Dan Pfeiffer
Appearances
Pod Save America
AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Picking seniority over the ability to deliver a message – is exactly how we've gotten this mess to begin with. It's how we end up with the gerontocracy of leading the Democratic Party that cannot communicate clearly or in any sort of modern way that it reaches the actual voters who decide elections.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Look, someone, a very experienced Capitol Hill person once described to me the politics of leadership elections in the House as akin to how decisions are made in high school student government elections, where it's all about – cliques and friendships and relationships, and there's no collective interest at play here. And I think that's part of what happened here.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Obviously, when they first came into Congress, there was a lot of tension between AOC and members of the quote-unquote squad and other members of Congress. I think that there are people who do value seniority because at a time when 90-some percent of incumbents get reelected all the time, you can rise to power simply by staying alive.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
I mean, just if you just say you're a lot of people will have not and will have not had a competitive election since their first primary and are not going to have another one for the foreseeable future. And so they can one day become the ranking member or the chair of something simply by exercising and eating well.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
It's like I said, seniority is essentially a participation trophy for members of Congress, right? You just have to be there and you eventually get something. I think... There is value in experience, particularly leading substantive committees in the majority, someone who knows what they are doing. Do I really care if the chair of the ag committee is an amazing communicator or not? Not really.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
No one's ever going to see that person on camera. You would have to go searching for that person. There is one role. that where communications matters the most, two roles, I guess, where communication matters the most in Congress. And it is on the Judiciary Committee and the Oversight Committee. And so let's use our brains and try to think strategically about who we should put in those positions.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
I'm sure there are members who are mad, who are friends with Elliot Engel or other people who have lost primaries, who are mad at AOC and other people who support the primary shelter. I'm sure that's the high school lunchroom politics at play here. But the idea that somehow she is a problem for vulnerable Democrats is insane.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
You think the NRCC is going to just forget she's a member of Congress and not run ads against her? It is true that Jerry Connolly is unlikely to show up in any ads against vulnerable members of Congress. That's because no one's going to know who he is. He will never get attention.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
It is almost impossible for a member of Congress to get sufficient attention to actually be heard by voters who decide elections. There is a list of one member of Congress... in the Democratic caucus who meets that test. And it is AOC.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
The best job for someone who can actually get attention is to be the ranking member on the oversight committee when these fucking MAGA goons are using this committee to try to do things like gin up charges against Liz Cheney. And AOC, she is good at what she says is good. She has a good message.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
But what is even more important than that, because there are a lot of members who are pretty good messengers, what distinguishes her from other people is she can actually get attention. She understands how to communicate in a modern way. The fact that Republicans hate her and are triggered by her is a plus.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Because it means that there will be conflict around the things she says, which means they will get more coverage. I know. We are just making a decision to not be heard. And that is exactly how we got into this mess. Politics is a war for attention. AOC can get attention. She has proven that when she has attention, she can deliver a more compelling message than most people in the party.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
But she's going to be denied that for a series of very dumb, self-defeating reasons.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
My understanding and my understanding equates to my having read Punchbowl this morning is that Democrats actually did a pretty good job of getting a bunch of concessions from Johnson in this bill. Johnson understood that he was going to need a bunch of Democrats to vote for this to get it passed, and he's given them a bunch of things.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
If we wanted to play good but probably kind of hackish politics right now, we would make a giant issue of the fact that there is a pay increase for members of Congress in this bill, the first one in 15 years.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
And that is deeply unpopular. And I am willing to bet that this was a – I'm just guessing here, so don't hold me to this, but I'm guessing that this was sort of a bargain struck between all the leaders. Because remember, this is the thing every member wants. No one wants to say it. And when members run for leadership, they often say they will support a pay raise.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
And substantively, we should actually pay members of Congress more. But if you wanted to find an issue that would galvanize people against the Republican Party, the pay increase would be one of them, even if it is not the most substantively responsible thing we would do.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
I would just add one more thing to that. People will look at that salary and be like, that's a lot more than the median American makes.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
That is absolutely true. But you also have to have two homes in this situation. You have to maintain a residence in your district, and you have to have a place to sleep in Washington State, which is why some people actually sleep in their office, but that's probably not particularly viable, particularly for people with families.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
But I was going to say going forward. So let's get through the – if this bill, as I understand it – pretty good for Democrats, then we should do what we can, get across the finish line, take the wins we got in here. And then next year, we should be, Hakeem Devery should hold all his votes until he gets what he wants.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
At least for the first few months, it's going to be a one-seat majority, most likely. presuming that Trump's nominees get confirmed and head to that and leave the House. So until those special elections happen, he will have a one-seat majority. And so use all that leverage possible to get as much as we possibly can.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Are you about to call for a shutdown? Are you going to shut down the government?
