Factually! with Adam Conover - ICE Murders and the Maine Senate Scramble with David Dayen and David Weigel

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

More horrific murders from ICE, an exhausting scramble to find a candidate to replace Graham Platner in the Maine Senate race, and a massive lawsuit to stop the Paramount/Warner Brothers Discover merger. The news doesn’t slow down, so we can’t either. This week, Adam is joined by David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, and David Weigel, national political editor at Semafor. --SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Actually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for being here. It's Friday, so I'm breaking down the news with two smart and funny people in a segment. My Discord community has started calling a crisp 45 because that's how long we try to keep it to. If you want to influence the names of the segments on the show or just talk about it with some other smart and funny people, head to Patreon.com slash Adam Conover for five bucks a month. You can see every episode ad-free. We've got a lot of wonderful other community features as well.

Now, let's get to the news. with me today are two really incredible national political reporters. We have Dave Weigel, National Political Reporter for Semaphore and Dave Dan, executive editor of the American Prospect. Thank you so much for being here, guys. Thanks for having. Thank you. Let's start by talking about these horrible ICE murders that have happened around the country.

We got, it's been a quiet, you know, nine months, six months or so for ICE since, you know, Minneapolis. and now they've killed three people in a week. Dave, can you tell us anything about this? Dave, Dan. Yeah, I mean, I think what this reveals is that it hasn't been such a quiet six months for ICE. They've just sort of gone underground.

But what we've been hearing over the last month is that there was a lot of pressure to increase arrests. And obviously they turned over. Kristy Nome is no longer the head of the Department of Homeland Security. Now Mark Wayne Mullen is the head. And he was trying to do this sort of more obscure under the radar way of conducting these raids and engaging in these detentions and deportations. But there's just sort of a fundamental reality that runs up against, which is if you want to do enough of these to satisfy the Stephen Miller's of the administration, you're going to put these very, not very well-trained individuals into very dangerous situations. and it apparently made, they're very trigger-happy.

So it's, it's, there's sort of, I don't know if it's, you can put a number to it, but there's a point at which there's a number of abductions per month at which, or per day, at which this becomes super dangerous. And that's what we're seeing over the last week. Fred, the more interactions you have, the more interactions ICE has with the public, the more people they kill almost inevitably. To say the three folks' name in Houston, they shot Lorenzo Sagada Arwajo, a business owner and father of three who was heading to work in his car.

Then in the town of Bitterford, Maine, they shot Johann Sebastian during Guerrero, a Colombian citizen and father also in his car. And then I believe there was another death in Florida of someone who was killed by a car. It was in the context of a nice operation, but they were not shot. They were vehicularly killed. What is it about? cars that cause because that's also the case in the the uh uh one of the cases in Minneapolis correct yeah Renee good yes so yeah I mean I think uh if if you're in a situation where you're you're trying to stop someone uh who you suspect and they're in a vehicle

then uh there are a lot of ways for that to escalate very quickly um you're trying to get someone out of the vehicle, you make claims that the vehicle is trying to run you over. And you're, you know, someone who is rejected from the police force essentially and you're not very well trained. And, you know, you react. And the truth is that this really all never stopped. You know, at the prospect, prospect.org, we've been actually doing a running count of ice deaths, not just in the field, but in custody, where there have been over 58 deaths this year, just in the past, since Trump's inauguration in 2025. And there was another death in custody this week, actually, that was announced that

that's been a little more under the radar. But it's just the, I see it, and I'm sure, you know, Dave can speak to this. It's just sort of a necessary consequence of, you know, having an. an improper trained, improperly trained police force that attempts to engage in something we haven't seen very much in American history, which is this mass abduction campaign. Yeah, I mean, one of the justifications was, I don't remember which case it was,

but that one of the men was fleeing and DHS said, the ICE officer fearing for public safety shot the man just because, oh, maybe he's going to go rough up an old lady, or vandalize a train car or something like, oh, generally, we're worried about public safety so we have to shoot a man in the back or I don't know where he was shot, but like the justification is so thin at this point.

They couldn't even say the officer feared for his safety. I mean, Dave Weigel, what response are you seeing from this politically, if anything? A kind of split fearful response. This has been mishandled by the Trump administration, but why did it start? I'm not going to spend the whole segment talking about why it started, but go back to the first Trump administration.

They had a policy of deporting as many people as possible. They actually deported fewer people day by day than the Obama administration. And they didn't want to be super visible. They did deportations, but they didn't advertise them that much as they did in this administration. Remember, they institute the remain in Mexico policy. They wanted asylum seekers to be out of sight of the media. It was interesting in the area. They were interested in the first.

term. This is, besides Stephen Miller, a different Trump team, they, they had this understanding in that Trump team that if people were seeing footage of people who look pretty innocent and then were pretty innocent of everything except not having paperwork to be in the country, being harmed, being tortured, basically, by the conditions, well, that would be bad and there'd be a backlash, and there was a backlash. There was a backlash in 2018. This administration, and very eubristically, very, kind of cruelly on purpose, wanted to make sport out of this. And you saw that in how they advertise for new ice hires.

