing here. But I think you go out and you talk to people, and we are the politics of short-term results.

Speaker 3 Everything is about what can you get me now. We're not even thinking about the giant medical miracle of Operation Warp Speed from a few years ago.
Like, how does something like this resonate with?

Speaker 3 Folks who are on their phones, they're flipping through, they want an answer right now, they want to be angry right now, they want action right now.

Speaker 3 How do you speak to a grander idea when it feels like the world is moving faster than that? I'm so glad you asked. So,

Speaker 4 you don't get long-term results in politics without short-term results. And this is a thing I think Democrats have really forgotten.
We've been doing high-speed rail in California for a long time.

Speaker 4 Nobody's winning any elections on that. Under Joe Biden, they passed $42 billion for rural broadband.
It passed in, I think, 2021, early 2022.

Speaker 4 By the end of 2024, you know how many people are hooked up to rural broadband? A couple dozen. We passed $7.5 billion for electric vehicle chargers to build a nationwide EV charger network.

Speaker 4 We built a couple dozen by the end of his presidency. You cannot win elections if you are passing billions of dollars that people cannot feel within two or three or four years.
And

Speaker 4 that does not have to happen. In the time that California has not built 500 miles of high-speed rail, China built 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.
We can do this.

Speaker 4 Making sure that money through government flows faster is how you make sure that people know government actually matters in their lives. When it goes too slowly, they don't know.

Speaker 4 And then somebody comes out and says, oh, vote for me. I'm the strong man.
I alone can fix it. I will make it work.
And then you run the risk that they're going to believe him.

Speaker 3 Now,

Speaker 3 in looking at the Democratic field right now, Democrats, I think, are hearing this message and then they're saying, maybe we should go on more podcasts.

Speaker 3 It feels like they're taking baby steps to this. Who is carrying this message? Who do you see as somebody? Like, we come out here and we talk to audiences in between acts.

Speaker 3 And more often than not, people are, they're desperate for an answer, whether that looks like resistance or whether that looks like a vision of the future that they can get behind.

Speaker 3 And we're desperately

Speaker 3 desperately missing some of those voices out there. Do you see this message being carried by anybody articulately?

Speaker 10 I see people in Congress and the Senate and governors explicitly picking up this message.

Speaker 10 I mean, someone asked, a colleague of Ezra Klein's, the New York Times, asked, where's the Democrats Project 2025?

Speaker 10 And Richie Torres, Representative Richie Torres from New York, just tweeted a photo of the cover of this book and without any words, just said, this is my idea of of Project 2025 for the Democratic Party.

Speaker 10 That feels lazy.

Speaker 3 That feels lazy on that part.

Speaker 3 Wow, yeah. Oh, there you go.

Speaker 3 Just to take a picture of war and peace. The second part.
We'll just do the second part.

Speaker 10 We're happy to do the work of writing the book if people are going to be taking up the ideas. But people really are taking up the ideas, and that's cool.
But I want to say one other thing.

Speaker 10 You know, you talked about what's the value of a positive vision. And I think it's a fair question.
Politics is incredibly negative right now.

Speaker 10 But I really do think that there's a lot of voters that are starving for not just a negative identity for their party, but a positive identity, right?

Speaker 10 It's easy for Democrats to say right now why Donald Trump sucks. You can do that over and over and over again.
You could do 10 hours of the constitutional crises that he's starting.

Speaker 3 You could make a television show about that.

Speaker 3 You could make a weekly, daily television show about it.

Speaker 10 What's the positive vision? All right, Donald Trump sucks. What are we going to place him with? What problems are we going to solve if we have power?

Speaker 10 The problem right now is that a lot of Democrats who actually have power in blue cities and blue states aren't doing anything with that power in terms of adding housing and clean energy.

Speaker 10 We want them to to show Americans what will we do if we win, if we can't show Americans the positive vision, if we can't show Americans what happens if we win, do we even deserve to?

Speaker 3 Well, it's a fascinating read.

Speaker 3 Abundance is available now, and also check out the Ezra Klein Show and Derek's Plain English podcast. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
Let's take a quick break. Right back after that.

Speaker 3 That's our show for tonight. Now here it is.
You'll love it again.

Speaker 3 Oswald. Who out there thinks Oswald did it by himself? I used to be that naive.
I know so much more now. Oswald's family and descendants, they have changed their names.
They are impossible to find.

Speaker 3 I've tried.

Speaker 3 Explore more shows from the Daily Show Podcast Universe by searching The Daily Show, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 Watch the Daily Show weeknights at 11, 10 Central on Comedy Central, and stream full episodes anytime on Paramount Plus.

Speaker 5 Paramount Podcasts.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart Podcast.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart Podcast.