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
This is an important distinction you're making. I was answering that question in the context of government funding.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
So let's take these things. This is a relatively and surprisingly interesting conversation about congressional strategy. I'm just trying my best. I'm trying my best. So let's do the government funding first. Now, the way this is going to play out, there's obviously going to be some House versions of the bill.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
The Democrats are going to be terrible because they're going to have to keep going further to the right to get – every person from Barry Loudermilk, who I discovered existed yesterday to, you know.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Yes, it's an amazing name. But what eventually will come back is a bill that got at least seven Senate Democratic votes. And so in that case – and that is probably a Thune-Schumer negotiation to get something that gets a sufficient – a large number of senators that then comes back to the House.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
And then that is something that is probably – unless something has gone horribly wrong in the Senate, it's something that we would probably be OK with or as OK as we could possibly be in comparison to a shutdown when the Republicans control all the levers of power. Now on the tax bill, this is incredibly important. No Democrat – should vote for the tax bill. Certainly coming out of the House.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Absolutely. We should say none. Not a single one. Now, there may be one person who breaks, but we have to treat this like Harry Reid treated Social Security privatization in 2005, which I know is an incredible- You write it.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Yours. It's on you. We're not going to be there. We're not there. We're not negotiating everything. You go do it. And let's see if they can actually get it done. But we do not give them anything for this. And this is incredibly important because we want to shine a light on the fact that Donald Trump ran to cut costs.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
And one of his first acts is going to be cut taxes for the richest people in America.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Just sorry to harp on to keep talking about this because I am shockingly interested in it, but we cannot consider keeping the government open a give to us.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
With the debt ceiling, keeping the government open, that is not a give to us because we care about people's lives. That is a give to them because they run Washington.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
I mean, in fairness to full disclosure here, I talked to the organizers of this effort several times over the last couple of months. I think this is incredibly important. Good job. All I did was read the things, the very good work they did.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Incredibly seriously. This is exactly how it happens. You get a pretext for an investigation run by a bunch of political cronies who will do what the authoritarian wants. We see this happen all over the world. And Trump told us it was going to happen. He appointed the people who would follow through on the things he told us he was going to do. And now they are doing it. It's incredibly dangerous.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
And I just – primarily as someone who has complained loudly about abuses of the fundraising system by democratic organizations and particularly scam packs, which there are a lot on our side. This is very important.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
The problem always is there's a collective action problem where the DNC – like even if the DNC or the presidential nominee or the individual senators were responsible in how they use their lists, everyone else isn't, right? And the most donors don't – They're not counting. Hakeem Jeffries has only emailed me three times, but something called Turnout Pack has texted me 7,000 fucking times.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
No matter how many times I hit stop, it never works. It's just the Democrats. It's all the Democrats. And ActBlue is the one place where you can actually have levers to pull to affect all of this. And so this is all very good stuff. We should do it. It's just – it's so sketchy when you get like Barack Obama has spoken and it's like a quote from Barack Obama.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Like it makes you think that Obama or Michelle Obama or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris has endorsed this PAC, whatever it is you've never heard of or people you've never heard of and you've never seen them expend money in any way, shape or form. And so – This is a very challenging problem. This is a set of reforms that can make things better.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
It doesn't mean that we're going to stop getting annoying texts, but we may get fewer of them, and the ones we get may be better aligned with actual organizations that are doing the work we want it done.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
I don't want to depress you, but they do these things because they test them rigorously, and they work. Right? They are A-B testing.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
No one is thinking – because all these campaigns only care about their list through Election Day, so they will burn it to the ground. Yes. And all they care about is their list. They don't think about the fact that the people on their list are on 700 other lists. And so when you're burning your list to the ground, you're affecting all of your other Senate colleagues or the DSCC or whoever else.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
And these are good questions that we should ask the DNC. Not that the DNC is in charge of all of this, but they do have some influence here. We can talk to them about how they're thinking about this as part of the DNC chair race coming up.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
It feels like we're on the cusp of something very dangerous, and most people are unwilling to reckon with just how dangerous it is.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Once again, I think he nails it. The suing of Ann Selzer in the Des Moines Register is stupid. Even the most MAGA judge, I think, is going to struggle to find the harm that Donald Trump suffered from a bad poll in a state that he eventually won by more than he won in 2020 and 2016. That is pure idiocy. It's so dumb.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
