Chuck Todd begins with analysis of the current travel chaos and President Trump's controversial comments on Alcatraz and movie tariffs. He highlights former Washington Governor Jay Inslee's successful tenure and discusses the evolving political landscape, including key Republican figures declining Senate runs and potential competitive races across the country that could reshape the balance of power.Then, former Washington Governor Jay Inslee joins the podcast, where he discusses his climate policy achievements and the existential threat of climate change. Inslee offers sharp criticism of Trump's energy and trade policies, warning they could cede technological leadership to China and harm American businesses. The conversation expands to examine political courage, institutional challenges, and what Democrats should be doing now to prepare for future elections. Finally, Chuck concludes with an "Ask Chuck" segment covering the promotion of moderate candidates, Glenn Youngkin's legacy, and papal politics00:00 Introduction01:15 The US travel situation is a mess03:15 Trump’s alcatraz comment was a distraction07:00 Reopening Alcatraz isn’t feasible07:20 Jay Inslee was wildly successful as governor09:20 Brian Kemp + Chris Sununu pass on senate run11:45 The political landscape is terrible for Republicans13:05 Senate map isn’t great for Democrats15:45 If Ken Paxton beats Cornyn, Texas could be in play19:15 4 states where Democrats could put senate seats in play19:55 Joni Ernst in line to replace Pete Hegseth?22:20 200 house districts within a 20 point margin24:50 Jay Inslee joins the Chuck ToddCast 26:05 Do you feel less constrained outside of politics? 28:50 Inslee's biggest achievements achieved 60%+ support 31:10 What are the details of his Climate Commitment Act? 33:20 The potential of fusion power 35:50 Donald Trump's plan to kill clean energy makes no sense 37:50 Trump is ceding clean energy tech and production to China 38:50 Why aren't Americans in the streets en masse? 41:20 Americans will suffer under Trump's policies 42:35 A bad economy will wake up the public 43:50 We'll see empty shelves within weeks 45:50 Institutions capitulating to Trump only enables him 49:35 NAFTA created winners and losers 51:20 Trump is grossly incompetent 52:05 Trump gave away his leverage 53:20 Tariffs generally aren't productive for the economy 56:50 Flooding in WA a direct result of climate change 1:00:50 Americans don't truly understand climate change 1:02:50 The insurance industry will force the government's hand1:04:50 People in power KNOW climate will be a problem 1:08:50 What should the Democrats be doing? 1:10:20 What can we learn from Canada when dealing with Trump? 1:12:05 Trump took ownership of the economy at his own peril 1:13:05 There's a lot of talent in the Democratic Party 1:13:50 Republicans will get wiped out in the midterms 1:16:20 Congress is now a country club 1:18:20 Voters on each side have self-segregated 1:20:05 We need a president who follows the law1:22:00 Chuck's thoughts on Inslee interview 1:22:30 Ask Chuck 1:22:45 How can we promote more moderate candidates? 1:28:20 What will Glenn Youngkin's legacy be? 1:31:50 Thoughts on "Conclave" and papal politics?
Chapter 1: What are the key issues with US travel infrastructure?
It meant I got to navigate Newark Airport. And if you followed my X feed at all, you will know this. And the entire Northeast corridor, here is the bottom line. All of the tri-state leaders need to get together. This is a mess. The train situation is a mess. The Newark situation is a mess. This is as big of a travel corridor as there is.
This is what makes people either trust government or not trust government. Get this stuff right, and they're amazed and impressed. Get this stuff wrong, and this is what sort of can leave a mark. And let's just say, look, there has definitely been, I think the Northeast Corridor has a few disadvantages politically. It is considered a bluer area.
It has made getting sometimes Republican support for various transportation projects that would be helpful. in the Northeast corridor, not necessarily helpful in other parts of the country. Um, it is tough to get bipartisan support for this sometime, but look, this is an important economic engine. The Northeast corridor is the gateway to this country when people come in.
So, um, it is something everybody, and of course it's really important when it affects me, right? Cause that's what that, that's why we've all started podcast in order to get our own grievances out of the way. So what grinds my gears is that, um, I semi tease. But the point is, it is a reminder of how government leaves an impression on the average person.
