Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Stories of Week 7/10: Abortion Response, Biden Polls, Midterm Forecast, Inflation Numbers, Uvalde Footage, & More!

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about Biden's abortion response, new polling data, inflation numbers, Uvalde footage, midterm projections, & more!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We have those details for you. Also, looks like Elon is backing away from the big Twitter deal. We'll give you all of those details. I mean, this has been a while coming. He's been dragging his feet and trying to make a big deal about the bots and whatever. Trump is responding as well, and that's pretty interesting, too. So we will tell you all about that. Also, some new developments with regard to Ukraine,

new questions about the U.S. strategy. We have President Biden justifying his trip to Saudi Arabia in a new op-ed, which is pretty revealing. Dramatic turn from what he was saying during the presidential primary. So that is interesting. Also, this is just sort of silly. Biden making a gaffe in his statement with regards to abortion. White House just blatantly lying to try to cover it up.

Not just lying, falsifying the historical record. It's completely nuts. White House transcript. It is a funny, weird, crazy, very revealing story. We also have an expert on to talk about the assassination of former Prime Minister Abe in Japan. Insane that this happened. I mean, this is a towering figure in terms of world politics, in terms of Japanese leadership. So all of those details as well. Sagar is looking at whether Biden is too old. I am looking at Mayor Pete's future political plans,

but we did want to start with that development, the executive order on abortion from the Biden administration. Let's go ahead and put the details up on the screen here. So finally, we did get some specific actions from this White House that has been under great pressure. Still a lot of questions about why this took multiple weeks to come together. Let me read to you a little bit of the details here in terms of what this executive order actually does, which is not a whole lot, to be perfectly honest with you. It says it largely finalizes what's already been announced by the administration, including instructions to the Justice Department to make sure women can travel out of state for abortion care. We've seen some states, including Texas,

floating the idea of trying to criminalize anyone helping women to travel out of state for abortion care. It says it addresses the elevated risk for patients, providers, and clinics, which includes efforts to protect mobile clinics that have been deployed to state borders to offer care for out-of-state patients. So again, trying to protect that ability for women to travel out of state. Biden's actions, the White House said, directs Attorney General Merrick Garland and the White House counsel to convene volunteer lawyers and organizations to encourage robust legal representation of patients, providers and third parties. So sort of encouraging pro bono lawyers to help people out. And he's also said he'll provide leave for federal workers traveling for medical care, which could set an example for private companies to do the same.

So, again, nothing too earth shattering here. I think there were some liberal critics of Biden who felt like, ah, at least he's doing something. And the tone of his remarks was a bit more forceful. But in terms of specific action, I mean, we're still, there's no, there's reporting now that the Biden administration did actually consider declaring a public health emergency. Apparently that's still potentially on the table. I wouldn't hold your breath on that one. That is certainly not enacted here. No clinics on federal lands. No clarification that Americans can legally transport abortion pills from Canada. That's something the governor of New York actually wanted. No plan. And this, to me, is kind of the biggest one. No plan laid out to divide the GOP caucus on, you know, exceptions, rape, incest. There are a bunch

of votes that could be taken here to codify some of those things into federal law, which would be very difficult for the Republican Party to deal with. They don't seem to be interested in doing that. At least there was nothing in this commentary or in these executive orders that would indicate moves in that direction. No encouraging mayors to deprioritize abortion crimes for prosecution. No comment on changing the filibuster to allow Roe to be codified into law either, which was something they had kind of floated, but clearly is not putting any muscle behind at this point. I have to look at it more politically and just would be a sign of, I don't know what these

people are doing. I mean, once again, if you say this is your number one priority, which they did, if you say this is one of the reasons they should vote for you, which you do, you know, this continues to be the major, the main Democratic message. It's like this is all you got after almost two weeks. I mean, the public interest in this is already fading. In terms of what you see from the Democratic base, there was a big bounce in the original Democratic ballot for the generic polling. You want to capitalize on momentum and try to meet the moment, And they really just don't have much. And in terms of words from the president himself, it's not exactly inspiring stuff at the press conference. We're not even a press conference, really just a reading of his executive order. Here's what he had to say. We need two additional pro-choice senators and a pro-choice house to

codify Roe as federal law. Your vote can make that a reality. I know it's frustrating and it made a lot of people very angry, but the truth is this, and it's not just me saying it, it's what the court said. When you read the decision the court has made clear, it will not protect the rights of women. Period. Period. After having made the decision based on a reading of a document that was frozen in time in the 1860s, when women didn't even have the right to vote, the court now, now, practically dares the women of America to go to the ballot box and restore the very rights they've

just taken away. That just highlights what we were saying, which is that that is the central case that they're making for the Senate and for the midterms. I think the only way that you could do it is to actually show what exactly you would do with said votes. I mean, there's no guarantee, right? I mean, I think that the point you made previously is so important because I don't see any real action

by the Senate leadership, either the Democrats or even from the White House, try and push some sorts of votes on the floor, which would, you know, rape and incest. You could, I mean, listen, if you can't pass that, that puts Republicans in a very, very tough spot. Yes. And you can highlight those types of stories. Same, I mean, even at the, you could even go further, actually, from what I've seen, like 15 weeks, bans are, not 15 weeks, at least guaranteeing the right, quote unquote, up until 15 weeks is extraordinary populace, like 75, 80 percent to be America.

But you could put that on the floor and then force Republicans to say, no, actually, I'm against that, which would put you on the side of like 15 percent of the population. But they're not even trying to go for an incrementalist approach. I think it's both fecklessness on behalf of the Biden administration. I also do think it's a failure of we've talked about this, these major Democratic groups. I mean, every day, I can't walk down the street here in Washington without some activist from some ACLU or human rights campaign or whatever. Do you have a minute to help codify abortion rights? And it's like, well, I should actually stop and interview them. So what are you going to do with my money?

Let's say I'm one of these libs who's walking around the city and I hand you 20 of my hard earned dollars. What are you going to do with this money? Like what is the point of donating to you? Yeah. I mean, listen, in terms of the midterms, do I think abortion is the number one issue for voters? No. Do I think that this could be a highly motivating issue for Democratic voters who've been extraordinarily disappointed and disenchanted with this administration if if they actually handle it properly, yes, they are completely squandering that chance. And that is, in the midterms, voter enthusiasm is everything. Obviously, you're going to have a smaller turnout typically than in presidential years. So whose people show up?

Whose people are motivated to go out to the ballot box. The Democratic message here of vote harder, guys, is just not super inspiring when voters can rightly look at the fact that you have the presidency, the House, and the Senate. Like, we voted, we did the thing that you asked us to do, and you're telling us, like, oh, that wasn't good enough. We still can't really do anything. When, again, you know, and AOC has been very vocal about this. Elizabeth Warren's been very vocal laying out here are some specific steps you could take. And they spend most of their time either hemming and hawing, pushing off any sort of action in spite of the fact that they had decades and certainly in the past couple of months, weeks after the leak of this opinion to prepare for this moment so that they could have been ready to go. There's a new article, too, from The Washington Post inside this two-week delay before they actually got around to doing anything at all. The headline

here is two long weeks inside Biden's struggle to respond to abortion ruling. The subhead says many Democrats were dismayed by his slow-footed response, but cheered his more forceful tone and actions on Friday. I don't personally really care about the tone. I care about the specifics of what you're planning to do. And it's interesting here because they point to, you know, there's a couple of really detailed anecdotes in here. One that I'll read for you that just kind of tells the whole story about how flat-footed they were caught. First of all, as we've discussed before, they didn't anticipate the timing, which I don't know why they thought that this was going to come out on a different day and had really sort of bet the farm and planned their whole thing around a different day that this was going to come down. But they were wrong about

that. So that was weird. But then they say about four hours after the decision overturning Roe was handed down, the White House emailed numerous abortion rights allies, asked them to join a call with top officials that afternoon to hear more about the Supreme Court ruling in the fight ahead. Those invited expected a fiery call to action, a detailed plan from the White House, a roadmap, not just for the immediate aftermath, but for weeks and months ahead. Instead, what did they actually get? Top White House and administration officials stressed the issue was important to Biden. They reiterated the actions the president had already outlined earlier that day, including expanding access to the abortion pill, protecting women who travel across state lines to get an abortion. The call lasted all of 20 minutes. And officials took no questions, according to an outside advisor who was on the call.

Afterward, multiple attendees complained to each other that the call was a waste of time and they left feeling deflated. Furthermore, they also reveal in this article that in a recent focus group of Democratic-based voters between the ages of 25 and 39, participants reported also feeling disappointed and discouraged with the White House's response on all of this. So, I mean, that's extremely pathetic. As we've discussed, whatever you think of this decision, this is a monumental sort of turning point in American politics, a truly sort of generation-defining decision coming down from the Supreme Court. And their response is a 20-minute, like, call just sort of reiterating their tired talking points. It really is pathetic. And then to your point, Sagar, which I think is an important one about how were these abortion rights groups

prepared for this moment? I mean, there isn't a lot of evidence that they were super prepared to take this on either in spite of this being their entire mission, in spite of having weeks in advance to plan. I also haven't seen them really taking the lead and pushing the White House and coming out, you know, and not just in anonymous quotes to the Washington Post, but really directly saying, hey, here's the plan. Here's what we need to do. Let's get on board. And instead, and we'll get to this in a minute, the White House is like castigating the left and the activists for daring to push them to do more than the like pathetic response that they've had so far. I just checked Planned Parenthood in the last couple of months has raised hundreds of

millions of dollars, 275 million from Mackenzie Scott, ex-Bezos, ex-wife alone. Just this in the last three months. What are you doing? Like, what are you spending these people's hard-earned, or I guess some people's hard-earned money on, in addition to Mackenzie Bezos's, or Mackenzie Bezos Scott. Listen, it wasn't easy being married to Jeff Bezos. Sure. I guess that seems to be the case so far. That's the thing I don't really understand in all of this, which is that it is just extraordinarily feckless, their response.

