Breaking News from Pod Save America - Trump White House Launches Bizarre MAGA-Themed Arcade Games

Episode Date: September 5, 2026

The Trump White House launches a bizarre new MAGA-themed arcade featuring games about deportation and building the border wall. Plus, leaked Jon Fetterman texts, Trump’s push for more data centers, and a speed round of the week’s strangest headlines. Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor break down the latest. CHAPTERS 0:00 - MAGA Video Games 04:46 - Trump Approves Of More Data Centers 06:14 - Jon Fetterman Text Leaks 14:15 - Mamdani’s Comms Team Working With Influencers 16:53 - Speed Round: Lori Chavez-DeRemer IG Report 19:31 - Claude Watches Adult Content 19:53 - Fox News’ Hasan Piker Obsession 21:00 - Trump’s Ballroom Story Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John, the White House released some sort of video game trailer earlier today. You have watched it, I have not. So I guess I'm excited to see how this goes. Let's run the clip. Okay, so it's like Nintendo. Oh, Sega. Oh, MAGA. Pretty old-school lo-fi.

What is that? What is happening here? We've got an eagle flying. I guess is that a bill that they haven't passed? Is that legislation? Seed oils. Oh, this is maha. Oh, that's a maha thing.

Oh, I guess we're building the wall with Tetris. Oh, yeah. So if you want to play deportations, which is the first game there, you can go on to arcade.gov and you can pretend to deport some people. Okay, so the first thing was migrants being deported. That's why they're marching around. That makes the whole thing. a lot darker. The rest of it was like, whatever.

Yeah, right. And Ego with the bill. Who cares? But they, of course, put the migrants, the deportations first as a way to trigger everyone and troll everyone. Just... Well done. It works. Well done. Yep, we're here.

In the same week that, you know, they also posted a picture of Haitians in chains being deported, mocking them. These are people who were legally allowed to be here. It's worth noting. I mean, there's been to great coverage last couple weeks, especially the New York Times.

Immigration arrests rose to record highs in June and July. ICE is basically hitting their 2000 arrest of day quota. The number of ICE staffers is now up to 29,000 employees in June, which is up from 21,000 when Trump took office. And then I don't know if you saw this story about the New York Times had a big piece on those, I think, 10 migrants who'd been deported to Western Africa. I have plenty of, yes, how was it going to bring this up? Yes, to Liberia and to Equatorial Guinea.

These are migrants from mostly from Cuba and Venezuela, so absolutely no connection to anyone in West Africa. They were shackled. They were beaten if they resisted trying to get on the plane. They were denied medical attention. One man peed himself because they wouldn't let him use the bathroom during the flight. These are how they were treated by the Americans. By the Americans. If you try to escape, we're going to shoot off your feet, they said to some of these.

In Equatorial Guinea, I think, right? Yeah. Yeah, once they got there. Before that, some of these people spent months in detention. One woman had sent 15 months in some sort of like pretrial detention. One guy was from Venezuela. He was in the U.S. legally. And he was arrested when he was trying to renew his work permit.

Also, a lot of Cuban immigrants. Yeah. Like this, there was another story about this. This guy came here in 2016 from Cuba by raft, applied for a green card, started a truck and company in South Florida. It was helping support his parents. And just sent not back to Canada. Cuba sent to a random country in Africa. Yeah, the problem is they can't send...

Well, I don't get why we're sending Venezuelans to Western Africa because presumably we now have pretty good relations with that country since Trump is running it, Marco Rubio is running it. Makes no sense. It is fucking gross. And the stories, like, so they're planning on sending in that New York Times story about 1,200 people this year to Liberia or other West African countries. And once they get there, the Liberian government

It's like, well, none of these people are criminals. And so they can apply to be permanent residents here. But so far, they're just in a hotel and, you know, terrified. Terrified away from their families. They've been in this country. And they were in the U.S. for some of them years working, paying taxes, contributing, have family here. Yeah. And there's going to be a lot more, especially because there were a couple hundred thousand Haitians

that had protected status that were able to work here and live here, living in Springfield. Ohio. And then J.D. Vance and the rest of them did eating the cats, eating the dogs. And, you know, a year later, now they took temporary protected status away and they're just being shackled and deported. Yeah, that sweep is happening, I think, as we speak. And they're sending people back to a country that is experiencing their war zone levels of violence. So pretty evil policy all around. If you want to get your news from a media organization that will not release fascist video games, please subscribe to POTSafe America here on YouTube. We are trying to build a progressive counterweight all the right-wing crap from Fox and everywhere else.

