Tommy Vietor
Appearances
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Introducing: Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams
Hey guys, it's Tommy. We're taking a break for the holiday season, but we've got something special for you today. Instead of our usual episode, we're dropping a new one from Assembly Required, hosted by the one and only Stacey Abrams.
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Introducing: Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams
In this episode, she talks with Celine Gowder, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist, about the threats to public health with the incoming Trump administration. They dig into what's at stake with appointees like RFK Jr., how to bring science back into policymaking, and the path forward to driving real change.
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Introducing: Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams
If 2024 is leaving with a lot of questions about the future, or if you've also found yourself shouting at the TV more than usual, stay tuned for this great episode, because if anyone knows something about not giving up, it's Stacey Abrams. Don't forget to subscribe to Assembly Required wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Jesse, who is in the Oval Office today. Oh, yeah. Rupert Murdoch. And Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
I meant hummus, not Hamas. How do we route that money in the wrong place? Who are we sending hummus to? No, it was payment for. We split that app.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Anyway, this is pretty... First of all, I didn't know that Uncle Sam had a Venmo. This seems alarming and unprecedented. Like Elon Musk, just an unelected tech billionaire.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
wrestling away congressional authority to spend money and the treasury department's role in the whole process and i don't know like this vindictive unstable man calling usaid evil and leftist marxists terrorist supporters uh this all seems like a pretty bad setup i forgot to mention that
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Also, apparently, even in past financial crises or debt ceiling fights, the political staff have never... done this. They've always let career civil servants handle this kind of sensitive information. And by the way, there was some reporting about the identities of members of the Doge team, these tweens and teens running around the place. I don't think they're any tweens. You don't know that.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Nope. You don't know that there were tweens. I like calling them tweens. Good job, Tom. Now the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia is threatening to arrest people or prosecute people that, I guess, expose their identities or put them at risk in some kind of way.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
And now you've got like Elon's army of dipshits and losers on Twitter now doxing the reporters who reported on the Doge staffers and leading them getting threats. So this is just incredibly facistic.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
I think that this is not about wasteful spending or even about USAID. I think this is a broader effort to usurp Congress's role in the spending process and create a precedent that they can then use again and again. Just to be clear, the president does not have the legal authority to abolish USAID.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Congress established USAID's authority apart from state and merging it with state would also be unconstitutional. So this is just a power grab. And I think how it goes... could determine whether there's another power grab. You're seeing some reporting that the Department of Education could be next. That's the thing in Elon's crosshairs.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
And it is part of a broader pattern that we're seeing in these first two weeks of them ignoring or breaking the law, ignoring norms to seize power. So they fired those inspectors general at all these agencies. They did it
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
illegally by not giving congress sufficient notice it would have been very easy to give congress 30 days notice and then fire all these people the republicans wouldn't stop them they wanted to have this fight and maybe take it to courts and win in court they have crippled the national labor relations board by firing a member so now the nlrb doesn't have enough members to meet so they don't have a quorum uh that means in practice this independent agency
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
That is supposed to investigate and prosecute labor law violations, cannot do its job. Similar thing happened at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or EEOC. They are browbeating Republican senators into supporting unqualified nominees. Like this is a massive, unprecedented power grab. And Democrats, I think, don't really know how to fight it or don't have the power to fight it.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
It also sounds like that OPM letter. went through Elon shop and did not go by people like Stephen Miller and other top White House officials. So I'm sure there's some intra administration.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Well, they didn't know if they should show up for work. So some of them didn't.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
I also think there's this lack of clarity now about whether some parts of USAID funding has been unfrozen. Secretary Rubio said that life-saving assistance like medicine, medical service, food and shelter would be exempted from the aid freeze. But no one really knows what that means. And I think that's kind of the point because this uncertainty has just upended everything USAID is doing.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
And I think, honestly, I think talking about this as a freeze is probably a mistake. I have zero confidence that the vast majority of this funding or these programs will be turned back on. And I think that, by the way, Rubio used to be a big defender of USAID funding. He said it was critical for our national security, and now he's totally flip-flopped.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
But let's just say that something you're working on is paused for 90 days. If you're a contractor working for USAID in Kenya or Ukraine or Southeast Asia, You don't have 90 days worth of savings to just sit on to see if your job is around in three months. You're going to go do something else.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
And it's going to completely cripple all this work that has taken decades to set up, this infrastructure, these contractors, these networks of people in these countries. And to your point, if you're getting antiretrovirals through PEPFAR and you stop, you're going to die.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
But in some instances, it's worse than that. They are folding this into their preconceived ideological anger, and they've decided that USAID funded programs that led to gain-of-function research that led to COVID. This is all kind of getting folded into like prosecute Fauci madness.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
And it's like Elon Musk retweeting at Wall Street Apes, which is his source on someone found some 40 million in taxpayer funding that went to some scientists in Wuhan. And it's just like, I don't know. Apparently, this is all just part of a conspiracy theory about how the lab leak was on purpose from, you know, thanks to Fauci's funding from USAID, I guess. That's the new...
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
And most of those 6,000 are like so tangential. So people who got random leads who pass along information or were part of a wiretap or God knows what.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Or they were just assigned a case and you don't have a choice.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
I'm so sick of this, this is what people voted for line. No, no one voted to give Elon Musk a line item veto for the entire federal government. And voting for Donald Trump doesn't mean we get rid of basic civil service protections for government employees.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Those are in place to ensure merit-based employment, to ensure that political influence isn't dictating every single person who is hired or fired, that there isn't discrimination or arbitrary actions. They have collective bargaining rights. There's whistleblower protections. There's all sorts of workers' rights that don't go away because Donald Trump gets elected president.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
I didn't love the USAID press conference setting. The reason being, as we just discussed, the Republicans are about to find a bunch of examples of USAID programs that seem silly even to us or seem like a bad use of money. And if the shorthand is Democrats defend USAID while the White House bully pulpit and Elon's Twitter amplifies all these bad things about USAID, I don't think that's a winner.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
I think... I want them to focus in on the Elon piece of this right now, because I do think like it's genuinely scary. It's a he's a nefarious new element to Trump 2.0 that is newsworthy. And he's the shiny object right now. And reporters want to cover it. And everyone knows who he is and want to know what's going on.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
And there's been some recent polling that shows that Elon's favorable ratings are underwater. Something comes on cases by like 16 points each. And I think Democrats should drive a wedge in between Elon and Trump and drive both their unfavorables up by talking about why an unelected billionaire is just kind of combing through the government books and doing whatever the hell he wants.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Like that is a weird, crazy, interesting story that no one is going to like. And I think it'll get covered. And I'm good for Brian Schatz for blocking all these State Department employee nominations. I think that's great. Hakeem Jeffries' 10-point plan has some good stuff in there. I read through it all, but I learned about it when I read the outline for this episode.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
So I don't know that it's broken through. I know a lot of it is like planning for down the road. But I don't know. I would focus on the Elon piece right now and just go hard. Yeah.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Are we at like King Hippo if it's Mike Tyson punch out? Where are we at in the escalation ladder?
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
I don't want him to have a slush fund, but for the United States having a sovereign wealth fund, it's a conversation worth having.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Oh, yeah, yeah. That sounds right. King Hippo. Yeah, I mean, the fentanyl czar is going to have some free time because I think USCBP had some data about seizures at the northern border in 2022, 2023, and 2024. And they found 70 pounds of fentanyl at the northern border as compared to over 66,000 pounds at the southern border.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Yeah, I don't... I think we can critique it. We can make fun of that.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Look, they need to step up. Like... Good to do a press conference today. They've been slow. There's all these reports of the Democrats, the congressional Democrats doing a conference call to figure out their response as the news changes. The OPM memo gets rescinded, whatever. Be a little more nimble. Take some shots. Don't worry about the words being perfect.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Make sure you try to get it to the people who need to hear it. Maybe don't use the word aroused. Maybe don't defend the most unpopular spending we do and defend some of the popular spending. But look, yeah, points for fighting, I guess.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
I do think everyone really needs to keep an eye on these media lawsuit settlements with Trump. It's not just ABC and their defamation suit. It's not just Facebook and their $25 million, you call it whatever you want, to Trump and to his library. There's reports that CBS might settle a suit that didn't even involve Donald Trump. Which is fucking crazy. The most ridiculous one.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that they edited, like every news organization edits everything always, and Paramount might settle that. And by the way, they happen to have a Paramount Skydance merger with that's sitting before the Trump administration, but suggesting that those things are connected would be untoward, so I wouldn't do that.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Literally in the Oval Office with Rupert Murdoch. So if we see the biggest media organizations in the country and their corporate overlords preemptively caving to the Trump administration and settling lawsuits. They could have won.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
That is a very scary signal about press coverage and fighting for the First Amendment right to cover the White House in the second administration, and we need to keep an eye on that.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
So I don't think the fentanyl issue was one with Canada as much as it was with Mexico and with China.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
We've been dealing with this guy for a decade and Trump's like, we gave $50 million to Hamas for condoms and then they use the condoms as bums. It's completely made up because some dork over at Doge, she was 19 years old and has the Twitter handle bigballs69420 misread a spreadsheet and didn't realize this funding was going to like Mozambique or something.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
And then the response though is like factcheck.org has Trump administration makes unsupported claim about 50 million for condoms to Gaza. It's like, oh my God. And then- We're done.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
And Twitter's successful. The Elon fluffers are out in force. They're everywhere. They're attacking everything.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Yeah, I think it's going to be a lot easier to get either real concessions or just lip service out of the Canadians and the Mexicans than it will be out of the Chinese. Xi Jinping is not going to bend or break easily. And so it does look like, ultimately, I think, the results matter a lot less to Trump than the politics.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
There were stories in the Wall Street Journal a week ago about how the Canadians didn't know what he wanted. They were on the other end of this fight. They didn't know what they were negotiating over.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Yeah, they wanted a new czar. But Trump looks like he's taking action. He's getting stuff done. He's making progress. He's picking big fights. So it's splashy. It's getting covered. You're right, state media is covering it, but so is every other news outlet that's trying to follow this administration. So I think it's really smart politics for him.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Well, you know what you do with a Jim Cramer prediction? You bet the other side, almost exclusively.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
Well, yeah, the J.D. Vance theory of the case is you throw in the tariffs and you create a big domestic industry. But these are all long game proposals that will take decades to play out. And Trump's just dicking around and doing a political move. Like it's clearly just naked politics. He wants to look like he's taking action. I think it's pretty effective in that sense.
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Elon Musk's Nerd Coup
you know he makes up some other big problem that canada and mexico doing he does this all over again yeah i just think it's like the casual news observer the just the headline person like oh you see trump he beat up on the canadians he got some concessions like good for him doing stuff
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Well ... he's back.
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A huge chunk of American shipping goes through the Panama Canal. It has gotten more expensive, but that's mostly because of drought. People usually attribute to climate change, not China.