And it gets me back to, look, you don't have to motivate the entire base. You know, there's a New York Times poll, which we're going to be talking about a lot tomorrow, which came out and said that abortion is only the top issue for 5% of the American electorate. However, 9% of the people are women as opposed to 1% of those kind of, you know, of the electorate. So you have, I mean, 9%, that's not huge, but that's still millions. And if you get those millions to come out and are energized, the evangelicals always were able to dominate despite the fact that they were like, what, 20-some percent of the population? At best, maybe 10%, 15%, you know, in terms of the real hardcore ones. But they always came out to vote, and they always came out to vote in the primary.

They put extraordinary pressure on Republican lawmakers. There is probably some space for a pro-choice kind of Democrats first in order to fill some sort of space in that, especially given that they punch so high in terms of elite power. But, I mean, I'm not seeing any mobilization planned, nothing. And the other thing is I don't even think it's so much about which voters this is the number one issue for. I really think it's about an overall picture of incompetence, of, you know, being unable to react, being unable to meet the moment,

whether it's on this, whether it's on gas prices, whether it's on inflation, whether it's on any myriad of issues and challenges facing the American people. And this is an incredibly visceral and high profile issue. And it's one, and this is the part that I think is really important, is, you know, I don't think that for a long time voters have really expected the Democratic Party to be there on the sort of bread and butter economic issues and be the, you know, the New Deal era type of Democrats. But the Democratic Party has said these type of issues, these cultural issues are the reason that you have to vote for us. These are the reasons that you have to put Democrats in power so that we can do something

on these issues. So it's also just a glaring failure in terms of their own explanation of why it's so important to vote for Democrats. It's this clear, glaring failure on an issue that the party itself has prioritized, even if it isn't a top priority for a lot of voters. So listen, again, it's a very, this executive order, it's too late, it's too little, it's that you don't see the political strategy, you don't see a congressional strategy. Maybe that's going to come, but I do not understand how you had weeks and weeks and were unable to respond in real time. And this is the best that you can come up with.

Let's talk about Biden. This is a especially hilarious one. Yeah. So from that speech that we showed you about Biden on Roe versus Wade, he pulled a Ron Burgundy and quite literally read things on the teleprompter, which you're not supposed to read. I'm not exaggerating. Let's take a listen. It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast a ballot is consistently higher than the percentage of the men who do so. End of quote. Repeat the line. Women are not without electoral and or political or maybe precise, not and or, or political power. That's another saying that you, the women of America, can determine the outcome of this issue. End of quote, repeat the line.

Okay, very clear what's happening here. All right. And by the way, it's two people who actually read off a teleprompter. You're like, I know exactly. Listen, I've done it before. I relate. Anybody who's read off a teleprompter has been at war, I know exactly what it is. Listen, I relate. I've done it before. I relate. Anybody who's read off a teleprompter has been at war with these things at some point or another. I get it. And listen, it's not as easy as it looks. Now, when you're the president, you do it a lot more than we do.

Also, let it stand as a funny moment, just another indication of his doddering age, whatever. The White House is not going to let that stand. The White House has decided to lie to you and to the historical record that what you just saw with your own eyes did not happen. Put this up there on the screen. The White House is now doctoring the official transcript of that event, saying that Biden did not say repeat the line. He said, quote, let me repeat the line. Now, again, he did not say let me repeat the line. You can hear it with your own ears and you can watch it with your eyes. There is no any time where he was about to say, let me repeat the line.

And yet the White House was so upset that they actually replied to the assistant press secretary to that clip on Twitter and said, no, he said let me repeat the line because that clip was going extraordinarily viral. Current count has 42,000 retweets and over 15 million views because everybody can see it. The guy pulled a Ron Burgundy. Maybe even joke about it. Be like, hey, you know, he's Ron pulled a Ron Burgundy. Maybe even joke about it. Be like, hey, you know, he's Ron Burgundy or like whatever. Make a joke about San Diego. They're not capable of that. They are lying about what he said and then doctored the official White House transcript so that for all time, despite the video evidence of what we've seen in terms of what historians will use in order to record the Biden era. This actually might be a decent thing to point to, which is since we have video evidence,

in the actual written record, they have, let me repeat the line. I also loved whenever he kept saying and or, because it's clear that whoever was editing it just didn't take out the and or and left it up to Biden. Maybe he likes that in his speeches. Who knows? But he's reading these things completely verbatim. So anyway, this is a humiliating incident, more for the White House than anyone,

that they're so sensitive that they're literally trying to lie and cover up an obvious misread on the teleprompter to the American people. They're like, no, that's not what happened.

This is Orwell. This actually is Orwell-y. I mean, their response made it so much worse. Yeah, way worse. Way worse. And it does worse. Way, way worse. And it does, what it reveals is a real sensitivity to the critique of Biden's abilities and his mental fitness and his mental acuity and all of those things. So, like, they couldn't just let it go, which would have been the way better thing to do here. I mean, again, listen, we've all had, anybody who's read off a teleprompter

has had a battle with the teleprompter, has read it in a weird way, a sentence that comes out in a strange way, or you butcher a word or whatever, it happens all the time. But they are so sensitive to this critique that they had to actually do this, like, Orwellian weird cover-up thing

and deny the reality that you can see and hear for yourselves. And I mean, there's also something to be said, too, about these are the people who are all like, oh, the war on facts and truth and all of that stuff. And then when they're a little uncomfortable with exactly how something comes in, comes out, they're like, oh, let me just go in and edit that transcript right quick and make sure it accords to what we are telling the public to believe actually happened in contradiction to their own experience of that moment. What's also weird is that why this clip? The 4th of July clip where he's like, and you're like, what? What did you say? What? I mean, he trails off and embarrasses himself all the time.

So why is this the one clip that you've decided to go on the attack for? But they did, and they're lying to you. They're completely lying to your face. And to this date, the White House transcript remains in the position of the administration as he said, let me repeat the line, despite clear evidence. You know, this actually is a problem because I learned this when I was a White House correspondent. Those people are not political staff. They're supposed to be like White House archivists or whatever.

They're like staffers. Oh, that does the transcript? Yeah, the people who do the transcript. Specifically for this reason, you're not supposed to be able to politically doctor a transcript. So somehow they were able to convince somebody who has human ears

that they did not hear what they actually did and pressured them to say, let me repeat the line, not actually what happened. I also them to say, let me repeat the line, not actually what happened. I also want to say the transcript is actually supposed to be done by never looking at prepared remarks to prepare the most historically accurate transcript. Again, for history's posterity. Yeah, they're supposed to – I've watched it happen. I used to know some of them because you kind of work with them when you're next to them as a White House correspondent.

Again, these are career staff. They're supposed to be completely void of any political decision making. And at the time, they were having a very hard time with Trump because of the way he speaks. Yeah. You know, so not exactly the easiest guy to transcribe. Yeah, that's true. And probably now, same with Biden, but they somehow were still able to influence the historical record on this point. So that means they went out of their way in order to push things in this direction. Just a little behind-the-scenes info.

Joining us now is Tobias Harris. He is the biographer and author of The Iconoclast, Shinzo Abe, and The New Japan. He's also Senior Fellow for Asia at the Center for American Progress. So, Tobias, thank you very much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. So, you wrote the biography on Shinzo Abe. He was assassinated, sadly, over the weekend in Japan. Just describe for us what this means in terms of Japanese politics, kind of who Shinzo Abe was for a broader general populace, and then as his biographer, what your reaction to the news of

all of this is. Sure. So, you know, when we think about Abe, I mean, and this has become, I think, very apparent in the immediate aftermath of his death. I mean, there's been no Japanese figure, probably for a generation or two, who's loomed as large as he has. And, you know, ever since he entered Japanese politics in the early 1990s, you know, almost through force of will, completely changed the direction, I think, of Japanese politics, of the Japanese state, was just a tremendously influential figure for a very long time, not just during his times as prime minister, I mean, which of course, I mean, he was the longest serving prime minister from 2012 to 2020, but

even before he became prime minister, between his two stints as prime minister, I mean, he's just a tremendously influential figure. And frankly, it's almost hard to imagine what the Japanese political system looks like with him gone. I mean, so with that in mind to your second question, I mean, of course, I've spent years and years thinking about him. I mean, even before writing my book about him, he was this figure who occupied a lot of brain space. I mean, just a tremendous shock.

I mean, certainly entirely unexpected. I think everyone who watches Japanese politics was anticipating years and years of watching him kind of invent a new role as an ex-prime minister and continue to wield influence. So it's just really shocking to think that that's not going to be the case. Yeah. You have a quote in the piece that you wrote for The New York Times where you're quoting Steve Bannon, of course, former President Trump's former chief strategist, saying that Abe was Trump before Trump, which he, of course, meant as a compliment.