You may not be paying attention to politics, but you pay attention when you can't get from point A to point B. And this is the type of stuff when when people are paying attention to government not working, it means you have somehow interrupted their lives. Right. There's sort of two types of voters, those that pay attention and those that tune in on Election Day.
And if you're disrupting those that tune in on election day, they're the ones that can turn election days into blue waves or red waves, depending on who is in power. And that brings me a little bit as much as I'd like to wax eloquently about the Alcatraz decision. I will just say one thing about Alcatraz and the movie business, this idea of tariffing all movies that come from overseas.
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Chapter 2: Why are Trump's comments on Alcatraz and movie tariffs significant?
Note when they came out. I don't think Donald Trump thought his Meet the Press interview went very well. I think two things really stayed sticky and I think will stick to him from that interview in particular. Asked about following the Constitution, I don't know, even though he actually takes an oath of office that says he promised he was going to defend and protect the Constitution.
He said, I don't know, to that when it came to following the Constitution. And then he continues to double down on this idea that he's going to play Mr. Scrooge. And, well, you know, $2 is enough. Well, what about the person that can't even afford the two dolls? What about that family? And what's he going to say to them?
It is an unusual and watching sort of former Republicans who do not like the idea of government deciding how many of anything you can have. You can, you know, sort of this idea. This is this is what communism is about. You let's limit the resources. You will hold back. You will decide, you know, hoard and
And, you know, you get two pieces, two loaves of bread for this family of six, but a family of four gets one loaf of bread because that's the rules from central from the central government. It is a really weird place for for President Trump to be going. And it only, I think, invites more problems for the Republicans as a whole in general.
And again, it continues this uncomfortable ideological realignment that's taking place inside. what we're supposed to call our conservative party, but we've been going through this. What is a conservative? The first word matters here, conserve, which is less government. You conserve the amount of, and in some ways, sure, he's trying to whack government with the sort of the chainsaw and doge,
But he also wants to use weaponized government when it suits him. He wants to strengthen government when it suits him, decide who gets a doll and who doesn't get a doll, decide who when when there's a military parade for his birthday and things like that. So what I would point out is I think it is not an accident that by Sunday evening he needed a couple of shiny metal object type of stories.
And Alcatraz is one of those shiny metal object stories, as well as somehow attacking Hollywood that would feed his base. And at the same time, perhaps, you know, do his little Jedi mind trick on the news cycle. Pay no attention to what I said about the Constitution. Pay no attention to what I said about about restricting the amount of toys that come for Christmas. Instead, look over here.
Look over there. Welcome to the rock. So for me, I look at the Alcatraz. and the movie business as simply distraction items. And this is what he's quite good at, right? This is what makes him, he's so wired for a short attention span world. He has sort of built, I always said this, he's been built this way his whole life, our media environment just caught up to his short attention span.
And now he is what is mainstream is fits right into Trump's mindset. So he sort of, the moment grew to him. He didn't meet the moment, the moment met him. And here we are. So that's the way I sort of compartmentalize those two. And look, this isn't easy. The decision of how do you cover Alcatraz? It's a ridiculous story. It's too small.
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Chapter 3: How is the current political landscape affecting Senate races?
Look, right now in campaign 2026, the biggest news over the last 96 hours was another recruiting failure for the Republicans when it came to some key Senate races, specifically what's going on in Georgia, where the governor there, Brian Kemp, passed on a bid to take on incumbent Democratic Senator John Ossoff.
And I think Kemp's decision when you when you couple it with the decision of now former Governor Chris Sununu in New Hampshire deciding an open seat, not even having to challenge a sitting incumbent, this would be an open seat race for him. He'd likely be the front runner right away, but he decided not to. And I think there's a couple of reasons. One is.
And this is something that I've experienced over the years. Any of the senators that used to be governors, the path from governor to senator, you talk to any former governor who's serving in the Senate and you ask them which job they like better, none of them hesitate. In fact, now they hate the Senate, the way the Senate works. It's dysfunctional. It's not bipartisan anymore.
