Trump’s Lawsuits Are Ruining Media (feat. David Sirota)

Hey, everybody, and welcome back to the Find Out podcast.

I'm sorry that my audio sounds so crappy today.

Rich referred to it as I was in one of the circles of hell, which is true because I'm in a windowless

co-working space office office because all of the soundproof rooms were taken.

So I apologize for that.

But hopefully I'm not going to be doing as much talking today because we have a guest, actually our first ever Academy Award nominated guest, which is really exciting.

So today we have David Sirota with us.

He helped

come up with the storyline for,

I believe it's Don't Look Up, the Netflix movie with Liliridar DiCaprio and about 50 other big names.

He has also been a senior advisor to Bernie Sanders and a speechwriter.

And he is also the executive editor and founder of The Lever, which you should all go to subscribe to.

So, David, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

So, David, there's a big piece of news that broke last week that the timing lined up perfectly because you just wrote about this.

The firing or the cancellation, I should say, of the Stephen Colbert show by CBS.

The timing of that was pretty interesting in that Colbert had just recently criticized the parent company of CBS, I believe, for settling a $16 million lawsuit with Donald Trump.

And then a week later, all of a sudden they were like, oh, this is a cost-cutting decision, even though Stephen Colbert is number one in the ratings and is the only one that has seen his audience go up in the last year.

So, David, walk us through a little bit about your piece and your thoughts on what CBS and their parent company, is that Paramount,

is doing to Stephen Colbert and to independent media in general.

Sure.

So we interviewed New York Times reporter by the name of David Enrich on our podcast, Levertime.

I encourage everyone to go subscribe to it.

And the thrust of the interview is about how all of these cases really can't be seen in isolation, that Donald Trump is essentially weaponizing libel law

to

try to suppress and really silence dissent and specifically criticism of him.

And he's not just using libel law, he's also using the regulatory power of the government.

So it's important to understand the context of what happened, for instance, at Paramount, that Trump was suing Paramount

for

allegedly CBS selectively and dishonestly editing an interview with Kamala Harris to allegedly preference her in the 2024 election.

So as he was doing that, his administration is is also overseeing and getting to decide

on whether Paramount gets to merge with a buyer.

So his antitrust regulators get to do that.

So when you take that context, I think what you see is that

CBS or Paramount essentially cut a deal saying, listen, our need for our merger to get approved that Donald Trump has power over is worth the amount of money to settle this case with Donald Trump.

They settle the case.

Stephen Colbert criticizes the settlement on national television and lays out the context I've just laid out about the merger and the like, calls it a big bribe.

He says that explicitly.

And three days later, Paramount fires Colbert.

Now, we have to take this again in the context of Trump has used libel law to sue ABC, got a settlement from ABC.

Trump is now launched a lawsuit, a libel lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal for the Wall Street Journal's recent reporting on his alleged relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

I think what's going on here is that media outlets are

are trying to cut deals with Trump so he's not a problem to their business.

And perhaps the theory is that by cutting a deal with him, he will lay off, that by bending the knee, this will stop.

But I think what's going on is

that it sends a message to him, and not just him, by the way, to him, billionaires, and corporations, that these tactics, these intimidation tactics really work.

In other words, you're not appeasing the aggressor, you're encouraging the aggressor.

And here's where it really is a problem, I think, not just for journalists, for news outlets, for media companies.

It's a problem for all of us.

So all of that is to say that this is an attempt to make it cost prohibitive to speak out.

And by cost prohibitive, I just want to put a fine point on it.

What it means is you can be sued into the ground.

You can be sued into bankruptcy.

Whether it's by Donald Trump

or it's by your local power broker, a local billionaire, a corporation, can use existing libel laws without changing them.

And Donald Trump says he wants to change them and make them even more, even worse for free speech.

But you can right now under existing libel laws be bankrupted.

That them filing suit against you incurs costs that you may not be able to

pay for for the alleged crime of being critical of billionaires, corporations, and Donald Trump.

To them, it's almost no money to drag you into court and to essentially bankrupt you.

For you, it's your whole, it's sort of your whole life, right?

So, so what I think is going on is that when these media companies, these giant media companies are cutting deals with Trump, they're supposed to be the well-resourced defense to this.

And instead, what they are effectively doing is encouraging an attack on free speech.

Yeah, I mean, and I think the big thing on this, right, is like these lawsuits are not, they're frivolous, right?

Like, there's not actually like, I don't even understand what the damages are that he's claiming that, that, like,

I assume you would concur that most of these, he doesn't even actually plan on getting to the point of getting a conviction or a, or a, you know, fine liable.

He's just doing it to bully them, right?

Look, I think a lot of these cases are legally weak.

Absolutely.

I mean, the case against CBS News didn't really make any sense to me in the sense of even if you take his allegations

at their word, that

CBS selectively edited

the interview with Kamala Harris to preference her in the election.

That is not fundamentally, as far as I can tell, I don't understand how that's defamatory.

to Donald Trump.

I think the ABC case talking about the sexual assault allegations, I think the

Epstein case,

the Epstein reporting by the Wall Street Journal, I guess he could argue that's specifically about me, him, Donald Trump, and he could make the argument, I guess, if the facts don't hold up, granted, a big if,

that that's defamatory to him personally.

But the larger point is, I think, is right, that

it doesn't seem clear that these cases are really about Donald Trump being defamed.

