No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Al Franken debunks Trump's RNC lies

Episode Date: August 30, 2020

Trump uses the RNC to try and paint Joe Biden as soft on crime to distract from coronavirus. And Brian interviews former Senator Al Franken about the lies from the RNC, what the best way to reach those suburban women is, and whether he’d run again for the Senate.Written by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CAhttps://www.briantylercohen.com/podcast/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we're going to talk about the Republican National Convention and Trump's desperation to paint Joe Biden as soft on crime to distract from coronavirus. And my interview with former Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, where we talk about the lies from the RNC, what the best way to reach those suburban women is, and whether he'd run again for the Senate. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. Okay, so the Republican National Convention. If you don't watch Fox News, the RNC was basically a... a four-day window into the dystopian fever dream that is Fox News prime time. It is some combination of outright lying coupled with just a relentless barrage of fear porn. Now, as far as the lies go, here are a few of the major ones.

We were told that Joe Biden is going to abolish the suburbs, which isn't true because what does that even mean? That he's going to revoke the Second Amendment, which again is absurd. Democrats are largely united behind an assault weapons ban. Just like the one that happened in the 90s and somehow miraculously the Second Amendment is still there. Democrats are also pushing for universal background checks, which, again, is not going to abolish the Second Amendment. They said Joe Biden supports executing babies until the moment of birth, which is insane and clearly not his position, that he would tear down the border wall. He never said any such thing, only that he wouldn't add to it, that he wants to defund the police.

That's not true. and, in fact, Biden wrote an op-ed in USA Today on June 10th saying, quote, while I do not believe federal dollars should go to police departments violating people's rights or turning to violence as the first resort, I do not support defunding the police. And in fact, Biden actually proposed more money to police departments. He proposed $300 million to police departments around the country to institute reforms like adopting a national use of force standard,

buying body cameras, and recruiting more diverse police. officers. They said Biden would shut down charter schools, which he's never said. Trump even hit Biden for voting for the Iraq war. The irony being that Trump also supported the Iraq war in the beginning. And Mike Pence, Trump's own vice president, not only voted in favor of it, he co-sponsored the war resolution. And they said Biden wants to abolish our borders. I don't even know what that means. So those were some of the lies. I'd be here all day if I had to cover them all, but The point is that the accusations they lob at Biden are complete fabrications. Like, I've always said, if you don't agree with the Democrats platform, attack that.

Like, debate on the merits. But their entire line of attack is against straw men. It's against things that do not exist. No one on either side wants open borders. So why waste your time arguing against that? The reason being, obviously, that their agenda is so unpopular that if they had to argue on the merits, they'd fail. So instead, they need to cook up big, scary, sweeping boogeymen because that's a lot more impactful than Republicans telling the truth and saying, we cut funding to

meals on wheels. We lock kids in cages on the southern border. We're in court trying to dismantle the ACA, which is the only law protecting coverage for preexisting conditions. All of those things, the truth, are way too unpopular for the Republicans to run on. So instead, they need to lie and and pretend that the left is running on dismantling babies and selling their parts. But more apparent than even the lies is the fearmongering. Not even the fearmongering. Straight fear porn, right? Like about boys using girls' locker rooms and school shootings and looting and rioting

and murders and burning down buildings, that if you elect Joe Biden, all of this carnage occurring right now will continue. The irony being that we're in Trump's America. Like, they're claiming that Joe Biden's America is so dangerous, but the president is Donald Trump. The pictures and videos that Fox News is playing on a loop are from an America that Donald Trump is in charge of. The way I know it's not Joe Biden's America

is that Joe Biden, not only isn't the president, he hasn't been in office for three and a half years. Republicans say it themselves that he's stuck in the basement. So how can you be stuck in the basement but also the mastermind behind the anarchy and lawlessness, apparently enveloping our communities. Kind of like how Joe Biden's in cognitive decline, but also the brains behind a far-left revolution set to overtake the country. Or how he's 47 years in Washington, just more of the same, but also ushering in radical leftism like we've never seen. Like, we don't need to rebut their attacks because they do that themselves.