It's still more bipartisan than the House, but it's less bipartisan than it ever was. It's hard to get stuff done because the party leadership runs the Senate now. Committee chairs don't have the power they used to have. The Senate is a terrible place to be compared to what it was just 20 years ago, 30 years ago. It is not the same place. It is not a deliberative body.
They don't deliberate squat anymore. Yes, you might occasionally get an interesting – day-long filibuster. It's about the only time you see any deliberation, if there is any. You don't see real debate. That would be kind of nice. There was a time that actually happened in the Senate, even in my lifetime. But this isn't the way it is. So
It is not surprising to me if Brian Kemp calls up any former senators that he knows or current senators that he knows. What do you think of the place? They're going to tell him it stinks. Ask the current the current list of governors will complain about the place. Mark Warner misses being governor. John Hickenlooper misses being governor. Mike Rounds misses being governor.
So and none of those guys will tell you that the Senate is a better job than that. So I don't wanna sit here and just simply say these are a couple of Republican governors who assess the political landscape and said it's a bad year to run. Even if it were a good year to run, The Senate doesn't feel like it's going to be a great place to be.
But the second thing that is going on here is the political landscape. I mean, if recent history is any guide, 2026 is going to be advantage Democrats. The question is, how big of an advantage? Is it a small advantage? You know, the way it was in some races sort of in 2022, it was sort of a mixed bag with a slight advantage to the Republicans. They always had a little more wind at the back.
That's why they won the House. But they couldn't pull off the Senate, mostly due to bad nominees, sort of Trumpy candidates that were just too Trumpy when Trump wasn't on the ballot. And that's the other thing. With Trump not on the ballot, we've seen a couple of midterms when that happens where Republican performance goes down. Democratic performance seems to grow.
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Chapter 4: What achievements did Jay Inslee accomplish as governor?
If you told me by the end of the summer, she's announced that she's not gonna run again, it wouldn't completely blow me away. I still think it's a little early in the calendar and that's still possible. So again, I gotta find my math here, right? So they need four seats. They'd have to win North Carolina, win Maine, hold all their vulnerable seats, those five seats I told you about.
And I'm actually pretty confident, barring a debacle here, They could do that. That's now more realistic than ever, especially when they've had Sununu and Kemp pass. So then you're looking like, where do they find two more seats? Maybe there's Texas. I'm skeptical on Florida and I'm somewhat skeptical about Ohio. I always say somewhat.
I think if the ticket is Ramaswamy at the top for governor, I think he's pretty polarizing. And I think he's more like Vance and he'll underperform an average Republican. Does he underperform enough? to bring down the ticket and to give a Sherrod Brown a shot? Maybe, maybe, we'll see. And I also, but here's another sort of counterfactual there in Ohio.
Sherrod Brown may be quite supportive of some of these tariffs of Trump. And can he message, can he somehow walk that line in Ohio? I don't know. So the thing that I would watch out for is I do think if Democrats want a path, they need one more, they need to put at least one or two more Senate seats in play. I'm gonna give you four states where I think
They're going to attempt to try to put two of these four in play, Mississippi, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. The farm states, I've talked to you about this before, between the tariffs and the AID funding cutoff, farmers have been hit hard. Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa are going to pay a price for the Trump economy that's steeper than most other states. Does that harm incumbents there?
And I'll throw one other thing at you. There's been interesting speculation that if when Donald Trump finally gives up on Pete Hegseth and the smart money in D.C. is when, not if he's going to do it on his timeline, not on the media's timeline. But we saw it already with Mike Waltz. The backup candidates, probably Joni Ernst. more than Tom Cotton. I know Cotton wants it.
I think Laura Loomer has cottoned, has got cotton in her crosshairs. And I think Cotton becomes a non-starter for some of MAGA World. That's not the case with Joni Ernst, who sort of tries to find her way a little bit closer, you know, a little more MAGA adjacent, I think, than Cotton is. And I think the
There's always, I think MAGA would love to be able to say a Republican woman was the first woman head of the Pentagon. So the point is, then all of a sudden you have appointment. Why is this speculation up and running? Well, Zach Nunn, who is a Republican member of Congress in the third district in Iowa, it is the swingiest of districts.