They're about Donald Trump not liking critical reporting about Donald Trump.

And the thing is, is that the libel laws exist in this country.

And for those who don't know, I think it's a really, it's kind of a technical point, but it's important.

It creates a higher standard for so-called public officials to prove libel.

That public officials,

public figures, if you will, you have to prove that

somebody didn't just get something wrong, but deliberately got something wrong,

or had a reckless disregard for the truth.

And the reason that standard exists is because

we want a vigorous free press and a vigorous discourse in this country where if you accidentally get something wrong, you can't be sued into oblivion.

The idea being that if you have to fear that, if you have to fear, you know, sort of getting sued for any teeny little thing, then you're not really going to, it creates a chilling effect.

You're not really going to speak out on much of anything.

And I think that that's what Trump,

big corporations, conservative billionaires, that's actually what they want.

They want you to fear speaking out against them.

They want you to fear that doing that can end up putting you and your family into bankruptcy.

Well, I think it's important, though, that in Trump's defense, he takes great care before speaking.

We can at least return the favor.

We can at least be as good as him as, you know, protecting his father.

He's never said anything false ever.

Never.

And it's because he invests his time and energy in making sure that he is right before he opens his mouth.

I mean, that's, so we should at least return the favor.

That's all I'm saying.

Yeah, I mean, it is really rich coming from him, you know, like this, this idea that you can't just, you know, sort of sort of

criticize people.

I mean, he is a walking criticism machine.

He often doesn't tell the truth at all, to say the least.

So that's why I think, you know, it would be one thing if it was if it was a guy who really did take honest pains to get things correct, right?

Who was very precise in his language.

It's another thing for this to be coming from Donald Trump, which really does say, okay, this is a political tactic, right?

I mean, this is clearly a political tactic to try to shut down criticism of Donald Trump.

Yeah, I think there's also like just two camps.

The more I watch Trump do this, there's two strategies he uses.

One is he's just throwing weight around for PR, which I think is like the Wall Street Journal thing.

Obviously, that story was horrendous for him.

And he was just like, all right, I'm suing you immediately because it doesn't matter if it's a good lawsuit, bad lawsuit.

He's just trying to let you know the public perception on my side I want is that you're wrong.

I'm right.

Okay, so that's another.

But then the other side, going to like the Colbert thing, I think is when he sees he does have leverage and uses it to his, he takes advantage of the weak.

So in that situation, he's popping and going, hey, you want to to merge?

Fuck you.

You're going to give me money if you want to merge.

He's doing the same thing right now with the Washington Commanders.

And he's like, hey, if you don't change your name back to the Redskins, you're not going to get your stadium, dude.

So he has these two spots where like sometimes it's pure protection for himself.

And sometimes it's actually him like leaking into getting a little bit more leverage than he had before.

So he can just get in there and start to turn the dials a little bit more than he did before.

It's kind of insidious.

The second part.

I mean, the first part is just like painful to watch.

It's so transparent.

But the second part is where I get worried, where it's like the little tiny spots where he goes, ooh, look what I can affect here.

He affects it and turns that dial just a little bit.

And nobody seems to notice until they see 10 steps later that the dial's been really, really turned.

I think one of the most notable things after January 20th, or I don't even remember if we made it to January 20th, but Mark Zuckerberg coming out and saying, like, oh, we're going to welcome racism and anti-trans bigotry back to Facebook and all meta projects, right?

We had all of these billionaires, these tech billionaires who shape the vast majority of Americans' perception of reality.

That is the game that they're in.

Basically rigging the game for Donald Trump to encourage his politics, even if that does mean like actual violence and actual harm against people.

And it's it the way that Zuckerberg did it, you know,

looking like he wants to be Gen Z or something with his carrot top head, you know, and a gallon.

But I watched the necklace was nice.

Yeah, like, like, it, it is just so patently offensive that these fucking dorks,

you know, have so much influence over all of us.

And there's nothing we can do about it as consumers, right?

We are, we are, are locked into the system if, if, you know, each one of us have a sub stack, right?

We have tech billionaire uh, Mark Andreessen, or maybe hundreds of millions.

I don't know if he's a billionaire, like that dude is bought in, right?

Yeah, X Twitter completely destroyed by Elon Musk.

You know, we have we've watched uh

Zuckerberg try and become like a bro over the last 10 years or so, learning masculine energy, right?

That's what he said, yeah, like getting into all the masculine energy stuff.

And, you know, then there's Google, YouTube, all of us use YouTube, and we have no choice but to basically live in this world that these tech billionaires who are just going to kowtow to Trump have created for us.

And I think we have to, you know, take us a step back and say, look,

libel laws are being weaponized by billionaires and corporations, dragging people into court, threatening them, et cetera, et cetera, for speaking out.

I mean, again, the New York Times did this amazing piece about United Health, threatening critics of United Health, right?

There was a situation in Texas where a billionaire tried to sue Betto O'Rourke for Betto O'Rourke essentially talking about money and politics.

I think what's different with Trump, what's even scarier with Trump, is that he is using those

kinds of cases while also

being in the top regulatory position in the United States.

So in other words, it's one thing to be threatened by United Health or a billionaire who, if you're at a news organization or you're a journalist, if you're just a critic, and you may want to try to fight that out in court, it's going to be expensive.