It's almost a cause for relief about how he's going to proceed down this path because he's clearly easily distracted. But I think it's important to understand – and you guys talked about this, I thought, very well as it relates to the ABC news settlement – is you have two problems with media outlets that Donald Trump is exploiting here.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
One is, like ABC, most of them are run by much larger corporations that have many interests before the government. Particularly in these – whether it's Comcast owning NBC or Paramount owning CBS or Jeff Bezos owning The Washington Post.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
The news business is such a minor part and often a money loser for these larger entities that they are not going to take on water on the businesses they care about to get on Donald Trump's wrong side to defend. If ABC News was on its own, an independent company, it would have fought that case to the very end.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
But because Disney has a million items of business before the government, they don't want to be in a fight with Donald Trump for the next year. For a part of the business, it is so small that Bob Iger suggested selling it at a loss a few years ago. And then the other media companies don't have the resources to fight these lawsuits. It is amusing that he's suing Ansel.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
He's also suing the Des Moines Register. A struggling newspaper that's part of a struggling newspaper chain that does not have the resources to do that in any way, shape, or form. And it used to be, there used to be an old saying that was, you never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. You never pick a fight with the press because they will beat you in the end.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
But the press itself can barely afford to buy ink by the barrel right now. Many of these newspapers or local television stations or other outlets could be bankrupted by just the idea of fighting an absurd lawsuit against Trump.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
are you as excited as i am dan john i was just so worried that i was my takes were just gonna be stuck in the fridge for weeks and i had to get them out before they started to smell i know well you don't put them on social media as much anymore so i know i should but because you're smart because you're smart i watch what happens to you on social media and it's an object lesson you're a walking scared straight for your own podcast offline canary in the coal mine um okay
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Yeah. And just another point on why this was a business decision for ABC is the way they structured the settlement. It's a tax write-off because it's a contribution to Trump's future foundation. Which, just notable, ABC News is giving $15 million to fund a monument to the most anti-press president in American history. But they get to write the taxes off, so that's cool.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
I think you cannot walk away from such an important fight. You absolutely cannot do that. And because walking away from that fight, even if you can't win it, even if you have limited levers to pull as Democrats do here, sometimes in politics, oftentimes in politics, fighting and losing is better than not fighting at all. And I would put this in that category.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
I think there are three parts of what Democrats would do here. The first is we have to do everything we can with the limited power we have to fight Trump, vote against his nominees, use legislative tactics that we have to try to expose them to longer debates or a longer process or more investigation or whatever it is. And use our bully pulpit, as small as it may be.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Second, we have to focus on how we get more power. And that is to realize that the most important thing that Democrats can do over the next two years here is take back the House in 2026. That is a very doable thing. So take back the House in 2026, focus on state legislator in the governor's races in 2025.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
But wherever we can get power, we have to get power because that allows us to create additional bulwarks against Trump's offenses here, but also sends a message to other Republicans about the dangers of Trump if the voters are rejecting it at the ballot box. And the third thing we have to do is we have to not just be against Trump. We have to be for stuff.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
That's the one thing that got lost in the last resistance is that we opposed everything Trump did. We thought our best strategy, and it was a successful strategy in the moment, was to shine all the spotlight on Trump, let him show the public why he was unfit and dangerous, and then reap the rewards.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
That was sufficient to win the House and the Senate and sneak through a very, very close White House victory in the middle of a pandemic. But it's clearly not enough to... win again. It's not enough to actually build a governing majority in this country. And so we have to have an agenda. And it is within that agenda that we must demonstrate that we are not defenders of the status quo.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
That must be an agenda that is populist in broadly defined, populist economically, but also populist in the sense that in the classic term of we are reformers of government. Right. We are looking to get to deal with corporate influence, money and politics, concentrated wealth. And if we can do all of those things, we have a shot here.
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AOC Loses to the Gerontocracy
Nancy Pelosi. Oh, man. Reportedly, Nancy Pelosi was lobbying for Jerry Connolly, a longtime ally of hers, in part because he is an ally of Pelosi, but also because I think she believes in the seniority system, which I'm sure we'll talk about. And it's one of the most bananas decisions I've ever seen in my life. It's just such a misunderstanding of what matters in politics.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Man, you were deep in your mentions. You could pull off off memory a Chris Busey take.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Do we think this person really thought this or they were just going for a game?