It is, frankly, he's probably the most vulnerable Republican in Iowa if he runs for reelection. decided not to run for the open governor's race in that state, which a lot of people thought he would jump into that, and didn't say right away he's running for reelection. So, look, there's a lot of chatter here about Ernst, Pentagon, maybe she's not running it. Who knows? Is Nunn holding out for that?
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Chapter 5: How does the Climate Commitment Act work?
Correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah, I was three terms and then 17 years in Congress and four in state legislature. So I had three good decades of public service. But I must I must push back against you saying I'm retired. I don't feel like not. Do not want to retire. I'm still in the game. I'm working with Climate Power to let people know about the science of climate.
I'm working on some gun safety issue with the Alliance for Gun Responsibility. I'm trying to stir the masses. I just had a piece in The Guardian I printed saying we've got to wake up and smell the roses to push back. So I really feel the same degree of lust for the fight.
Let me put it another way then. Do you feel... In some ways, being in office can constrain you. I'm not saying you were constrained in what you said, but you've got things you have to do. You know, when you're a governor, there's stuff, there's the have to do's and the want to do's. And sometimes, you know, you can't do the want to do's because of the have to do's, you know?
Well, I was a bit of a rebel as governor. I kind of did what I wanted to do because it was in the interest of Washingtonians. So I really did not feel constrained. And I think actually, to some degree, that was a little bit of the strength that I brought to the table because I was willing to push boundaries.
And, you know, on issues like health care and climate change and a more progressive tax system. And we we had a lot of positive change in 12 years because I didn't approach the job as feeling constrained. I always felt it was my job to raise the state's ambitions and not be constrained by forces of the status quo or economic power. And so, no, I I'm unconstrained now.
I was fairly unconstrained then. And some people were not happy with that, by the way.
Look, I, you know, I will say this consequence, whatever you, you know, if you're trying to make everybody happy, you're probably going to make nobody happy. Right. There is this fine line. I do believe in incrementalism. Personally, I do believe in building coalitions from from the middle out. But there is something to be said.
If you're trying to placate everybody, you're actually not going to make any progress. There is sometimes you've got to you've got to be willing. Look, I'm going over here and these people are going to be unhappy. But that that's so be it.
Well, I do think that executives have a couple of different approaches. Some say, look, I'm just going to try to bank as much political capital as I can and not ruffle the waters as little as I can. And that's my route to popularity. That was not my route. I always felt that I wanted to push the envelope of positive change. And when you mentioned incrementalism, I think it's interesting.
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Chapter 6: Why does Jay Inslee criticize Trump's energy policies?
Explain to people how it works.
What it does, it stands up a provision that will help meet our carbon reduction goals. We have a goal of 100% clean electricity. That's in law. And this creates a mechanism to assure that we reduce carbon both in our utility grid and in our transportation and in our industrial sector.
So what it does is it sets an absolute cap, an absolute limit on pollution of these toxic materials in the state of Washington. And it forces the polluting industries to purchase a credit against that total amount. And we only sell enough credits to go to that total amount. So they have to pay to pollute. The first principle of it, the polluters have to pay for their pollution.
And that's a very important concept because, you know, when you go to the garbage dump, you got to pay, you know, 15 bucks, 20 bucks to dump your garbage.
For the right to do that. Yeah. A lot of communities, you got to pay people to just pick up your trash.
Exactly. Well, for too long, though, we've allowed polluting industries to treat the atmosphere like a big garbage dump for free. Well, guess what? If it's for free, guess what people do? They dump their garbage in our only atmosphere that is now putting a blanket of carbon dioxide around the earth.
Take that money, it goes back to citizens. How do you prevent... So, you know, you have a power grid surge and all of this, you know, these are the fears that get thrown at people about these policies that if you put this cap on carbon, either one of two things is going to happen.