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Do you see the TikTok CEO sitting next to Tulsi Gabbard, the future director of national intelligence? What a country.
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Another kind of foreign policy adjacent one is he's going to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. And I'm just very interested to see what that means in practice because there's lots of reporting about connections between the Mexican government and the cartels, elected officials, or the Mexican military and these cartels.
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I want to know, are they going to get tagged with providing material support? Are we going to go back to the campaign rhetoric where we all were talking about – using the U.S. military to bomb Mexico, bomb the cartel drug manufacturing facilities.
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That's right. I mean, I guess my, like, we'll talk about this later, but my modus operandi for Trump 2.0 is to take it all literally and assume he's going to do these things. So if we're going to call them terrorists, presumably then you kill the terrorists because that's usually what you do with terrorists if you're an American government. So stay tuned.
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Well, Dan's- Enjoy Severance, you elite prick. We're watching, Dan and I are watching Yellowstone. What was it? Lioness 2? What was it called? Special Outs.
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I think that Greenland, he really does want the territory. I think with Panama, he's probably just trying to get a better deal, a better rate. But as far as I can, I looked into this a couple weeks ago when he started talking about it again. I think that they are charging us the same rate as everyone else, this ACP, the Panama Canal Authority.
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I think the big, big picture on this is Trump's brain was frozen in the 70s. And he remembers when Reagan used to attack Jimmy Carter over the Panama Canal all the time. And it was a huge political issue. And he's just bringing it back.
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I don't know. I think Lovett was Googling this feverishly during his speech. Don't tell people all the magic.
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Right, right. When we were laughing, what did Claudia Sheinbaum, the new president of Mexico, threaten to call the United States like greater Mexico or something?
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Well, little X was like, can you please stop carrying Vivek around on your shoulders?
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Yeah, profoundly frustrating 24 hours. I mean, I thought Dan's piece on this in Messagebox, his newsletter, which you all should subscribe to.
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It was excellent. There was lots of less thoughtful commentary on Twitter about how, once again, Dems suck and Republicans rule because we gifted Trump this political win. And I just wish, and while that is true, the politics of this did not end well for Joe Biden or the Democratic Party. I wish people were pointing out, though, that the vote in the House... to ban was 360 to 58.
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So like 186 Republicans voted for banning TikTok or divesting TikTok. It was 79, 18 in the Senate. So you had 31 Republicans in the Senate. So this is a overwhelming bipartisan decision. The reason they did it was national security concerns, which they've done an absolutely terrible job explaining to anyone. So no one understands why this happened.
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But I also think part of the story of how Trump went from wanting to ban TikTok and trying to do it on his way out the door to getting to saving TikTok is also that he met with a big donor named Jeff Yass or Jeff Yass, who said something to him that led him to flip-flop on this issue. And I think Jeff Yass owns 15% of ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. So there was a big money angle here.
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And then TikTok wasn't shut down. They shut themselves down So they could put up this little, please save us, Mr. Trump, that they shouted from their tall tower. And then they gave him the win. And they're like, oh, Mr. Trump saved us to suck up to the incoming administration. So it was just like, it was so obviously a stunt.
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And people were like, the commentary on Twitter in particular was just so fucking credulous.
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Probably, but Jeff Yass bought a ton of shares of Truth Social at the time and put a bunch of money into the Trump team's pocket. I think it could be a why not both situation.
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And they made a big show of like declassifying all this information around the Ukraine, Russian invasion of Ukraine. So why not do that again here? You know, there's a way to put information into people's hands.
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There's actually a Steve Bannon thing. He always says, we're going to fix bayonets.
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I mean, by law, by dance has to provide the Chinese Communist Party with whatever it wants. Basically. And the broader context is the Chinese have hacked into basically every single telecom company in the United States. We've been unable, the United States government's been unable to get them out.
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We've learned over time that this op that's called Salt Typhoon, they've managed to get audio and text messages of calls from Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, senior political officials. So there's this ongoing hacking war happening. And the idea that the Chinese national security state wouldn't use TikTok when it's on all our phones.
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Trump wants to force a sale to someone more supportive of him, like Elon Musk. I think the critics of this ban are right to point out comments from senior U.S. government officials where they said that like real momentum behind TikTok's ban came when there was tons of pro-Palestinian content on there about Gaza. And I do think that was sort of bizarre.
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You're buying nothing. You are technically buying a digital playing card, but it's not supposed to be viewed as a security or an investment or a donation to Trump. You're buying nothing because you like the thing.
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But people buy and sell and trade these things because they know with some of these meme coins, also called shit coins, you can see huge rips to the upside where there's like Dogecoin and all of a sudden Elon Musk likes it. And you can see people pile in and the price goes up.
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You can see the value go way up. And if you bought a million of them for one cent and it goes to a dollar, you make a ton of money. So that's what seems to have happened here. A company connected to Trump owns 80% of these Trump coins. They also get a fee on the sale of these coins.
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I saw a guy named Connor Grogan, who's a director of Coinbase, estimated on Saturday that Trump's team had made 58 million in fees from all of the Trump coin sales. So Trump, they launched this Trump coin. Trump promotes it on True Social. The thing goes to the moon. And then they launched the Melania coin. And it seems like a bunch of people saw that happen.
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And maybe they sold their Trump coin to buy Melania coin. Well, maybe you sold the Trump coin because you're like, oh, no, they're going to launch a thousand of these things. The value is going to go down. Whatever happens, people just started selling like crazy. And the price just collapsed. And it's called a rug pull in the kind of like the coin world. Yeah. So, I don't know. We'll find out.
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All the schmoes who buy late lose out and all the people who own it early win. This is the hock to a coinification of the presidency. And, you know, normally you might see like regulators investigating what happened here. Maybe law enforcement gets involved. You think Trump's going to have his DOJ dig into what happened?
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And he's now going to write the regulations for how crypto is regulated. So this is the new world, folks.
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I think credit, good for those people. There are arguments you can make for the utility of Bitcoin or the blockchain or other of these technologies. There's no utility to a meme coin or a shit coin. It's just for shits and giggles.
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And for the president of the United States to launch this thing the day before he's inaugurated and then someone pull the rug on everybody who got in late, he's harming his own people who might have bought in.
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What you should take from what I think we take away from those quotes, though, is just how egregious this was. This is like shockingly irresponsible, borderline illegal.
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Basically my son Dan Pfeiffer from Delaware. Everyone from Delaware got a pardon.
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I mean, I would like to be I would love a little more specificity if I were her. Yeah.
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What do you open the thing? It's like commutation. Come on. Yeah, pardon is so much better. But like back to Cassie Hutchinson, I mean, I don't know her. She's been on the show. She was a witness. She was someone that Republicans accused of committing perjury before the committee. And also someone who was at the lowest level, right?
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She was an assistant in the White House, has no resources, is not going to be able to hire like the fanciest lawyers out there. So I would be a little nervous if I were her. I will just say, because... And Trump called her out at his overflow speech. Yeah, he did. He went after her basically by name.
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Every personal political decisions Joe Biden makes, he tends to make only with his family and like one or two aides and then just roll it out right away. And it creates a political nightmare. Right.
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Right. There's all this reporting about how he decided to run for reelection without really running it by staff. There's reporting that the Hunter pardon was made in concert with, you know, like a family meeting. And then they kind of rolled it out weeks and weeks ago and then did the rest of them this week. So, yeah, I mean, I think the the.
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And the timing, the communications plan wasn't really there for a lot of these. I do think it's going to really hurt Joe Biden's reelection chances. It hurt how he was talked about. He could have put Hunter in this last batch and buried it all. I guess there was kind of the question, the issue of sentencing that complicated things timing wise. I guess.
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The Leonard Pelletier one is interesting though. He's a Native American activist who's been in jail since 1977 for allegedly murdering two FBI agents. But it's been very controversial. And I think, you know, people have been trying to get him released for years and years and years now. I mean, Amnesty International called him a political prisoner, et cetera, et cetera.
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Yeah, but also there's this presumption of guilt. And you see shitty people like Rand Paul tweeting about how now we know... You know, Fauci is guilty for his actions during the pandemic. And maybe that maybe who cares?
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Tommy? January 20th, 2025 is Liberation Day. It's just a giant Bill Pullman ripoff from Independence Day. Yeah, no aliens. How dare you, first of all. It's funny also that Dan criticized Trump for being too wonky, too policy focused. Didn't expect that. I sort of had a similar reaction. It was sort of remarkable in how unremarkable it was.
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My memory of the 2017 inaugural address is all that one line about American carnage. And then I rewatched that speech after I watched the 2025 version. And it's actually amazing how similar the two speeches are. We're going to make America great again. We're going to protect our borders. Some hand waving about unity.
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You should, everyone should listen to Strict Scrutiny this week. They go deeper on this. It was very interesting.
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He updates this one with new, more modern grievances, like the judicial system being weaponized, the battle against inflation and the need to invade Panama. But there's like verbatim lines at the top. Like in 2017, he said, for too long, a small group in our nation's capital have reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.
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I also everyone should go watch this just to see the look on J.D. Vance's face at the top where he starts talking about all the things he didn't want. And he looks like so pained and kind of constipated. Speaker Johnson is like twitching and looking around and staring into the middle distance. It's it's.
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And Melania and her big, goofy fucking hat is just hiding her eyes and looking down. And it's so pissed the whole time. And then Trump starts talking about how her feet hurt and how she wanted to go home. But he made her come here. It's so weird.
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2025, for many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair. So it was, you know, just kind of like stump like the same thing. I did note, though, for all Joe Biden's attempts and efforts to be a decent person and have a dignified transfer of power.
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Trump still took a dump on his entire presidency in existence right next to him. So that was kind of him, cordial of him.
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Watch what he does, not what he says, and focus on those midterms.
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I mean, I think moving all the events inside and only doing things with tech CEOs and billionaire donors while the MAGA faithful have nothing to do or go to some giant arena where they get ignored, that's kind of a perfect metaphor for how I imagine this whole thing is going to go.
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Well, there were Proud Boys marching through the streets. Idle hands, devil's playground. But I mean, I do think this is why you're seeing like the Steve Bannon fight against Elon Musk and the tech oligarchs, because they're worried that their populism is erasing the minute the votes were counted. And they're not wrong.
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That's simplisafe.com slash crooked. There's no safe like SimpliSafe.
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It sounds like, oh, maybe someone started it to target them. That was my takeaway in the moment.
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Well ... he's back.
He also said that in the overflow of speech that maybe Nancy Pelosi wanted January 6th to happen. And that's why she turned down the 10,000 troops he says he offered and noted that she's guilty as hell. So that was said in the Capitol where the insurrection happened four years ago.
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Well ... he's back.