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
John, I don't want to fast forward ahead to the resolution part of this, but I have some ideas for you.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I was just like, are we really doing this? The replies to that tweet were actually encouraging about the future of the internet.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Me too, I paid no attention to it. I mentally muted the whole thing for a week. I did too.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
That's because we did worse with women, John. That's right. That's right.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I just think it's worth remembering that after the debate, Joe Biden was behind the whole time. He was behind to Trump basically from the summer of 2023 onward. By the time the debate was over, Joe Biden had a 3% chance of winning the election, which And the idea here was we could not go into election with a dangerous authoritarian who had a 97% chance of winning.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
So we had to look for another option. And that option was Kamala Harris, who probably went into it with a 45% chance of winning. And she was not able to get that last 5%. But there's two questions. There is the could Joe Biden have served four more years? I think the indication is pretty clearly no. And is could Joe Biden win the election? And by the time the debate was over, it was obviously no.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Highly unlikely that he would do so. And there is one last moment to try to make a change to give us a chance to win. He, in the end, weeks later than we had hoped, but did step aside. Kamala Harris ran a very good campaign, not a perfect one, but gave her a shot to win an election in a very, very tough situation. And that's sort of where we that's where we were.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
And and I will say to all not the blue and non people from the discourse section, but most people like there was a could be a good faith disagreement on Joe Biden's electoral chances. Or Kamala Harris' electoral chances. But in the end, most people came together to try to get her elected and worked pretty hard at it.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
There was a lot of reminding people that they tried to kill Joe Biden by not making Trump get a COVID test in 2020. COVID test, yeah. That's right. That was bad. Yeah, they did.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I think that there has been a lot of criticism in the Democratic Party and on this podcast about Joe Biden's absence from the scene. It is time to make a bug a feature. And let's let Donald Trump own this shutdown. This is between Mike Johnson, Donald Trump, Elon Musk. Have to figure this out amongst themselves. Let them do it. And if they don't, this is on them.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Oh, interesting. Do you know who the ranking member on the committee is?
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
That's great. What if they do one with the insurrectionists? We are the world style. Like a rap battle.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
It feels like in hindsight, one lesson here is that if your political opponent comes up with a dangerous conspiracy theory that incites people on a major issue in the election, you don't turn it into a catchy song and then have all of your influencers share it on TikTok for hours at a time.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Just saying, like, it's just, it's a way of thinking about things going forward. I, like, want to listen to it. It's really catchy.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Do you think Crooked could put up a $100,000 reward? Oh, that's a good idea.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
So Taylor Swift, dogs and cats. Jesse Waters. Is there another option? I forget. Vaccine and vaccines.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I'm still flummoxed by the fact that Lovett was in a college version of Chimera Club. That's not right.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I mean, the problem always is we don't really have any scale for making these judgments. So it's really, let's just pick one.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
This is bullshit, Tommy. The judges, they're fucking you here.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
You know what I would do if I were you? I would sue them. I'm looking at you, Sal.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
The prevailing narrative that the conviction won't really matter is, I think, pretty disconnected from both what the polls actually say and the reality of an election that is likely to be this close. I stand by that 1,000%. He would have won by 10 if he hadn't been competitive.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Yeah, that's good. And the polls are a snapshot in time, so do better next time, Elijah.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
But even still, the argument we always made it would come down to 100,000 votes. It came down to 237,000 votes. That's right. That's true. That's true.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Well, he was good. I mean, he was. No, he was good at the State of the Union. He was good. He was fine. Like he was not, it was not the historic speech. It was treated by some people, but it was good.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
It was at least evidence. It was evidence of energy and coherence.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I think we're going to collectively sue you for such bad takes.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I mean, let the audience pick. Yeah. You got to pick best in show.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Also, here's one thing I can tell you. Our worst take is not winning the Pundi of the year, no matter what it is.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Come on. You are misreading John there. More public appearances like this. Like that. And the next one was not like that. It was an epic fucking disaster.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I mean, it's Alan Lichtman. I think it's Alan Lichtman. Yes.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I can't believe you have gone back to back years of doing none of your resolutions. Don't forget the volunteering one of last year.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
The thing I really want to work on this year is regaining some semblance of my attention span.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Did you do that, Dan? I would say no. No, I did not.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I did not do the things I wanted to do to regain my attention span. I doubled down. I think two weeks after I gave this resolution, I set up push notifications for that account that retweets all of Trump's truth socials, which was a sign that I wasn't going to make it this year.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Oftentimes, I'll just open up my phone on a Friday night before bed and was like, man, what was John thinking at 930 to jump on this third rail?