It's another thing where, when Donald Trump is,

as president, is suing your news entity, and your news entity is regulated in all sorts of different ways

in its business

by the Trump administration.

And Trump

sort of his regulators being

relatively unabashed about them being willing to reinforce what Donald Trump wants from those news organizations, right?

The FCC was investigating Paramount and CBS over the same thing that Donald Trump was suing Paramount and CBS over.

So this is, I think what I'm getting at here is this is fusing the political agenda of the particular politician to the operation of the state, right?

And that is a classic, a really classic trait

or quality of what happens in authoritarian countries, where the

individual in office and their political ideology is not just expressed as policy that they promised on the campaign trail, but their individual political

sort of desires, a specific personal political desires, gets fused with the agenda of the state regulatory apparatus.

Now, David,

something that I took, I was in journalism school 20 years ago, and libel is always, it's a core part of the education, right?

And

the number one defense against libel was always the truth, if you're telling the truth.

And because if you say, like, he was convicted of 34 felonies, that is a fact, that is true.

And if saying that out loud and amplifying that to 20 million people costs him money,

those aren't damages that are recoverable because you were telling the truth, those are just consequences of a thing that happened and you're telling the truth.

Where does, I mean, I know in when it comes to case law,

if you lose a bunch of these cases in a row, typically that will, you know, stifle frivolous lawsuits.

But how do you feel about it?

He has a bottomless access to resources, right?

Like he can fund every frivolous lawsuit that he wants.

And if there's nothing else, I mean, is there anything else?

Or can we still stand on the truth in a libel accusation?

Or can they still just sue you into oblivion, even if you're telling the truth?

Look, I think if you ultimately take some of these cases to their conclusion in a court system, you can win on the truth.

They have not changed the underlying libel statutes for sure.

And so I think you can win.

The problem is the cost to win, right?

Like if

going all the way to trial and winning your case as a defendant costs $100,000, $200,000,

you may not have that money

to defend yourself, right?

And even in states, some states have these anti-slap laws.

They're called strategic.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, they're laws that slap means strategic lawsuit against public participation.

Essentially, what a slap suit is, is you report the truth, somebody sues you to try to shut you down, to try to shut you up, whether or not

what you're reporting is true.

The design of the lawsuit is to shut you up.

So some states have passed anti-slap laws that are trying to deter those kinds of suits by saying, hey, if you bring a suit and you lose, and you lose under this anti-slap statute, you have to pay the defendant's legal fees.

You pay a, so the idea is it's supposed to deter you.

The problem is, at a certain level of wealth, even the anti-slap penalty won't deter you, right?

Oh, it's a, you know, if you're a billionaire, oh, you mean I'm going to get hit with, if I lose, I'm going to get hit.

The worst case scenario is I got to pay $200,000 of legal fees to the defendant.

Like, that's not a big deal.

I've already gotten a lot of what I've intimidated people.

I've sent a message.

By the way, I've sent a message to everybody saying, if you come at me with criticism, this is what you may face.

Right.

So, so, so I think you're right to point out that the bottomlessness of the resources

inside of this system is part of the problem.

And I saw he, he filed the lawsuit against Wall Street Journal, if I'm not mistaken, in Florida.

And I believe they, I read that they have an anti-slap law in Florida, which feels like something he would know.

And News Corp also, I think, has probably close to bottomless resources.

I mean, how is this going to go?

Well, the other thing that's supposed to be a deterrent that we haven't discussed is something called discovery.

And this is where it's going to get interesting with Trump, I think.

So discovery is if somebody sues

another person in civil court, like let's use the Trump example.

Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal saying their reporting on the Epstein situation is factually false and defamatory.

So the first thing that Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal have to try to do is prove that what they reported is factual, right?

Here is what we reported.

It is factually true.

Trump can say it's not factually true under the law.

in the court proceeding, then Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal get a level of subpoena power that they can force Trump to turn over documents and information, whether it's phone records or whatever it is, that they have subpoena power to

get at information that they would allege Trump is keeping secret.

And that is a really powerful tool.

That's supposed to be another deterrent here: that, hey, you're a billionaire, you're Donald Trump, you got bottomless resources

to prosecute a case like this in civil court, but maybe you don't want all of your documents opened up.

So I think this is a bit of a game of chicken because I think ultimately, if Donald Trump pushes this forward, I mean, I guess we don't know like what's going to happen, but I'm slightly confused about Donald Trump wanting Rupert Murdoch in the Wall Street Journal to have court-authorized subpoena power to go into Donald Trump's life.

It seems baffling to me.

And also, let's not forget that News Corp is no stranger to these cases because they had to pay $787 million

for essentially lying about the voting systems that we used in Georgia, I think in particular.

And it's an interesting one because they have been so in lockstep with each other that you would also think that they probably know more about Trump than some of the other media outlets.

So

it seems to me that this is just this was his lash out that he had because he is

flailing on the Jeffrey Epstein stuff, right?

This is kind of the first time we have not seen him be able to control his

supporters in the BAGA movement.

Though I have seen since he sued a bunch of people saying, see, this was a lie and like it's so, but like you could see the tactic behind it.

Fake news again.

Fake news.

Always the fake news.

Yeah, I mean, I'm waiting to see.

Honestly, I'm waiting to see.