No, the Panama Canal Authority. It's a semi-autonomous government entity controlled by Panama operates the canal. There are ports and infrastructure getting built by the Chinese on either side of the canal. Panama is one of the countries that signed a deal with China for the Bell and Rove initiative. So maybe he's referring to that.
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Well ... he's back.
But there were a lot of factual errors in this part of the speech. He says the United States lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal. Most of the deaths happened during the French construction portion. Such a good fact check. They quit on. But also, well, also the people who did the work were from the Caribbean. They were not American citizens.
Pod Save America
Well ... he's back.
They were people who were basically indentured servants doing this work. Several thousand Americans died, but it's not 38,000. Yeah, not 38,000. Not even close.
Pod Save America
Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
on social media, people sharing videos of a helicopter or plane dropping water and missing a building and being like, here it is, their perfect example of California and why liberal government has failed, right? Here we have it once again. These liberals can't do it. You need private firefighters. You need a Rick Caruso, whatever it is. And it's like, these are people doing their best.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
And from where we were a few days ago to where we are today, they did an extraordinary job.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
And by the way, yeah, I just done that too. Like, yes, false alarms, very scary. You do enough false alarms, people aren't going to take the real one seriously. That's the huge, of course.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Well, like I think Newsom said this to you, some version of like the truth requires some patience and requires some time. We're in the middle of it. We're in the middle of it. And the fact, look, pre-deployment problems. Surely we will learn ways to do this better. Some of it will be personalities, individuals who made mistake.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Some of it will be structural, which is much less interesting and people don't give a shit about, which is probably ultimately have been even more important. But just the fact that these terrible fires raged is not in and of itself a sign that the government, that failed just because it looks bad on TV. So much of this is about what looks bad on TV. I don't want to defend Karen Bass.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
I found it shocking that she went to France for the Olympics three times, which I learned from that article. Yeah. Three times.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
It's for the most part, though. A climate change hero. Elon Musk. It is like sort of the mirror image of the kind of conspiratorial mindset like that. Whatever. That's fucking nuts. But like, no, most people do not believe that the government is responding as a conspiracy to hurt California. Right.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
But I think like the the mirror image of people assuming that there is some kind of conspiracy that explains everything is in a crisis like this. It can't just be bad. It has to be because people have failed us. There has to be individuals who are responsible.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
There has to be someone to blame right now because I can't handle the uncertainty of just knowing that people are doing their best and it's not working. It has to be something else. It has to be more about a human failure.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
It was sort of striking that you could imagine Joe Biden giving a very, very similar version of the speech had Kamala Harris won. And like I came away from it, like he says, overall, we have reinvigorated people's faith in the United States as a true, true partner. Is that true? Have you done that?
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Do you think that's where people are right now as they watch you hand the keys over to Donald Trump? Even if there is some truth to the fact that you have reestablished relationships and had the achievements that you're describing, you live in a world where your presidency will be bookended by Donald Trump and all the damage and policy changes that that brings.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
And you can try to pretend otherwise and you can subtly or not so subtly kind of hint at trying to create kind of like political leverage opportunities. on Trump about the position he'll enter the office in, the changes that Joe Biden has made.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
But the speech largely seems to ignore the fact that we're about to transition to someone who is going to do great damage to our policies internationally and our reputation.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Yeah. It's also, you know, okay, you're describing your accomplishments, but we're seeing Donald Trump take office here. We're seeing right-wing movements rising around the world. What have you learned about that? Like, I don't need you to take on your critics. I understand not wanting to engage with them. But like, what have you learned about being president? What have you learned about America?
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
And maybe, you know, you don't go to the hardware store for milk. And like, I guess I'm not going to get anything from Joe Biden beyond America's best days are ahead. And maybe that's all we can really expect from him at this point. But it's like this is a dark moment for this country. It will be a dark few years for this country. Pretending otherwise just makes you irrelevant.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Yeah. I'm being very harsh. I also think that's like, this is not a moment where we like, no speech can resolve our frustrations, hope, anger, fear for what's about to come. And that's an impossible position.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
It's just like, yeah, it's just sort of like, we're going backwards, man. We're going to face it, whether you can or not.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Can I make the nerdiest analogy I've ever made in this show? You just set the bar pretty high. So in Star Trek Next Generation, every once in a while, there's an episode where they go to the battle bridge. And basically, the bridge is where they have their kind of highfalutin conversations. There's a conference room off the bridge where you sit and you talk about the nature of...
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
of life and what it means to be a space-faring people. But every once in a while, the ship gets so fucked up and so many people are dead and something is so broken that they gotta go to the battle bridge. I just think we need a battle bridge mindset.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
We've been defeated every which way. A bridge-surrection? Yeah, exactly. A bridge-surrection. We're in the battle bridge. The shit is at the fan. The saucer is separated. That's the energy. Pods of America brought to you by Helix. I love my Helix mattress. I have a Dawn Lux, very comfortable. I took the Helix sleep quiz. That's what they matched me with because I'm a stomach sleeper.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
It's firm but plush. I highly recommend it. The Helix lineup offers 20 unique mattresses, including award-winning Lux and Ultra Premium Elite Collections, Helix Plus, a mattress designed for big and tall sleepers, and Helix Kids Mattress, designed for growing bodies, endorsed by child sleep experts. So how will you know which Helix mattress works best for you and your body?
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
When you take the Helix sleep quiz, you'll find the perfect mattress in under two minutes. But as I mentioned, I got the Dawn Lux and I really like it. Not sure you could take my word for it. Helix has been awarded the number one mattress picked by GQ and Wired Magazine.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
It's even recommended by multiple leading chiropractors and doctors of sleep medicine as a go-to solution for improving your sleep. It's definitely improved my sleep, made life a little better, made me feel better in the morning. I'm just a huge fan. And it was a huge upgrade over my previous mattress.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
So go to helixsleep.com slash crooked for 20% off site-wide plus two free dream pillows with mattress purchase. That's helixsleep.com slash crooked for 20% off site-wide plus two free dream pillows with mattress purchase. helixsleep.com slash crooked.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Keep beating it. Dear diary, you'll never believe it. We were just in the studio and it felt like a normal day.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
maybe it was maybe it was what was happening in our city just look just just it's nice we can beat each other um whoa what what is that so it's starting to me it's like so obvious and transparent that it's just it's like sloppy so yeah no first of all love love advice on masculinity from someone dressed by a stylish to look like east brunswick's coolest bar mitzvah dj
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Yeah, I mean, I was trying to figure out what this even really means, like the corporate culture has been neutered. And I think it means yelling at employees is actually I think it's a lot like less like because there's a sort of I think like kind of corporate.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
So Mike Johnson, actually, the next sentence that he says, because he's walking on the Capitol, he says their conditions and he throws out their forest management, water management. It's like, OK, this is a disaster, an emergency right now. California needs money right now. I don't even know what it means to put conditions on California. Nor does Mike Johnson.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
idea, right, that like feminine structures are more flat and collaborative and male structures are more hierarchical and aggressive, right? And I think they, like, they feel like, this is like all me too,
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
yeah it's also like it's such a silly thing but like you know it's it really reminds you of 1984 in the slippery slope no slippery slope in 1984 you're right there in it in 1984 in books and other books the clock strikes 13 like that yeah looks like 1984 but you're 1984 you're never there's no before you're in it you're just in it you'd actually never get the slope you're at the bottom of it who set the corporate culture at facebook mark
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Yeah, there's a freedom that comes from being like Trump or wanting to be in Trump's good graces. And people talk about the ways in which it's sort of that you just have to kind of basically agree with Trump and then you're in his favor. But there's a subtle way in which I think what you also get to do is pretend that there are no hard choices in life.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
And Zuckerberg does that a bit in this interview where he acknowledges that there are difficult decisions and some filters have more false positives and more false negatives. But what he's doing here when he talks about COVID, when he talks about misinformation in 2016, he's not acknowledging the trade-off. There was a ton of misinformation on Facebook.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
whether it helped or hurt or mattered, I don't know. There was a ton of dangerous misinformation on COVID, right? Maybe some things got swept up in that net that now in hindsight, they think maybe went too far and maybe it was not correct, but didn't need to be taken down, whatever. But there was dangerous misinformation. That was a very real issue.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
And if you're gonna do less of that, as you said in your own video, that there will be worse and terrible things you now see on Facebook as a result. There are trade-offs here. You built this platform. And Tommy, to your point about him not thinking about content moderation,
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
I think it actually is like a kind of more damning thing to say to believe him, because I do think whether it was Twitter, Twitter did not start as a platform for people to share their political views. It wasn't about what you thought. It was about what was happening. It was supposed to be about sharing where you are. Facebook was about a post.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
I mean, obviously, it was about ranking hot faces, but but like it was not about politics. It was about politics. posting about your life and your community. They have all been continuously over and over again, caught off guard by what happens when politics and celebrity intercede until they're into their platforms. And then they built something so big, they couldn't control it.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
If you build a building and you're like, sorry, it's too big to make sure it's safe. Nobody gives you credit for it, but they built something too big to be made safe.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
It's like no more woke. You got to ban. You got to ban woke. And you better stop doing those things we're making up about you doing all those things that aren't happening. They better stop right now.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Yeah, we're just relearning the same things over and over again. Well, that was interesting, too, because I remember he was criticized from the left because he wasn't taking posts down. He was just going to demonetize them or lower them in the rankings. I can't remember.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
There's a part in the interview where he said that, you know, that he that they felt in some way kind of attacked by the Biden administration. And he thought that like, hey, like. you're supposed to be on our team, we're in a world here and we're supposed to be fighting other countries and other countries tech platforms and that at least Donald Trump wants America to win, right?
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Which it feel like a kind of something, it reminded me of what I heard over the years from various, like kind of high up tech people, which is that like, yeah, our companies are making mistakes, but you don't want to regulate them. You don't want to break them up because we're actually in a fight with China. We're actually in a fight with these other countries.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
And I think that that is sincerely, sincerely. Yeah, he doesn't like content moderation policies from other countries.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Yeah. Somebody's got to pay the, pay the credit card fee. This was like over the weekend, it was just a, we were just facing this tiny insignificant example of like how anything that is happening in the world gets fed into this like meat grinder of information, because it's just like, everyone asks us, where should we donate? How should we help?