David was talking about this. But there's this really, this campaign of kind of brio and back slapping. You need 47 days of training because Trump's the 47th president. That's not the most serious basis for how to train people. The number of people who have taken the oath of office equals the number of days you train. And they were mocking and advertising. this. They wanted shows of force on the street to make people afraid. Now, Miller's always been interested. Steve Miller's always been interested in making immigrants, migrants afraid to come to

the country, afraid to go out in public. That was family separation. But it wasn't this public. And that's the context for all this. I say that politically they've been a little shaken because this in Maine, Susan Collins is running for vessels as we discussed, running for reelection. Yeah. And she's tried to finesse this, that she is a, Republican in a blue state, most of the states did not vote for Trump ever in three elections. And when after the good killing in Minneapolis, when ICE was in Maine, she took credit saying, I talked to Christy Noem, who was then DHS secretary, and I've got them to roll back to what they're doing. This time in Maine, the shooting over the last week, she again tried to get in front of it and say,

well, I as the influential senator who's not always on board with Trump or on all these policies, I'm trying to get body cameras to these agents. And actually we would have had them months ago if Democrats hadn't been protesting so much. It's a very muddled response. You have this contrast of, look at our tough, brave agents and body armor taking out these terrifying immigrants.

What they always do is there'll be a roundup, but the advertisement, the people they'll tweet, the people that'll get their, you know, go to Kinko's and get a blow up of somebody's mugshot, it'll be the most unsympathetic cases. Look at this drunk driver we got rid of. don't why do Democrats not want to get rid of a drunk driver? The administration has been wobbly when there's been one of these shootings because they can't

really defend the policy to the help. And they have in Susan Collins somebody who would really rather this, the salings of this go down and also the quality of the ICE deportation program go up. But they're kind of hoisted by this partard that started out day one of the Trump administration of, let's be as rough and tough in Charles Bronson movie as possible about doing this. Maybe there won't be any negative consequences. There are terrible negative consequences for how people view mass deportation right now. And you're seeing that in real time. I mean, shortly after the second one of these killings, the one in Maine,

Mark Weymullen announced that there was not going to be stops by, you know, vehicle stops for an indivision. term, and Trump apparently didn't find out about that by being briefed by Mullen. He found out about it on social media. He found out about it on Fox News. And he was furious. And he immediately reversed that policy within 24 hours. It's sort of a bizarre push pull within the administration, right?

I mean, I read a month or two ago that, you know, when DHS was pulling the ICE enforcement out of Minneapolis that like Stephen Miller wanted them to stay in longer and go harder, he was advocating internally for doubling down and seemingly maybe lost that internal battle to some degree. It seems that the same thing is happening now where Susan Collins, obviously any amount of generalized anger

towards the administration is bad for Susan Collins. If, you know, Mainers are angry in the streets about unjustified killings, that's going to be bad for her, whether or not she had anything to do with it simply because she's a Republican. And she has plenty to do with it.

let's be clear for confirming all of these secretaries and being a part of the, you know, helping the administration being a part of the party. So she would rather it be quiet. But Trump like is making headlines. I mean, it's I got I got the paper New York Times right here because I'm trying to get my Luddite bona fides up on the front page. Trump demands ice restart use of traffic stops.

Like that's, that is the administration's response to the killing. Do it more. Like, don't slow down, do it more. I mean, you really imagine Stephen Miller sitting there just fingers steepled going, yes, yes, more dead immigrants. I'm happy. Like, that's what he wants, right? He wants immigrants to die so that other immigrants are afraid.

So it's a political contradiction for his side, is it not? No, definitely. It is, you heard it from David, Dan just now. It's incoherent. There are people in the administration who think, if the goal is getting the biggest number of non-citizens out of the country, there are ways to do that that don't make good TV. And there are some people in administration who want to do it that way. There are things they've done. We're going to deny licenses to truckers who are not citizens.

Well, you kind of know who those people are. You can send law enforcement to round them up. The way they have transformed ICE is more in the middle, as you were saying, in the Miller mold. They like the idea of these visuals. They like the idea of really angering the left. So much of this comes down to what makes our opponents the most angry. And you've seen from Tom Homan and other people in administration who are not even cross-purposes, they just say different things in different days.

They tried to make this argument after the Minneapolis shootings that the problem here is that liberals are protesting. And Democrats should tell their voters, stop protesting this, get out of the streets, don't defend migrants. that is also much further than they went in the first time. Taking a do not protest the government position, look, there's a constituency for that. I'm sure there is. But that is further than any administration, a very long time has gone to say if you disagree with us,

don't say so in public. Don't encourage people to disagree with us. You are part of the problem. We might investigate you for terrorism. That's how far they're going. The administration has taken other steps to criminalize different kinds of left-wing protests. We're going to try to build cases against Antifa.