Not everyone would certainly take it that way. What was meant by that? I'm not going to try to read the mind of Steve Bannon. I mean, I think it was a point sort of about nationalism and nationalist appeals and looking at that aspect of Abe. But I actually think they're very, very different figures. And I talked about this in the New York Times piece. you look back at the entire arc of Abe's career and also his family, which really shaped his political identity and the ideas he was pursuing. You know, Abe was a state builder. Abe looked at the long arc of Japanese history, both up until the time he entered politics, but then also looking ahead to the future and wanted to build a strong, top-down, centralized government

in a way that the Japanese government hadn't been after 1945, that was going to be able to have a proper national security establishment that would be able to respond to crises effectively, that would really be able to meet the challenges that Japan was going to face in the coming decades. And he was very clear about this. He was persistent about it. It was something that he always made clear. And so, you know, and also with that came, I think, a certain amount of flexibility and pragmatism. It was always about what do I need to do to make sure that Japan is strong and prosperous and secure in an increasingly dangerous world? And frankly, that also meant that he was willing to do things like open the Japanese economy to trade, welcome foreign investment, welcome more immigration. I mean, you have a record by the end of his tenure, you had a record number of foreign workers in

Japan. That does not sound like Trump before Trump to me. One thing, though, that is an echo of some of the debates, at least that we're having now that are unfolding on the right of American politics is he introduced his own version of patriotic education into schools. There was some whitewashing of Japanese war crimes in World War II, which is very much a break from the way that this had been dealt with in schools and in sort of national culture before. Could you speak to how significant that was and what he was getting after there? Absolutely. I mean, and, you know, I don't want to downplay that aspect of him. I mean, that was certainly early in his career back in the 1990s

when he was a young lawmaker, you know, trying to make his name. You know, that was an issue he attached himself to. There was this movement to change the textbooks that were being used in schools, you know, fierce enmity towards the teachers' unions, which really throughout the entire Cold War period had been some of the most radically left-wing unions among all Japanese unions. So there's, I mean, there's no question that that was part of his agenda. I mean, he very much saw education. In fact, you look at the book he wrote back in 2006, which really, I mean, really lays out his philosophy and his way of thinking quite clearly. You know, education to him was also part of state building.

And, you know, he looked at back, going back again, going back to 1945 under the U.S. occupation, one of the things the U.S. did was completely reform the Japanese education system, much more local control, you know, of course, much more room for the teachers union to influence what was happening in the classroom. And he saw that if Japan is, again, believing that Japan needed to be a strong state, he saw the way Japanese children were educated as an obstacle to that, because he believed the Japanese children were being taught to hate their country and that that had to change. And that if you were going to have Japanese children being willing to sacrifice on behalf of their country, then they had to be taught, made to feel proud of their country. I personally, I don't think you need to downplay historical atrocities to make people feel proud of your country.

And I think lots of I think, frankly, lots of Japanese people felt proud of what was built after 1945 and the country that Japan came. So, you know, but this was absolutely part of his program. It was clearly something that he wanted to change about the country. I think the most fascinating, I've respected Abe for a long time. I think of all the major U.S. allies, Japan is the one which people probably know the least about here in America, but he still had a deep amount of affection, at least amongst the U.S. elite. He was, I think, friends or had appeared with four sitting U.S. presidents, which is remarkable. And I think what you point to and you write is

that his major commitment was to Japan, not only as to an ideal, but something that should be robust in its defense, both against China and North Korea. I was telling you before we went on the air, I actually had the opportunity to ask him a question about North Korea, 2018, whenever he was the prime minister appearing next to President Trump. And that was really the last unfulfilled part of his legacy. So do you think that that legacy will move forward in Japan as a result of his assassination, which is a titanic political moment? Like how will Abe-ism, is it like almost like a Kennedy figure in trying to recast and reclaim that? How do you think this is going to affect them going forward? I mean, it's a great question.

It's one that I think lots of us are trying to figure out, you know, once the dust settles, what exactly is going to happen. I mean, there's a few different moving parts of it, I think. First of all, you know, he did, you know, over the course of his career, he built the Japanese national security establishment in a way that you hadn't seen before. You have a more potent military. You have, I think, a more streamlined command structure. You have a proper Ministry of Defense, which is something he created the first time he

became prime minister. You have a national security establishment or secretariat that allows the prime minister to have a much more direct hand in making foreign and security policy. So all of that now exists. His successors now have these institutions. They're much more able to be national security leaders to serve as global statesmen in the way that he did compared to the past. One other thing that he changed is that I think the LDP, the Liberal Democratic Party,

is, I think, a much more uniformly, I guess, call it hawkish party than maybe it had been at the start of his career. You know, there used to be, I think, you know, much in the same way that the Republican Party, you know, of course, used to have, you know, or actually really both American parties used to be much more diverse in the kind of views. The LDP has become a much more ideologically coherent party compared to when he entered politics in 1993. And some of that was a result in 2012 when he came back to the LDP's leadership. A lot of the older, more dovish LDP members retired and ended up being replaced by younger,

hand-picked politicians who shared Abe's views. And so you now have, I think, a big chunk of the LDP basically wants to press on with Abe's vision for a stronger Japan, a more capable, a Japan more capable of defending itself. And so you do have, of course, with current Prime Minister Kishida, a self-styled dove, liberal, he's from Hiroshima. But even he, he was elected really thanks to Abe's support last year and made very clear that he was committed to pushing ahead. And so right now in the next couple of months, there's going to be a big debate about defense spending for the budget next year. All signs point to there's going to be an increase of some kind.

It's just a question of just how much and what they're going to spend on. And Kishida has also signaled that he's willing to consider acquiring offensive or not offensive strike capabilities, but the ability to strike targets overseas in a defensive capacity, let's call it. And so that, I mean, that's where we are right now. There's still some questions about what the public is going to sign on for, what members of the coalition government are going to sign on for, but certainly there's a lot of energy behind moving ahead with that. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for breaking it down for us, Tobias. We really appreciate it. You were his biographer. We'll have a link down in the description to the book and to the New York Times article that we referenced,

and we appreciate you joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Folks, we're getting close to the midterm elections, and so we decided we are going to dive all the way into the polling, the candidates, the Democrats, the Republicans, the House, the Senate. There's also new polling for the New York Times that we teased about a million times yesterday during the show that we were going to dig into as well. So the whole show is going to be election-focused, save for our monologue. Sagar is looking at energy crisis. I'm looking at the crisis in Sri Lanka that is spreading to a lot of other countries in the developing world.

But to start with, a couple of announcements. Two announcements. Housekeeping, number one. Live show. Let's put this up there on the screen. So center stage, Atlanta. We are coming September 16th, 7.30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. We've got a great show planned for all of you. We would deeply appreciate it if you bought tickets. As we said, it's a way to show the industry. We can sell a bunch of tickets. We have to sell this thing out. So please, please help us out if you're in the area or elsewhere. And that way we can plan a great big tour all across the country. It's very, very helpful to us. All right. So we wanted to start with that New York Times polling, which is deeply,

deeply revealing both about Biden, the Democratic Party, Trump, the Republican Party, all kinds of things to get into here. So let's start with the big picture, how the country is feeling about the president and how Democrats are feeling about President Biden right now. Let's go ahead and put this first part up on the screen. So this is the New York Times headline. They say most Democrats don't want Biden in 2024. New poll shows with the country gripped by a pervasive sense of pessimism. The president is hemorrhaging support. So here are the specifics on those numbers. And this is quite stunning for an incumbent president. His own party, 64 percent of Democratic voters say they would prefer a new standard bearer in the 2024 presidential campaign. And his approval rating among all voters is just as abysmal as it could possibly be. Only a 33% job approval rating. When you dig into these numbers, you will not be surprised to learn that voters say the economy is extremely important to them.

In fact, 75% of voters say the economy is extremely important to them. And yet only 1% of all voters rate economic conditions as excellent. Among those who are working age, only 6% said the economy was either good or excellent. So voters are saying overwhelmingly the economy is their number one issue, that it's extremely important to them, and that they think it is absolutely abysmal. One other piece on, we're going to dig in a moment into the sort of age breakdown here because the abandonment among young voters is particularly striking given that this was the demographic that was supposed to set Democrats up for like permanent dominance within politics. And they are fleeing Joe Biden. Now that doesn't mean they're going to the Republicans, but they are deeply, deeply dissatisfied with this president and with the direction of the country. But another thing that I thought was really notable within the numbers of the number of Democratic voters saying they want a different candidate, you know, of course, Joe

Biden, the reason he got the Democratic nomination overwhelmingly was because of his support among Black voters. You now have more Black voters than not saying they want a different nominee. So 47% of Black Democratic voters say they would like to see someone other than Joe Biden as compared to 44% who say they want Biden right now. Let me just give you one quote from one of those voters and how they're thinking about this. 44-year-old Clifton Hurd, a maintenance specialist in Alabama, says, quote, anybody could be doing a better job than what they're doing right now. He's an independent. He said he voted for Biden in 2020. But his disillusion over the state of the economy and the spiraling price of gas is now reconsidering Trump. He says, I understand they've got a tough job of Mr. Biden's administration, but he was not prepared to do the job.

I also really loved this quote from a 38-year-old. She's a former factory worker in Greensburg, Indiana. She said she's been currently sidelined by a back injury. She says, quote, we used to spend $200 a week just going out to have fun or going and buying extra groceries if we needed it. Now we can't do that. We are barely able to buy what we need. And I especially love this part. I feel like he hasn't really spoken much about it. He hasn't done what I think he's capable of doing as president to help the American people. As a Democrat, I figured he would really be on our side and put us back on the right track.