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
And so the team vets organizations puts them in an easy place and you can donate the money and the money gets sent to those groups.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
And then it's like, no, you're stealing the money. No, we're not. We're not taking a cent from these donations. But then it's like, you're actually doing it to get the email addresses. It's like, hey, guys, we ask people for their email addresses when we want people's email addresses. You think we like we watched our city catch fire.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
We're like, this is a great opportunity to set up a charitable fund so that we can harvest email addresses for future political campaigns.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Yeah, that was what I was hoping. That was how I reassured myself. I was unfolding. I was like, oh, this is generating attention for the fund. And maybe people in our audience or outside of our audience that would understand that this is fucking bullshit will see this. It's like, oh, these are great organizations that are helping on the ground.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
But you should feel very happy to do it through votesaveamerica.com slash relief.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Yeah. I mean, look, there are Republican members of Congress in California.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
It is especially galling when you see there have been people like DeSantis, but a bunch of them that have called for conditioning aid to Democratic areas on either side of their state desperately needing aid after a disaster. We have had disasters in Florida, in Texas. We just went through these terrible floods in North Carolina.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Republicans understand the need for aid in an emergency and are completely for it on either side of crises that affect Democratic states.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Yeah, it's also like the ideological part of it is just beside the point, obviously. But like disasters, a big disaster in California, it affects the whole country. This is a huge port. This is a huge part of the American economy. A disaster in North Carolina affects the whole country. The whole idea is we help parts of the country rebuild because it helps all of us.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
We are all better off when we know that in a disaster, if there's something that happens to our town, our community, our state, that the resources will come in that come over the top of what you could do locally because that protects all of us.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
So I think that's pretty galling about this too. So the reason Johnson's wasn't there is that this was a specific meeting. This was a meeting with Republicans from New York, New Jersey, California, who are specifically interested in raising the cap on state and local tax deductions.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Don't let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
The reasons that that's interesting is that was one of the ways they helped get the cost down on the original Trump tax cuts. There's a state and local deduction that helps people from high tax states like California, New York. and New Jersey. And Trump is in this meeting with these guys and they're like, this cap affected our people. And Trump was like, I didn't know that. Nobody told me that.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
So this is a meeting of a group of House Republicans trying to figure out a way to make the debt problem worse. That's the goal of this meeting.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
And in order to make the debt problem worse, which is what this group of people wants to do, they need either Democratic votes or they need the votes of people that have not been opposed some of the time, a group of people that have never in their time in Congress voted to raise the debt limit.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
And so fundamentally what that meeting is and what a lot of this is, is an admission that Republicans are fucking stuck, that they have to raise the debt limit. They don't have the votes to do it. And they're trying to figure out some way out of it.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Mike Johnson also talked about the possibility of the condition for California tying it to raising the debt limit, which is just a way of saying they don't think they can do it, as Tommy was saying, without Democratic votes.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Yeah, it's like the aid is conditioned on opening up a pipe between Fresno and Laguna that doesn't exist.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Right, well, it's hard to even like, this is an emergency. The disaster relief needs to come quickly. And so it's like, what is it, a condition on California doing some reforms? That seems impossible. How is that even going to be enforced? So it seems more about like some kind of restriction on the money that everybody can declare victory on. That would be the hope.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Yeah. So. whether or not the mayor should have gone on the trip. I think it's pretty clear that she should have come back once the warning started coming in Sunday. They were pretty grim.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
I do not think she should have been away during this time. What I think is like, what I was like trying to, it's so hard to understand what's going on now. There's so much noise and you sort of step back from it. And there's this debate about Karen Bass.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
There's this, I think very reasonable and important debate to have about how we manage fires in California, water management in California, building policies in California. All valid, all important.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
I think there's an important debate to be had after this crisis about the way in which accountability is broken up and divided between Los Angeles as a city and Los Angeles as a county that I find quite stupid and anti-democratic and makes it very hard to figure out who is responsible and allows a lot of people to pass the buck.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
But I also think like the kind of right-wing propaganda, blaming everything on woke, plus some of these debates that are ultimately, I think, incidental to what unfolded, also obscure that this has been an extraordinary response. There has been an amazing success of local government in the face of unprecedented wildfires to get resources there.
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
These people on the lines for days without end getting in face of climate-worsening
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Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
uh fires they're not responsible for people building houses on the hills they're not responsible for 30 years of forest mismanagement they're not responsible for long-term water policies they're there trying to figure out how to put this out and like the utility companies getting power back in a bunch of different places all at once like there's a lot of good in the response to that i feel like has been completely obscured like i saw
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
a take so bad it might get you in thrown in jail uh in sarah longwell's defense she was right there i mean seltzer has historically been right she has been someone who's been willing to put out polls that did not match the herded class but yeah it ended up being very very wrong look we we all saw we were getting on a plane to uh to vegas from phoenix and we were uh we were cheering
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I love making up your own system. It's like a it's like a degenerate gambler. It's like I always hit on red sevens.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I mean, it wasn't an original thought. It was sort of the dumbest thing you could pull for in the moment.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
That guy's, I think, I believe, fully red-pilled now. Oh, that checks out. That checks.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Yeah. Yeah. Pretty white. That one wins for me because it's when you when you think of the most ridiculous theory, Joe Biden should not run for reelection as racist. I think is number one.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Right. The Commission on Presidential Debates was formed in 1987. This wasn't like the founding fathers. What are we talking about here?
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I think if Travis had just left out that one clause about the makeup of the consultant class, he had a great point, which is we didn't do great with young men this cycle.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
My favorite part is when Vivek pretends he's an equal partner in this Doge thing. Yeah. Yeah, just like he's like, you know, Elon walks around with his kid on his shoulders at all times. That's a little silly guy.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
You'll be on the lawsuit. I don't like your collective tone.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Look, Joe Biden shouldn't have run again. The hard part about this was what people don't remember is in the 2020 primary, there was also a conversation about Joe Biden's age. I think we all were on the side that he was probably too old to be running then. Said as much on the show. He won the primary. That made them very angry. They didn't speak to us for four years.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
And so in the midterms happened, I think Joe Biden took the wrong message from in 2022 that Democratic success in a midterm when a bunch of completely. Outside the mainstream, crazy Republicans ran for Senate seats and lost like Dr. Oz, that it meant that the White House was strong, that he should run for election. And that was some sort of indication of his political strength.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Obviously, it was not. But I felt like from my position, like I was wrong in 2020. Who am I going to tell the incumbent president not to run for president? in that moment outside some sort of like major event or indication.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
We talked a thousand times about the polling about his age, concerns about it. We would constantly ask the question, how do you fix this? And I think almost every one of those conversations started with, I don't know that it is fixable, but if it is, here are the things I would try to do. They didn't really try to do any of those things because obviously there's been all this reporting now that
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Keeping a full schedule was challenging for the president, et cetera, et cetera. So we don't have to belabor all of this, but that's kind of the backstory that people don't remember.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Yeah, it's funny that Elon Musk does a lot of business in China, a lot of factories, a lot of Teslas would want restrictions on U.S. outbound investment in China to get knocked out of the bill.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Yeah, the only problem with it is it's got to be some percentage performance art, right? They know what they're doing. They know this is so crazy and ridiculous it's going to get me clicks.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Right. That's that's like the tour. I know this is new to you, but yeah, it's not new. Right.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Not anti-vaccine, I just think it will kill you, which I will repeat to everyone I see. Boy, do I feel safe.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
This is- This is a good example of where we need members of Congress to for once be really disciplined at his confirmation hearing and not give speeches and just be like prosecutors narrowing in, asking him question after question to try to get him to say what he really thinks. Because he's also said that he thinks the polio vaccine killed many, many more people than polio ever did.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
You know, he says things like he has this veneer of just asking questions or I'm, you know, I just want more data or research. But underneath that are really radical views and they just got to tease him out of them.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Oh, that would be great. He'll be good. He'll be very good on this. By the way, if the J6 committee goes to jail, we should produce a song with them.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I think vaccines for me. No. Oh, well, not to the fun. Take this. Not dogs and cats.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
No, that's fine. I imagine more of a rusted root, Dan, if we're being honest.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
For love it. I mean. Selling nitrous balloons and.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Oh, no. I think Kristi Noem is a potential favorite to be the vice presidential nominee. Electoral benefits of South Dakota? There are none. But I do think the Trump campaign knows that abortion is likely to be the single biggest headwind for their campaign. They want diversity on the ticket. That could be gender based. That could also be racial diversity.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I think they'll ultimately decide that Donald Trump is going to need to peel off some of the suburban women that he has lost to Joe Biden. They're going to need to try to push back on concerns about stripping away abortion access. She's terrible on the policy, but I do think they're going to view it as an identity. This is a great take. This is a totally fine take.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
This was before the puppy killing thing came out. Key context. The puppy murder. And this was me and Brian Tyler Cohen ranking 10 different candidates. So we had to make a case for everyone we chose.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Well, the adrenochrome was really flying around at that point.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Squeeze their nuts while you judge them so they don't move.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
All of us are really taking this well and not at all getting defensive about our taste. I didn't go off for five minutes about how I was on a different show.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Political science isn't science. And I think you have to allow for uncertainty. And when you speak in such definitive ways, I think you really leave yourself open to being punched down or up. Yeah.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Maybe the one from the live stream he did that night where he was like, ah.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Next year, I want to skip this recording again so that I cannot be held accountable once again. I somehow got on a list that has led me to get dozens of cold emails from random tech consultants. I want to find that list. destroy it and destroy whoever created it.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
I think what happened is I decided to come in just being a jackass with jokes and you guys were serious and it kind of changed the vibe.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
The irony of you saying this, Dan, is you write books. I wrote books.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Unbelievable. We thought we'd get a little more mileage out of them, but it turns out it's short but sweet. Like the Viagra of Etsy purchases, you know, one-time deal.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
You know it doesn't make you feel good. What's the goal? Talk to me.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Who are the big CRM managers? Salesforce. Salesforce. Coming for them, coming for your tower. I want to talk to more smart people off air, experts. Talk to a really smart guy about Sudan and Somaliland today. I could elaborate if you guys want to hear more about it. I love it. Classic Tommy resolution.
Pod Save America
The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
It's really helpful to talk to these very smart, nerdy, nice people and just do it to get smarter on background. That's the thing I like doing. I want to get good at using AI tools. I tried to use ChatGPT to write me a list of resolutions and I failed. So I want to get better at that.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
So Tommy, experts and AI. Experts. Maybe there's some overlap there.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Yeah, we'll see who wins. Let us know. Pick your fighter. Finally, I've been reading a book about mindfulness meditation, but I haven't been doing it. I think it'd be good to do it. It's good for you. Okay.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
And beautiful performances. And the performances. Incredible.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Well, that's just premature. If only, if only. You got the top right, you're just wrong. Not the primary, the general.
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The Pundies: Worst Takes of 2024
Who was the first one? The first one was the worst, right?
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Biden’s Final Warning
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Biden’s Final Warning
Well, yeah, I think you make an important point at the top, which is that the Israeli government has not voted on the deal yet. And a far right member of the Netanyahu coalition just announced he might remove himself from the government. So things are pretty precarious. Tony Blinken said that should start being implemented on Sunday. That that would be good news. But let's hope it's right.
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Biden’s Final Warning
But I think there's just a lot of uncertainty in this deal currently. And a lot of it could fall apart before we get to the end of phase three, like you outlined earlier. Phase one, which is six weeks, and is the part that is the most fleshed out with this gradual release of prisoners, of hostages, I should say. And then the Israelis could release over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.