When you subscribe, when you watch, you help us get good information to people. And also, it's free. So please do. Okay, that was awful. So let's switch gears, John. While you were out of the office for a bit, a second Trump data center quote has hit the political towers. Oh, God. Let's watch.

Well, I look at data centers very, very carefully. I mean, being formerly in the real estate business, I was really good in real estate. And I can tell you, if I were running a state or a town, if I was a mayor or a governor, I would want as many data centers as I can. If you want to go through poverty, crime, and squalor, I would say don't approve data centers, you know, you have your choice. Good to the point where there's like so many bad Trump quotes about data centers that it's hard to figure out what to use in the ad. Also, yeah, we actually believe you if you were mayor of a town, you'd want all the data centers. Yeah, because you're a terrible person.

Yeah, you're a terrible person. Yeah, you'd be in the part of town where there would be no data centers. And then everyone else would be screwed, but you'd have made money because the company. will have given you a kickback or a special deal. And then all the people that had to deal with higher electricity rates, they would have just, you would have told them to go fuck themselves. We're looking at some polling yesterday. Data centers are 35 points underwater.

People are unfavorable towards data centers, regardless of whether they live near one. They just don't want them in their communities. Voters say they would rather have a new nuclear power plant or a prison built in their neighborhood before an AI data center. Methadone clinic. I know that was only 1% higher than data. senators, but it was higher. It was higher. All right, again, switched gears. So the Wall Street Journal has a deeply reported story out this week on Pennsylvania Senator John Federman. It is quite troubling.

The gist is that John Federman seems to show no actual interest in doing his job, except for going on Fox News and talking about Israel or Iran. To back up this thesis, the journal published messages from Federman to his staff where he pretty much explicitly says as much. So a couple specifics for you guys. The representatives from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia came to Washington. They wanted to meet with Federman. Here's his conversation with his staff about their request for a meeting. Federman says, why do I have to keep meeting with CHOP? That's what they call the Children's Hospital. The aide says, because they are worried about vaccines and Medicaid cuts. Federman says, well, I'm not. I'm convinced they just want free trips to D.C. Okay. By the way,

Philly's not that far from D.C., so it's not like you really need a free bus ticket or something. He also backed out of attending a funeral for three police officers killed near his hometown. Here's how that text exchange went. Federman gets an update from his aid on the logistics and the duration of the funeral that will be three hours. Federman says three hours, aid. Yes, it's a very formal ceremony and the equivalent of three separate funerals. Federman, this may be a non-starter. He ends up not going.

He also canceled a meeting with three paralyzed military veterans. And then still did like a fox hit. He lied to his staff, said he was sick, strolled in an hour later looking fine, and then they realized, oh, he just wanted to go on TV. He blew off a state rep to meet with Bruce Pearl, the Auburn coach, former Auburn coach. He skips committee meetings or he walks in, gets marked as president and walks out. He's obsessed with Israel. We can walk through some more of that. But it's like, why do you want to keep doing the job, man?

You clearly hate it. The reason I thought the story was so compelling and well-reported. is because, like, all the conversation about him has been like, well, he was this progressive guy and was he kidding us the whole time and he was really right wing or did he become right wing or whatever. And this is just like basic, put all the politics aside. This is just basic constituent services. You're a senator. Your job is to take meetings with your constituents to help them with problems that they have and to be there for them. You were their elected representative in Washington. Right. You represent them. And there's plenty of things you do that are not political in nature or not partisan. in nature for your constituents. And he's just not doing any of those things. Yeah. And it's also hard because clearly this is like a different person than before he had the stroke.

Yeah. And I know some people now like to put this in the box with all the other left, center left battles in the party and be like, well, the signs were there before and we should have known in the left. You know, it's like anyone, there's people, there's like party chairs from Pennsylvania in here that were like, no, he won that race because he won that. worked hard and cared about people and showed up and he's a different person. We know, we both know people who knew him well, worked on the campaign. He's a different guy. I mean, yeah, my human reaction was like, this is quite sad. This is a guy who never recovered from the stroke.