And I just feel like he is not. I mean, this speaks to something that we try and highlight every single day. People are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt if they feel like you're trying to do something about it. Not even if you are doing something about it, if you're trying to do something about it. And he is just simply not able to live up to that. So the decline of support in young people, which we're going to do an entire thing on, the decline of support amongst black voters. But also, I think talking about age is important as well. The number one reason that people say that they don't want him to run again if he's, as Democrats, is age. And the crosstabs of that, as you pointed out, Crystal, are really interesting. It's older Democrats who are like,

yeah, I think this guy is just too old. And what they point to is, or what you said yesterday, it's like young people who overwhelmingly backed Bernie, who was older than Joe Biden, they don't care as much about age. Yes, they want younger blood and it kind of turns them off. But the sole determination of age is actually amongst people, this kind of makes sense, who know better or who at least know people or deeply familiar with what aging looks like. And I did my own monologue on this yesterday. I played an interview with Biden just 10 years ago. You can't tell me that's the same guy. Just not.

I mean, command of the facts, stature, even looks better, different, more full in the face, cogent, ability to engage, doesn't shuffle whenever he walks, doesn't stumble over his words. His gaps were always, they were more like top of the mind saying what shouldn't be said as opposed to, I don't know, misreading the teleprompter or just being genuinely unintelligible when speaking. Yeah, that's right. And I mean, the way I feel about it personally is that it's not his age per se. It's his ideology. It's his inability to meet the moment and do the job. And that's kind of the numbers that you get from young voters who say their number one issue with him is just his job performance. If he was, you know, 90, but he was

doing the job well, I wouldn't care. You know, you could be however old you want if you're able to do the job. The problem is that he seems unable to do the job. So that's the number one issue for young voters. Number two is not progressive enough. That's a very different landscape from, as you point out, the oldest voters. And I actually hear this and see this commented online and hear it even from my own parents of I can't imagine at this age being able to do the job of the presidency. Like I feel my own. I feel what it is to start

to slow down. And so to think of him, who is not, you know, certainly at the top of his game, trying to handle this office is hard to watch and hard to imagine how this is working out. You know, I think it is really, really stunning and cannot be said enough how much of a rebuke this is of Biden that his own party, a solid almost two-thirds majority, says they want someone else. And yet there was an article yesterday, a CNN reporter who reached out to all the sort of, you know, elected Democrats who were being floated. Gavin Newsom is getting a lot of attention, running ads in Florida and all of this. And people are thinking, oh, maybe he's setting himself up for 2024. J.B. Pritzker, Ro Khanna, they reached out to all of these folks who've been floated as like maybe they're going to be the one to primary Biden.

And every one of them was like, nope, sitting by, standing by, not going to do it if Biden is in the race. And he's, in my view, he's 100 percent running if he's, you know, able to. That's the only caveat is like if he literally doesn't make it there. But we're talking about, you know, months before the presidential race really kicks off. We're talking about, I think he'll probably announce post-holidays. So we're talking about early in next year. That's right. So it's very, very soon that it's coming. And, you know, I don't think that he will have a lot of in terms of numerical challengers in the primary. I do think he will face a challenger from the left. Certainly, Marianne Williamson has been thinking about it

and floating and there may be others out there as well who are thinking about it because as a just as a historical matter, this is an incredibly weak president within his own party. People want another option. The thing I keep saying and keep thinking is Joe Biden was the consensus choice because people were persuaded this was the guy who could win. And he just doesn't have the numbers to back that up anymore. I mean, when you look at – go ahead and put actually the next graphic up on the screen that has his approval rating or has the right track, wrong track. I mean, you have massive numbers, almost 80% of voters saying that we're headed in the wrong direction. His overall approval rating in this poll is only 33%. So it's hard to look at those numbers and be

like, oh yeah, this is the guy who's electable. This is the winner that you really want to put on the field. So it very much undercuts the core argument that he made to the Democratic primary base that got him in the slot to begin with. I completely agree. I just think it's fascinating, too, that none of the Democrats are even opening the door to it. I mean, at this time in the 1970s, so let's say we're in roughly 1978. Well, Ted Kennedy had very much top of mind. He's like, I think I'm going to challenge this guy. He's like, this guy's not doing well. And the lackluster results of the 1978 midterm elections are really what gave Kennedy the confidence to say, on top of the Iran-Contra crisis, he said, this guy can't do the job. I

have to challenge him. We have to try and have a new generation. Now, look, Carter did beat him, ultimately, in that primary, but it did certainly wound him going into the general. But the theory of the case, Kennedy was a bad candidate for a variety of reasons. But still, the thinking at the time was like there's just no way this guy can stand up to Ronald Reagan. They were right. They were right. They were actually totally right. That's actually such a great point because oftentimes the lesson that Democrats learn, and you see this even in the response from, I can't remember which one name checked this specifically, but this is the ethos coming from these Democrats who are saying, no, if Joe's running, like, we're out.

I mean, Bernie Sanders obviously already took himself out of contention, too, if Joe was running, which I think we all should assume that he ultimately is. The lesson they normally take is it was a mistake for Kennedy to primary Carter because that hurt Carter. And that's what leads to him losing to Ronald Reagan. No, that is not what led to the massive like landslide defeat of Jimmy Carter. In fact, the lesson should have been when you had that weak president, you actually should have switched horses. Now, I don't know that Ted Kennedy was the right dude for it, but they actually did need to change who they were backing to have a prayer of being able to stop that, you know, Reagan revolution coming into power, which has reset our politics now for an entire generation, for my entire life. So it's kind of the opposite lesson of what they should have learned. They should look at that and go, you know what? Kennedy was on to something. Carter was extremely weak,

and we were going to get our butts handed to us and we should have gone behind another nominee. But that is not the lesson they learn. And listen, I mean, they use the threat of Trump, right? Even though, and we're going to get to this in a little bit, even as these numbers are super dire for Joe Biden in the head-to-head matchup with Trump, he still edges him out. Still beats him. Still beats him. And, you know, his numbers are better than the next most likely person, which is Kamala Harris. Yeah. So they're really they're really kind of stuck. And I keep thinking about remember when in France, Emmanuel Macron wins pretty easily over Marine Le Pen, in spite of the fact that I think his approval rating was in like the low to mid 30s as well. Very similar dynamic to

Joe Biden. And Ron Klain, Biden's chief of staff, tweets out, interesting that Macron is able to easily win with this very low approval rating. That's clearly the path that they think they're going to be able to walk, which is, listen, you may be totally miserable under, I mean, you may despise what you may be completely disappointed and disillusioned, but you're still gonna like us better than that other guy. And that's what they're ultimately betting on. That's their only prayer. Yeah, it is.

And like you said, they have data to point to. Yeah. Macron did win. You know, the poll does show him. And I just, you know, look, it just shows what a messed up country we're in. There's actually a poll literally just came out this morning that relates to what you're saying.

Should Trump run for president again? This is Politico Morning Consult 2024. Yes, 35%. No, 61%. Should Biden run for president again? No. Yes, 29%. No, 64%. I mean, that's basically the margin of error. You have two-thirds of the American people on both sides saying, I don't want either. And yet, that is almost certainly to be the outcome. Crazy stuff could happen. I think if you're a Democrat, what you should plan on is a very likely contingency that Donald Trump may also be too old to be able to run. He also could have a health concern. He's not exactly the best health, you know, he may not be able to run in 2024. And if that's the case, I mean, Biden is dead. There's no way he stands up against Ron DeSantis or any generic Republican. I mean, I, I, yeah, today I agree with you. It is a long time between then

and now. So I don't want to say like I think it's too early to make that assumption. But I do think that Trump is the most beatable of the Republicans when it comes to Joe Biden. I got to eat some crow here. Dr. Oz is not doing so hot. In that, I thought he'd be great. I'll be honest with you. I thought he was good on TV. Honestly, I did too. I'm actually a little surprised by how poor he's been so far.

It's still early. My man Oz is just terrible. So far, Fetterman, despite the fact that recent reporting shows that he can't even properly speak and may never even get that skill back, is destroying him whenever it comes to painting him as an outsider, which, you know, to be fair, he has a mansion in New Jersey

and he's got a more recent ad, which is slamming Dr. Oz has gone extraordinarily viral, resonating in the state, painting Oz as an outsider who doesn't even belong in Pennsylvania. Let's take a listen. People in Pennsylvania tell me they can't go on vacation this summer. Folks you mentioned are going off to these beautiful houses, second and third houses they've gotten hanging out. That's not what's going the rich and famous knockoff. It starts with them actually like, you know, doing this People magazine, welcome to our mansion, showing them around the basketball court. And then it lists all of the properties that he owns and shows some of them. He owns nine different mansions around the world.

And the kicker there at the end, they say, number nine, he finally bought a house in Pennsylvania. And what's crazy is, I don't know what the hell Dr. Oz is doing. Put this up there on the screen. He's had no television ads since he actually won the primary. He's completely dark. Fetterman is destroying him on the airwaves, pointing himself out as an outsider. And Oz doesn't have any affirmative political vision. I mean, he was actually, frankly, he was doing better on the campaign trail, going after David McCormick and really running against Biden. And he hasn't been on the air since May 21st, even though John Fetterman is destroying

him day after day after day as a carpetbagger from New Jersey. That's not what the expectation on Oz was whatsoever. On the one hand, yeah, he's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He personally has the money in order to do anything that he would need to to go up on the air. But two, he's got a big bank account, a big war chest. His issue right now is that Pennsylvania GOP voters don't trust him after a brutal campaign. To the extent that people went with him, it was really only because Trump really dragged him across the finish line. He should have been up the day after, both targeting the GOP because unfavorables are so high, and two, going after John Fetterman. I mean, it's crazy that John Fetterman is beating him right now, literally from his hospital. Like, Fetterman has not been on the

campaign trail for two months since he suffered a stroke. As I said, reporting indicates it was way more serious than Fetterman ever let on. He finally told everybody the truth after the doctors openly were like, yeah, this wasn't some mild stroke. And the campaign videos that have come out recently show him have lost an extraordinary amount of weight from his own personal health. There's reporting, like I said, that indicate he may never fully retain his ability to speak. And yet, Oz is losing outside the margin of error in the head-to-head polls against Fetterman. It's a disaster what's happening to him. The latest poll, USA Today, Suffolk has Fetterman up by nine.