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Biden’s Final Warning
The Israeli troops pull back from population centers. Palestinians get to go home, and then aid gets surged into the Strip. But... Phases two and three have not been finalized yet. Those start getting negotiated, I think, on the 16th day of phase one. So phase two is likely to include the return of all hostages by Hamas in exchange for more prisoners and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops.
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Biden’s Final Warning
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Biden’s Final Warning
And then the third phase is reconstruction. But. Joe Biden views this as a deal that will permanently end the war. I don't know that Netanyahu thinks of it in the same way. Throughout this negotiation, he has tried to reserve the right to restart fighting at the time of his choosing. And right wing lawmakers that are part of his government coalition want that to happen.
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Biden’s Final Warning
I think Netanyahu should have the votes to get it through a security cabinet and the full cabinet. But I just don't know right now. It's sort of in flux.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Yeah, there's two different votes. I think there's a security cabinet vote and then a full government cabinet vote.
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Biden’s Final Warning
So in a lot of the reporting on the deal, you'll see these background quotes from Israeli or Arab diplomats saying, this deal only got over the finish line because of Trump. Now, obviously, that is a very self-serving quote if you're a Netanyahu official or someone sitting in Qatar or Egypt because you want to curry favor with the incoming administration, not the outgoing.
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Biden’s Final Warning
But I do think Trump deserves some credit here. A lot of this basic framework of this deal, the three phases, the sequencing, et cetera, that was on the table eight months ago.
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Biden’s Final Warning
and this time in these last couple days it seems like trump through his you know steve whitcoff his new emissary was able to apply or willing to apply pressure on netanyahu's in ways that biden was not and i also think that if trump had said bb stick it to biden don't give him a deal let's not do this until i'm officially president that's would have happened so that part i think trump really does deserve some credit for that said
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Biden’s Final Warning
Biden's team negotiated this whole plan. And that's not a small thing because it's the phasing and the sequencing for how the hostages get released and where Israeli troops withdraw from and when. It's complicated stuff. And getting Hamas and Netanyahu on the same page on anything is going to be complicated. So Biden's team, they did the diplomatic spade work.
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Biden’s Final Warning
I think he also deserves credit for bringing Donald Trump into the talks. Biden could have said, I'm going to try to go it alone these last few weeks. I want 100% credit for this. But he didn't do that. He I think reportedly in that Oval Office meeting with Trump said to him, let's do this together. Let's try to get this done.
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Biden’s Final Warning
And that along with pressure from Trump has seems to have made the difference. It's also just worth pointing out that like. When Biden introduced this deal in May of last year to now, a lot has changed. Hamas has decimated. Hezbollah's decapitated. Iran is weakened.
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Biden’s Final Warning
And then on top of Trump putting pressure on the Israelis to do this deal, there's also just the reality that Netanyahu can say to the far right, hey, I know you hate this ceasefire, but Donald Trump's going to give us anything we want going forward.
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Biden’s Final Warning
I mean, I just think like he knows he has four years of dealing with this guy and Trump's out there tweeting there will be hell to pay apparently by both sides. And so he knows that, like, I think he knows he was not in the best graces with Trump when he. committed the mortal sin of congratulating Joe Biden for winning the election in 2020.
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Biden’s Final Warning
It took a while to crawl back from that being in the doghouse. And so I think Netanyahu was like, look, he can say to his right wing members of his coalition, look, we'll give him this one. If I decide to restart the war, Donald's not going to stop me.
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Biden’s Final Warning
And if we want to annex the West Bank- I was going to say, is that a- That's on the table now because a lot of Trump's biggest supporters like Miriam Adelson, who gave him- Tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars for his campaigns want the West Bank to be annexed in the next few years. So he just knows he's on better footing with Trump.
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Biden’s Final Warning
I know it's weird, right? Like in a way he kind of split the difference because they're announcing it now, but I think the release if it starts on Sunday, that's kind of timed along with the change of power. But I assumed he would do the same thing, which is just wait, try to draw the Jimmy Carter comparison directly.
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Biden’s Final Warning
no i mean yeah it's not like he's stealing his spotlight a lot no that's right and you know he is uh trump has been dispatching his many friends and surrogates to the middle east into all sorts of countries to have conversations about work that should be getting done by the current president so yeah he doesn't mind stepping on him does this make you look back at biden's record in gaza and decisions in gaza any differently
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Biden’s Final Warning
It makes me feel frustrated that more pressure wasn't brought to bear on the Israelis earlier. There are people who are smart, who I respect, who will argue with me that that never would have mattered, but I don't agree. Yeah. It seems like it could have tried, you know? Yeah.
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Biden’s Final Warning
Tech oligarchs? They're bad. Don't like them. Tech oligarchs bad. What do we think about the wobbly Statue of Liberty as an analogy, as a runner? You know, we didn't get to that, Dan.
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Biden’s Final Warning
I was going to say, yeah, somewhere outside of a wet market in D.C., someone picked up a pangolin and it evolved and morphed into an Obama cosplay. Is it too soon for fucking?
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Biden’s Final Warning
COVID joke? Fine. Okay. You can cut that if you want. Thanks, Tommy.
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Biden’s Final Warning
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Biden’s Final Warning
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Biden’s Final Warning
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Biden’s Final Warning
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Biden’s Final Warning
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Biden’s Final Warning
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Biden’s Final Warning
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
It's everywhere. But also lots of people. It's great. It's really great. I love the peanut butter. Still my favorite to this day.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Welcome back to Pond Save America, Senator Chris Murphy. So in an interview with Greg Sargent just before the holidays, you made this point and I'll summarize it, which is basically Trump is full of shit. He has no interest in governing. It was always infrastructure week. He's at it again with this Elon Vivek government efficiency department, which isn't even a department.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
And we shouldn't lend these efforts credibility, even when we as Democrats need to be the party of government reform. Can you just lay out what your argument is there?
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
I talked to Bernie and I was like, well, what do you think we should be doing differently right now? And that was one of the things he talked about. Like, we're not talking enough about money in politics. We're not talking enough about corruption. You have... Joe Biden with an op-ed this week about how we need to remember the insurrection.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Democrats were desperately trying to make this case about democracy, but people didn't either care enough or believe it or make it salient enough in their vote. And part of that is about credibility. Democrats need to make an argument about these kinds of issues. But part of it is message, part of it is messenger.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Do you believe Democrats have the credibility right now to be the party of taking on corporate interests, taking on money in politics? How can we just do a rebrand?
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
First of all, I don't think you should put yourself down. You know that both of us went to Williams College and we both did the same Oxford program.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
I did. We both went to Oxford the same year. And I just think that puts us in the perfect position to talk about populism. I think that's exactly, we're exactly right for that.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
As we're doing this, you've made this point, everyone's made this point, we're out of power. We just don't have any power for the next two years. We are critics on the outside. As we're laying out our own positive agenda, we are going to have, it seems to me, these kind of two tracks. One that's a quote-unquote...
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
normal Republican politics track where they're talking about budget reconciliation and trying to cut taxes for the wealthy and doing a border bill. And the other is the kind of even more abnormal, unhinged freaks going up for these big and important jobs ahead of national intelligence, ahead of the FBI.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
How do you think about the two sides of this coming fight, the policy battle in Congress versus fighting these terrible nominations and the threat Donald Trump poses through the Justice Department? You know, it's really funny.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Yeah. Here's what I sort of was struggling with as I was thinking about this today, which is we need to make an argument about what we stand for whether or not Republicans are able to confirm these people, right? We need to make an argument of what we stand for, whether or not we're able to stop RFK Jr. or Kash Patel or Pam Bondi or whoever it may be, Pete Hegseth.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
But the argument you might make to your Republican colleagues is probably a little bit different, right, than the argument you would want to be making to the American people. Can you talk about that? Like right now, like if you're trying to stop Kash Patel from getting the votes to be at FBI, you're not talking about reaching 200 million Americans. You're talking about reaching three human beings.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
There's there's one part of this that I feel like hasn't been getting enough attention, which is you're talking about how your Democratic colleagues maybe aren't totally honest with themselves or with the situation to understand the threat it may pose to the media, to them. But neither are Republicans. Right. Like if you're talking about a House Republican candidate.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
majority that is razor thin, a Senate majority that's pretty thin with a few people that they can lose. It is not outside the realm of possibility that a weaponized Department of Justice would go beyond Democrats to try to intimidate Republicans too, right?
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
So I want to talk about the rigging and then I want to talk about how to unrig it. So Puck reported this week that Amazon will be paying $40 million for the privilege of airing a documentary about Melania Trump, executive produced by Melania Trump. Disney and Paramount, apparently also bidders. Mark Zuckerberg announced this week
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
that Facebook will no longer be doing any fact-checking, which is just a capitulation to Donald Trump. Tim Cook of Apple donated a million dollars personally to Trump's inauguration. Are you at all surprised? I'm surprised by how quickly and with such alacrity these people have bent the knee.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Yeah, well, it's a value shift. Partly it's a kind of, I don't know, like an apathy and cynicism, right? Which is, well, that's just how the system works. That's just how the system works. And in a way, Trump preys on people's beliefs about how corrupt the government is in order to institute that very version of a corrupt government.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
So let's start from the assumption that we are not potentially going to be sliding towards some kind of autocracy, but we're mid-slide. It's happening. Where are the places right now where we still have purchase, right? Where we, you know, there are still Republicans in closely divided districts that are afraid of losing their House seats. There are still independent media.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
We're one small, tiny little part of that constellation. Talk to me about how in this we arrest this side and start to climb our way up.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Part of it does also seem to be like the kind of rhetoric, and I don't wanna just pick on Joe Biden, but he is, I think, the signal exemplar of it, which is this kind of, for lack of a better term, like kind of highfalutin language about democracy and institutions and preserving them.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Now, you've talked about how we have to attack democracy as it currently exists, which is, I think, a provocative way to make the argument you've been making just during our conversation. But what does a full-throated version of this sound like? How does it sound different than how Kamala Harris sounded in 2024, how Hillary Clinton sounded in 2016?
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
So this is going to seem like a small issue compared to what we've just been discussing. But Senator, do you know what time the sun will set in New London, Connecticut today?
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
27. 4.36 p.m. Your constituents in New London, Connecticut will be shrouded in darkness by 5 p.m. Now, I went back and I looked at your record, sir.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
And you've never been a sponsor of the Sunshine Protection. I have not. Uh, but I, but I actually have a compromise that I want to propose to you. Can you just, what is your current position? Can we do like a half an hour? No, we're not doing a half hour. That'd be so confusing. No. So, so, uh, are you in favor of making daylight saving time permanent for Connecticut? Just for Connecticut? Yeah.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Well, I mean, everyone else can do it, but just would you like for your constituents to have daylight saving time run through the winter?