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Post-election, you're just in it. And it's funny to listen, to be in a group chat with you where you're texting your anger about something and see how long you've held yourself back before you start tweeting about it.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
So two things. One, I am going to make another run at my attention span. And the thing I've started doing since election, which has caused me to miss many of John's best Twitter fights, is to put my phone away before I put my kids to bed and not look at it for the rest of the night.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
So no longer two-screening, like watching TV or something like that. So that's one. Whether I will manage to continue doing that, open question, but I want to do that. The second thing, and it's related to Tommy's path towards mindfulness, is... It's not even a joke. I'm being serious here. It was the path towards mindfulness. The winding path.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Both mindfulness and attention span is I want to take up yoga in 2025. I started doing it some this year.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
You know what's funny? I debated whether I would do this one publicly, and then I was like, Levin has been basically doing a one-man pitch for Pilates for weeks now, so this is a safe space. I do yoga, too. I do yoga, too.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Do you go to group classes? Yeah. I've been doing hot vinyasa yoga. Nice. But I want to do it regularly. I do it every once in a while now, but I want to do it.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
A Cassandra, if you will. The best part about that take, or the worst part, I guess, is the way in which Bill Ackman speaks so confidently about something he does not understand at all. It's like if I decided to just expound on astrophysics on this podcast.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Is what it's called. I can't wait for five years from now when we're doing this exact podcast to look back on our response. The worst pun take will be our take about this in our incoming president-elect, Nikki Haley.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
My task is to remind people because it was so long ago that you were on Survivor at one point.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
You're still in the intro because I turned on the TV.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
We'll get to that. Less regulation, just fucking pay-to-play left and right. And they are chomping at the bit. A lot of these are tech companies, like there's probably something to do with Meta, who have felt like they could not acquire other companies under Lena Kahn's FTC because of Biden's very good antitrust policies.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
So the corporations, they're going to be Donald Trump's friend because Donald Trump's going to do what they want. And they know if you're friends with Donald Trump, he is like an old school corrupt politician. If you're friends with him, he will hook you up with some government contracts, some other stuff.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
It's great. I saw that this morning when I woke up way too early as usual, and it was great news. And it's sort of what we've been waiting for. Every time you have a transition from the president of one party to the president of the next, the outgoing president furiously spends that last two months trying to –
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Then you have Democrats who are trying to figure out how to deal with Elon Musk as a public figure. Someone who is quite popular with a group of voters that we lost, namely young men. And in understanding that he is a world-famous, very successful business person. And he has taken on a task. And I think that they are – and I think Ro Khanna in particular is probably pretty smart about this.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And he has a relationship with Elon from – long time in California. But I mean, he was a Commerce Department appointee in the Obama administration when Elon was hoovering down solar tax credits for Tesla. But huge fan of the Recovery Act that Elon Musk. I think the way we navigate the Doge Commission requires some deftness because what they want to do at the service level is quite popular.
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Get rid of waste and fraud and abuse in government. Everyone agrees with that. And so you want to be in the situation where you're agreeing to work with them, and then when they come back with all their Social Security cuts and their elimination of the Department of Education, then you hammer them. So I think that's the appropriate way there.
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I don't know what – I can't speak to what John Fetterman is doing. I don't really understand the – going on true social, that is fine.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Offering – suggesting Trump get a pardon, that seems primarily like trolling. I don't really get that, but – And then I think there's this other thing that I think we all have to remind ourselves as we think about the next four years. We are never running against Donald Trump again.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
He is not our opponent. The first four years of Trump was about every single day trying to increase the likelihood that we could beat him in the 2020 election. And we succeeded. Not as well as we would like, but we did succeed because he's back. But this time we have a different set of tasks.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
So we don't necessarily have to – if we agree with Trump on something that is popular, it is okay to agree with him and then take that issue off the table. We don't have to oppose him on every single thing if it is an area of potential agreement. We also don't have to chase him down every rabbit hole. Our task is not to beat Trump.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
It is to rebuild our brand and then separate the new Trump coalition from the Republican Party that comes after Trump. And so we have to think with that mentality. And that does mean it's just a very different approach than resistance 1.0.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
get as much Tennessee as we can, fireproof their accomplishments, use the powers they have, and pardons is a big part of it. And it had felt for the last couple of weeks like that was not happening. I'm sure it was happening internally because they didn't just come up with these pardons yesterday, like they've been working on this for a long time.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And also, it's like, do you think Democrats are kissing his ass?
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
There is a moment when you lose an election, everyone loses their fucking mind for like 90 days. And they do dumb shit, right? They overreact. Mark Zuckerberg. That's different.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Like, obviously, the thing that Mark Zuckerberg cares about most in the world is power and money. But if there was anything else he cared about, it was immigration reform. He started the group Forward.US. He has given money to this. He's talked about it. And now he just gave a million dollars to someone who was on TV over the weekend talking about deporting millions of people from this country.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
But it was good to see sort of that outgoing use of power in a way that was consistent with the president's values and protecting people from a dangerous thing that's going to happen when Trump takes over.
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It's just – really, I want to just emphasize this point. Everyone loses their fucking mind when they lose an election. It's like a period of time. Go back and look what all the Republicans did after Obama won re-election. John Boehner went out the next day and said, Obamacare is the law of the land. And then Sean Hannity endorsed immigration reform.
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They lose their minds and the Democrats are – we, they, we, everyone is reeling and making a bunch of dumb decisions. And these manifest themselves in some of the examples you just gave.