Yeah, I mean, that's crazy. And what's remarkable, too, is that, and this shows you how, you know, a lot of times policy doesn't matter, whether we would like it to or not. In the gubernatorial race, where you have, you know, Shapiro, who is a well-known figure in the state on the Democratic side.

He's done a few good things. There's nothing, like, objectionable, really, about him. And then you have Mastriano, who is a well-known figure in the state on the Democratic side, he's done a few good things. There's nothing, like, objectionable, really, about him. And then you have Mastriano, who is, like, was there on January—I mean, this guy was intimately involved in the January 6th election insanity. He's completely extreme on abortion. I mean, he has these views that are very much out of step with the mainstream politics. That race is closer than, actually, Fetterman and Oz, which is really interesting and a testament, I think, to what a smart campaign John Fetterman is running. Frankly, this is the type of thing that Republicans normally do well, where they're like, you know

what? We understand our economic policy in particular is really unpopular, so we're not going to talk about that. We're going to use cultural touchstones and vibes to show you that we are the ones that get your concerns and we are the ones who are going to fight for you and that you can relate to. And in this matchup, I mean, this is a perfect matchup ultimately for Fetterman because Fetterman does, he is Pennsylvania through and through,

is the mayor of a steel town. He, you know, wears the basketball gym shorts everywhere he goes and it feels very natural. He's got, you know, he's very comfortable in his skin. He's not one of these Democrats that like, you know, they've never worn jeans and a flannel shirt before they filmed the campaign ad, which is like 90 percent of the candidates. Democrats love to run. Republicans do that sometimes, too. But this matchup where Fetterman clearly saw, oh, I know the contrast to make here. I know how to, I know how to pull this off. I'm not sure that I would have predicted that this

would be as damning and as devastating as it is so far, but it really, it has been very savvy and very clever. And I think it has hurt Oz a lot, especially as he is completely silent. And he's running, Oz is running this completely cookie cutter, standard Republican talking point, line of attack against Fetterman. His most recent tweet was, when the most extreme liberals endorse John Fetterman and tells you everything you need to know about what kind of senator you'd be. It's all just like, oh, he's left, he's Bernie Sanders, he's a socialist, all just completely cookie cutter talking points that you see in every single Republican race.

And people are not impressed. Also, extreme liberals? Right. That's what Kelly Loeffler, remember, this is Kelly Loeffler running against Warnock. She would be like, radical socialist Raphael Warnock.

Well, how did that work out for you, Kelly? Yeah. You know how you run against John Fetterman? Don't talk about him at all. Talk about Joe Biden. And Biden, Biden, Biden. This is This can be a Biden stooge. Just run against Biden. Run against the National Democrats. That's the easiest thing. You don't even have to tie to them. It's make it into a national referendum and say, hey, if you want somebody to go up and stand up against Joe Biden and lower your gas price, then vote for me. I mean, is that so difficult? I just, I truly don't get it because the problem

that Oz has right now is Fetterman is destroying him as the carpetbagger and he needs to at the very least be on the airwaves reminding people that he lives in Pennsylvania now. Listen, I mean, look, there's a long history of carpetbagging. Ask Hillary Clinton and Bobby Kennedy. You think they were from New York? All right, so throw this up there on the screen. Fetterman is running and flying planes over the Jersey Shore to troll Dr. Oz. He's selling bumper stickers that say Dr. Oz for New Jersey. And this is really resonating with a lot of people. And like I said, the issue with Oz is it's not like he has a tremendous amount of support within the GOP base because they don't trust him after the brutal campaign, David McCormick and all of that. And look, even if Trump comes to Pennsylvania and tries to drag him across the finish line for the general election, it's still going to be a very uphill battle. Fetterman is, again, a testament,

just like we were talking about with Herschel Walker, where candidate quality doesn't always matter. But when it does, it can matter a lot. It can matter just enough in order to drag you across the finish line. And with the current campaign, as long as it remains, it can matter a lot. It can matter just enough in order to drag you across the finish line. And with the current campaign, as long as it remains where it is now, and Oz seems totally frozen and inability to really not even define Fetterman, but have a reason to vote for him, which again, I think is extremely easy. Just, you know, vote for me in order to stand up to Joe Biden. I don't see the, I don't see a way where he can pull himself out of this. Now, look, it's still early. He could shift strategy. He could do exactly what himself out of this. Now, look, it's still early.

He could shift strategy. He could do exactly what I'm saying. Look, he's still a multimillionaire celebrity. He didn't get there by no reason. He's very politically talented when he wants to be. I just think that he's very frozen right now and doesn't seem to know what to do whenever he's backed into a corner. It really does. The Fetterman strategy here really does remind me of what Obama and his team did to Mitt Romney in 2012. Yeah, that's right.

It really does look like a very similar playbook. I don't know if you guys remember those ads, but they were excellent and they were savage. And, I mean, remember the guy that's like, you know, white working class guy, I think in Ohio, saying that they made him build the stage where the executives then announced that they're all getting fired. And he's like, it was like I was building my own coffin. They went up on the air early. And that actually goes against a lot of sort of conventional wisdom in politics is you

wait till the end and then you, you know, dump millions of dollars of ads on the airwaves because that's when voters are finally paying attention. Well, the Obama team said, no, we are going to define Mitt Romney early before they have a chance to define themselves. And we are going to paint him as this cartoonishly villainous, like, Monopoly man character, rapacious capitalist private equity ghoul. And it was very effective. And I mean, he's really never overcome that image of himself that was very carefully crafted by the Obama team. And the reason that it landed and it worked is because there was some there there. And because Mitt Romney is this very awkward character anyway, and he would say weird things, you know, the trees are the right height and all this sort of stuff where you're like, you're not a real normal human being, are you? And I think that Fetterman is running a very similar playbook of I'm going to go up early. I'm going very hard to overcome, especially when you have, in contrast, Fetterman, who is a sort of great political character and has this great everyman vibe. I think it's – look, it should have been an extraordinarily winnable race. If he does lose it, it's entirely his fault for doing that, for allowing himself to get defined.

I mean, look, we have a long history of electing super rich people to the Senate. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's not like Mark Warner and all these other people haven't faced similar attacks. Mark Warner's worth actually probably, I think he's richer than Dr. Oz. So was John Kerry, but guess what? They all got elected. So it's not like it can't be done. And it's not like they didn't face the attacks just like that. You could very easily parry it with a modicum of political talent. Personally, I thought he would, it's not that hard to translate from the screen in the modern era, but he's flailing. He clearly is out of his depth. If I had to guess, I don't think he's used to being attacked. I think that a lot of these people are so used to being in the public spotlight. Celebrity. Celebrity kind of. Bubble, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you're just not used to dealing in any sort of substance. He's probably on the back foot for the first time in his entire life. He's super rich, got nine mansions, was a massive celebrity, had a very high Q score in terms of his favorability ratings. Took some hits over the years for hawking diet pills and all that stuff. But he's just not used to being in the arena. And, I mean, Fetterman, to his credit, he was an actual politician, came up through that world, ran a great campaign against Conor Lamb and is using the same playbook, even though the guy is literally in the hospital. So it's humiliating for Dr. Oz. He needs to step it up. And for right now, in terms of how he's responded to this, it doesn't look good. At the same time, what are all

the caveats? National wins are almost determined. You know, things are probably only going to get worse for Joe Biden. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that you should just run against him and Oz could still win this thing. Yeah. Some Republican consultant is going to come in and be like, here's how we're going to do things. You just sit back and let us take it from here. Mitch McConnell is not going to let whatever. He's not going to let Dr. Oz just sink to the bottom so quickly in Pennsylvania. He needs that seat. He needs to keep it.

They are going to throw everything they possibly can into this thing. And so don't count anything out right now. It's early and that's where things stand. Well, because remember, this is one of the few pickup opportunities for Democrats. So if Democrats win this seat, they can afford to lose one of the others that they have and still maintain control. So this is a rare situation in this year for Democrats where they have an opportunity for a pickup. And that would that would very much that would really hurt Republican chances, especially when you have, you know, other other less than amazing candidates in other situations across the country. The Republicans are doing their damnedest to try to keep the Senate in Democratic control. And I do think that what's happening in the House is another sort of stunning indictment of the poor quality of some of these candidates,

because in the House, where it's just the national wins, Republicans are poised to completely clean up. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. So here's this is a tweet that says new Biden's anemic approval rating is weakening House Dems map even more than you thought. Dems were on defense in at least 30 districts. Now Republicans are preparing to seriously contest a dozen more. Many of those districts are Biden plus nine or higher, meaning that Biden won these districts oftentimes by double digits. They go into some of the polling here, which just shows you how bad of a landscape this is for Democrats overall and how in the House, where again, it's much less about the individual

candidates and much more about just how do people feel about the state of the country? And the answer is terrible, not good. How bad things look for the Democrats. So they say Biden is down 15 points in a pro-Democrats group's polling of a now open Oregon seat that he won by nine points in 2020. He's down 16 points in a New Hampshire district that he had won by nine points. He's down 17 points in a recent Republican survey of a Minnesota seat that he carried by seven points four years ago. So you're talking about massive, like 30-point shifts towards Republicans that are putting seats into play that in their wildest dreams they wouldn't have thought would be feasible for them to win in this