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Yeah. Well, I mean, when school starts too early, these kids should be sleeping later. Yeah. Right. Okay. I accept that. My compromise view is that- You were an evangelist on this? I am. I actually was. And through learning and thinking, I have I have changed my view.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
And so my view is now that every state should not be forced into daylight saving time permanently. That actually what should happen is every right now, every state can choose between either staying on standard time year round, which is something Arizona and Hawaii does. Right. Or choosing to do the switch. I'm just saying add a third option.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Give every state the right to choose permanent daylight saving time if that state so chooses that if Massachusetts and Maine want it and Florida and California want it, every state can make a decision for themselves.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
Senator Chris Murphy, thank you for your time. You know, we once had a fight about Connecticut pizza, and I have apologized to you in the past about how great Connecticut pizza is. I was in a long-term relationship with someone from Connecticut, which is how I ate so much Connecticut pizza. That relationship has ended. And honestly, it's the worst part.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
But your relationship with Connecticut pizza has not ended. No, no, that has continued. That has continued.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
And that's the beginning. That's how change happens. Senator Chris Murphy, thank you so much for your time. Thanks, man.
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As LA Burns, Trump Plays Politics
It's really hitting me. The other night, I had two and a half drinks. I was like, I guess tomorrow's ruined. I guess that's it for tomorrow. Yep. But not with Z Biotics.
Pod Save the UK
How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
Hi, it's great to see you guys. How are you? You provide me some emotional lift and relief when I listen to you because you're past the terrible big election. And I know it's not great, but it could be a lot worse.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
I feel like I've said literally everything I have to say about this election a hundred times over and there's nothing new. You know, this is the part of the election where like there's no debates left. There's no big kind of, you know, there's no October surprise yet. There's just a relentless series of campaign events and interviews and speeches. And it's like, which ones move the needle?
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
We'll never know. How are you feeling just in of yourself at the moment? I feel horrible because the fact that it's a tied race is just hard to stomach and understand, given all that we've seen from Donald Trump over the last nine years or whatever it's been. I think with respect to sort of where the campaign is, I mean, look, I talk to smart people on the on the Harris campaign all the time.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
They, I think, all sincerely and honestly believe that this thing is tied. There are seven key battleground states and all the public polls and all the private data we're seeing has it within the margin of error. And so what's really scary is sometimes elections in the U.S. kind of break one way or the other in the last two weeks based on something that's in the news.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
You know, it could be a letter from Jim Comey scolding Hillary Clinton like 2016. It could be Bibi Netanyahu bombing a new country. Maybe we'll bomb Jordan.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
What have they been up to? You know, King Abdullah, you're up. So I don't know. But that's the stuff that makes me worried.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
Yeah, I mean, it couldn't be any more clear that Bibi Netanyahu wants Donald Trump to win. Most Israeli voters want Donald Trump to win. It's profoundly frustrating, I think, that Joe Biden's Gaza policy has been terrible. Since the very first day when he flew over and hugged Bibi Netanyahu, I thought that was a mistake, just sort of knowing the character of that man.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
And if you look at what's played out over the last year, I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I think my Twitter algorithm has decided that I want to constantly be fed the most horrific images from northern Gaza imaginable. And it just like shakes you to your core every single day seeing what's happening and knowing the U.S. complicity in that.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
I think the problem for Kamala Harris is that Joe Biden is the president and she just doesn't have a ton of space to break from him, especially on foreign policy. I think having talked to people kind of in her orbit, I think she shares a lot of the frustration that you and I might have about Netanyahu and what he's doing.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
I just think it's very hard for her to break from her current boss, for lack of a better word.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
Boy, that's a good question. I mean, I hadn't heard all those quotes, but I like them. They nailed it. He's going to struggle to refute a lot of these allegations. Yeah, he did say he would like to, you know, grab women by the private parts. I think what I think you're likely to see from Trump is just more kind of overt meddling in British politics.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
You know, I mean, elevating people like Farage, inviting him to the White House. Kind of getting reform on the map even more. There's this weird connective tissue in the right wing in America where we're like they have these conferences where they invite Liz Trust to speak. They're the only people inviting Liz Trust anywhere. You know, it's like it's Bolsonaro down in Brazil.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
It's Viktor Orban in Hungary. They all come together and kind of. exchange authoritarian best practices. So I imagine, you know, Trump has a long memory. He does not forget slights. I think he wants to be liked by the UK. He views you guys as one of the kind of places that I think he cares about his opinion over there. He wants, you know, the royal family to like him.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
But yeah, it would make me a little nervous.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
I don't think so. I saw these reports. I mean, 100 people knocking on doors. It's nice. Thank you. Appreciate it. But it's a drop in the bucket. But you're right. Elon Musk is currently holding a contest where he's giving away a million dollars every day
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
to voters in certain key swing states who are registered to vote and who signed his dumb little petition, which pretty clearly seems to be in violation of election law, which says you cannot incentivize or pay people to register to vote, which is clearly what his plan is there.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
Oh, yeah. You think the Labour Party tips were like, here's what you do. You let the other guys be in charge for 14 years. They ruin everything. They put a literal buffoon in charge of the entire party.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
They were like cicadas. They just did their time. Real quick sports question that I promise I'll answer. Okay. Do you guys follow American football at all?
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
We keep having a London game. Yeah, we just keep... Yeah. Are you offended by the fact that, like, this past weekend, my New England Patriots played against the Jacksonville Jaguars? Two of the worst teams in the entire NFL played some of the worst football I've ever seen. It felt worse than when Barack Obama gave the Queen an iPod. It felt insulting.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
Well, the NFL is trying to expand into the European market. So there keeps being a London game every weekend. Yeah. But it's just been shit.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
Oh, yeah, I think he might have gotten some old DVDs, too. We suck to giving presents. But what could a Labour and Democratic Party line? I mean, imagine if we really coordinated and tried to make this upcoming COP climate summit. Yeah, something, you know, and actually did something on climate change. That would be amazing.
Pod Save the UK
How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
Imagine if there was some sort of effort to work together, not just the US and UK, but nationally on this sort of global refugee crisis and migration and figuring out ways so we can burden share across every country.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
to help people, so you don't have these right-wing neo-Nazi parties demagoguing the issue and popping up in places like Austria, where you really don't want to see a right-wing neo-Nazi party. Germany. There's a couple of things.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
Yeah, I mean, it was some sort of, you know, global minimum tax. I know that was an idea that was floated early on in the Biden administration. But you're right. I mean, it's funny when every multinational just sort of pops up and is suddenly headquartered in Ireland. Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't make a lot of sense. Not sure how this works.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
I love the Coco hangover stories. You have like the occasional good one and they're always funny and they're always, you always paint a picture that just feels very familiar. Thank you. I think, well, sadly, there will be relief, but that relief will only really fully set in after Kamala Harris is sworn into office, given all the shenanigans we saw from Donald Trump the last time.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
So I think there will be relief from a lot of quarters about kind of dealing with this unique threat that Trump poses and hopefully just finally being able to move on from this guy because he is starting to look really old. He's kind of losing the thread. I don't know if you guys saw – He did a town hall Q&A the other day where he just ended up doing a DJ set for 38 minutes. Yeah.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
Where he's playing like cats and shit. It was crazy.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
No. Well, here's the challenge. I think that right now Republicans are on track to take the Senate, which will block sort of any legislative efforts Kamala Harris might have. It's not clear to me yet how the House of Representatives voting is going to shake out. But there's a chance that, you know, it could be Kamala Harris versus the fully Republican Congress, which is just going to suck.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
Because what Republicans do is they say government is bad. They highlight the ways it has failed or has not helped you vote. And they use that cynicism to drive people away from the Democratic Party, the people who support institutions and believe in government and fair taxation and yada, yada, yada. And so, you know, we're going to be in for a rough road, I think, either way.
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How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
I think, though, you know, the American system, like the president, is just so powerful, especially on foreign policy, that'll be an enormous relief to get rid of Trump if we can. But knock on wood.
Pod Save the UK
How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
Yes. I mean, she will have far more leeway to do things on foreign policy than in any other place. I hope that means more diplomacy. I hope that means getting back into talks with the Iranians about their nuclear program. I hope we can fix our idiotic Cuba policy in the United States. We've embargoed this island for decades now for no reason.
Pod Save the UK
How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
And now, you know, I think they're in the midst of a multi-day blackout because there's no power there.
Pod Save the UK
How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
for people so there's just a lot of things we could do a prioritization of human rights trying to you know continue to build up alliances whether it's NATO or the EU or other places um and just you know keep our friends our friends yeah tell me um thank you so much for joining us on Podside of the UK we are keeping everything crossed yes we will join you on this very long dreary road ahead I think I think that I think that we can all agree that's that's what it is isn't it for all of us
Pod Save the UK
How f***ed are we if Trump wins? + Is Jeremy Corbyn MP forming a new party?
Thanks for having me. It was very fun.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah, it's not really a winner. I mean, then there's the specific stories. I mean, I don't know how much you guys have talked about the Samoa incident on the show, but I do think it is. It tells you everything you need to know about this guy.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Like the quick and dirty version, right, is in American Samoa, there was this horrible incident where two babies died because the nurses administering the vaccine mixed the measles vaccine with an expired aesthetic and it killed these two children. It was this horrible, horrific mistake.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
And it ultimately, you know, the nurses went to jail for it, but it led to Samoa stopping vaccinations for about 10 months and then starting them up again. And then obviously people were very hesitant. So into the breach jumps RFK Jr. and the anti-vax crowd and this sort of information vacuum and climate of fear.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
And according to NBC News, what he was hoping to do was basically set up a study comparing the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated babies in Samoa. And what inevitably happens, right, someone comes from New Zealand, they have the measles, an outbreak starts, like dozens and dozens of kids die. In response, Samoa launches this vaccination campaign.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
And in the midst of that, RFK is still having his people say, no, no, no, just give them vitamin A and vitamin C. But fast forward six weeks, 95% of kids in Samoa are vaccinated, and there's no more measles related deaths. But just like the fact that what this man wanted was to run
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
This giant, you know, eugenics adjacent experiment on babies, I think kind of tells you everything you need to know about him and how he will approach overseeing the medical community. I mean, like, this is fucking deadly. completely unethical, immoral stuff that he's going to do. And like, this is his approach. This is what he believes.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah, I mean, I guess going against, you know, the establishment or American royalty, that could work. But I think, I mean, you know this better than I do, like what the MAGA movement loves more than anything else is a convert. Whether you are a person of color or you're gay or you were once a liberal, like that's why they love Tulsi. That's why they love RFK Jr.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Those are the people that prove that they've been right all along over in the MAGA movement and the libs were stupid. So I think that's kind of his entire power is his last name.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah, I mean, she's not remotely qualified to do the job, but I think it's just... good to remember kind of first principles here. They're like, oh, she was in the military. She had a security clearance. That doesn't mean she had access to any information. It doesn't mean she knows how the intelligence community works. It doesn't mean she knows how to manage all of these people.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
It does seem like her biggest problem is her willingness to believe bad information and discount good information, especially when the bad information is coming from like the Russians or the Syrians and the good information is coming from the US. But then the second biggest problem I seem to have with her or I see for her is that she's a liar.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
You probably talked about her trip to Syria in 2017, where she met with Assad for three hours.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
why she met with Assad, since that wasn't cleared in advance. And they left all the Google Doc changes on, so some reporter found the Google Doc and could see all their spins and lies. Long story short, she goes to Lebanon, dips over to Damascus for a meeting with Assad. and pretended that it was spontaneous. She got there.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Assad just wanted to meet with her, but actually the meeting was within one hour of her arrival. So she lied to her colleagues. She lied to her own staff. She lied to the ethics committee about all of this. And it just leads you to the question. Why is a general matter? I'm not like, offended by meeting with adversaries.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
But meeting with Assad in the middle of this brutal civil war where he's killing half a million people is bizarre and gross. And also, did you know that she brought her spouse and she went with Dennis Kucinich, who brought his wife like who brings a plus one to a civil war?
