Breaking News from Pod Save America - Trump Issues Disturbing Response to Charlie Kirk Shooting

Episode Date: September 13, 2025

You’re 30 seconds away from being debt free with PDS Debt. Get your free assessment and find the best option for you at https://PDSDebt.com/rank. In the wake of political violence, Trump stokes division on Fox News. Tommy Vietor and Brian Tyler Cohen react. CHAPTERS 00:00 - Charlie Kirk's Killer Turned In 09:18 - Trump's Dangerous Response on Fox News 14:01 - Ad Break 15:15 - Trump Answers Questions from Press Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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All right, Brian, we got some good news today. Utah governor, Spencer Cox, announced Friday morning that Charlie Kirk's assassin is now in custody. Liberal Tears is brought to you by PDS debt. He was identified as a 22-year-old man named Tyler Robinson, coctaw reporters that Robinson's family and a family friend ended up turning him into law enforcement. So Dan Pfeiffer and I dug into the details of what happened this morning in a previous YouTube video. Check that out if you want more. But Brian and I wanted to talk about the way that social media has made everything so much worse the past couple of days. is Governor Cox actually talks about this in a speech he delivered Friday morning. Let's watch a clip. Having one so gruesomely displayed on camera in all of our hands and in all of our pockets,

we are not wired as human beings biologically, historically, we have not evolved in a way that we are capable of processing those types of violent imagery. And by the way, we've seen another one with a gruesome stabbing very recently that went viral. This is not good for us. It is not good to consume. Social media is a cancer on our society right now. And I would encourage, again, I would encourage people to log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member. Go out and do good in your community.

Very good advice that I probably won't take Brian. He's talking about the video of Charlie Kirk getting shot that was everywhere on social media. And so just to be clear at the start, like I think what happened to Charlie Kirk is fucking evil. It is indefensible. I don't care if you don't like his politics. Political violence is a cancer. It will spread and it will hurt all of us if we let it.

And I think we all have to condemn it. I know you have. But the social media element of this. I mean, so Wednesday, right, we're all sitting at our desks. We're very online people. You see the reports of a shooting at a TPUSA event. Then you see reports that Charlie Kirk himself may have been shot. And we're all just like kind of praying that he's okay.

But then this video of his assassination from Marlon. from multiple angles. It's just it's in your social media algorithm and getting fed to you over and over and over again. And it was, it's sickening and you can't get it out of your head. And I just, I have to wonder like, what is this doing to people emotionally to see this stuff? The concern is that you get desensitized to the,

to the gruesome nature of all of this. And like that's the worst part. Like if this stop, like I think the failure of our society is getting normal, allowing ourselves to become normalized to this kind of stuff. I know that I didn't seek out the video. I didn't either. Most people didn't seek out the video. I tried not to find it.

I have family members. I know kids of friends of mine who were fed this stuff because they just came across it. And we have Twitter's algorithm, for example. Elon Musk has kind of enabled this to just flood our timelines. And so there's really every incentive structure in the world to, make sure that we see this. But I think, again, the big failing of, of, like, you know, our society is watching this kind of stuff and, and just assuming that this is, you know, this is normal now. This is how it's going to be. And like, and it, when it loses its shock value, I think is,

which is the moment that we're in right now, I think is the, is the most dangerous point of all of this. Yeah. And look, people who have watched us, you know, talk over the years know that we're not big fans of Elon Musk. But just to be clear, like, Elon has changed the Twitter algorithm and structure so that you can get paid for views. Yeah. So you have these influencers who are promoting this video because it will make them money. On top of that, Brian, I saw people selling, like, crypto coins that were somehow like RIP Charlie before he had been pronounced dead on Twitter.

And it's all part of this, like, evil algorithmic financial scheme. And like, you know, it was shocking what happened on Wednesday, but this is something I've just, I've noticed for a long time because I like, I read a lot of news. about Ukraine and Gaza, so that stuff is constantly getting fed to me. And like, literally every day I will see a Ukrainian or Russian soldier get a grenade dropped on their head from a drone. Literally every day, I will see an image of a child in Gaza who was wounded or killed by an airstrike.