All of that is so much more than they need to do if the goal is just reducing the number of migrants in the country. I had Fox News on today, and all of it was about, you know, Marco Rubio fighting Antifa and stuff like that. Right. Like that is their response. David

Dan, if you just tell us a little bit more, we spent a lot of time on the politics of it. But just how successful has the Trump administration's deportation campaign Ben, and, you know, what are the, what are the effects that are happening to real people that are not making such big press as, you know, these three unjustified killings? I'm sure there's plenty. I mean, it's, it's been quite successful, certainly from the standpoint of, I think,

this year we will probably hit a net negative immigration in terms of the population statistics in the country. I mean, the only people. sort of coming in from overseas are white South Africans, right? That's that's become the entire refugee program. And then these other various ways that they're keeping people out of the country, both direct like, you know, actual deportations and indirect, like some of the things that Dave Weigel was talking about. One example is that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau put out a guidance to banks just a few weeks ago that said, hey, you know, banks, you might not want to give immigrants any loans because they're, they're unreliable.

They might not be able to pay you back. So, you know, exercise some caution in if you want to maintain the safety and soundness of your bank. So they're doing, there are things like that, little things like that happening all over in ways that try to discourage immigrants from coming to this country or staying in the country. And these are having massive, I think the thing that gets losses, these are having massive economic impacts. I'm aware of a study that's going to be coming out next week that looks at the ice surge in Los Angeles at the middle of last year. And what the economic impacts of that were. You're talking about millions of people that just stopped going to work because they were afraid that at their job, they would be abducted by ice. And that had a huge

ripple effect across the economy. And not just going to work, but just being out in public, going to restaurants, going to, you know, concerts or wherever that you would normally congregate. This kept people locked sort of in their homes and fear. And that had significant economic impacts. And not just in Los Angeles, but all of the surge cities that we've seen, whether Minneapolis or Chicago or wherever. Folks, live shopping on whatnot is exploding. According to What Not, the number of sellers making over $1 million on WhatNot has doubled in the last year. If you're selling online or out of a storefront full-time or as a side hustle, you already know the challenge.

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I know. I like that I don't have to go around, you know, to like different stores or something. It's just all on my website. Well, it's like, oh, do I need to go to like a, do I need another type of website to like find the right pictures or to like a, a, another type of website to upload the, like, it's all in one place. The video or the audio or like, no, I want, it makes it easy, make it easy on me, please. Yes, and you can do all those things, photos, videos, changing fonts. You know, I mean, the designs are amazing.

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candidate in May. This is like, I feel like every election, there is a perfect storm of the most fucked up thing happening in the most. important race. Ever since Scalia died in the middle of the 2016 race, but I was like, oh, this is like a fucking West Wing episode, right, level of events coalescing. And this is another one of those examples that Platner moments after winning a landslide victory in the primary has the most horrible allegation, and of course many allegations before that, but like the most politically deadly allegations that anyone could receive, he dropped out.

and now the Democrats of Maine have, what, a total of two weeks or something like that to choose another candidate? Dave Weigel, how is that going for them? It is not going poorly, given everything you laid out. It's not going poorly. No, so Republicans would say this last week, not blaring it on the record. They really were hopeful that Platterner would stay in the race. And there were a lot of rumors in campaign circles that Republicans had incredible opposition research on Platner, more details and rumors about his personal life.

They just needed him to not drop out by July 13th. It was July 13th. Once he couldn't drop out, they were going to drop it. So they've actually been worried that Democrats are going to come out with a stronger candidate. And the way that Platner supporters, not Bernie Sanders, who's been kind of out of this process, but other progressives who endorsed Platner played this was pretty smart. which was saying, as you said, Platter won a landslide. We need nominee who's going to be in Platner's mold.

So the candidates who jumped into this, most of them ran for, not most of them, but they include three Democrats who ran for governor. Maine has ranked choice voting. So the impulse is to run positive campaigns in rank choice voting because you want to be somebody second and third choice. You don't want to just go negative and not be ranked. And a candidate who ran for the conservative House seat that Republicans want to flip this year and lost that ranked choice vote.

and they've been fairly friendly even in this process. This is not a very negative campaign for the Senate seat. And everyone agrees on a few basic issues. Like, for example, there's no candidates saying, if I'm elected, I'm not going to vote for Medicare for all. They all support Medicare for all. There's nobody who doesn't want to abolish ICE. They all want to abolish ICE. And with the meaning of that, you know, shaped by what's happening right now.