climate. So it really is starting to be a story of two houses. Now, listen, I think you would still say Republicans are narrowly favored to win the Senate as well houses. Now, listen, I think you would still say Republicans are narrowly favored to win the Senate as well. Ultimately, you know, this polling is still early. Things could shake out just based on the national mood. You would still rather be a Republican running for Senate as well. But the House picture is really clear and Democrats are in for a very ugly November. Yeah, I like the way you put it, which is that the House is just much more of a referendum on the national mood. You know, House races never get the amount of interest that these Senate races are. And they're more dynamic. It's more expensive. Your candidate quality

probably matters the most at the Senate level of any of the national elections. So gubernatorial and House, gubernatorial, you know, more so like the Senate, but House is just complete wins. And with this, I mean, the fact that they're contesting in Biden plus nine districts, at the same time, I think we should just be careful because what we've been talking about are these wild swings in the Democrat generic ballot, like what we saw after Roe versus Wade. To the extent that the House Dems have any chance, it's in those states trying to run on that, trying to activate some sort of committed base in order to actually overcome the enthusiasm gap, because that's just where the Republicans are cleaning up, not just on the generic ballot, but

their base is ready to come out and vote against Biden. Independents are fed up, disgusted with Biden, disgusted with the lack of action. They have to be able to make some sort of affirmative case the way they were in 2018. Suburban women, you know, the people who had showed up in the past who hated Donald Trump, they'd have to try and make the same sort of referendum. But it's just not working for them. And in the Hispanic areas in particular, what they point to, I mean, actually, the New York Times poll even showed this. Yeah. Effective tie between Hispanics, between Joe Biden and Trump. Imagine that. That's crazy. And if you look at men, it's actually probably higher. Yeah. Even for Trump. I would say that. Which they're able to do. And if they can capitalize on that,

we'll talk about Jill Biden later on this week, but her comparing Hispanics to breakfast tacos as unique as breakfast tacos and not being able to pronounce bodega, which is crazy. I mean, have you never been in New York City before? Bogota? Like what is happening? Listen, we could spend all day on that clip, but it's a big problem going into the House. And Pelosi's day, I mean, she already knows her days are numbered. I really don't know how they're going to handle Dem leadership next year, because they're going to have to have a real Democratic leader who needs to make a case for why they should be Speaker. I don't know. I don't know how that's going to work. I'm sure they're going to rig it, but it could be total chaos in terms of the actual election for it.

I mean, it seems like she's setting up Hakeem Jeffries as her successor. That seems like everybody's more or less planning on that. That's the direction that things are going to go in. And I can't see anybody on the left really rocking the boat there. They should. Yeah. my breath there. I think some of your warnings, though, are well said in terms of not over interpreting Biden's low approval in some of these districts, because keep in mind, part of why Biden's numbers are so low is because of his erosion among the Democratic base. Those are not people who are going to come in and then vote for a Republican, most likely. Those are people who are incredibly dissatisfied with Biden, but they're still Democrats and they may be exercised over abortion. They may be exercised over any number of issues. You know, actually, gun rights and gun control has been another issue that has been in some polls even higher than abortion rights in terms of Democratic based sentiment and what they care about. So the fact that Biden has a super low

approval rating in a district doesn't necessarily mean that all of the people who are unhappy with him are flipping to the Republican Party. So that's a word of caution. But I do still think overall, I mean, this is a really ugly portrait for Americans. You just can't have it be the case, going back to the original polling that we were looking at here, that only 13 percent of the country says we're on the right track and they return the party in power, you know, back into power. I just that's not a universe that is likely to occur. That is an extraordinarily unlikely state of affairs. fair. So I think it is a real commentary on some of the extraordinary weakness of the Republican candidates that any of these Senate seats are even in play. And I think the size of the gap at the House level really shows you just how poorly they're doing by comparison at the Senate

level, because I do think Republicans are in position to have an actually historic year in terms of winning seats at the House level if things do not shift. Let's start with the big, very bad inflation numbers. Let's put the headline up on the screen here from Heather Long at The Washington Post, who does a good job just tracking the numbers. She says, Justin, inflation is getting worse. Inflation rose 9.1% year over year in June. That is the highest since 1981, the year of my birth, and the highest so far in the pandemic period. Gas, rent, and food drove the increase. Gas accounted for about 50% of the increase. Inflation was up 1.3 percent just in the month of June alone. Let's go ahead and put some of the specifics here. This next tweet up on the screen about what categories we are seeing the highest inflation in. This again, Heather Long says inflation

continues to hit hard. Groceries up 12 percent in the past year. That's the biggest annual increase since 1979. Chicken up 19 percent in the past year. That's the biggest annual increase since 1979. Chicken up 19% in the past year. That's the biggest increase ever. Gas up 60%, biggest since 1981. Electricity up 14%, biggest since 2006. Rent, this is a really critical one, up 5.8%, biggest since 1986. A little bit more on rent. Put the next one up.

Over the past three months, rents have risen at an annual rate of 8.2%. Owner's equivalent rent rising at 7.3% rate. That's especially worrying because rents don't tend to turn around quickly. And the part that is probably the most crucial point here, let's put this A4 up on the screen. Bottom line, wages are up 5.1% in the past year. That sounds pretty good, but costs are up 9.1%. That means you are getting a massive pay cut. Gas prices have come down a little lately, she says, which will help, but food, rent, electricity are showing few signs of relief. We're going to get to the cope, the political cope from

Biden and Pelosi in just a moment. But, you know, there continues to be hope that, oh, we're getting to the peak month after month after month. We hear these, oh, we're at the worst of the crisis is behind us. But what's really troubling here is that even if you strip out the most volatile pieces, which are like food and gas prices, what they call core inflation is still rising at a rapid pace. That would seem to indicate that we are not moving past the end of this crisis. And listen, I think everyone should have a lot of humility about predicting exactly how and what happens here. But there is no sign at this point that, you know, the Fed's goal of reducing inflation is working. The Fed's goal of reducing inflation is working.

The Fed's goal of hurting you is working, but the Fed's goal of reducing inflation through the actions that they're taking, thus far, we're not seeing it in the numbers. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's any getting around it. And any of the structural issues that are affecting inflation are not being solved. So gas, I mean, you know, people are saying the administration we're about to get to is, like, championing the fact that gas is only $4.60 a gallon. It's actually still near $5 here in D.C. Okay, yeah, I'm not going to say $0.30 a gallon reduction isn't a good thing, but that doesn't mean that it's still good.

I mean, by the time before Russia invaded Ukraine, I think it was $3.50 a gallon. That was already high, and a lot of people were complaining. So around the twos is where people feel comfortable as a consumer. So, look, you're still over 100% on that. On food, I mean, the food price problem continues to skyrocket. Also, the fertilizer issues and natural gas and more that we've been talking about, none of that is going away. Not just right now, for years and years.

Because crop planning and others that people, farmers and others need to do in Europe and in the United States. All of those problems remain. On top of the supply chain issues, I mean, the port of Los Angeles continues to be a nightmare. It's not as bad as it was a year ago, but it's still not even close to 2019. And then you add on top of that the recessionary problems that we already have in the economy where people just don't want to spend as much money. So you have a reduction in demand, you have the supply chain problems, and then you have the gas issue on top of the geopolitical risk situation. All of that just means that it's just not going to go away anytime soon.

In addition to fuel oil is probably the highest part of all of inflation that people are seeing at home. As I've talked about here ad nauseum, the energy crisis that we're all experiencing is going to continue. And as the country gets colder into the winter, that's actually when I think we'll probably see some of the worst energy inflation. So gas may come down to four something a gallon just because of reduction in demand. But electricity prices are going to probably just replace and eat even more of people's incomes. So it's rough out there. It absolutely is. I read the New York Times analysis of these inflation numbers and what they mean and what might happen in the future. And they're quote unquote like silver lining or like hope of what might happen. They

say there are some reasons that today's rapid price gains could abate based on the economy's fundamentals. For example, consumers might struggle to sustain their spending as prices jump. If they move in with roommates, stop taking vacations or pull back on social activities to save money. Supply could begin to catch up with demand, allowing price gains to decelerate. So they're hoping that people are hurting so badly that they're having to move in with roommates, cancel their social activities, cancel their vacations, stop driving. I mean, that is the economic policy of this administration. And this is what the Republicans are offering as well. They have no actual solutions that would deal with the corporate price gouging, the supply chain issues, nothing that's going to get through