And like half the time, it's the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. You know, and like I'm not asking to be protected from reality, right? Like people should know what's happening, especially in Gaza when it's like U.S. tax dollars are funding the bombs that are getting dropped on these kids, but it can be really scarring and like you said, desensitizing. Like this should shock us, but it eventually stopped shocking us. I think the worst part too is while this was happening, my first thought was not not on what kind of human response people would give or what people, human response people should give, but I knew immediately that it would just be weaponized, that it would be weaponized by the left

and the right to kind of go back into our corners and use it to confirm our priors and to attack the other side. And like I think that's the point at which like kind of a lot of the humanity in all of this gets, gets lost. I like I took the last two days off, just kind of taking the governor's advice before he even gave it, which is like you get lost in this world of I think like online responses. And some of them are especially extreme. and some of them are mostly, or most of them are focused on kind of, you know, weaponizing what has happened to, like, bolster your side and make a political point, bolster your political ideology. But just kind of put my phone down for the last two days to protect myself and my mental health. And, you know, like I said before, I mean, the biggest thing is when this starts to become normalized, when you become normalized to this stuff, when you become desensitized,

to the stuff, I think, is the point at which, the point at which this starts to happen more and more because it loses, it's, it's like, you know, the effect of what it is, which is heinous. It's heinous. And look, my reactions, it's, look, I saw the video, I heard about what happened to Charlie, and then I started to see photos of Charlie Kirk with his wife and his two little kids, and his two little kids are, like, they look like they're the exact same ages and genders as my kids. And, like, honestly, I could barely talk about it without crying, because when you view what happened to him through that prism. You cannot help but think about what that mom just lost, what that little girl just lost, what that little boy just lost, like their father is gone.

And I also thought about being Charlie in those last moments and not being able to like tell them all the things you want to tell them because they're not old enough yet, right? And so like, I was struggling not to like weep when we recorded about it on Friday. And then I saw clips of a younger like sort of TikTok social media influencer named Dean Withers who I think was going live when he was learning about what happened. And he had known Charlie and debated Charlie. Charlie and like they were not friends, right? They were like opponents politically. But he started crying because he was talking about Charlie Kirk as a human and as a dad and

as a family and people were mocking him. And it's like, you know what, guys? Dean Withers is a good human being with a good soul. And that's how all of us should react when another human being is executed before our eyes. Like it's good to just have a fucking human reaction first. We can join the political fights another day. Like you don't have to battle every battle like in that moment.

You know what I mean? It's just like I think people need to sort of, this is like a log off touchgrass thing, right? And just like get back to first principles and some humane. Yeah, I think that's well said. I mean, look, I know that there's a lot of stuff floating around online that that shows what an opponent Charlie Kirk was to the idea of empathy. But if you don't like Charlie Kirk because he was opposed to the concept of empathy, the response. It feels antithetical to then say, I'm going to exhibit the same characteristics that I don't like him for. You're not endorsing his political project.

No one should assume that. It's so crazy. It's also, look, look, just, you know, you and I both in the political kind of media space, it's been a very weird couple of days. Because I'm sure, for me at least, like, everyone I know has reached out and been like, be safe, be careful, do this, do that. And it's all done with good intentions. And I love everybody for it. But, like, it does get in your head. Totally.

to think about it. And I think it's really bad for the country that already we had anyone who ran for office was worried about political violence. That was something that was already in the head because of Trump's attempted assassination because of Gabby Giffords, countless other examples throughout our history of political violence. But now even reporters who cover politics have to worry about violence. People like Charlie Kirk who just are commentators about politics have to worry about political violence. Like that is what that is the environment you would expect under Vladimir Putin, right? Like where if you're a journalist who's digging too deep into the oligarchs, all of a sudden you get thrown off a balcony, right? Like this like it

it will damage our democracy in profound ways if people are scared to say what they think and are unable to voice their views and have political debates where we can resolve things because that's when you end up resorting to violence. And frankly, it's all compounded by the that social media is full of anonymous assholes who threaten each other all day long. Yeah. You know, the interesting thing, too, and you can speak on this much better than I can, is like when there are moments of like national outrage or whatever it may be, like you look at the way where Obama responded to Sandy Hook in 2012,

and you contrast that with how Trump comported himself in response to this, which was initially to host a recorded address where he basically declared war on the very concept of leftism, right? Without knowing who the shooter was. Without knowing anything about the shooter. And of course, you know, we've seen these instances before where Trump kind of issues his clarion call to his supporters and he doesn't have to do it overtly. He can do it kind of implicitly and the way that they respond.

And we saw that on January 6th, for example. And not only did he not learn the right lesson, but he expressly learned the wrong one, which is that, you know, people will respond to these explicit or implicit. calls for violence handed down by him. And so instead of being more careful about the way that he chooses his words, he sees, okay, this is a cudgel I can wield against people. And this is a weapon that I have in my arsenal. It's clearly like his instinct is not to be a calming presence in our political discourse.

It's to fan the flames. Right. Here's one example from a Fox and Friends interview he did on Friday morning. Radicals on the right as well. We have radicals on the left. People have gotten or watching all of these videos. and cheering, some people are cheering that Charlie was killed. How do we fix this country?

How do we come back together? I'll tell you something that's going to get me in trouble, but I couldn't care less. The radicals on the right, oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime. They don't want to see crime. Worried about the border. They're saying, we don't want these people coming in.