And now, look, this law and order, schick, is obviously what Trump. wants to talk about because it's a way for him to distract from the obvious issue that's impacting everyone, which is coronavirus. And I'm going to get to that shortly, but I do want to stay on law and order for a moment. A few things here. First of all, Trump is not the law and order candidate. Trump is the guy who commits amoluments clause violations with the same frequency that most of us watch television. Trump is the guy who Robert Mueller indicated in his report in writing committed 10 instances of obstruction of justice. Trump's the guy who extorted a foreign country for dirt on Joe Biden and got impeached for it.

Trump's the guy who orchestrated a top-down, large-scale cover-up so that no one would find out. That is who Donald Trump is. He'll try and gaslight you into thinking that he stands up for law and order, but we all know by now that the things Trump says he stands for, he doesn't, and the things Trump attacks are the things that he himself represents. The next thing is that the irony of Trump trying to hijack law and order while painting Biden as some anarchist, is that Joe Biden has actually denounced the very violence that Trump's

claiming that he supports. This was Joe Biden immediately after the latest episode of violence in Kenosha. Protesting brutality is a right and absolutely necessary. But burning down communities is not protest. It's needless violence. Violence that endangers lives. Violence that guts businesses and shutters businesses serve the community. That's wrong. In the midst of this pain, the wisest words that I've heard spoken so far have come from Julia Jackson, Jacob's mother. She looked at the damage done in her community and she said this, quote,

this doesn't reflect my son or my family. So let's unite and heal, do justice, end the violence, and end systemic racism in this country now. So weird. I've listened to that at least three times and yeah, I just can't. pinpoint the part where Biden calls for the anarchists and the Marxists to take up arms and defend the Antifa manifesto. Yeah, maybe I just have to listen again. So the issue with claiming that

Joe Biden is soft on crime or that he's actually supportive of crime is that he's explicitly come out and offered a full-throated denunciation of it. But with that said, in fact, there is a presidential candidate who's supportive of crime, and that's Trump. He actually needs crime to exploit it for political purposes. And you don't have to take it from me. Here's Kellyanne Conway admitting as much. I also noticed there was a quote today from a restaurateur in Wisconsin saying, are you protesters trying to get Donald Trump reelected?

He knows full stop. And I guess Mayor Pete knows full stop. That the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who's best on public safety and law and order. That the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence, the better it is for who's best on law and order. And she's clearly suggesting that that person is Donald Trump. So if the Trump administration is so clearly operating under the assumption that more

vandalism, more violence will help Trump, then they are obviously not trying to stop it. I mean, come on, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out. Keliang Conway admitted violence helps Trump. Republicans have basically predicated the RNC on violence. Ergo, he does not want the violence to stop because the violence is. is his reelection strategy. And that's no secret, right? Because Trump is so ham-handed

that even when he has a brilliant plan to undermine his opponent, he makes it about as subtle as a heart attack. I mean, Biden himself has come out and acknowledged that this is exactly what Trump thrives off of. These guys are rooting for violence. That's what is all about.

To prove that you should be scared of Joe Biden, they're pointing to what's happening in Donald Trump's America? You know, I made it clear from the beginning that there's no place for violence or looting or burning. And when I spoke with Jacob Blake's mother, Julia, you guys played her on the air. She's saying, that's not who we are. That's not who our family is.

That's not who Jacob is. Don't do it. And so, you know, he continues to root for violence. It's, you know, the country will be substantially safer when he is no longer in office. And bear in mind, this isn't a new strategy promoting violence. Think back to Portland during the weeks of protest there. Who was the violence between? The federal troops, the paramilitary forces, and the people of Portland.

That was the violence. Meaning that without the troops, the violence would have subsided. So the fact that the troops stayed when their very presence was the cause of the turmoil goes to show that the violence was the point. This way Trump could shriek about Democrat-run cities and Fox News would have plenty of footage to air on a 24-hour loop to somehow try and convince people that Joe Biden's America is too dangerous, even though it's not Joe Biden's America, it's Trump's America, but Fox News doesn't operate in this

plane of reality, and so somehow that piece of information doesn't seem to matter. But the real question amid all of this is, will it matter to the suburban moms that seem to be the coveted group at play here? And my honest answer is that if Republicans are trying to reach these people, the suburban housewives, as they put it, I don't know that the way to accomplish that is by railing against radical leftist, communist rule and abolishing the borders of the country.