He never recovered from depression. He seems quite depressed still. I mean, if you're just kind of going into your, curling up into your phone and not speaking to human beings, like it doesn't seem like a happy guy. He seems like he needs help. On a political level, it's obviously infuriating. He's a deadbeat. He's a deadbeat senator.

The state deserves better. the Democratic Party deserves better. He should have just resigned. Also, though, of all the things to be obsessive about, his thing is bombing people in Gaza or bombing people in Iran. Like, that's weird. It's hard to unpack why you get there or how you get there. And the piece notes this, but that is the one position that I think he had during the

campaign and before the campaign that sort of went unnoticed because it was before October 7th. And so he was very pro-Israel when he ran, and it just wasn't. as big of an issue in the Democratic Party, or at least as big of an issue as it is now. So that's always sort of been there. Yeah. But I do think what's... But there's pro-Israel, but then there's just the total lack of empathy. Yes.

Yes. Well, I mean, and you can see that, Israel aside, which is if you look at his voting record, he still votes, like in 2025, he voted with the Democrats a little over 80% of the time on genuinely partisan votes. The average Senate Democrat is 92%. But even that's sort of obscures because some of the... Some of his breaks were like many times on the same issue, which was like government funding. But he votes with Democrats most of the time he's voted against 42 or 46 Trump judges.

And he's voted for zero Trump appellate judges. So there were only district judges that he voted, the four that he voted for. So like he's there. He's not like voting like a right wing lunatic. He's voting like almost like a maybe moderate sort of center left Democrat. And yet all his time is spent going on Fox and shitting on Democrats. So he's like a right-wing troll on television and on the internet, but he votes like a pretty standard sort of center-right Democrat. Yeah, troll in the streets, mansion in the sheets kind of thing.

Which goes to your point about empathy, which is like, what is the purpose of this? Yeah. Just to be a dick? And also, like, it just seems like there's 100% odds. He's going to switch parties. It also speaks to how personal and petty politics can be. The Republicans saw an opportunity. They're all nice to him.

Democrats are understandably angry and incensed by his comments about Gaza or whatever else because he's actively trying to troll them. And so it just creates this vicious cycle. It seems like this guy is gone. Do you worry about like, I read this and I was like, oh shit, everyone's going to get really mad about this and this is going to push him even further. Now, it may be inevitable that he switches. He has said a couple of weeks ago, like, no, I'm not. It's not happening. I'm not going to do it.

But like, there's in the back of my mind, I'm like, I don't want to say or do it. anything that pushes him further to switch because that is an unbelievably important vote if he is the if he is the deciding vote well john uh you have a responsibility gene i do as well i did notice though about an hour ago a new twitter account popped up called former fetterman staffers who have previewed that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that they're going to start posting more receipts about john fetterman being a deadbeat so um obviously like look this guy isn't doing the job I think it's great that you people are like blowing the whistle on him. It is going to make him feel more paranoid, more attacked from not just the party, but from within his own organization.

Yeah. Psychologically, this is not going to help. Yeah, I would just tell people to think about it this way. We get 51 votes. Amazing, right? Amazing election, 51 votes in the Senate. We take control of the Senate. And then John Federman switches.

And then suddenly, the first. there's a Supreme Court vacancy. And now we don't have the Senate anymore. And we get, you know, Alito or Thomas or someone else replaced by someone who's 30 that we're going to deal with for 30 years. Justice Eric Trump. And it's like, do you think that is worth,

like being really tough on John Federman right now when absolutely, when 2028 comes around and he's up, yes, like let's go all in and elect someone else. But in the next couple of years, just... We're stuck with him for a while. There's a lot of people that could be impacted by this who are not John Federer. And what the ideal situation here is someone who loves him and is close to him and says, John, go do something else.

I know. You don't like this. Another interesting story this week, there were a bunch of stories about New York City mayor, Zoran Mundani's communications operation. The New York Times had a big piece on Friday. A lot of these pieces have really focused on their outreach to online influencers. The gist is the mayor's communications office has been restructured to have teams that talk to traditional media, but now there's also this big kind of influencer team that provides them information about what Zoran is doing, often via signal message. The piece treats a lot of things that are mundane like they're scandalous, which is kind of baffling.