So they're all progressive candidates who, they'd be the most progressive senators. in Maine history if they got the nomination like Platner would have been. Ends of the process is they're debating a couple times. There are weekend votes to select the delegates. Candidates need 500 signatures to get to this convention next weekend in Maine on the 25th. And they will vote a couple times until one person has a majority. Then the work is calming everybody down and saying we've chosen our candidate. So far it is not.

going poorly again. If Republicans are really we're hoping this this two and a half week process would be a lot nascar and meaner. So the race is to get the votes of delegates to the state party convention. Is this the kind of thing like if Plattenor had stayed in

the race with no issues that it's a convention that they would have held but the vote would have been pro forma and now it's a real vote? Or is this like an entire process that wouldn't have happened at all and is just now occurring for the first time? time. No, it's the second one. This is a break glass thing. Although I would say that Janet Mills, the governor who

was running against Platner, dropped out before the normally scheduled convention, which is indication that she was not going to do well there, that the rank and file main activist Democrat wanted to vote for Grand Platt. No, but yeah, David's right. This is a made-up process that there's basically no provision in law formally for what to do if a senator, Senate nominee dropped out. before that deadline. And so they came up with this process where you have these nominating meetings this weekend, which are in all 16 Maine counties, and any Democrat can vote for that delegate to go to the convention. And then the 500 delegates that come from that process, along with 100 members of a state committee in Maine, then do the balloting to arrive at a nominee. So five, six of this comes from a grassroots process. And it's actually a weird capsule of what the world might look like if we had short campaigns with no money involved and purely based on organizing.

There are no ads right now for any of these candidates because they would be pointless. You're only, you know, you're, you'd be narrowcasting to 600 people unless you had, you know, the algorithm that you could get on those 600 people's phones. It would make no sense to do any ads. So there are no ads. There's no outside force like Bernie's not involved. Schumer is staying out of it. There's nobody sort of coming in from the outside telling you who to vote for. And it's purely, can you get a bunch of people to a meeting in a town hall to nominate a bunch of delegates? Like, that's the goal. And it's purely grassroots. It's purely neighbor to neighbor trying to get people to this meeting. And it's like, it's the most quaint thing in the world. It's like bespoke politics.

It's this bizarre situation that we would not have had before. And it's kind of kicked the platinum situation off the front page. I mean, it's, it's a pure sprint. And it's, it's created its own momentum and energy. That is fascinating. I mean, my favorite kind of politics is small scale politics. It's part of why I like union work so much because union democracy is a lot about like, hey, let me call my 10 friends because we need to get 100 people to the meeting so we can all vote and it can have legitimacy. And it's like,

if you show up, you get to decide what happens, you know? And that is, that's how democracy should be and often is in small scales, but we've abstracted it so far up on the national level that it's often hard to see. So let me get this straight. If I'm a, if I'm a main Democrat and I'm like, oh, fuck, Plattenor's out.

Like, I want to say in this, I can go to a Democratic Party meeting if I'm a registered Democrat, and then I vote for a delegate. And then are the delegates saying, hey, I'm a Troy Jackson delegate, or I'm a this guy delegate, or is it more like, hey, I'm Bob, I'm your local pastor, I'm the school board president, and send me because I'm a good guy? Or, you know, how much does the average, you know, Mainer Democrat know what they're going to get? I think Dave can maybe speak to that better, but my understanding is that,

that, you know, there aren't, formally, there aren't supposed to be any slates where, like, you vote the Jackson Slate or you vote the Schenabellos. She's another candidate, Secretary of State of the state. You vote the Bellows slate. But I think at these nominating meetings, what you're going to see and what we'll see this weekend is people saying, look, I'm for Medicare for all, or I'm going to make sure that the candidate supports my values and my values are X, Y, and Z. And those are going to line up with the particular candidates that are out there. So I do think that, you know, you will have the ability to,

you know, and Platner's volunteer network, which is 15,000 strong is probably going to be a major factor in this. They have the organization to get people to these meetings. And so I think that's going to be a major factor in, you know, the makeup of these delegates and who eventually becomes the nominee. Right. All those like sort of super organizers in the Platner campaign are going to be saying, hey, let's turn out to this meeting to make sure that we get someone who shares our values. I mean, Wigel, I'm curious, did they, this is a very impressive process to come up with so quickly, like even just to conceive of, it's hard to get political people to agree on a process like this.

It obviously reminds me of when Joe Biden dropped out. And you had Democrats saying, oh, we should do a, we should have a convention. We should do a thing. And like clearly there was no way to agree on what things should be done. And so, you know, the Kamala Harris machine spun up and they, you know, it happened that way. Was this process, though, a response to that debacle? Because you definitely had Democrats saying that year, oh, I feel unrepresented. I didn't get a choice, right?

some extent. People were pretty happy. But, you know, it wasn't seen as this has the Democratic stamp on it in quite the same way that this process in Maine might. Right. And they also knew Republicans would use that the way they use the Biden-Harris switch, the way that the way that Trump in every election has claimed that it was raided against Bernie Sanders. Does he believe that? Maybe he does, but he knows that it angers Democrats. He's trying to get them to be so angry they don't show up. And so you saw the Republican nominee for governor even put a message when this process of being developed. Bobby Charles saying, well, if any Platner voters are angry at having their vote taken away from them, I am willing to, I'm ready to accept you into my movement.