I mean, I'm not presuming Trump is this shrewd, but I wonder if he knows that something is coming down the pike governmentally, regulatorily, that News Corp wants and/or needs, and is therefore expecting a similar settlement and News Corp backing off because Rupert Murdoch and News Corp want some kind of regulatory relief, some kind of merger that's necessary to their business, some kind of licensing deal.

I don't know exactly what it is, but I do wonder if,

whereas private citizen Donald Trump may not have done this,

President Trump knows that he can try to do this knowing that simultaneously News Corp is going to be asking his administration for something.

I think what we're about to see is more attacks against the judicial branch.

Politico just reported today that the

judge who was assigned this case from the Southern District

wasn't like an Aileen Cannon.

It was an Obama appointee who made history as the first gay black man to be appointed to the federal

bench.

This judge also has seen this before because this is the judge who was assigned the case when Donald Trump sued Michael Cohen for

other like similar

harassing slapsuits.

So I fully expect for Donald Trump to turn his ire at the judge.

I expect, like we saw, I forget if it was last summer or two summers ago, we're probably going to see a rise in threats against this particular judge and that jurisdiction.

You know, and instead of it being the focus like New York was

when he was facing trouble for his indictments in my state, it's going to be in his own backyard.

So I think there's going to be a lot of blowback here.

I think Donald Trump is starting a fire that he's going to have trouble putting out.

Yeah, look, I certainly agree.

And I just, I think it's really important.

I mean, you know, when I interviewed David Enrich at the New York Times, he made a really interesting point that I didn't know much about, which was that in Florida, and I'm paraphrasing here, but in Florida, they considered

reducing or limiting the anti-slap law there in their state recently.

And what's interesting is that it didn't pass the effort to make it easier for billionaires, powerful people to sue critics into the ground?

The reason it didn't pass was in part conservative talk radio hosts said, hey, this would actually be really bad for us.

Right?

And I think there's a really important point here that I guess gets lost in the sort of negative partisan polarization, which is that the First Amendment, the ability to speak out and criticize vociferously people in power

is not a partisan issue, right?

Like you may hate Donald Trump.

You may love Donald Trump.

You may want to criticize Donald Trump all your, 24-7.

You may want to criticize his critics 24-7.

The point is, is that what you need for that kind of small D democratic discourse, as sometimes ugly as it gets, as sometimes distasteful as it gets, what you need are laws and a court system that make it safe safe to do that.

And that this is when you attack that safe space,

the legal foundation of that safe space, you are, you are, there's all sorts of unintended consequences that probably aren't going to end up being great for your side at some point either.

Right.

I mean, I think that's sort of like, I'm just looking at how can Democrats use what they're doing against them.

And that's sort of the territory we've gotten into here.

And it's like, my mind goes to, all right, look at what Fox News is doing with Obama right now.

Bombshell report.

Obama did this.

It's like he didn't do any of that shit.

But this is, if Trump were in the same position, Trump would want to sue Fox News.

Democrats need to get more comfortable when they have the ammunition to go right after the source, which they're not doing.

Trump administration has no problem doing that.

And you know what?

DNC has pretty good resources, true.

They can do that, especially if it's somebody who's sitting down.

Obama's got a ton of resources.

I mean, look, they got to start doing that.

And look, they're doing it in other areas, too.

It's not like this isn't happening.

You look at the redistricting that's happening in

hopefully in New York and California to combat the redistricting in Texas.

These are the strategies we need to use because it seems like when Trump is challenged by the same tactic he's using, he goes, oh, shit, sorry about that.

And he backs off and goes the other way.

I agree.

And I think.

I mean, they're texting me still like 12 times a day, you know, the Democrats, like, hey, give me money, you know, give us money for this.

We have to do that.

If you sent me a text and you said, we're going to file a lawsuit to defend, like, we're going to pick a fucking fight right now.

Yes.

And we need money because fights are expensive when you're fighting fascists.

I'd be like, all right, here's 50 bucks.

But when it's like, we, you know, we need to defend our minority.

I'm like, no, we don't.

We don't need to do that.

You can't have my money.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Yeah.

I mean, the redistricting stuff, I mean, you know, I, look,

I am always torn between you got to fight fire with fire

and also like at what cost, if you're fighting fire, you're just going to to create one giant fire right i mean like as an example like i think gerrymandering is is like bad right i mean i think we most people agree like like why like extreme gerrymandering is just like not good for the democracy right it's like bad right okay what do you do if one party is doing extreme gerrymandering right it's like oh well you know they're gonna do it in their state they've got a huge state the democrats do it in their states like like like how do how you don't want to unilaterally disarm.

I totally get that.

And like New York's redistricting hasn't been great.

California's redistricting hasn't been great.

I mean, I do also think there's like a middle ground here where

you can have a better districting situation that better reflects your state's political complexion without going to like extreme, ridiculous measures where you're fully into the actual gerrymandering of districts.

I think Democrats have erred too far on the side of like,

we're not even going to like engage in really making our districts, you know, more representative.

And let's talk about why that is for a second, because I think it really does actually get to the core of what's wrong with the Democratic Party.

So why haven't Democrats better districted states like California and New York to compete with the Republicans who were excessively, absurdly gerrymandering districts in various red states?

The answer, actually, in a lot of cases, is that the incumbent Democrats, the people who are already there want their districts, I'm talking about Democratic House members and the like, they want their districts to be like 60, 65, 70% Democratic districts, because that means they don't have to do very much work

to stay in office.