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah, I mean, like, ultimately, Tulsi and the agency she runs is going to be charged with putting together the PDB, the President's Daily Briefing, which is the most, you know, crown jewels of all US intelligence on all the issues happening in the world that Trump needs to know about? And is she going to bring in credible stuff? Is she going to put that document together in an ideological way?
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Is she going to continue to disbelieve, you know, the CIA or other components of the intelligence community when they say Assad used chemical weapons and blame somebody else? So I think the question is like, What information is she getting?
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
How is she constructing that document for Donald Trump and filtering intelligence information to the president of the United States and other top decision makers? And on top of that, like every National Security Council meeting will usually begin with a lay down from the DNI of the most relevant information on like whatever the topic is, Afghanistan, Afghanistan. you know, Yemen, whatever it is.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
So she's going to be kind of doing the PDB process and then repeating that in every national security meeting. It's like, why her? No one can answer the question. Why does this person make sense for this job other than some kind of payback for a political favor?
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah. And she's also, I mean, I don't know the things that the kind of the, some parts of the MAGA movement liked about her anti-surveillance pro Snowden. She seems to have flip-flopped on a lot of that. Like it sounds like she's now in favor of section 702 intelligence collection, which is the U S government working with American technology companies to get access to stuff that,
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
It sounds like she was a huge proponent in 2019. I think she went on Rogan and said that she would drop all charges against Edward Snowden if she were president. Now it seems like she has flipped on that position. So I guess I just don't know where Tulsi stands on anything anymore.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah, and I guess that's all that's required for Tom Cotton. He's just like that credulous. He's like, all right, cool. It works for me. 702 is supporting Snowden's staying in jail. I'm good.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
And all the, all the secretaries and JD, I mean, they just got up there and they just fluffed the president and said how amazing his leadership had been. It's like, I don't know. It sounds like he did a
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
like, oh, there's a bad social media perception and persona of Kash Patel out there. Whose fault is that?
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Maybe him tweeting that he's going to chainsaw off the heads of various elected officials or going on every right wing podcast and talking about his enemies list and all the evil happening in the deep state and lying about his background and pretending he was, you know, the lead prosecutor in Benghazi when he was just like a
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
junior lawyer kind of helping out on the edges like yeah there's a bad sort of sentiment out there about cash patel because he's an unqualified deeply dishonest person and that seems like a bad thing for an fbi director he's a clown that had a podcast on epoch times which is a conspiracy website i didn't know that actually
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
A lot of people confuse is a good person with nice to me. You hear that with a lot of these kind of bro influencers who like, oh, Trump was great when I met him at UFC 64 or whatever. It's like, well, it doesn't mean he was a good person. The single most troubling story about Kash Patel to me, Tim, comes from his time at the Pentagon at the very end of the Trump administration.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I mean, I have two sort of buckets of thoughts, Tim. I mean, the idea of blaming this crash on DEI before there's an investigation and then handing the mic to a real-world Boston castmate turned Fox News host turned Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who then hands the mic over to Fox News weekend anchor turned Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a lot. It's a lot for me to...
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Long story short, there was a hostage being held in the kind of Nigeria area. the Pentagon launched this rescue mission. They had a bunch of Navy SEALs in an airplane who are going to parachute out of that plane, land, walk a couple miles and rescue this guy. And to conduct a mission like that, you need to get permission to fly into the country's airspace, in this case, Nigerian airspace.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
And they're about to turn on this operation, green light it. Cash says the State Department got us access into Nigerian airspace. And then right as the plane with the Navy SEALs in it is about to fly into that airspace, they figure out that he had lied. And he just made that up. And so Cash Patel nearly blows up what was ultimately a successful rescue mission.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
And also, I mean, the worst case scenario is you fly a bunch of U.S. military aircraft into Nigerian airspace and it gets shot down. And to this day, no one knows why he lied about it. Like Mark Esper, the secretary of defense at the time, writes about it in his book. There were top Pentagon officials screaming at cash. And he was like, who fucking cares? Everything worked out in the end.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
And it's just the most irresponsible thing I've ever heard.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I'm very open to any facts. If Cash Patel wants to come on this show or any of the shows on Crooked Media and correct the record and correct me, I am absolutely willing to listen. This is what I read.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Just a DEI hire. What that story tells me is the degree to which Republican senators see things happen where they know a nominee that they're about to vote for just lied and just don't care. And they just think it's a game. And they think that deniability is all that matters and the truth is irrelevant. And it sucks. It's incredibly frustrating. Because what do you do there?
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
It's like the worst fight in a relationship ever. It's like when you say to someone... you know, you did this and they just won't give you an inch and they give no quarter or they deny it and you know, they're lying. But where do you go from there?
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah, that's a good way to do it. Here is a general matter. What I think love to see every single senator at these hearings do is stop giving fucking speeches and just use your eight minutes for questions. But that's a perennial problem.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I look, I think use your time to get information, try to pin them down on things, whether it's policy or perjury. But I mean, if it's a really good speech, it's an incredibly compelling, passionate speech that goes super viral on TikTok. That's great. But like I was watching Peter Welch spend like several minutes talking about how much, you know, he was like a RFK scholar in college.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I really like Peter Welch. I think he's like good on policies and a lot of great stuff. But I was like, what are we doing here? It's like four minutes of your time.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
That's what they did at the Jan six committee, right? Like they kind of gave it to a prosecutor or gave it to one individual and let you really narrow in. It's a much better way to go.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
You've got a 44-year-old guy with no relevant experience, barely any relevant experience, who's nominated to lead the FBI for a decade. Because Trump fired the last guy he nominated to leave the FBI for a decade after firing the first one, Jim Comey. Yeah, so we should be asking the dude questions. I mean, the enemies list thing is the part of that that pisses me off the most. It's in his book.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
What would Obama have done? What would George Bush have done? What would Reagan have done in a moment like this? I think you go out and give a speech that's thoughtful and that is about the victims and mourning and this sort of like collective wound that the nation is experiencing because of this tragedy.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
He published a book with a list of enemies. If that does not bother you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
He talked about it. It is exhausting. Yeah. Tom tells he's up in 26. I guess he must have decided that this is the one he's going to kind of go full mega on. They're never going to like you. They're not going to support you. You're not going to get like you're not going to be accepted by them.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
That's a weird one, though. Like, who is that for? It's for the building, I guess, for the FBI when you get there. But does it get you anything from the senators who vote on you, who give you the job?
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah, I mean, I think... They're calling it a freeze. I think we should assume that all of these programs are gone unless otherwise indicated and gone permanently, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah, well, yeah, the Egypt, the Egypt money is all about Israeli security operations. So, I mean, in 2023, there was $63 billion of foreign aid. That's less than 1% of the federal budget. But as you know, Tim, when you do focus groups or polling, people think the foreign aid budget is closer to 10%. So there's political, you know, it's a political winner for sure. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I don't think any president in history would go out and do like a freewheeling press conference, even if they did have command of the facts. But it's just this is like the Trump era. Right. It used to be you didn't want to own bad stories or disasters. And now he's just puts himself in the middle of everything. And it's just it's an interesting I guess it's just how communications is now.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
But like the money we're talking about goes to fund things like combating Ebola or Marburg virus outbreaks abroad or monitoring the avian flu or cleaning up mines and cluster munitions that didn't blow up in places like Ukraine or Laos and Cambodia.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
But it also, you know, there's also money for like, you know, education in Jordan, the country, which gives us enormous leverage in political influence in these places. And if we just turn that off, like that influence is now gone. And you mentioned, I mean, look, there is a lot of political attacks on foreign aid, but you mentioned PEPFAR. I mean, PEPFAR is George Bush's greatest accomplishment.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
It saved 25 million people. It was like universally supported. Recently, I forget which Republican senator started attacking it because like $4,000 were accidentally spent on abortion services in some country and that money was refunded. And I don't know if that got it on the chopping block, but now it sounds like there's, you know,
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
AIDS drugs on the shelf in clinics that they're not allowed to distribute. It's just, it's insane.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Totally. I mean, the China infrastructure projects often... are devastating for countries down the road because they create these debt traps that the countries can't get out of. But you know what they don't come with?
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
War and Pandemic. We're on the show. We're talking about the CCP. But the Chinese money doesn't come with any strings attached around human rights. So it's a little bit easier. But you're right. I mean, it's not just that we're turning off money that gives us influence in places and China can fill the breach. It's that we're actively being dickheads
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
to people in Panama, Colombia, Denmark, for absolutely no reason. And these are like, Denmark's a NATO ally. Like, okay, let's play this out for me, Tim. The United States military sends a whole bunch more US military members to our base in Greenland. And we just decide we've annexed it and occupied it. Like what happens?
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Does NATO have an Article 5 responsibility to respond to this US invasion of Greenland on behalf of Denmark? Like this whole thing is just It's like a farce in some ways. It's insane. But this is kind of the reality of what we're talking about right now. And it makes us look like clowns and unreliable.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I mean, the most interesting kind of thread I saw on this was by a guy named Atul Gawande, who got into all the public health projects that were being impacted by this, the funding freeze. And that, I think, was where people's heads instantly went, just in terms of the risk factor.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
But maybe there's value to this, right? You're commanding, you're owning every story. You have the attention on you at all times. It goes against my instincts, but I'm wondering, I don't know, is this the right instinct?