Congress. The only thing that they can do is crush demand. And so that's what they're actually hoping for. I mean, how absolutely grim is that? They are hoping that the American consumer is so badly hit that they have to pull back on their car trips, their road trips, their vacation, their spending, their meals out, their, you know, moving in with roommates, all of these things. It really, that it's just incredibly ugly that this is what our policymakers have resorted to. Housing is the one I'm probably the most worried about because you already pointed out 8% on a national average. Okay, you know, that's national. But if we're talking metro areas, so there's actually a story that just broke this morning. Manhattan rent has

broken $5,000 for the first time in New York City history. $5,000 for the average rent in the city on Manhattan Island. Okay, yeah, you can live in Brooklyn. Is it going to be that much better in Queens and elsewhere? That stuff bleeds out because what happens is, of course, the ultra rich are not affected by this. And even the upper middle class broadly can afford it. I'm talking about this in my monologue. Only 17% of white college educated voters say that the economy or inflation is their top issue in 2022. The fact is they can just absorb it, but everybody else has to deal with it. And so the trickle-down effect of squeezing upper-class and upper-middle-class people out of the housing market is just going to balloon the rent market even more, which is just going

to force even more working-class people, even middle-class people, honestly, out into the real dregs of housing. So people are going to have to drive more, which means they're going to spend more gas, live in subpar conditions, 30-, 35-year-olds living with roommates. I mean, this is not the way the country was designed to work. But effectively, that's the policy right now of the Federal Reserve is to push things in that direction. Yeah. And we are covering for either this weekend or for next week a story about how many people are pulling out of their contracts. When they're buying a home, they put the house under contract, and then 15% are now walking away and say, ah, we can't do this anymore because of inflation,

because of the way the prices have escalated, and specifically because of the way that mortgage rates have dramatically spiked. I mean, a huge historic spike in mortgage rates, which again, that's the intent. But the place, though, you're not seeing the results of the Fed policy in terms of inflation coming down, but you are seeing the Fed policy in terms of regular consumers, Americans being hurt and, you know, increasingly struggling to be able to sort of move forward with their lives, and especially things like being able to get into a house, which, as you said, that has a trickle-down effect in terms of, okay, if that person's not buying a house, then they're in the rental market. Then someone who was already in the rental market who was sort of struggling to hang on there gets pushed down into homelessness. It's a really, really bad downward spiral. So let's talk about what the

politicians are saying about all of this. President Biden, let's go ahead and put a five up on the screen. He says the CPI data is out of date because gas prices have fallen. Let me read this statement. He says, well, today's headline inflation reading is unacceptably high. It is also out of date. Energy alone comprise nearly half of the monthly increase in inflation. Today's data does not reflect the full impact of nearly 30 days of decreases in gas prices that have reduced the price of the pump by about 40 cents since mid-June. Those savings are providing important breathing room for American families, and other commodities like wheat have fallen sharply since this report. It is a good thing that gas prices are going down. There's no doubt about it.

But as I was saying before, if you look past the gas and food prices, core inflation, you still see these huge spikes. So, you know, in terms of really making a case that we're at the peak of the crisis and things are going to start to abate, that maybe that could be the case, but there isn't particularly evidence for that in this report. It's also just so stupid. You're not supposed to celebrate $4.60 a gallon. I mean, we were sounding the alarm here on this show when gas was like $4.30 a gallon. And just look, keep in mind what's happening on the West Coast of this country. California is still $5.99 a gallon on average, which means in the city, it's over $6 a gallon. Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, and Illinois all still have $5 a gallon. The national price, yeah, it's at $4.60. Here in the Northeast, it's well over

$4.50 a gallon as well. So the only people who are actually seeing cheaper gas are the people who live near refineries in the South, like Texas is at about $4.13. But I don't think you should celebrate the fact that gas, the cheapest gas in the country, is like $4.11 in the state of Georgia, where they've had to slash the gas tax and do all sorts of financial chicanery even to get there. This is not a victory. And yet at the same time, Nancy Pelosi, let's put this up there on the screen, She says, I think we're peaking. I think we're going to be going down from here. Now, people pointed out Biden in December, so seven months ago, said that inflation had likely peaked.

Also, I learned from personal experience, you shouldn't be getting into the prognostication game and you should just sit back and let it all work out. Just be like, what's going on here? Because all we can really understand is that inflation is out of control for a multitude and a variety of reasons, far longer lasting than anybody expected. And you should have a deep amount of humility if you're a policymaker. Let's throw that up there. The Biden comment specifically, I think it's the peak of the crisis. That was in December of 2021, back way before we hit 40-year highs on inflation. If anything, inflation has actually gotten worse in the last seven months. So when you consider the cope and the prognostication from these people, the issue I have too is that they're just constantly trying to gaslight the American people. Like Biden is trying to go out there and

say, well, gas prices have come down every day for the last 30 days. Yeah, you're right, from $5 a gallon nationally to $4.60. So $0.40 a gallon to a still unmanageable price, that's not a victory. They're always trying to play games with the charts and by saying gaslighting people. This is the strongest labor market since World War II, the strongest economy. Listen, as you pointed out in the wage thing, wages are up 5, inflation is up 9. So that means people got a 4% cut. A year, if you compare it to 2019 So that means people got a 4% cut. A year, you know, if you compare it to 2019, people got even a larger of a cut. So what does that mean? Things are way too expensive. You know, I was looking, people are paying like $8 for a dozen of eggs

in some places in the country. That's crazy. I mean, eggs is one of the highest, chicken as well. I was even seeing, and this is really gross and dystopian, there are YouTube channels of like this old grandma called Depression Cooking, which is seeing a skyrocket number of views because people are buying whole chickens to learn how to like roast chicken stock, make their own taco, anything to cut costs at home,

specifically moms, you know, or people are going out and buying like Costco rotisserie chickens and learning how to make a whole week's worth of meals. anything to cut costs at home, specifically moms, you know, or people are going out and buying like Costco rotisserie chickens and learning how to, you know, make a whole week's worth of meals out of those things. You know, look, being frugal is fine, but it's more pointing to that's the economic reality. People are pointing to, people are looking at YouTube channels to try and save $5 here, $4 here or whatever per day, just because the price is so much higher. People's grocery bill is up over 100% in some cases. Yeah, I guess, you know, the other thing that really irritates me, not just irritates, it really enrages me about the Biden response is his defenders, you know, would say, oh, well, back in December when he said he thought this was the peak, this before Russia invaded Ukraine.

And so, you know, this is out of our hands. What could we do? Completely ignoring the fact that we are playing a very active role in that crisis, that our posture and approach of keeping that war going indefinitely is creating massive inflationary pressures, not only for our own people, but around the globe. And this is part of, you know, we covered the crisis in Sri Lanka, which has a myriad of causes, but one of them is skyrocketing food and fuel prices that are leading people to absolute desperation. And so inflation is high around the world. There are a lot of reasons for that. But part of it is our response to the Russia's war in Ukraine and in particular the Russian oil ban. So to pretend like, oh, there's nothing we can do. We're just going to sit back and hope that things get better

from here and hope the Fed does their best to crush the consumers so that ultimately supply and demand can meet up again. Hope is not a strategy. And also, that's the worst possible way and the most painful way that you could deal with inflation is by just depending on the Fed. I haven't been able to really stop thinking about this one. I know. We know the details, of course. We've known them now for a while. The cops stood out there, did nothing, the broad contours. But luckily, some hero somewhere leaked the video, the full video, of the officers and their engagement in Uvalde in the classrooms. Let's go ahead and put this

up there on the screen. Major props to the Austin American statesman. They got the video. They did an excellent job doing the analysis. They edited it. I mean, one of the most haunting lines is they say that they edited out the screams of the children from the video so that none of us would have to hear it. And what they point to is just a level of screwery inside which is difficult to comprehend. You can actually see the gunman come in. You see a child actually peek his head around the corner, and you can immediately hear the gunshots. That's apparently where the screams were edited out. Then within a couple of minutes, you see three officers come in, come close to the door, get engaged. But immediately,

the moment they have fire, they all run back. From that moment forward, for another 77 minutes, nobody goes inside. And we are talking about dozens of guys who are gathered within this room. Just milling around. Fist bumping. On their phones. Literally on their phones. Getting hand sanitizer. Fist bumping.

Getting hand sanitizer. It's difficult to describe how aimless so much of this looks. We have a video mashup here. Just look. If you know if this is a sensitive thing or whatever, I recommend that you don't watch it. But for those who can stomach it, let's take a listen. I'm going to put it up. Stand there. I'm ready to fight. So the reason that that matters is you can see clearly, I mean, 10 minutes, 11 minutes, there were gunshots that were still being fired while these guys were standing out there.

If you continue to watch, I mean, again, it's a 77-minute-long video, but if you continue to watch, what you see is you got guys milling around at the 56-minute mark. They're like, we're going in, but they don't go in. Everybody's, quote, looking for the keys even though the door wasn't locked, and also even, you know, why didn't nobody ask for the keys earlier? A colossal cluster. You know, the hand sanitizer thing we referenced. Just put this up there on the screen.

I mean, just look at this guy. I mean, he's got a helmet on. You know, he's got his vest on. He's getting hand sanitizer. People were fist bumping. People were checking their phones. People are text messaging, making phone calls. You can say, which they have, and blamed Pete Arredondo,

who was the chief of police, who made the call not to go in. But you guys were all out there. And ultimately, it was the Border Patrol guys at the end who were so disturbed that they even went in. Although, to be fair, you can see that they were standing out there for a little while, too. They were milling around there for a fucking hour, too. Yeah, so, like, look, it's not, they're not,

there's some heroes, I don't know who they are. I think the biggest one is probably the guy whose wife was, I think he was killed and called him and was texting him from the room. He tried to go in. They literally held him back, stopped him. You can actually see some of that in the video, too. So I don't know. That image with the guy and the hands, it just really sticks with me. It's at the 57-minute mark, too.

I mean, they're all just so casual. Like, there's nothing going on. Like, this is no big deal. Just hanging around, hanging around in their tough guy little outfits like they're badasses when they're too fucking cowards, too cowardly to go in and rescue these kids. I mean, they didn't have the kids' screens edited out in real time. They heard that. They heard that gunfire in those classrooms where there are children and teachers and they do nothing for so long. You know, one of the other

things that really stood out to me is, remember we were told, oh, they engaged the gunman, but they were wounded. So they had to fall back. Oh, were they? Really? Show me. Where's that? Where does that happen? I mean, that was a total lie and bullshit. And I knew that from the beginning because they wouldn't give us any details about, like, who was injured, how they were doing, were they in the hospital? Nothing. None of those police officers ended up going to the hospital because none of them were injured. That was a total lie and part of their cover-up as an excuse for why they did not ultimately go in. And to your point, you know, they all have wanted to scapegoat this one dude who definitely deserves a lot of blame. No doubt about it.