Instead of saying, hey, I'm a Democratic incumbent House member, my district could go from 70%

to like, let's say, 55% Democratic performance.

Like, I'm going to have to work a little bit to like, but you know, I could still, I could still win.

Instead of doing that,

when those proposals come up, hey, we're going to make your district 70 to 55.

So this other district over here is a competitive Democratic district, right?

Like this red district over here is now competitive for Democrats.

The incumbents who are the ones who have power will say, no, no, no, no, no.

I like it that my district is like super easy.

And this is the problem.

It is an individualistic attitude among incumbents rather than sort of for the greater good of the party and frankly for the country.

I mean, that's one place where like where Trump is doing the thing that works, which is at that point, he would come in and go, shut the fuck up.

We're doing it my way.

Democrats don't do that.

As plain as they, we need a Democrat out there who goes, shut the fuck up, do it.

I don't care what you think.

I 100% agree.

And I can't believe that.

I can't agree more.

Yeah.

Sorry, Luke, do you want to say more?

No, go ahead.

Okay.

So,

you know, this is also where we've ended up with members of Congress who are, and it's only on the Democratic side right now, but like, are dying.

They've had three, four members pass away since November.

And the Republicans only have a five-seat majority, I believe.

And when you take out three Dems in those seats, like all of a sudden, they can let people, you know, there's a few members they let vote no, you know, that makes it harder for us to go.

Like fall asleep during a joke.

Or the whole thing with the, you know, the oversight, which we've talked about a bunch, where, you know, Jerry Connolly, who had throat cancer stage four throat cancer he died three months later but he was like no i want oversight chair because it's my turn and and basically passed over what who i would say is the most effective communicator in the democratic party which is aoc it's just absolute madness right and the connection between safe seats and gerontocracy is very real and it makes sense right listen if you don't have to work to get reelected, okay, and you're the kind of person who doesn't want to retire, okay, even though you're 900 years old.

Too fucking old, right?

Like, like,

like then it be, then it becomes semi-retirement, right?

Oh, I don't have to work for reelection.

I still get paid once in a while.

I can like participate.

Right.

It's like tenure because the district isn't competitive, right?

And so there are two solutions to that.

Either you can do a better job of districting

the districts in places like California so that 70% Democratic districts become 55% Democratic districts.

So more red districts become more competitive.

That's one way to do it.

The other way to do it is to start having much more competitive primaries.

Because that's the other thing I think that, I mean, I am encouraged by this, that

there is one danger

for an incumbent

in representing a 70%, 80, 90% Democratic district.

It's that then the fight becomes inside of the party itself, inside of the primary.

And it is possible to defeat Democratic incumbents in primaries where the winner of the primary is effectively all but guaranteed to be the winner of the general.

And we saw a little bit of an upsurge with that with AOC.

I mean, she surprised the whole political world when she beat Joe Crowley in one of those districts.

We've seen sort of a pushback against those.

I mean, I've always said this.

The Democratic leadership of the current Democratic Party, they're terrible at basically everything.

They're terrible at fighting Trump.

They're terrible at passing legislation.

They're terrible at improving the lives of

their voters, their constituents, of Americans.

But they are the goats.

They are the greatest of all time at one thing, which is keeping control of the party, keeping their status inside of the party, essentially keeping themselves locked

in the steering room of the Titanic, even as the Titanic is heading for the iceberg.

They are really, really good at that.

And that, I think, is a thing that needs to be focused on to break that hammerlock of control.

And one of the ways to do that is for there to be much more vigorous primaries of the Jaron Tops.

I think we can win that too.

I mean,

it's right on top of us.

I was just looking at, I read this article just the other day.

New York Times or Washington Post.

It's a big article, big deep dive into the people who voted for both Trump and Mom Donnie.

And they're asking how, you know, Americans are so famously well versed in policy.

It just blew their mind.

Sorry, I can't even get that out.

It just blew their mind that somebody could vote for Trump and Mom Dani.

It's like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Have you been paying attention to anything for the past 10 years?

Fearlessness wins.

And Mom Dani is utterly fearless in saying what he believes.

And yes, it is a safer environment for Democratic socialists to say democratic socialist things in New York City.

But when you look at like Giuliani and Cuomo and Eric Adams, like these aren't hard leftist, you know, politicians.

So like he is still being assertive and being fearless and saying what he believes.

And if there's one thing like Trump is simultaneously afraid of everything, like existentially, but he is not afraid, utterly fearless in saying whatever pops into his head at that moment.

He'll just say it.

He'll say it to the whole world.

And that is what a lot of people.

left or right or disaffected or like, you know, especially the detached sort of swing voters, they love that fearlessness.

And it's what you see from AOC.

It's what you said, what we saw from like Deja Fox when she came on, Joe Walsh, utterly fearless.

And that, that, that behavior is rewarded.

And especially in a time like right now, where we kind of, all of our fucks are off the table anymore, we really, really crave fearlessness.

And, and so like, it blows my mind that somebody could be surprised at this when we're watching how ineffective terrified politicians are in their leadership positions on the Democratic side, yeah, I mean, we call it authenticity.

I mean, I think authenticity

is a real and important factor.