So yes, Maine Democrats were very aware of this. There was a little bit of tension, which, as David was saying seems to be kind of over, because Platner's the headlines about the Platner campaign saying the remnants of the Platter campaign is shutting down, basically, saying we want to make sure this process is not slanted and that it honors our movement. It was becoming clear in the back channel conversations between the main Democratic Party who were, you know, people elected these positions when they had no idea who the Senate nominee was going to be. And the campaign, which was its negotiating position was if we don't like this, our candidate will stay in the race and be battered by Republican attacks and abandoned by the whole party. It already was abandoned.

So they was in mind and they tried to come up with the process. David was right on the process. The only thing I would add is that they also have rules that 25% of the delegates in each county when they elect the delegates have to be some sort of minority. And that can be LGBTQ. It can be young Democrats. It can be people with disabilities. Migrants. It can be migrants.

So they're trying to, they were trying to create a diverse delegate pool. It means an overwhelmingly white state. It has some diversity. I don't think that's mandatory. And they also were trying to. I'm not sure that that's mandatory. I think they're encouraged to try to get there.

They're encouraging it. Yeah. They're encouraging it. But the fact that they're mentioning that is that they, part of the rules that they came up in 72 hours were, and we want this process to be diverse. The Platner part of it, like I was saying, 72% of people knowing some bad things about Platner, primary voters, voted for Grand Platner. So the people who were going to show up to these caucuses are progressive. And there was not really a danger that somebody was going to sneak through.

And, aha, I am the Chuck Schumer corporate Democrat who goes to every APEC happy hour. That's not going to be the nominee. It was always going to be, it was going to be somebody who's pretty. progressive and that really did lower the temperature. Yeah. So it's, you're right. I don't think it's going to be complete, you know, Woodstock, kumbaya situation at these conventions, but it is like David was saying, more like normal politics with a pool of people. This is not like the, the days when Democrats are split between George Wallace and George McGovern. This is people who really

hate Susan Collins and want a progressive to be the nominee. But there's still a little bit of awkwardness, right? Like, uh, Wigel, I was reading, uh, your recent piece on this from like, it was just like a couple days ago and you had linked to Troy Jackson's a fellow's name, right? Who ran for governor? And he, you said he ran on a pseudo ticket with Platner as you can see in this video

and you link to the video and I went to watch it. The video has been taken down, right? Because clearly, like Troy Jackson is like, well, I ran with the guy a couple weeks ago. Now I don't even want there to be evidence of me standing next to him on the internet. And so there is this sort of odd, you know, we need to

carry the torch while also distancing ourselves from the guy who was holding it a second ago. Don't worry about the guy who had the torch, but he's dead. Like he didn't exist. I'm a completely different person. Is that a challenge for these candidates or no? Yeah, it is a challenge. And that's something that Democrat wrote to you. Oh, and sorry, David Justice too.

I just say the clip was specifically Graham Platner saying, I rang Troy Jackson first on my ballot, the ranked choice thing. Troy and I are completely aligned on labor issues. And it was very clear that if you're Republican, you can take that clip and say, Troy and I are completely aligned and just run Grand Platner saying that that was the clip. But Troy has not hidden. In fact, the answer has been. And he did some media interviews in the last week that, yeah, he believed this guy and he was let down, but he believes in his values. That's been getting people through this awkwardness.

David was trying to talk about it. I don't think it's going to be a problem in the next two weeks. I think once that nominee is selected, as, as David said, Republicans are going to do everything they can to try to link that nominee back to Platner. How much in your, both your view, and then we'll move on, does this affect the national prospects for the DSA slash progressive slash pro-Palestinian, whatever you want to call it, wing of the party? I can take it and then you can go ahead, David.

So, yeah, I mean, I think that the establishment is, certainly attempting to use this as a cudgel. We're seeing this most prominently in the Michigan Senate race, where Abdul al-Said is sort of on the Democratic Socialist side of the matter. And Haley Stevens is the establishment centrist Democratic candidate who is now benefiting from about $50 million of Super PAC ads. And there have been very clumsy attempts to say, oh, Abdul al-Sayyad also is, you know, someone who, you know, treats women badly. There have been these attempts to connect the, you know, poor vetting of Platner to El-Sayed. I'm not sure how successful those have been, but there was a poll this week that showed Stevens up in the race.

And so there's going to be this attempt by the establishment to say, you know, this shows that we can't trust. this new movement, this new Democratic Tea Party or whatever, with these important races. I'm not sure that it's going to be totally successful. There are some sort of bellwether races out there. There's a race in the Phoenix area where there's a Democratic Socialist candidate in Kinew Kirk, who's kind of rising on an incumbent named Greg Stanton. There's a race in mid-Michigan where there's an open seat on the Democratic side because it's a Republican-held seat. and there's a progressive candidate in that race who's leading. You know, I think these outcomes are going to continue because I think the mood of the electorate is basically anti-establishment.