Like, that's how you went over the Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson white ethnostaters. Those people here abolishing the suburbs and they're in. They're on board. You got him. Not sure Trump ever didn't have them, but now he's really got him. But in terms of the regular swing voters,

I think they're less interested in Trump's threats of anarchy and disappearing borders and more interested in the pandemic sweeping across the country, the pandemic that has killed more than 180,000 Americans, the pandemic that might be keeping their kids home from school, and so they have to figure out how to juggle work and teaching. Like, that seems to be the more pressing issue here as opposed to, I don't know, infanticide. Like, what Trump and Republicans don't realize, and what they've refused to realize since the beginning is that the virus being politically

inconvenient for them did not make it go away. It's still here and it is patient. And while the GOP might have signaled that they're done caring, the virus hasn't. And that's something that people are worried about. And in a way, Republicans insistence on prioritizing this violence and looters and rioters in like two cities over the pandemic currently killing a thousand people a day all across America is all the proof you need that they're not taking this seriously. And if they're not taking it seriously now during the election when they're making their pitch to voters, when they're on their best behavior, you can bet your ass they're not going to pay attention to it after the election if they win. All we've got so far

was Hail Marys for hydroxychloroquine and disinfectant, and that's with the election on the line. If Trump wins, he will put a Trump-branded face mask up for sale on his website, and you can call it a day. So look, I can obviously only speak for myself, but you've got to imagine that 99 out of 100 Americans see the threat of coronavirus as the more important issue here. And the two campaigns could not have made it clearer

which issues they are willing to prioritize. So if you're worried about this virus and you're looking for a leader who is willing to acknowledge it, not to mention actually working to solve it, then you should vote for Biden. If you're looking for a leader who'd rather denounce the violence as opposed to exploit it for his political benefit, then again, that's Joe. But if your thing is maintaining that violence, if your thing is pretending the pandemic, that's not over, is over, then maybe you guys Donald Trump. But I would be willing to bet which one of those resonates more with America.

Americans. Next step is my interview with former Minnesota Senator Al Franken. And in the aftermath of a Republican convention that was steeped in lies, there is no one better to talk to to call those lies out. Okay, I got to say we've got a great one today. You know him from, I had to take that line from you. Sure. You know him from his time on Saturday Night Live and then later as a United States

Senator from Minnesota. Al Franken, thanks so much for coming on. You bet. Pleasure to be on, Brian. So let's start off right off the bat with a Republican convention full of, you know, lies and the lying liars who tell them to borrow a phrase. Do you think that the suburban housewives that Republicans are trying to reach are buying the frothing lies at the RNC, you know, that Democrats want to abolish the suburbs and send our jobs to China and then end the Second Amendment and eliminate all borders? Yeah, you know, suburban women. Uh, suburban women in 2018, uh, voted on health care. And that's why we picked up 41 swing districts.

Um, we have to carry that message to them. They're, you know, they're obviously, uh, the couple from, uh, St. Louis, uh, the brandishers is I call them, Mr. Mrs. Brandish. Um, they, uh, they actually said, right, they're going to go to get rid of the suburbs. that we were going to eliminate the suburbs. Was that it? Eliminate the suburbs, eliminate borders. There was a point at the convention where they were saying that, you know, we're out here to dismantle babies and sell them for parts. I mean, like... Yeah, that Biden was for ripping a baby just before birth.

Out of the womb, yeah. Yeah. And look, we should go through the lies. But there is this thing, which I'm not sure. sure that's sufficient to go through their line because we do that. And you see that the problem now seems to be that there are people get their media from very different places. So probably the people that are going to be watching this and listening to this are maybe already convinced that they lie. So the question is when I was watching this,

is I'm obviously a stickler on facts. That's why I wrote lies and lying liars who tell them if fair and balance look at the right. And that's why I wrote Rush Limbaugh's a big fat idiot. And that's why I wrote the truth with jokes. And that's kind of what I do. I mean, that's one of the things I've done. And yeah, it's, I'm kind of interested in the lies

that haven't really been covered that much. I'm from Minnesota One of the things he's talked about is how tough he's been on China And he really is bungled In my opinion, how he's dealt with China And he says this all the time And he didn't say it at the convention He said it in Charlotte

In his acceptance speech after the delegates voted Him unanimously renominated him He said that that the Chinese have paid tens of billions of dollars in tariffs. Now, have you heard him say that? Yes, numerous times. No, they haven't paid a cent. The country's sending you goods.