But you had on the scene there that you see visibly in this video. You have the Uvalde Police Department, the regular police department. You have the Uvalde County Sheriff's Department. You have the Texas Department of Public Safety. You have Texas Rangers. You have U.S. Border Patrol. And you have U.S. Marshal Service. Show me in the video where they're having to restrain these people from going in.

No, they're not trying to go in. They're not like, oh, my God, we want to go in and this guy just won't let us. No. They're all doing the same thing, which is absolutely nothing. So, listen, as you said, we knew a lot of these details already, not because this is the story they told us, but it became blatantly obvious

that they had just kind of hung around and hoped someone else would come in and do the hard work and do the scary thing that they didn't want to do. But to actually see the video and all these guys and how casual they are as kids are bleeding out on the floor, you can't unsee it. You can't unsee it. I mean, and the people who are the families here, they're so upset. That teacher who we played a video of him before, he just talks, He says he'll never forgive these cops.

I mean, he was sitting there. And I want to address another thing. People were like, well, there weren't a lot of shots afterwards. People bled out in that classroom. You don't know how many people died. If you'd gone in there and you neutralized this guy within 10 minutes, maybe you could have saved some lives. But, you know, a lot of people bled out. That's your blood loss.

And anybody who's worked in the military, first responder, will tell you the first minutes are critical. So you let somebody just sit there and bleed out for over an hour, you're guaranteeing death. At the very least, you can give some people, at least some people, a fighting chance. And again, that's just something that they are not, they won't even acknowledge. And what pisses me off even more, this mayor, this guy has a serious problem. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen because he's been playing cover up from the very beginning. He went out and actually castigated the Austin American statesman as, quote, chicken and unprofessional for releasing the video footage before the families were able to see it first. Yeah, well, why didn't you show it to him? You know, it's been over a month and they've been asking for it from the very beginning.

And this guy is very upset because Uvalde police has been getting the blame. And actually on this part, I will agree with him. He's like, it's not like the Texas Department of Public Safety doesn't have things to cover up too. And yeah, you're right. Screw all of you. That's really what it comes down to. I was also reading about how there was a, quote, heated debate where Governor Abbott and others had wanted to release a video, but didn't do anything about it. Now look, maybe his office leaked it and they didn't want, I don't know who leaked it. That being said, I think the governor and them should still be much more forward. And I don't think it should come out this way. It shouldn't have to be leaked to the

Austin American statesman. The governor and the attorney general should come out and be like, hey, here's a video. Anybody in that video who has shown a dereliction of duty is hereby laid off, fired by the state of Texas. At the least. Yeah. The least. Yes. Not, you know, and you think about it, given the way our laws are structured, none of them are ever going to face any criminal penalty for what they did here, given the Supreme Court and ruling that police don't actually have a duty to protect you. But also, you know, none of them are really open to civil liability either. I personally think they should be. I think this guy, Arredondo, should be sued to high hell for what he did.

Again, because at least you can tie back the decision-making to him. But there are a lot of individual actors who made terrible, terrible, terrible decisions that day. I mean, at least we have the video. At least we can all see it. I think it's really disgusting that the mayor tried to use the residents of like,

oh, how dare you release this? They wanted it. Of course. A resident shot back because he said, oh, these journalists are chicken and unprofessional for releasing the footage. And they said a resident shot back asking him if he thought the cops were chickens. How about that? Presidents, I'm sure, feel that this has been a service that has done that gives the public and gives them some at least answers about what actually happened. So to hide behind this, I mean, it's just total bullshit. It really has been a cover up at all levels. They and by the way, there is still a lot of information that has not come out because they are blocking the release of the body cam footage,

any and all documents relevant to that day. At every level, from the county to the state, they are standing in the way of that information ultimately being released to the public. And at this point, I mean, the very least, given the colossal, what should be criminal failures that happened here, the very least they can do is provide these families with the truth of what unfolded on that day. And people who are relatives of the victims reacted and they're disgusted. They're horrified. And like, you know, this is the main thing. It's not just the Evaldi police. There were feds there, Border Patrol. Texas Rangers, U.S. Marshals. All of them should be dragged

before. I mean, look, can't somebody in Congress step up too? You have subpoena power. Yeah, that's true. Drag their asses before Congress. Make them testify or let them plead the fifth if they want to. But let people see it. Because the video, I think, should just be the

starting point. I mean, I'm not naive and I think most of these guys will keep their jobs, which is honestly the most disgusting part of this entire thing. Shall we check in with our friend John Bolton? Yeah, let's do it. Former national security advisor under Donald Trump, also former U.N. ambassador under President George W. Bush. So he's served in all sorts of Republican administrations. And he was recently on CNN with Jake Tapper, and they were talking about whether Trump was really competent enough to plan and execute a coup. John Bolton had some interesting insight on this. Let's take a listen. With all due respect, one doesn't have to be brilliant to attempt a coup. I disagree with that. As somebody who has helped plan coup d'etat, not here, but other places, it takes a lot of work. And that's not what he did.

I'm sorry. Come again? I mean, not that any of us are surprised that John Bolton has been involved in planning coups, but usually they try to keep that quiet. Here he is just brazenly saying the quiet part out loud, just openly admitting to it casually, like this is a perfectly fine and acceptable thing to cop to. Yeah, it was completely nuts. And the reaction we'll get is really funny from the neocons who still support Bolton. Yes. But it was one of those just absolute quiet part out louds. Maybe he was trying to be funny, but I don't think so. I think that there is some truth. He's got a long career, Assistant Secretary of State, and obviously he hasn't made his views private on this. And Jake Tapper actually continued to press him on this. Let's listen to that.

When we were talking about what is capable, what you need to do to be able to plan a coup, and you cited your expertise having planned coups. I'm not going to get into the specifics, but… Successful coups? Well, I wrote about Venezuela in the book, and it turned out not to be successful. Not that we had all that much to do with it, but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president, and they failed. The notion that Donald Trump was half as competent as the Venezuelan opposition is laughable. But I think there's another- I feel like there's other stuff you're not telling me, though. I think I'm sure there is. Well, so that's actually interesting. Having lived through some of

that when I was covering the White House, they refused to say that it was a coup. I don't know if you remember that. And now here he is. And now he's like, yeah, I was involved in that coup, that Venezuelan coup. Because there were people who were like, well, hold on a second here. You are recognizing some guy who is like the parliamentary leader, is the leader of Venezuela. What right do you have to do that whenever clearly he doesn't have any position where he has any hope of actually becoming the president? It became a whole thing. I mean, that guy visited Washington.

He was given, like, diplomatic recognition. Juan Guaido. It was totally by parts. Remember, there was standing ovation for him and all of that. The Maduro government, by the way, didn't go anywhere, and now we need their oil. I don't know if people have checked that out. So it was—anyway, I remember covering it at the time and people were asking like, hey, is this a U.S. coup d'etat? They're like, absolutely not. You know, we're representing the diplomatic or the democratic

will of the Venezuelan. But I'm not going to claim Maduro is democratically elected or Juan Guaido. OK, like the whole country is a complete mess. The whole point is that when you start trying to meddle in other countries like this specifically, it's really weird. And that is – to have him just say it out loud in that way and also just fully acknowledge is just – it's crazy. Right, because the mythology I think in America now is like, well, during the cold, of course, you know, out of our – we didn't really want to. We were kind of forced. We had to do these coups, it wasn't great to serve American interests, read capitalist interests. But, you know, that passes all behind us. And here's John Bolton outright being like, yeah, coups, Venezuela, remember just a couple years ago, we were

involved in that, which again, at the time, there's no way they would have admitted to the fact that they were basically trying, I mean, not basically, they were literally trying to foment a coup in the country now in the modern era. And here's John Bolton just admitting it on television. The response was equally revealing, though. Let's go ahead and put up, first of all, this is from, put up D3 here. This is from someone who's a bronco marsetic who i think is a good and smart observer he says i hope my american followers can understand how extreme and abnormal this is i don't know any other country where a former official can just

openly say this and then the journalist interviewing him simply nods along as if it's completely unremarkable i mean at least t, at least Tapper has a brain and is capable of listening and then following up. But he kind of chuckled like this was some sort of a joke. Like, ha, ha, ha, ha, of course we do coups. Yeah, there is no other nation on Earth that would just outright admit to this casually. Like, this is no big deal. And then everyone just goes on as usual. And I'm sure John Bolton will be back in a cable news green room next week.

Super weird. Yeah, and I also love love yeah the january 6th thing oh that you know you gotta push you gotta have hearings and all this on this they're like oh yeah you know he was talking about goo it's like well hold on a second because that was not bipartisan well it was but in practice but congress never voted on that you know people are supposed to have some sort of democratic input nobody wants to have a hearing, apparently. It's just amazing to me which coup planners are pushed out and which are allowed completely off the television. I have a little bit to say on that in my monologue as well. This Pride Month,

we are not just celebrating. We're fighting back. I'm George M. Johnson, author of the most banned book in America. On my podcast Fighting Words, I sit down with voices that spark resistance and inspire change. This year, we are showing up and showing out. You need people being

like, no, you're not what you tell us what to do. This regime is coming down on us, and I don't want to just survive. I want to thrive. Fighting Words is where courage meets conversation. Listen on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jeff Perlman. And I'm Rick Jervis. We're journalists and hosts of the podcast Finding Sexy Sweat. At an internship in 1993, we roomed with Reggie Payne, aspiring reporter and rapper who went by Sexy Sweat.

A couple years ago, we set out to find him. But in 2020, Reggie fell into a coma after police pinned him down and he never woke up. But then I see my son's not moving. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat coming June 19th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no.

This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.