And one sort of misstep in Maine isn't necessarily going to derail that. But maybe David can elaborate further. That's definitely right, although, and I wrote about a bit this week in Semaphore, the third way, which is the centrist Democratic think tank. There are several, but that's the one that makes the most news. Put out a memo saying this explicitly, hey, the lesson of Maine is that we can't take a risk on these left-wing candidates who are duping Democratic voters into voting for them despite their flaws. But they put that out in part because they worried that the country and Democrats were moving on from the Platner story pretty quickly. And I think that's just true. People move on from some stories stick forever.

and then some stories are everyone's lips and then there's a holiday weekend. Nobody talks about them anymore. And they were worried that Plattner would be like that. The Democrats say, that's one, what's one story? What happened to that guy? Didn't they replace him? How does that, what's that to do with our candidates? When I was in Michigan last month, before Plattner dropped out, I brought this up to El Sayed,

and he laughed. He said, like, Muslim guy with a middle name Muhammad, and I have to carry this grand Plattner guy, too. That's not fair. And I think that's a pretty widespread idea. But as David's saying, Democrats are trying. Let's refer to the establishment of the Democratic Party, which is a broad term. But basically, people don't want the left to win these primaries.

They definitely have been going to a playbook that Blatner dusted off, which is, you mentioned, David mentioned the Arizona race. It's outside Phoenix, Mesa and Tempe, safe Democratic seat. And Kai Newkirk, who's the DSA candidate, there was just a very fuzzy, some people, some local Democrats put out a statement saying they felt uncomfortable around him just to get it into the into the air. I'm hesitating to talk too much about it because it was so flimsy. But just to get in the air, this guy who's a newcomer you'd never heard of,

he might have something in his past like that other guy. And in Michigan, there's been a little bit of an effort to say that the left wing candidate there. He has these old tweets. I mean, I wrote about some of them too. Old tweets he hadn't to lead, old positions that are kind of crazy. They're definitely trying that. but the worry among anti-left-wing Democrats is that just voters are, maybe they're even paying attention to Maine,

but they're not taking that and casting it on every single candidate. So they might over-invest. I think they're returning in Michigan more to what worked for other anti-left-wing candidates in the past, which is that, hey, this is a Democratic primary. You're loyal Democrats. Do you want to side with the Bernie movement, or do you want to side with the party that, of Barack Obama? the party of Gretchen Whitmer, the party that it delivers for you.

Why would you blow it all up with something untested? Platner's a little piece of that, but they've got a lot they're trying to throw into that casket. Okay, let's talk about the Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery merger. I had to hold off making this number third, number three, because this is the one that matters the most to me. Actually, I should say, well, I'll do my little disclosure after I tell a little bit of the story. Of course, Paramount owned by David Ellison, a Trump Alist.

has been trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, one of the last remaining major movie studios trying to buy another 100-year-old movie studio and a news organization and suite of cable channels and other multimedia properties. And not only has a collection of 11 states, 12 states maybe, 11 or 12, filed a lawsuit in order to stop this merger,

which appears to have gotten traction. But here's the disclosure. the Writers Guild of which I sit on the board has also filed a lawsuit alleging that this is going to be horrible for labor, making a labor argument. And then I also saw today that at least one of the firm's own shareholders has sued. I'm not sure how strong those grounds are, but saying that

the adolescents have cut like corrupt deals with Trump and we're going to hurt the business. Dave, Dan, I know you've written about this extensively. Do you feel like there's been a sea change in whether people think this merger is going to go through now, because that's what I've felt. I felt a change in the commentary. I think you're definitely equipped to answer that question just because that's been the mood change in Hollywood, right? I mean, I think when this actually went down and the merger was announced, there was just

kind of a fatalism around it. And a lot of people were afraid to speak out because they felt like, oh, I'm going to have to go to Paramount for a deal or Warner Brothers or whatever. And then, you know, block the merger.com came through. there were 5,500 names on a petition, including some very important people. And that ended up changing, I think, the direction from fatalism to, actually, we have a real chance here.

And I think the two lawsuits complement each other very well. So, you know, the state attorney's general lawsuit is really about changes in output and changes in bargaining leverage with distributors. So it says if there's one fewer studio, then they're going to have more leverage to cut more favorable deals with theater owners and get better splits on those deals. And therefore, theater owners are going to have to either raise ticket prices or reduce quality in their theaters, screens and sound and things like that.

And the same thing on cable. If you have 50 cable channels, you have more leverage to cut better deals. And therefore, the cable company is going to, going to have to raise prices to maintain their profit margins. And so that's that side of it. And then the WGA comes in with the labor side of it and says, actually, it's also bad for us who want to make stuff in Hollywood because, you know, we're going to have one fewer studio to negotiate with on the labor side. And so they're very complimentary. I think they may be combined into one lawsuit. we will see if, I believe today, we're taping this on Thursday, but I guess it's going to air on Friday.