They're sending Chinese TVs that Best Buy is bringing in. Best Buy pays the tariff. Which then passed on to the American consumer. Right. We used to sell them a whole bunch of soybeans and corn because we have a huge surplus that we can ship to places like China in soybeans and corn. Well, that was their retaliation, was putting sanctions on that. And what happened? Our farm economy just went completely south.

and we saw farmers committing suicide. First tranche to farmers did not by any means make farmers whole was $12 billion. That was our taxpayer's money paying for his boneheaded sanctions the way he did that with China. But that's a lie. he says it all the time billions and billions and tens of billions of dollars in tariffs they haven't paid a cent and it has an effect on the lives of people who were Trump voters and shouldn't be Trump voters and those are the farmers in Minnesota it might almost be better to you know to focus on unlike you said on on things like this that have a material impact

on people as opposed to, you know, I know the lies like eliminating all borders and abolishing the suburbs are sexier because they're just that much more insane, right? Yeah, they're, they're scaring people. It's fear. Obviously, that's a big play. That's their big, one of their big plays is scaring people. Yeah, I mean, the entire RNC is just basically predicated on fear porn. But I was talking about suburban women, okay? Yeah. health care. So the press secretary, Kaylee McAnney, gave a very personal speech at the convention you saw it.

It was about a preexisting condition that she had, which is a hereditary thing about her inheriting the propensity to get breast cancer. And, you know, it was a very personal story, appreciated that. The thing is, it was supposed to be her story on pre-existing conditions on how the president cares so much about pre-existing conditions, except in 2017, when I was there and voted against the Republican Senate bill and saw what was going on in the House, what their bills were. None of those bills protected people with pre-existing conditions. In fact, the only thing we have protecting coverage for preexisting conditions, the only thing

that protects us right now is the ACA, and they're in court right now suing to overturn it. You're suing to overturn it, exactly. And, you know, remember he said in 16 that he's going to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, he said, was something terrific, something terrific. Well, he didn't do that. Remember promises made, promises kept? You know, Mexico, first of all, he hasn't built the wall, and the non-existent wall, Mexico hasn't paid for that. That was paid for by Bannon and his contributor. Right, right. Or what little they allocated to the wall when they were done with the yachts and paying off their credit card debt. I tweeted that that Bannon

and the other the other crooks at the we build the wall had actually knocked down two miles of the wall and resold the rebar on Craigslist

and a lot of people believed it this is what happened you tweet something like that and about really that's terrible yeah so there's nothing. There's nothing that they can do that people just go, that is just awful. That is awful that they did that. But yeah, no, they, and then when McCain did the thumbs down, he actually

said this. Who knew health care was complicated? Everyone schmuck? Everyone. And so, you know, pretty much everything said there is a lie. I mean, he went after China and he went after the Bidens of China. He was introduced by his daughter who's gotten, I believe it's 18 trademarks from the Chinese. It's going to be scary. This is very frightening. And he's playing the fear card big time. and okay you know you're the president you're the president you've been that way for

over three and a half years now and well let me let me ask like i mean like you're saying i mean these things the you know from from kaley mackinney's lie to um to the you know the economy and the tariffs lie clearly the goal of the rnc is to distract people from the in this country from from the principal issue that we're facing right now which is the pandemic that's killed 180,000 Americans and continues to kill 1,000 people a day. So do you think that, you know, the blatant misdirection efforts are helping or hurting them? I don't know. And I don't think that, you know, I saw, I've seen a lot of commentary saying, oh, you know, people aren't, I don't know. I don't know. We'll see some, whether they get some bump from this.