But I also think that, like, I would go even, even a little bit deeper, that Momdani and Trump are very, very different, obviously, for all sorts of reasons, policy, et cetera, et cetera.

But they are both rhetorically,

at least when they're running for election, in the case of Trump, talking about things that resonate with people.

The affordability crisis.

I mean, it's a joke that Donald Trump talked about the affordability crisis on the campaign, right?

Talking all about groceries, right?

And you look at the data on what's happened since he's gotten into office.

I mean, the idea that that guy cares about bringing down prices of necessities is ridiculous.

But

he talked a lot about it.

Mom Dani, the whole campaign is about the affordability crisis.

So I think the first threshold for all of these candidates, for successful candidates, is to at least be talking about authentically the problems that regular people are facing.

And frankly, it's strange, but that's not really something that's necessarily pervasive in the Democratic Party yet.

Right.

I mean, it's not.

It's not, right?

I mean, you look at Kamala Harris's campaign.

And we're on the right, the one year.

Right now, we're talking on the one-year anniversary of when she started running for president, when Biden left,

said he wasn't going to run.

You know, the inside reporting from her campaign was all about how she was basically, her advisors were telling her, don't go too populist on economics, right?

And it drove a lot of us crazy.

And I think the thing that really drove me crazy about that

was this idea that they felt they had to, I don't know why they got Jedi mind-tricked in this, but they felt they had to like

tell people that everything was good because they're the incumbent.

And it fundamentally misunderstands how to run for election when you are perceived to be the incumbent.

Somehow, the lessons of the 1936 election have been forgotten.

And the thing is, if you think about that, it's kind of interesting, right?

FDR, most successful Democratic president of the last, whatever, 100 years.

He wins in 1932.

That's easy to understand how he wins, right?

He's running against Herbert Hoover.

It's the Great Depression.

Okay, like that's like a, like you would have had to really fuck it up to like lose that race, okay?

But then the question is, wait a minute.

The Great Depression wasn't over in 1936.

How do you, you're the president.

You're seen as like the man, right?

Like you're now in power.

How do you win re-election in the middle of the Great Depression?

And the answer is, is that he ran a campaign saying, I am understand that what is going on in this country remains unacceptable.

I have not been able to do what is completely necessary to fix this problem because of this obstruction and because of all the organized money aligned against me.

I welcome the hatred of the organized money that is against me, and that is why we have to win this race.

Kamala Harris didn't take any of those messages, right?

Everything's better.

People don't realize that the economy is actually better than they think.

And the thing is, is that I do think like on the merits, maybe there was an argument to be made that actually a lot of Biden's policies were doing better than what Trump had done in his first term.

But when when you're going out to campaign saying, hey, listen, if you're mad about the economy, you're just wrong, is like ridiculous.

The message should have been, listen, we started the ball rolling in the right direction.

We have not been able to get done what is necessary to get done.

We've had to actually stop doing things that we've been trying to do that were successful.

And we have to win this election to break through the obstruction.

Right?

Like, that was not the message.

No, definitely not.

It's crazy to me it wasn't that.

Sorry, go ahead then.

No, I was just going to say, I mean, there's an argument to be made that, you know, Joe Biden's first term was, was probably the most populist

on the data side since FDR.

But we also didn't have, he wasn't communicating that effectively, obviously.

And then it was weird for, you know, lots of reasons, but I mean, let's be honest, but, you know, Kamala also, like this, just like, oh, don't worry about inflation.

It's going down, which even when it inflation is going down, that still means prices are going up.

So it's not, it's not a compelling message.

It's accelerating, you guys.

Don't worry.

I know.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

It's going up in a slower market.

It's wild to me that you couldn't like, they just were not talking about reality.

Well, I think it's a fear thing.

Like, cause they're here.

And it was way before this point that we saw this.

I argue it's 2023 when you see this most clearly when Biden in a silo decided to run for re-election and the party went, sure.

Sounds great.

It's like, are you fucking insane?

This guy is going to run in his early 80s to be president when he's 86 and he's like this in 2023?

No, but nobody stood up and did it.

And it's the same shit that happened when Kamala took over because the entire infrastructure of the party was Biden is a protected source.

He's a protected guy.

We don't talk about Biden.

We don't go against Biden.

If you go against Biden and say, hey, we fucked up inflation, we fucked up immigration, whatever, it's going to be a death knell for you.

And it's like, no, that's not true.

If Kamala Harris had come out and said, look, we've made mistakes in the economy.

The inflation's getting better, but here's the things we want to do to make it actually like you feel it.

And yeah, we could have done better on the board, blah, blah, blah.

People would have respected it.

They would have been great.

But because the democratic infrastructure is like, no, protect Biden, don't say any bad things, fucked up the whole thing.

You know, there's a term for this.

It's a really go ahead.

Very quickly, there's a term for this that I want to just make everyone aware of because it's one of my favorite terms.

The term Omerta.

Omerta is like a mob term.

It means the cone of silence.

That's what it means in like organized crime, right?

And there really is an Omerta inside of the Democratic Party that you touch on, which is that,

and it didn't always, it wasn't always the culture, but the culture of you may not

speak ill of fellow Democrats, of what the Democratic Party is doing.

And there's a political logic to it up to a point, but it has become suffocating.

And I think that like people forget, it just drives me crazy.