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Isn't that what happened when they did this exact same thing in 2017 and cut the- Yeah, no.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And they hired lots of people. No, no, wait, wait. CEO bonuses and stock buybacks. That's right.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
She did mention, you said the operative word here was she hit him on it a few times. And there were a lot of ads on it. There wasn't the most, the ad that future for the super PAC spent the most money on was on this very topic. It was called the buddy ad. And it had,
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
a guy watching an iPad of Trump saying to the donors at Mar-a-Lago, you're rich as hell and I'm going to cut your taxes, and then went on to say what Kamala Harris was going to do to raise taxes on billionaires. But it was never a centerpiece of the campaign. It never was a defining issue. We can never make it stick.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And that, I think, has more to do with the short runway the Harris campaign had, maybe – Just the dominance of inflation as an issue, that it didn't stick. I do not take the fact that Trump won as evidence that all of a sudden tax cuts for corporations are popular. Far from it. And I think this is our best bet to really begin to make some cracks in the Trump coalition.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
People elected Trump to lower their costs. And so our message is pretty clear. Trump is not lowering your costs. He's lower. He's cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, the very companies who are making billions of dollars by jacking up prices on your groceries and your gas. He's going to give them a tax cut and you're not going to get, and he's not trying to help you.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
He's trying to help them. And then there's a second element of this, which I think is important, which is we have to make this all seem like as it is giant fucking corruption, right? You have him promising it to his donors. You have a bunch of billionaires who are going to benefit from these working in the government. You have Trump himself working in it.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
You have companies giving a million dollars the inauguration who are going to get huge benefits. We have to show that this is the exact corruption that Trump said he was going to fix, and now he is not fixing it. He's exacerbating it to help the rich at your expense. And then the last piece of this is, how is this all going to get paid for in the end? It's
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Elon Musk and Vivek are going to want to pay for it by cutting Social Security, Medicare and getting rid of the Affordable Care Act. Is that what we're going to do? And so I think those are sort of the three steps there.
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One simple way to do that is to juxtapose the tax rates of these corporations with the tax rates of people. That Walmart's going to pay a lower tax rate than people who work at Walmart or shop at Walmart. And I know I could already hear our fucking econ policy buddies saying it's totally unfair to compare individual and corporate tax rates, but I do not care.
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Go on another podcast and complain about that, all right?
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
The people who decided this election for Trump did not send him to Washington to cut taxes for corporations. They're going to be fucking shocked. That's one of the first things he does.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I hope it's the 40 death row inmates. Joe Biden, this has kind of been lost history, but Joe Biden was the first modern president elected who was an opponent of the death penalty. The upside of his Catholicism.
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Like one of the things – we can do 17 podcasts and we will do 17 podcasts on the corporate tax fight – on the larger tax fight coming up. But one thing Democrats can do is you pick an income level by which you agree to extend them. But anything below X, you're going to extend. And then you make the – which is what eventually happened with Obama and the Bush tax cuts.
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And then the fight becomes about anything above that number. And so like we'd say we'd pass it tomorrow that everyone who makes under $300,000 a year – I'm just picking a number out of the sky – uh, that there are those taxable extended, but anything above that, that they're fighting over that. And so you got to isolate the fight for the very, very wealthy in the corporations.
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That's the juxtaposition right there, right? Which is he's not going to lower your costs, but he's going to lower the taxes for the wealthy and the corporations. That's sort of where you sit there. It's not a wow moment for people who took like, two semesters of econ, but it is, it runs, but we should make absolute hay of it because it's what he promised.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
He promised he would lower costs and we have to hammer him when costs do not go down. They will continue to go up. They always do. And we like make that point, make them own it. Right.
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I don't know what the answer... Yeah, we should have plans. Sure, we should absolutely have plans. But we need a... We need a simple idea that would also probably anger the econ nerds, but that... Like, I think it's something that we... We don't understand the power of symbolism in our ideas, and we're more focused on the substance.
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It's like, yes, we're going to have a 12-point plan, and it's going to do all these things. It's just like Trump building the wall in Guinea, Mexico to pay for it. The voters know that that was an absurd thing, but it sent a signal about them. The wealth tax was an example of an idea that is – tells a story about who you are more than the specifics of the policy.
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Obviously, there are only 40 inmates on death row in federal penitentiaries. There's huge numbers of them in state prisons, but it would send a powerful signal to do that on his way out the door. So I certainly hope that that is something that is on the list of things they're actively considering over the last month here.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And so I think we need some things like that. I mean, Kamala Harris is enforcing the law against companies that price gouge, which I know she sort of backed away from for parts of the campaign was one of those things, right? Where it's like, it's not going to pass your Brookings test over. Is there going to solve all the problems, blah, blah, blah.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
But it sent a signal that about who she is and what she would fight for. And I think we need to sort of think in some big picture, less white papery ideas on how to do this.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I think there is a chance that people think Elon is so rich that he doesn't care about money. They sort of feel that way about Trump in some ways. But I think that – I don't think we should accept that premise of that argument. And – I believe that our best argument against Trump and Republicans is corruption. It's all corrupt.