Today there's a hearing. There's a hearing to see if there's a temporary restraining order to actually stop the companies from merging because they could do so sort of in defiance of these lawsuits. But if the temporary restraining order hits, and now I think Paramounting executives are kind of resigned to that happening, then they're sort of in the same boat that they would have been if the federal government tried to block this merger. And the TRO hearing that's going to be held, it's almost like a mini trial because the way that they give a temporary restraining order is they say, well, this has a likelihood of being successful. So we actually might know really quickly what the legal side of this is. And therefore, what's going to happen? And just the last thing, you know, there's this thing called a ticking fee that is involved in this. And it's going to create a lot of pressure on Paramount because every day after September 30th that this merger isn't closed, every single day, the purchase price gets larger and larger. And it's $7 million a day. And that ticking fee continues until this is over. And, you know, antitrust trials could take a year. So, you know, the money adds up. You're talking about a billion dollars, maybe more. And that's on top of all the debt that's being thrown around with this deal anyway. So it's going to put a lot of pressure on Paramount. They're certainly willing to go all the way to the Supreme Court. They hired a lawyer who's a Supreme Court solicitor. So they're ready to go with this thing. But I think that, you know, you put these two lawsuits together and there is a change in expectation. Yeah, I mean, seeing them sort of become resigned to the fact that they weren't going to

hit their target date to close, that is a manifest change in what has happened. Like regardless of what happens with this hearing, the fact that, okay, it seems like they're not going to hit their date, that's a big, that's a big change. And I also found it fascinating, it's fascinating to see the state AGs. sort of take the reins from the federal government. I can't think of another time. Maybe you guys can correct me that a collection of state AGs have fought an antitrust case on this level.

Pretty much always been the purview of the feds. At least I've asked folks, and I haven't heard of a case. And it's really interesting politically because David Weigel, I believe I read in semaphore, there was a piece a couple days ago that was sort of laying out the paramount position saying, you know, we should still be able to get this done. Why won't Rob Banta meet with us and cut a deal, like, and we'll make some concessions

and like he's turned us down and, oh, we'll have to leave California if they do this, da, da, da, da, da. And I think they might be missing the fact that like, this is a guy who didn't run for governor just so he could sue the Trump administration more. Right? Like, this is, this is Banta seeing the California, California Attorney General as being almost a shadow attorney general for the country in, to some extent. because that's what, you know, Biden's Attorney General would have been doing had he won, you know, as the election 2024.

So I'm curious how you see it, Weigel, in terms of the national politics of it. You laid it out well, I would add, and I've talked about this case, there's another report talking about that, but as he's litigated other things, when you talk about what this is what the Biden administration would have done, that it's kind of literal. There are people who've left DOJ as it's been directed in, in, in, towards Trump's different animus. And as the civil rights division has been turned into a way, a, a bureau to find ways to sue against white discrimination. Just, there's been this exodus of very qualified attorneys. And you've seen in, in D.C., where a lot is litigated, unprecedented losses for DOJ attorney. They should not be losing as much as they are. Yeah.

So there's a lot of, there's a lot of confidence in AG shops. And the ones who are part of this, too, the other states, they're part of this, all of them have, let's imagine, you're, you think you're going to spend your career at Maine Justice in, in D.C. This happens. Maybe you don't want to be a corporate attorney, but you want to keep doing good work. You're going to go to a state AG's office. They have a lot of talent working on this. And yes, the threat, the threat of paramount leaving, this is, this is something California's been dealing with every time a company can get a tax break. I don't expect Fonda to respond to that threat for the same reason. The only other thing I'd add is, It's not as daily relevant as the ticking fee. But this is something a lot of Democrats have told me they want to focus on if they get back to Congress. A very unifying issue for Democrats who are divided on many things, as we've discussed, is using investigative powers to go after corruption in the administration, possible kickbacks, the special treatment that companies have gotten by donating to the president. And so that's a lot of heat that is going to come. If Democrats win the House or the House or the Senate, win them both,

a lot of heat that's going to come on any potential to merger in six months. That is, I don't know how much that's on their attorney's minds, but there's less talent in the Trump administration, and there'd be even more people using their subpoena powers, using discovery to investigate what has been happening. Yeah. That can't be good for you. I've never run one of these companies.

I can't imagine you want two years of a Congress looking into you. The observation I'll make is, I said many times during the Biden administration that, I mean, look, I'm an antitrust wonk. I give a shit about this. Part of it's because of my work in Hollywood, and I saw how mergers destroyed the business for me and hundreds of my peers, how everyone is making less money. We have less places to sell our services. Hollywood is collapsing because of mergers that radicalize me on the issue. That is basically the writer's guilt's argument is that it's terrible for workers. and I've been making this argument for a long time.

When the Biden administration came in, it was the beginning of a sea change in antitrust policy. As Tim Wu and others chronicled, we had 40 years of pro-merger policy. And then things started to shift back in the other direction with, for instance, Lena Kahn's appointment to the FDC. And one of the saddest things about, you know, Biden losing, many sad things about it, many bad things happened.