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I guess where I'm struggling with this is I do think that voters want to hear about common ground and working together and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But right now we're an opposition party. with no power. So it doesn't fucking matter if we work together with them or not. They don't need us. They don't want us. They don't care.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
And so I think you have to act accordingly and raise the awareness in the cost of some of the most egregious things Trump is doing. And that gets complicated when you're talking about areas where clearly Democrats are off sides like immigration. The Lake and Riley Act got a bunch of Democratic votes. It does things that I find
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
like indefensible on a policy level, like just deporting people accused of a crime that just discards all due process rights for, for people in this country. I think mostly it's like, be fucking interesting. Talk like a human being, pick a fight, go into places that are unusual so that whatever you're doing gets shared on social media.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I mean, Tim, you and I both spend a lot of times in safe spaces with people who agree with us, like MSNBC, whatever. But you know, I went on Fox the other day with Jesse waters and, um, That interview is, I heard from more people, it got more pickup than like anything else I've done. So I don't know, maybe we need a little more, a little more combat.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I mean, it's just like the most anodyne talking point. And so whether or not those are the right words to say, who's going to hear that, right? Like, well, there's no pickup of this, of just kind of very boring comments. I've played it twice on the podcast now because it was so boring. So kudos to you for that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Listen, I like on the politics question, like, I don't know, the politics for Ruben Gallego in Arizona are probably very different than a lot of other members. Right. And Ruben was like very vocally for the Lake and Riley Act. And will people be voting on immigration in the midterms? I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I mean, the Trump's goal presumably is to lock down the border and solve all our immigration problems. And it doesn't mean he'll stop talking about it or making up caravans. But does that reduce the salience? Like, I don't know. It's interesting bet. But yeah, no, I think we're an opposition party and we have to act accordingly and talk like people and be nimble and be interesting.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah, I mean, like Congressman Pat Ryan sort of been saying and doing interesting things, trying to be out there, trying to be clear cut, clear eyed. I mean, I think, I think what you're getting at and what Democrats are feeling is that there is a leadership void.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
We have, you know, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are the leaders in both houses in the Senate or the, in Congress, but there's not a democratic leader. Like there's not a nominee. I mean, Schumer talked about how aroused people are.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
That was pretty good. That was hard to watch. I'm all right. A little flaccid. A little tepid.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yes. I want a fighter. I also think obstruction works. Mitch McConnell built an entire career off of that. So the senators should find ways to bog down everything Trump does. It's also just like when Barack Obama won in 2008, he got 365 electoral votes. We had huge majorities in the House and the Senate. Did Republicans... wipe their hands and give up?
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
No, they fought everything we did tooth and nail and they drove down our favorables into the midterms of 2010. And that to me is the roadmap. It's just all focused on the midterms.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I'd love to hear your, your media training. How many genders are there, Tommy? How many genders are there, Tommy? Uh, The honest answer, Jesse, I don't care. I'm a libertarian. I don't care. You can be what you want to be, Jesse.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Well, I'm not a Democrat, and that we know. What happened? I didn't know you were a libertarian. I actually run the New Hampshire Democratic Party's libertarian party speed. First of all, I don't think that anyone who goes on an unserious show should be forced to treat unserious questions like they're serious.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
The subjects I was sent in advance were like, we're going to talk about Biden's legacy, the pardons and Democrats going forward. So that just gives you some insight. Also, though, I am libertarian on most social issues. I think the role of the government should be to leave people the fuck alone. If you decide your gender is something other than male and female, good. Good for you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Live your life however you want. If you want to have an abortion, the government should leave you the fuck alone. I very much am a libertarian on like a whole basket of issues.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah, no, the substance is atrocious. And that is unequivocal. There's a stylistic and sort of process point that was interesting to me that I guess what we're going to be living with for the next four years.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Those are different approaches. And I think they all kind of worked well. The one thing I thought about after the fact that I should have done was just be like, can we talk about Dominion voting? Anything they've been sued for for various defamation cases, just try to repeatedly bring that up. That's a next time thing.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I want to practice what I preach a little bit, get out some more. I really respect the fact, Tim, that you do a lot of adversarial stuff, like you're kind of at press conferences. That was not a fish for compliments. No.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I've been thinking about this a lot. I've actually taken your counsel. I'm happy to be public about this. I find Steve Bannon very interesting. I listen to his show often. I think... When you listen to Ben and talk, you're usually like a couple of weeks ahead of the curve on where the mega movement is going. I would like to better understand what he thinks Trump 2.0 is like.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I'd love to press him on whether the mega populism he's voted for is represented when you have billionaire, you know, liberal tech oligarchs sitting on stage and Elon running, you know, huge swaths of the administration. I went on a Barstool show when I was in New York and I want to do more stuff where we're just like, I hate the fucking platforming debate.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I'm done with the platforming debate where people are platformed. And I just want to go into places where there's a little more, I don't like debate. Like I hate the like, Ben Shapiro owns a 19 year old content, but a conversation with someone that disagrees with you vociferously, like that's a good thing.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah, we all missed a generational wealth opportunity. I lived in San Francisco in 2015. If I just listened to one nice nerd who said, hey, you should buy Ethereum or whatever it was at the time, it would have been cool. A couple thoughts on this, Tim. I think we all have to stop saying bro, tech bro, crypto bros, because it's obviously, I'm a pod bro, it's obviously pejorative and condescending.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I think they don't like it. It's no mystery why whatever comes after that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
We can say what we want, but we should probably not be surprised when people tune out everything after. I was talking to Ro Khanna about this the other day. One thing I think Democrats miss is there is a piece of the crypto story that is aspirational. It's not just like get rich quick. But there is that. It's also anti-establishment.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
It's people who felt like they were sticking it to the big banks in the system and kind of operating outside of the control of, you know, whatever they they're kind of pushing against. And I do think Democrats can sound overly negative and like assholes who are just oppositional to this stuff.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
So we have to we have to capture part of that narrative in the hopeful message, but also talk about the fact that Trump coin and meme coins and so much of this stuff is a grift. is a Ponzi scheme. It is going to hurt people. You're going to have more like kind of SBF collapses and Lunatera collapses, and there need to be like regulations that protect people.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
So that's the other part of the message.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
It's just about like... persuasion, trying to like not make them feel attacked. And I think, you know, Biden did some good things trying to regulate these tech companies. It was obviously a long past time, but in the process, it seems like we radicalized a lot of rich people who poured money into Donald Trump and Republican coffers.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Anthony Albanese in Australia. Okay. He doing anything for you?
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
That's a good project for me this weekend. Anthony Albanese. Progressive. You can Google him. The problem is right now, things are a little messy internationally. You don't say. You saw the Canadians. You said Trudeau stepped down. There's a real chance that Pierre Polyev comes to power in Canada, the conservative leader. It looks like the G7. You got South Korea.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
They just had a little martial law incident. They're trying to prosecute, impeach, and remove their president. president. That seems bad. The Germans are about to have an election. We got Elon kick it up dust for the far right party. So things are a little messy, man. I don't know. There's not a lot I'm especially hopeful.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I mean, Keir Starmer and the Labor Party, they had a rough start, but they're going to be in power for a while. They could do some good things. Does that help? David Lammy, foreign secretary. In the UK, I like him a lot. I know him a little personally.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
No. Let's just come together, Libs. We can do this. We're going to make it through this two years. I get into some doomer places like I know you do, Tim, usually around 10 p.m. at night on Sundays. And we've got to pull up. We've got to pull up the plane.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Well, I think he's speaking to a really hard reality in politics in that sometimes really bad things happen in the world, and there's no rhyme or reason to it. And it makes us feel better when we can throw a conspiracy theory around the chaos or around the pain or something to explain this to ourselves, but that's not always going to be the case.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
And this might have just been a horrible accident here. We'll figure it out, right? But I saw the same things you did, like people blaming the air traffic controller shortage or the buyout proposal, or like, you know, firing the head of the TSA. And my instinct was to find that gross. And then I saw Trump this morning, and I thought, I don't know, maybe I'm not built for politics anymore, Tim.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Like, maybe this is how it goes. Gross is what it is.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I also just want to, before we get into substance again, point out how tan he looks all of a sudden. I know he lives in California, but I, it hasn't been that nice out. So I'm wondering if there's a,
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
You know, I'm good, buddy. It's great to see you. Actually, I think in like 2018, I emailed Ben because I used to call him Baby Bannon, which honestly was kind of unfair because I think he left the Bannon world. So we agreed to not be quite as mean to each other online, but I never actually met Ben. So I should probably do that someday.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah. I mean, I don't have a lot of experience with either SSRIs or heroin. I'm not aware of them. SSRIs causing like a euphoric high or a craving or the need to take another one an hour later. I don't know. Maybe you have more experience with these things.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah, I mean, certainly your body can adjust to their presence in your system and then getting off them can cause challenges, can lead to withdrawal symptoms. But to your point, I think this is kind of a few days or a few weeks long process, not an addiction that can plague people literally forever. for the rest of their lives and can ruin their lives at a moment's notice if they relapse.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
So it's an outrageous and absurd comment.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah, I mean, he's such a slippery, terrible person. And it did seem like he crammed for the test, but he kind of skipped like the 101. I mean, if you're going to merge Medicare and Medicaid, which is a proposal he floated, you should probably have an idea for how that would work. But when pressed on that, he's like, I don't have a plan. I'd love to work it out with you, a member of Congress.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
At times, it didn't seem like he understood that it was Medicare, old people, Medicaid, poor people. He said Medicaid is fully paid for by the federal government. That's wrong. It's actually paid for by a combination of federal and state funds. And again, you made the point about how he was wrong about premiums and deductibles. They don't exist for the vast majority of Medicaid recipients.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
We're talking about nearly $2 trillion worth of federal spending. I think Medicare was 14% of total spending in 2023. So these are enormous programs that he doesn't understand the basics of, let alone how to administer them.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
Yeah, I mean, look, we're looking the no votes you're looking for are what Collins, Murkowski, McConnell and Cassidy, that's kind of like the four that people have ID that you need. So knowing that list, I mean, I presumably the ways to reach them would be through talking about the fact that he's clearly pro-choice and now he's pretending to be anti-abortion. Maybe they don't believe him.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
I'm curious what you think about this pitch, Tim. The problem with attacking RFK is you kind of de facto end up siding with big pharma companies The drug companies, the healthcare industry, right, which is not where I like ideologically am like, I don't like those guys either. I also don't think it's smart politics.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
So the question is like, okay, how do you pick an enemy to kind of counteract that? I've noticed that the Wall Street Journal and their editorial page have decided that the enemy is trial lawyers. And they're saying that Kennedy is just going to open up a whole bunch more litigation pathways for his trial lawyer buddies and that he might personally profit from some of those lawsuits.
The Bulwark Podcast
Tommy Vietor: Deniability Is All That Matters
And I'm just curious if you think that angle is effective. Like, I remember ATLA being an enemy from my John Edwards for president days back in 2004. People didn't love trial lawyers. I remember my dad referring to Edwards as an ambulance chaser and 24 year old me got very offended. But I don't know. Is that an effective approach?