People forget that like democratic primaries

are supposed to be rough and tumble affairs where the fighting, we used to understand that the fighting and the arguing actually strengthens the prospective general election nominees.

It tests them.

It tests their metal.

And the person who proved that most recently was Barack Obama in 2008.

I mean, that was one of the most, you know,

down in the dirt, nasty primaries, Obama, Clinton.

And it did not weaken barack obama it strengthened him for the general election we have like since then it has become a culture of omerta where where any of these debates are frowned upon regardless of the merits on the fact that the debate is even happening

so we're there's there's been some coverage about the coming dnc autopsy of what happened last year and and the headlines you know have said like oh the dnc the democrats are not going to look at what the consultants did, and they're not going to look at the original sin of Joe Biden deciding that he was going to run for re-election, even though he absolutely should not have.

You know, that looks like on its face, I think, a hopeless situation where it's like, clearly the Democrats are doomed.

But, you know,

I think if history is instructive at all.

And I don't know if this works on both sides of the aisle, but I think back to the 2012

RNC autopsy, where they came out and they said, we have to be more inclusive.

We have to reach out to Hispanic men, Hispanic people more broadly.

And four years later, they got the complete fucking opposite of that.

They got a racist.

They got Trump taking the nomination.

So, you know, as hopeless as I may feel looking at the headlines saying that the DNC is not...

is going to do an autopsy and look at everything but the problems, I think that gives room to build the populist anger that will push the DNC to either break or to get out of the way of real progress.

Yeah.

Oh, listen, I'm optimistic.

I mean, in a weird way.

I mean, I'm optimistic with caveats.

In

2007, I wrote a book called The Uprising, which I felt like we were, it felt like a similar moment,

where it was a second term president, second-term Republican president, and there was this moment where there was all this populist anger on the right and left.

And the premise of the book was, this is going to go in one direction or the other.

Someone's going to harness this.

And what ended up happening, and I was actually, you know, I tried to be optimistic and I was hopeful that this would go in sort of a center left direction.

And what ended up happening in retrospect is that I think Obama channeled a lot of the center-left populism into the establishment of the Democratic Party.

I think he then took hope and change, turned it in, frankly, to more of the same.

And that created the conditions for

essentially for Trump.

I I think Obama got really lucky that the Republicans ran a private equity guy in 2012.

Like they ran like Mr.

Aristocrat, like the monopoly guy somehow.

He got really, really lucky.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

So he got really, like, had Trump come along a little earlier, like Trump maybe could have won in 2012.

Who knows?

Right.

But the point is, is that a lot of the center left anger went into the Democratic establishment and there was a great disillusionment.

A lot of the center right went into the Tea Party, which helped create the conditions for Trump.

I feel like we're in a very similar moment now.

But here's the difference.

And I think this is why I'm actually somewhat even more optimistic.

And maybe I'll be proven to be wrong.

And I'm not making predictions.

I'm out of the prediction business, which is that if you look at polls,

self-described Democratic voters are more angry at their own party's leadership than they have been, I think,

in my entire adult life.

That typically, even when Democrats are like fucking everything up and out of power, Democratic voters themselves are not that mad at their Democratic Party leaders.

That is different.

We are in a somewhat ahistorical moment here, or at least not, you got to trace it all the way back to the 1960s, right, with the anger over the Vietnam War.

And I think that creates the potential for some real serious change inside,

regardless of the DNC, doing an autopsy and pretending the dead body isn't there.

I mean, that's what they're doing, right?

It's an autopsy and they're pretending the dead body isn't there.

Like forget about the DNC.

I'm talking about at the rank and file voter level.

I feel like

the arguments that there needs to be a whole new generation of leadership are going to land in a much

more salient way than perhaps they have in the past.

So I have great hope that whether it's in the midterms or tons of candidates competing for that 2028 Democratic nomination, that that is going to create and harness this into many different directions.

That competition itself is going to create, creates the potential for something much better to come out.

Well, and I think with no kingmaker left in the room, right, or a queen maker, whatever, like the DNC, they can say whatever they want, but there is no

reason to listen to their recommendations if you're an average candidate.

Like we are in an environment that very much rewards fearlessness.

And Luke hasn't chimed up

too much right now in this session, but like he's got the most followers of all of us, and he is the most fearless in just screaming fuck into a camera because I don't know that that indicates quality, though.

It absolutely does because it's emotional quality.

And right now, we are in an emotional place as a party.

And that is what is being rewarded.

And that is what is going to come out.

I mean, Gavin Newsom was DOA in my comment sections, at least, until he started just getting really fucking angry about what was happening in California and Los Angeles.

And now he's like A1.

Like it's Buddhajig

who randomly, mysteriously just starts to say fuck all of a sudden.

Butigej and Gavin Newsome

voicing that rage, that anger as best they can and, you know, in the environments they can.

So like, I think we're in a place now where, where this can actually happen because, I don't know, we we ran out of fucks.

Incidentally, we have more than ever.

And I'm going to speak up.

And Luke, we're going to pat you on the back again.

But like, the reason that you have three quarters of a million followers is because you are tapping into people's anger.

People are pissed.

We just lost to a convicted felon who destroyed the economy on his way out the door, and he got to come back after we did a bunch of good stuff.

I mean, it's madness.

It's absolute madness.