But, you know, that work felt unfinished, right? Oh, my God. like they were just beginning to turn the boat the other way and now all those people are out of government. And what you see now is actually people like Lena Khan and Alvara Badoia, former FDC Commissioner, who are out of office leading the charge out of office. Like these people are in the news every single day

giving interviews but also putting together coalitions, like giving expert testimony. And so I've been impressed the way that it has almost felt like the antitrust movement or the antitrust enforcement movement has picked up steam out of office, which I think is, bodes really well for, you know,

the continuation of, of it in the future. We were talking about corruption the Trump administration. So let's just talk really quickly as our bonus topic. A very funny story that dropped just like a couple hours

before this recording that a White House teleprompter operator used his position to win around $100,000 by placing bets on the prediction market Kalshi about what President Trump would say in his speeches. First of all, that's funny that they even offer that. And in fact, you can go, Trump is going to give an address tonight.

And you can go bet tonight on whether he's going to say China. And maybe a good bet. But if you had access to his teleprompter speeches, you could be pretty sure he was going to say China. And also I find it fascinating that Kalshi recently paid Donald Trump Jr., I believe, around $300,000 for consulting work. So, you know, what do you guys make of this? story? Well, I mean, by the way, Trump Jr. also advises for a polymarket, which is the main

competitor to Calci. He's an advisor on both sides. You know, this comes in the middle. We need the antitrust has to look into that. But sorry. Yeah, exactly. This comes in the middle of a tug of war between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is a financial regulator in Washington, and the states over who gets to regulate these prediction markets. And any, to the extent that this is this massive corruption and people are losing tons of money to insiders who have perfect information and are gaming this system, I think that's going to vote really poorly for the CFTC side of the argument, which is that we have the sole authority to regulate these and everything's fine with these prediction markets. and they provide good information to, you know, the public, and they're a public, they're in the public national interest, which is actually the specific term that they use in their regulatory

proposal. You know, I think the state side of the argument is this is gambling, and we have rules against gambling in many, many ways, and they're just trying to circumvent it, and these guys should be kicked out of the market. And I think when you start seeing this preponderance, of stories of corruption within these prediction markets, that's going to have an effect on who wins this tugged war. Weigel? He said it very well. He set the context, but I, again, think if there are people who have the power soon to pull

over more rocks, there have been questions about money made on decisions around the Iraq war of timing of when the invasion was going to begin, of what Trump would say in his speech. That wasn't just the teleprompter operator. There are questions that have not been answered because of what is not being asked, what is not being investigated in D.C. right now. There clearly have been people making money based on what they learned from Trump, even around tariff timing. So this is just a bottomless pit of scandal that if somebody takes the lid off it is going to.

And my expertise is not what David says. It's more how things are. I fought over in elections and messaged, it's very understandable to people because a lot of people are thinking they're going to make some money on the side in these prediction markets. The idea that they are being rigged by people with political power is just baseline offensive. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, on the same day that this went down, it was reported that true social is going to be selling real-time faster access to stock market participants to investors of, Trump's tweets so they can run his tweets with information that is market moving. Ludicrous.

So more to come on this, I'm sure, we'll have plenty more example. Can you imagine, like, working for a government bureau and just going to Kalshi and being like, oh, fuck, I know, oh, that's wrong. Oh, I can bet on that. Like, hundreds of thousands of people are thinking this every single day. It's a massive honeypot for corruption on a massive scale. Thank you guys so much for being here.

It's been a wonderful time having you. Dave Weigel, where can people find your work? They can find it at Semaphore.com and on Blue Sky and on X still. I mean, whatever your opinion is about X still. A lot of happening, a lot of ways to make money on Kalshi, too, probably. But it's all, Dave Weigel's money on everything. I mean, maybe soon, you know, you can subscribe to X to get Elon's tweets a little bit sooner. All right.

He hasn't taken advantage of this money-making opportunity. And Dave Dan... He does need to do something to boost the SpaceX stock. Yeah, that would be a good idea. And Dave, Dan, the American Prospect, where else can people find you? Yeah, it's American Prospect at prospect.org. And, yeah, on social media at D-D-D-D-A-Y-E-N. Thank you guys so much for being here.

And, of course, you can support the show at patreon.com. slash Adam Conover. Thanks so much for being here. And we'll see you next week on Factually. That was a HeadGum podcast. Hi, I am Mandy Moore. Sterling K. Brown. And I'm Chris Sullivan.

And we host the podcast, That Was Us, now on Headgum. Each episode, we're going to go into a deep dive from our show, This Is Us. That's right. We're going to go episode by episode. We're also going to pepper in episodes with different guest stars and writers and casting directors. Are we going to cry? Yes. A little bit.

Often. A lot. A whole lot. That's what I'm hoping, man. Listen to that was us on your favorite podcast app, or what? watch full video episodes on YouTube or Spotify, new episodes every Tuesday.