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This is so fucking corrupt that the richest man in the world spent over $100 million to get Donald Trump – $200 million to get Trump elected and is now going to get billions of dollars in tax cuts and gets to pick the people who regulate his companies. Like tell that story.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And you can go down the line with all of Trump's appointees, the people who are in and out of government, David Sachs who invests in all kinds of companies being the AI and crypto czar. All of these things that tell that, like, this really is, you know, I don't know if you listen to Rom, Emmanuel on Ezra's podcast. I'm almost at the end.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
It's been out for weeks. You're just doing it. I think you told me you were starting.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I've been doing a lot of stuff. Yeah. You're just like, I can only take Rom in seven-minute doses at a time, so it's going to take me.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I'm like, oh, man, we're here now? You're about three minutes away from a Obama reference that's going to feel equally dated to a lot of people listening to this podcast. Cool, cool, cool. Great. But Rom used the term that the Oval Office is eBay. Now, that is not the term I would use.
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Right. That is the image. He might have given that line in 1998. But the image that we want to do, that we want to sell is that these people are all fucking corrupt. that they are all making money hand over fist at your expense. You've got all these rich people in there doing it. They're getting tax cuts for themselves. They're picking the regulators.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
They're getting away with stuff you could never get away with. And if we can tell that story vividly, I think we really do have a chance to reverse the politics on a lot of this.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
Well, I mean, that's where the prices matter, right?
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
The corruption message is going to matter more. Just like people turn against the wealthy, like in Occupy Wall Street, they turn against the poor and people on government assistance in times of economic strife.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And if the prices really don't go down and people continue to be angry and sad about the economy, they're going to have much less tolerance for these guys fucking throwing parties for themselves in the Oval Office with just light and money on fire. Yeah.
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Do you remember in the primary when Trump would go to rallies and he would be like, every time I bring up the trans issue, you guys all applaud. So I keep bringing it up, right? Like he was sort of mystified by the power of it. So I think it is something that he has followed. Unlike immigration, this is not an issue that has been a long cause of his.
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He just is sort of following the applause in the room. I think it's fucking gross to say, oh, it doesn't matter. Oh, it's not a big issue after you mentioned it. all the fucking time on the campaign trail in the most, in the grossest, most bigoted way possible. Um, I generally think he also was probably surprised to be reminded that he said that about bathrooms in 20. Yeah.
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16 or whatever he said that. And so he's just now trying to square all the circles in his little head that I was right then I'm right now. And then they gave him an obvious out by the way they asked the question about the Sarah McBride statement. So we could just, uh, push it, push them both aside and I really, not really have to answer.
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Don't give me a pardon. That's me winking for those listening to it on their phones.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I think, and this goes to one of the lessons of how trans issues played out in the campaign, which is you have to engage. You can't ignore them. And you have to engage by going bigger. Because when you get to the bigger issues of human rights and civil rights and treating people with tolerance, we have the high side of the argument, both morally, obviously, but also politically.
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And when Republicans are able to narrow focus it around sports teams, bathrooms, taxpayer-funded surgeries, and the infamous ad, then... they often win that. And so we should absolutely take it on. It would be so demoralizing to people in our party if Senate Democrats were unwilling to use the filibuster to stand up to protect us. So we absolutely cannot do it.
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And then just – I 100% agree with that. I do – maybe this is naive on my part, but I do believe that Senate Democrats would fight – would stop this. The other thing is what Donald Trump says on trans issues is also not that important because what you have to really watch is what's going to happen in his administration. Yes. With Project 2025, which basically compared being trans to pornography.
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Yes. And just a series of very dangerous policies are likely to be implemented, whether Trump wants to have the issue or have the conversation or not. And we're going to have to fight every single one of those that we can politically at the ballot box, legally, etc.
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This is one of the things there aren't a lot of benefits to be a minority. One of them is that you can just do the right thing sometime.
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That is a common technique for injury is the old handshake switcheroo.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I would just say, look, I, as a person who waits for the facts, I will, I anxiously await the security footage to be released probably directly to Benny Johnson or Tucker Carlson or someone like that.
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that Nancy Mace has a long history of stunts to get attention. And so this would not be out of line.
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No, I did not. I read that whole interview, top to bottom, and at no point... Me too.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And at no point was... When I read that, I was like, you know what? I know why magazines have fallen down. Yeah.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
We are basically just an AI bot reading these and telling you the best parts. But I read that whole interview, and at no point was I like, man, he's kind of got a point there. That did not happen. It's particularly not in this part. I'm trying to figure out what the 72 days were.
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Yeah. The thing, it's now the second time I think that he has said that immigration was a bigger issue than the economy. And I just think that is something to keep in mind because his actions suggest he does not understand why he was elected. And it had a lot more to do with inflation than with immigration. Immigration was a big issue. I'm not going to take that.