We don't know if people get bumps anymore from conventions, but we shall see. I, you know, this fear, the city is exploding, you know, that is what they're counting on. But the pandemic, of course, is the big lie, and they lied, they just lie about that. And so it was, he saved millions of lives. Really? First of all, we have 4% of the world's population and 25% of the fatalities. I don't think he saved millions of lives. The crazy part about that is he gives that example, you know,

as if it's the shining example of his heroism. But his having, you know, quote, quote, saved millions of lives is in the event that he had done nothing at all, as if, you know, as if the bar for the president of the United States is to do nothing, but if he deigns to do something at all, the bare minimum, then he's a hero. Well, he, first of all, he denied that there was a problem for two months. Right. So that alone is responsible for tens and tens of thousands of deaths, not doing anything. And it wasn't like he wasn't told in his presidential daily brief and it wasn't like azar didn't go to him and tell him what what it was and he actually

called azar an alarmist and said i don't want to talk about that what i want to talk about is smoking the vaping and i it's i'm really mad that kids can't vape bubblegum and literally that was azar's meeting with him this is going to potentially hundreds of thousands of people, you're an alarmist. I want to talk about how man I am about the ban on vaping these slavers. Johnny Ernst, who's, was my colleague and is currently still, she's running for re-election in Iowa. She said that in 2014, when she was running then that Obama had displayed a failure of leadership on Ebola and two people, two Americans died on Ebola in Dallas at the hospital where they screwed up. And that was a

tragedy, but it was two people. And so Dana Bash on CNN said to her, okay, you said that President Obama showed a failure of leadership on Ebola, and we lost two Americans. We've lost now, and I think at that point it was 160,000 Americans. You think Trump has displayed a failure in leadership. And then she went into a good, I don't know, two-minute blah, blah, blah, on wearing masks and social distancing. Sounds like that. finally Dana Bash said okay okay let her did that thing where you let him speak and I don't know why

they do that anyway and she said but and she said has Trump shown a failure in leadership and she said no my former Republican colleagues have been the worst kind of enablers and it's all been fear it's all been fear of they'll lose their jobs if they do anything and that Trump will go after them and they'll get primaried and they should pay a price for this. We obviously need to elect President Biden and give him a majority in the Senate and then we can start to, first of all, heal this wounded nation. This has been, you know, I'm 69 years old. I've been around for assassinations for Vietnam for 9-11 the war in Iraq obviously this is the darkest period I think I can remember I was around for the civil rights fight this is so dark right now

one 180,000 Americans and counting but and but also people at home trapped at home kids not able to go to school um you know i have i have four grandchildren um three of them who have been doing virtual learning uh we don't know what's going to happen this fall uh it'd be great you know it's it's damaging both ways and this did not have to happen. I wrote a piece called how a malignant narcissist could

successfully handle the coronavirus. And I basically say that a malignant narcissist of merely average intelligence would have known that handling this would have reassured his re-election.

And we didn't have that. We didn't have that. And it's on him. It is all on him. We would have had a pandemic, no matter what. We've had a global pandemic. We would have had it. We didn't have to have an out-to-control pandemic. The disadvantage for him of that is, like you said, and I don't think anybody doubts the fact that we would have had a pandemic. And of course, no one is saying that the pandemic in and of itself is Donald Trump's fault. But obviously the way he handled it is his fault. And, you know, we have the benefit, so to speak, of being able to look at every other country in the world

and see how they handled it. So it's not like we live in a vacuum, right? We can look right up north at Canada. We can look at New Zealand. We can look at South Korea and Germany and all of these other countries who handled it successfully, who did, you know, who put the work in to contain the spread, who enacted, you know, created a nationwide testing and contact tracing system who created enough PPE, produce enough PPE for their frontline workers who instituted nationwide mask mandates and who advocated for stay-at-home orders as opposed to politicize masks, as opposed to foment protests against stay-at-home orders. They did what you're supposed to do.

They listened to the scientists instead of their son-in-law. And also, because the man will not admit a mistake, he continues to say, Well, it's, no, I stand by. It will disappear and the sun will disappear in about four billion years. It'll burn, it'll run out of the hydrogen. It'll explode. And it'll be this red star that goes out actually past the earth. I mean, it'll envelop the first three planets.

And that's when the coronavirus will be gone. That'll die then. So anyway. So my fear is, you know, there was a lot of screaming about last night about the Hatch Act. We're not going to win this election on people who are scandalized by him violating the Hatch Act. And I looked at that last night and I went like, there's a lot of Americans are going to look at that and go like, gosh, that is just gorgeous. That is, that's presidential. That's it.