Like, I guess my read it and I was like, if you work for a politician in the board campaign in 2026 and you're not doing this, you should be fired. What are we doing? Like op-eds at this point? And like it's fine to pull back the curtain on this stuff. I do think it's interesting to understand how a politician can. communicates, but listen to this paragraph. The mayor's office says that it does not pay influencers. Still, their proximity and access to a figure as popular as Mr. Mamdani can help increase their own social media following and by extension, potentially put them in a position to attract

paid content sponsorships and commercial brands. Some influencers said when they feature Mondani, the videos get more likes and viewers watch longer. I'm sorry, what? Don't journalists benefit from covering popular politicians and maybe like, I don't know, write books or get TV contracts? The first thing that came through my mind, what are you fucking talking about? Crazy. What is the criticism here? I don't know. I think the only legitimate criticism seems to be that you're not supposed to use signal under no retention.

I know. It's a little hard to stomach that knowing that everyone in this White House and the Trump White House uses signal. None of them are communicating via approved means and all the reporters know it because they play ball because that's how they have to talk to these people. Yeah, that's no one's abiding by that anymore. Sorry. It is. The records that no one is keeping and no one is going to hold them accountable

for this or anything. We've got war plans on Signal. I think the mayor's office doing some signal communication with a few influencers. It's not a problem. You know what? Maybe the influencers could just go right

into the mayor's office and meet with them in person and then no one would know what they talked about either. They probably will. Yeah. You want to do that? How about that?

Press. Yeah, he's going to do both. He's going to talk to press all the time. He's talking to press all the time. And this, I'm sorry. I know because we're liberal for defense.

But like, if a republic, if this was a story about a Republican, I'd feel the same way. This is ridiculous. It's just smart communication strategy. And this is just like sour grapes from fucking mainstream media, legacy media. It's like, oh, it doesn't understand how communications works these days or does, but isn't happy about it. To my ed board. All right, let's do a speed round. You should do ed boards.

They're good. They're valuable, and he will. Okay. Lori Chavez-Deremmer, I think that's that how you say your name? she's the former Labor Secretary, Shiasikand. There was an IG report that was released about her.

And it's a doozy. I'm going to read you a quote. In one episode, Chavez-Dreamer asked to visit an Oregon strip club with her security detail. Once there, she took money from her purse,

handed it to her driver and instructed him to give it to a performer. When the driver resisted, the bodyguard told him to comply. Chavez-Durremer then handed the driver more money and instructed him to drop the bills

one at a time onto the partially nude woman. Most fun Trump cabinet agency? What the fuck? This was not the vibe with you know, Hilda Salis and Tom Perez and the Obama administration. This is very

It's funny that this woman turned out to be like a labor secretary. One of the more scandalous members of the cabinet because she was like a not that maga member of Congress before this. She was like supposed to be maybe one of the more moderate cabinet secretaries that Trump picked for his term. And she ends up being this like completely crazy scandal-ridden cabinet official who was forced

out. A couple more quotes from the from the IG report and this Washington Post report on it. The environment she created was toxic, intimidating, and humiliating. It referenced an inappropriately close and unprofessional relationship with her bodyguard under security detail. They can't confirm that they were banging. But there's like overnight key swipes in each other's room. room. So, okay. They use government funds for personal travel. They regularly drank on the job.

She sent her personal aid, an executive assistant, to her home during the workday in a labor department vehicle to organize her bedroom closet, hang up her laundry and dry cleaning and arrange her clothes, shoes, and purses. I mean, love it does that. That's a good post. That's a crazy, that's a crazy story. Man, that is wild. She, yeah, that was a good one to fire. It's crazy to think, like, I'm the labor secretary now. I could do whatever I want.

I'm sure she was, well, she's certainly not helping workers. No, no, not at all. It feels like that's a cabinet agency where it's the Trump administration. And so they've already got all the labor protections they can. They've got this whole agency. So it's like, what else are they going to do? She's like, I'm going to go have a good time. Secretary of Labor is like, no tax on tips.

Nice. Okay, I want to read you a headline I saw on Twitter. This is from the Polymarket Twitter account, which aggregates news from. some reason. Just in. Vibe Coder catches Claude viewing adult content in Chrome during a debugging session, leading the Internet to declare artificial gooner intelligence has been achieved. AGI.

Wait, what? Claude was watching porn, I guess. How does someone know that Claude? I don't even know how you find that out? I don't know. It's too good to check. Yeah, no, I'm going on Twitter. Next thing.