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I'm not going to suggest it wasn't. But particularly for a lot of the voters who picked him over Kamala Harris or who moved to him who would vote for Biden in 20, inflation was their top issue. And if you focus on things other than inflation, you will pay a price for that before too long.
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I think the Democrats became the party to some voters of out of touch extremism. And that is a process that began long before Kamala Harris was the nominee. It was exacerbated by probably our – a lot of the parties sticking with Joe Biden for a long time. It was exacerbated by – the trans ad we talked about exacerbated by Kamala Harris saying on The View that she couldn't think of any place to –
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I thought a lot about how and why the White House did it this way. And I think it's pretty simple. We know all the people who work in the White House. They are very smart. They know exactly how shooting out the Hunter Biden pardon on its own before you pardon anyone else on a Sunday night at the end of Thanksgiving weekend is going to, before you jet off to Angola, is going to look.
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Nothing would come to mind in terms of where she would differ from Biden. But it also has been going on since COVID, where we have been sort of relentlessly defined out of the mainstream as a party. And that doesn't mean that people are fully on board with Trump or think he is the party of common sense.
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But I think we seemed a little less in touch with working class people that may a lot less in touch with working class people. And that's why he won.
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Well, I mean, he called the White House and said, this is what we're doing.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
They didn't know he had made the decision to do it, but I'm sure there's a conversation on rollout, right? And the president came back from Thanksgiving with his family where they had a family meeting about this. Hunter was at that meeting. Hunter is staring down the barrel of going to prison. soon. And the president makes a decision. He calls back and says, I've made this decision.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And then they have a choice. Do they just do it right away before it leaks or do they allow it to leak out there that he is thinking about it and then face a bunch of pressure? And so this is not how anyone would design. I think it's just, it's a very, this is how the process worked. And it takes a long time to get 1300 commutations and pardons together.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And that process was ongoing and not yet finished when he made this decision at Thanksgiving. So there's no plan that had it this way. It's just like, this is how life unfolded. And this was a family issue. And one thing you always read in the reporting is on family stuff, no one argues Biden calls the shots. And that's how this was.
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I've got that happiness out of the way. Let's get into the shit now.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
The position of FBI director is one of the most powerful in this country. You have an army of investigators and law enforcement officers who work for you. It is so powerful that unlike the Department of Defense, the director of the CIA, Congress gave the FBI director 10-year non-consecutive terms.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
So you can't amass too much power, and you are insulated from the influence of individual presidents and members of Congress. And Donald Trump, for the second time now, is firing an FBI director. And in this case, he is doing it, and he wants to install a loyalist who has published an actual list of the enemies who he wants to prosecute. And that should be a big, giant deal.
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And it's not going to be because Chris Wray just slouched off into retirement. And so instead, you have to pick the alternative scenario where – Joe Biden leaves, Donald Trump is sworn in, he walks in the White House, and then he fires the FBI director, who has years left on his term that was confirmed by the Senate, to replace him with Kash Patel. But because Ray resigned...
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
When he is trying to appoint Kash Patel, it's just going to seem like he's filling any other cabinet – empty cabinet vacancy like all the rest of them. And it just – you can't – this is – it is a big deal what he is doing with the FBI and Chris Wray made it seem like a lot less big deal. So he did not uphold any of those values and principles that he talked about.
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He actually undermined them by giving in to Trump. Pure cowardice in my opinion. Pure cowardice.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
In the end, if Kash Patel is going to be the FBI director in either way, it's not going to make a huge difference to the Benny Thompson's, Adam Schiff's, Anthony Fauci's of the world who are going to be investigated. But it is a chance to grab the nation's attention for just a moment to show how dangerous this is. Because as we're going to talk about on this podcast –
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We all ran around for a year and a half saying that Donald Trump was an existential threat to democracy. One of the reasons he was an existential threat to democracy is because every fucking morning before breakfast, he announced on True Social that he was going to investigate all of his political opponents, which we said was fascist and authoritarian and dangerous.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And now he's doing that exact thing. And so many people... Chris Wray included, are sort of like, eh, maybe not that big a deal. And so if it is as big a deal as we think it is, and I imagine Chris Wray probably thinks it is, then you have to at least try to tell that story.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
And it makes it harder to tell that story if you're just going to hand the keys of the FBI to Kash Patel as opposed to making Donald Trump take them from you and do it. Like, this is what Preet did as U.S. Attorney in New York. He made Trump fire him. And that was a big deal. And firing the FBI director is a huge deal. And it should get that attention. And it won't because of Chris Wray.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
I'll send him an invite link to Substack, see if he can get started early.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
So let's probably try to separate this out into a couple of groups.
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Billionaires' Bet on Trump Pays Off
There are corporations which are staring down the prospect of an all-you-can-eat buffet of corporate greed under Donald Trump.