So, David, we're going to have to wrap here in a second, but I just, you know, obviously Rich was talking about Budijic and Gavin Newsom, but I'm curious, what characteristics do you think are going to be necessary for that next Democratic nominee in order to not only win a primary, but to win a general election that is going to be, you know, a block, you know, is going to be a knockout, drag out fight as well?

Yeah, I mean, I think that, look,

I worked in the 2020 primary.

It was an extremely disillusioning experience in the sense of,

although, you know, I wasn't surprised by it because I've reported on politics and worked in campaigns for a long time, but sort of what determines these primaries at the voter level is

what was troubling to me,

that I think we have to understand that there are

conservative elements of the Democratic Party electorate, like not just conservative voices, but conservative elements that are still looking for kind of not just conservative Democrats, but I don't mean like ideologically conservative.

I mean kind of conservative in

their vision of what to do.

That there's a fear of like quote-unquote radicalism.

And maybe now, you know, since then, it'll at that point be eight years that it's like we're living in radical times.

We need more quote-unquote radical solutions here.

I mean, I don't think the New Deal is very radical, right?

I mean, it was at the time, but like, I think you're right.

I mean, but it, and it is comparatively radical to what the Democratic Party pushes today.

So

I think there's an opening for a candidate to speak to big visions about

a whole new way this country can and should work.

I think that the so-called radical ideas of Medicare for all, as an example,

that some kind of free college for all, some kind of much more robust retirement system that's more expanding social security and the like.

I mean, these are basic human needs

and they are universal, right?

I do think we're moving beyond,

in a lot of ways, the era of identity politics, where identity politics is weaponized against class politics, that universalism and simplicity are the way for a policy agenda.

I mean, people like Medicare, people like Social Security because because it's universal and because it's easy, right?

They get it.

It's automatic.

It's not like you got to jump through 25,000 years, right?

There's no loopholes.

It's like, that's it.

Like, it's funny to me that like the Democrats are flailing around always looking for solutions and the two most popular programs in the history of the country and in the history of the party are sitting right there waiting to be waiting to be expanded.

Everyone likes these policies.

Like, I mean, it's a little more complicated than that, but like it's right there, right?

So a candidate who can speak to those issues and that agenda and a candidate who can, I think, also speak credibly about corruption.

You know, I saw John Ossoff recently, and this is an issue near and dear to my heart.

We did the audio series Master Plan, which is all about the secret history of legalizing corruption in America.

I think John Ossoff, he made a speech saying that, you know,

something to the effect of we're living in the most corrupt political system in the Western world.

Citizens United was the worst decision in the history, in the modern history of the country.

And he articulated what we tried to articulate

in the series, which is connecting corruption to how it affects your daily life, right?

You're paying more for your prescription drugs because the pharmaceutical industry buys off the politicians, right?

Like the corruption connected to the real issues.

And the thing about why I think this is such an important

theme

will be in the 2028 election, or could be, is that we remember that that's how John McCain became so popular.

John McCain emerged from a corruption scandal, the Keating 5 scandal, to become

a crusader against big money in politics.

And it spoke to people across the ideological spectrum.

Obviously, Donald Trump is the human personification of corruption in so many different ways, the human personification of big money in politics.

So it's an easy argument.

But the reason Democrats have, in a lot of ways, shied away from it is because I think they're afraid that they're going to end up indicting their own party.

But here's the thing.

Both parties do need to be indicted.

And one way you exude authenticity is

to show that you're willing to go after both parties when it is necessary.

The average person on the street thinks both parties are corrupt or are at least not serving their interests.

We have a problem where very few politicians are willing to say that for fear of offending their own party, but it's a message that is waiting to be delivered.

Yep.

I totally agree.

And actually, we are at time.

David, thank you very much for joining us.

Everybody, you should go subscribe to The Lever.

You should also go subscribe to our sub stack as well.

You know, all of these big guys are getting wiped out by Trump lawsuits.

All of us are trying to do our best to

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So if you can subscribe, that would be great to both of us.

And also before we go, Chris, what is that shirt that you're wearing?

Oh,

you're on mute.

You're muted.

You know, 10 years into working remote, I still can't control the mute button.

I don't know what's wrong with me.

But I was saying to no one, because no one could hear me, that the Find Out shirt only gets more comfortable over time.

So if you go to thefindoutpodcast.com, you can get your own.

Made in the USA, union printed.

You know, I've been working with the folks who print these shirts for all of my nonprofits for years and years.

They are the best in the business.

So go to thefindoutpodcast.com.

Go pick up a shirt.

And I think Rich might have had a mug that was a little bit more.

Hey, Rich, what too?

What's on that?

What do you got over there?

I mean,

the thing I love about this diner style mug, besides the fact that it's made in the United States and

is awesome, is that it's heavy enough that if I needed to, like, I don't own a gun because I could beat someone to death with this coffee mug

and it would not break.

I mean, it is like 1950s diner style.

So, yeah.

So, just to clarify, it's findoutpodcast.com.

And if you want to go shipping six months a month on a subscription, you can go to findoutpodcast.substack.com.

And obviously, you can go subscribe to David's outlet, The Lever, Thelever.com.

Levernews.com.

Levernews, excuse me.

Levernews.com.

Levernews.com.

All right, David, thank you very much.

Thank you, everybody.

Thanks to all of you.

It's nice to meet you.

We'll talk soon.

Thanks, guys.

Take care.