Okay. We have Fox News on in our office all day long, usually, because it's, You know, they play every Trump press conference and it's helpful to see it. You get more Hassan Piker on there than his Twitch stream. So you took me where I was going. You led me where I was going. We've remarked upon how often they are running stories about Hassan Piker. Justin Bargona as Zateo totaled it up.

Do you want to guess how many segments in hours of airtime in the last week alone there were? Okay, week alone. Oof. I would say... Go with hours because segments is confusing. Okay. I would say... four hours.

Okay. According to my research, this is from Justin. Fox News mentioned Hassan Piker in 566 segments across 267 programs since August 4th. In the last week alone, they ran 107 segments totaling nearly eight hours of airtime.

Eight hours. No one has done more to make Hassan Piker famous. Unreal. Fox News. Fox News. Good for you, Hassan. They really have given him quite a platform. Yep, he nailed it.

Finally, did you read Ben Terrace's magnum opus on the ballroom yet? Open tab. It's an open tab. I can't recommend it enough. I love that Ben just like, ask, like, all right, I'm going to ask him to find out why he likes construction so much

and just gave him an hour and gave him a tour. Yeah, so I talked to Ben a little for the story. Actually, like, I was literally like, I was going to the Paw Patrol movie and killing some time in the mall with my son. I thought it was interesting. They dropped the Paw Patrol guys into Jurassic Park and they like ripped off Jurassic Park shop for shot at the end though.

Rubarb was cute. I fell asleep for a while because I was a little banged up. But we were killing time in the mall beforehand. Ben shot me a note. The question was, should Democrats tear it down? And my kind of knee-jerk take was we have bigger fish to fry, but I imagine that the Democratic private debate are going to be like, I propose we firebom it.

And everyone's like, I propose a bulldozer. You know, it's going to be like one-uping each other. But the story is amazing because of how much access Ben got in time with Trump. He got a tour of the constructions. I walked around with them. Stephen Chung marveled at the granite or whatever. It's worth your time. It's a great piece.

I'm going to read it. Yeah, I also, I saw the excerpt where Ben asked him about Ossoff's contention that he's building all these monuments to himself because no one else will once he leaves. And then Trump's like, yeah, he's right. I am doing that because no one else is going to do it. Monument to me. Okay. That is. It's just admitting it.

Yep. It's just admitting it. He knows. He's like, no one's going to build monuments to him. He'll be loath. There's a whole piece in there that's like Axelrod being kind of introspective about whether if someone had just called Trump back in 2010 and taking him up on his offer to potentially build a ballroom at the White House, whether we could have avoided all this. It's a real like Earth 2 thing. But it's also like let's go down that path.

Let's open those sliding doors. Can you imagine us announcing? in 2010, that in the midst of the financial crisis, while the CEOs of the banks are getting their bonuses clod back, or not getting them clod back, we're like, oh, but Donald Trump has offered to help us build a ballroom. No, it would have been saying. It was the dumbest idea. So the Salahis can break in. Yeah, that's right. Or not break in. Oh, yeah, or get closer breaking in. No, it's crazy. I mean, there is like, the kind of, as I'm sitting there reading it, I'm like, you know, thinking as I'm exercising this one, I'm like, okay, how could have this? how could this have gone? What if Obama calls him, says, come on down, gives him a tour of the Oval Office, kind of puffs him up a little bit, befriends him a bit? Like, does that make

Trump more of an ally? Or does that give him even more of a taste for the sweet, sweet White House and want to run more? You know, it's like hard to tell. Knowing Trump as we do, which we do, because we've been talking about him for 10 years, I think it makes it more of an ally. I really do. And to bring us all the way back to our earlier story. And I've heard, I've heard, I've heard, our friend, Tim Miller talk with us in the bulwark. Someone just be John Federman's friend. I know. Be a Democratic comment. Chuck Schumer had the smart comment in that piece where he was like, we value him and

blah, blah, blah, blah, and I'm sure Chuck Schumer privately is like, fuck this guy, what's going on? But like, someone should go be John Federman's friend. And it might not work. He might still flip anyway, but like, what does it hurt to try? Yeah, it does not. All right. Thanks for watching this episode of Pod Save America here on YouTube and subscribe.

Pod Save America is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Ferris Safari with Ree Churlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, David Tolls, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.