We don't want you burning our shopping centers. We don't want you shooting our people in the middle of the street. The radicals on the left are the problem. and they're vicious and they're horrible and they're politically savvy, although they want men and women sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders.

Brian had not seen that clip. Dude. Soothing, huh? I mean, I'm like almost speechless. I think, I mean, it's crazy to claim that the radicals on the right are just fighting for, like, peace. I mean, Melissa Hortman was, and her husband were assassinated, like, weeks ago.

ago. We have, I mean, he himself incited January 6th. Paul Pelosi was bludgeon with a hammer and his fucking kid, like, posted that he was going to wear a Halloween costume. Yon Musk mocked it, too. Elon Musk did, and so, you know, like, the notion that, like, one side is just, like, warriors for peace while the other side is, are the, I mean, like, you look, I mean, we, we, it's not even a dog whistle anymore, right? There's a debate about whether his rhetoric on January 6 was what and cited the mop, obviously it did. But in that case, I don't care about calming things down?

He's not capable of doing it. It's not something, like he legitimately that's not a product he sells. Like you go into that store and it's just not on the shelves. Like it never was and I think we dilute, because he's the president and because there is a high bar that we kind of delude ourselves

into thinking that he is going to meet the moment ever and he never fucking will. And, you know, like, and the sad part about that is, is I think that so many of us have lowered our, our expectations for what the president should be able to do from where it was, like, you know, during the Obama era. But like, you're the president of the United States. That is the fucking bar. So, like, meet that bar. Like, that is, that is the whole job is to be able to do the express opposite of what Trump is doing

right here, which is just to invite further violence and do it on the basis of some completely, completely baseless, made-up standard where Democrats are just, like, reveling in, in, in some desire for violence while Republicans are are lambs sitting there and just hoping and praying for peace. Yeah. It's like, look, I haven't read every presidential speech in history, but I would assume that almost literally every single president in the history of this country, including Donald Trump, by the way, has said some version of the line, while this percentage of the country voted for me, I now represent the entire country. Yeah. And then there, he's just like, actually, those guys are bad. You know what I mean? And like, I'm sure his like little apologists, the Caroline Levits of the world,

would be like, oh, he's talking about the very fringe left. The Trump whispers that are going to, well, actually, what he meant, what this, what the President of the United States meant was, because, you know, apparently he's not able to, he's not able to express himself properly, that we, that we need these other people to come in and say, actually what he meant was X, Y, Z. It's just like, we, but we know what his followers heard. Liberal Tiers is brought to you by PDS debt. Our financial system isn't just broken. It's rigged. And if you're buried in debt, that's exactly how they want it. Big banks profit when you're desperate. Creditors win when you lose, but you don't have to play their game. PDS debt helps you

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and it just feels like you're in a situation you'll never be able to get out of. PDS debt could be a critical solution to help you in that moment. You're 30 seconds away from being debt-free. get your free assessment and find the best debt option for you right now at PDSdebt.com slash rank. That's PDSdebt.com slash rank. PDSdebt.com slash rank. President Trump also demonstrated his emotional side on Thursday when he was asked about, you know, how he personally, Trump personally was holding up after losing Charlie Kirk. Because Charlie Kirk was friends with Trump, was friends with the Trump family. Here he is commenting on that.

How are you holding up for the last thing to have to? I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the Trumps. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years. And it's going to be a beauty. It'll be an absolute and I think it's construction. Yes, so there is Trump getting a question about literally just losing a friend,

and all of a sudden we're talking about construction on a ballroom. Yeah. I mean, it's like sociopathic, you know. Like, I mean, the extent to which he is the, the universe revolves around him in his own mind. Like, I mean, it's, it's, it's. And he gave a version of that same answer on Fox and Friends, too. It's like, clearly somewhere in his head, he was like, pivot to message about ballroom?

Yeah. As if that's a thing, would that anyone cares about? Yeah. I mean, it just like, he is, he is chronically, he's, he is a megal maniacal narcissist to a degree that I don't think words can, can fully express any better than just watching that video. Yeah. Well, who better to lead our country in this very scary moment? Well, look, Brian, it's good to see you. Glad to be able to kind of just talk aloud about this scary moment in our country's history. And look, weird as it is to say this, I think that folks should heed the words of Spencer Cox and just like take some time.

Take a beat. You know, take it from two guys who spend an unhealthy amount of time online and, you know, just there is a lot of virtue in being able to log off and spend time. with real human beings and your family and friends and not feeling like you have to be a part of a really dangerous and unhealthy discourse. And also like, look, there are some arguments that it might feel like we are losing in this moment. That's okay.

You know, like we will wake up tomorrow and find a way to fight for the things that matter and make the arguments we need to make. And it's okay to take a beat. So thanks for watching this and we'll talk to you guys soon. Thank you.