The cost of energy is going to go up because there's a limited amount of potential supply or there just won't be enough when there's a surge, whether there's a heat wave or a cold wave or something like this. Explain to me the provisions that I'm sure are in this bill that you have that sort of deal with sort of outsized events that could cause surges in cost or surges in power use.
Well, the best answer to those concerns is experience. And our experience has been wholly positive in that regard. We are building clean energy jobs like crazy in Washington State. I've permitted probably the biggest wind turbine farm in the western United States. I've permitted quite a number of solar farms. We have two of the most advanced battery companies in the world today.
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Chapter 7: What are Jay Inslee's views on political courage and institutional challenges?
And to think, to have to imagine an American president facially ignoring the US Supreme Court, it takes the powers of imagination because we've never experienced that in the United States. Hungary has experienced it. Germany has experienced it. Argentina has experienced it. We never have. So I think part of it is we have to imagine this because we've never experienced it.
But I do believe there's some exhaustion, but I'll tell you, people are waking up. So I spoke to, I don't know, 20,000 people on a sunny day in Seattle a couple weekends ago. On my street corner up here in Bainbridge Island, every day there's two dozen people standing out there. And they're not in the New York Times or on your show, but they're just out there. People are waking up.
I wrote this piece in The Guardian you referred to about a month ago, and there has been some marginal waking up that's happening. So I'm very pleased by that. because people are starting to feel the ramifications, because he is capable of totally ripping apart every law and every constitutional privilege if we don't get out there. So I'm glad that we are. And everybody's got a stake in this.
There's going to be a report released tomorrow or a couple of days after this by Climate Power.
I work with a group called- Just letting people know, we're taping on Tuesday, April 29th, because I always like the timestamp. So on April 30th, you guys are going to release this report.
They're going to release a report that's going to talk about the incredible tens of thousands of jobs lost that we've already lost because of his attack on clean energy. I guess what I'm saying is the assault on democracy has real term ramifications for your economic conditions of your family. It's not just kind of ivory tower constitutional law. It means you're going to pay more for utility.
Your kid's going to lose their jobs. and your prices are gonna go up. Those are the real term ramifications of losing democracy, not just pointy-headed things for constitutional lawyers at the law schools.
You know, it's funny you put in those terms.
Although I favor those people.
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Chapter 8: What should Democrats do to prepare for future elections?
What did you learn in your conversations with voters that says, you know, when you talk about these issues, talking about them this way, not that way, or what advice would you give to other politicians who want to get voters to understand the urgency better on their terms? Not necessarily on my terms or your terms, but on their terms. What have you found to be most effective?
So I'm going to tell you a story that doesn't really match the script, but I'm going to tell you a story because you appreciate campaign stories, right? Oh, yeah.
I love a good fish story, and I love a good campaign story.
So I'll tell you part of my learning experience. So I went to Hamburg, Iowa. It was my very first event, and we were going to focus on climate change because there had been a horrendous flood.
You were fired up, I bet, right? First event, you're like, no.
First event. First event in Iowa. And because there had been a horrendous flood swept through town, it was a magnificently choreographed event. We had a guy who actually was Al Gore's advisor whose mother's house was destroyed in the flood. And we could go through and we had, you know, eight or nine cameras and the whole radio and everybody was there. It was a wonderful event.
We could see where the water had come up halfway up the windowsills. There were all these silos that had collapsed in the flood. So all this wheat was just laying out all over the ground. I mean, it was a very good graphic illustration. And that place had never seen a flood before. It had been there for 150 years. And that town had never seen a flood before.
So this was a perfect example of climate-caused disasters that we now are experiencing today. And the thing was going well. I talked to a lot of people there. They all thought that we should do something about climate change. And it was really a great visit. And as I was going to get in the car, my young staffer, who I didn't know very well, says, you got to come over here, Gov.
You got to meet Henry over here at the auto body shop. And I go, no, no, we're done. We got to go. He says, no, you have to come see Henry. Everybody knows Henry in town. I said, no, no, we're done. He says, look, you got to come. I said, OK. So we walk across town. We go into Henry's shop, auto body shop. And there's NRA posters and Dixie flags everywhere.
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