You know, we had, I thought Biden gave a fabulous speech. I thought that was the best speech of the convention, frankly, because it was the most important speech. And, and I thought, you know, there were a lot of great speeches. But that one was the most important speech. And I thought it was great. And we're going to see whether people respond to one guy directly in the camera, telling what he wants to do, and also talking about.

about bringing people together and versus what we saw last night. And I am I am not sure which prevails. And I will see. We'll see. But he will do anything to win this election. When you say, if I don't win, that means it was rigged. is basically a way of saying, I can't win without cheating. That's really what he's saying.

And he's going to in any way he can. Well, let me ask you this. I just want to switch gears to something that you were speaking about a little earlier, and that was, you know, taking back the Senate and obviously the presidency. In a situation where we are able to flip the Senate, I feel like the thing that always happens is that Democrats are, the ones who, you know, decide that we have to take the high road and that we're the ones who have to unify. So, so basically in the Republican's ideal world, they get to move things

as far right as humanly possible. I mean, basically, you know, destroy the institutions of government and bend them to their will. And on the left, in our ideal world, it's, it's unity, it's compromise. And that's what it seems to be so often, you know, like when, when Republicans are empowered. The things that they accomplish for themselves are just bananas, you know, and the things that Democrats try to do, they screech about, and then when the tables are turned, they're doing the same thing 10 times worse. So in the event that we do take the Senate, do you think that there will be, you know, deference to compromise, or do you think that finally we would see some type of aggressive push to enact our agenda, an aggressive push to bring Puerto Rico

on as the 51st state, to abolish the filibuster, to, uh, pass, you know, a new voting rights act, to pass the Green New Deal, to all of, you know, everything on our Democratic wish list. What are your thoughts on that? I think we will move to get rid of the filibuster. It's going to go sooner or later. You've seen Mitch McConnell break pretty much every rule. The most egregious, of course, was not giving Merrick Garland a hearing. And, you know, he, He has said just a couple months ago, he was asked if vacancy comes up in the Supreme Court during this year, would you, you know, hear, nominate a nomination, would you have hearings and confirm a replacement? And not only did he say yes, he said it with a sly smile.

right and of course that's as cynical as you can get they eliminated the blue slip i know that you know that i don't know if all of your uh listeners and viewers do the blue slip was something had been in place for over a hundred years which gave senators from states from the opposite party of the president a veto on federal judges for their state and it was actually ended on me a judge that was going to be in the minnesota our judge a federal judge in a circuit court and what that had done is now Republicans have been vetoing like Ted Cruz that just had not done what you normally would do, which is appoint some committee in your state of a bipartisan committee of legal lawyers in your state and find someone who's respected of the president's party.

And that's what I wanted to do, find a Republican, but I'd find we'd find someone who's very well respected. And that's why up until now, the federal judiciary has been a very respected institution. They ruined that. They are just putting through people who are just not qualified and ideologs. And we're not going to reinstitute the blue slip. So they ruined the federal court, really, for the rest of time. We're not going to put unqualified ideologues on. We're going to put, you know, progressives who are qualified.

But this, they have done incredible damage to the institution of the Senate, the institution of the presidency, and I fear what will happen if we don't win both the White House and the Senate. Well, I feel like, you know, and putting aside all of the things that all the points of hypocrisy from Trump. I guess the broader question is, how does the country come back from this? Like, in the event that Biden wins, because if Trump wins, I don't think we come back from this.

But if Biden wins, is there a way back to normalcy? Are you talking about unifying people? There's going to be, if Trump loses, he's going to, you know, lead the resistance. And he'll go on, what is it, AOM? is that the O-A-N, yeah. He'll take that over

and he'll be aggrieved. He'll say it was stolen. And this is not, we're not going to be healed as a nation completely at all, at all. Hopefully, you know, we're going to be able to do the kinds of things

that most Americans want. Most Americans want us to build on the Affordable Care Act. Not get rid of it. Most Americans understand that climate change is a real thing. They want us to rejoin the Paris Accords and they want us to. And those are jobs. I mean, did Trump add any coal jobs in the three and a half years?

No, of course not. Those are real jobs. And in retrofitting, why didn't it not just retrofit our buildings that are not energy efficient. There's a lot of manufacturing on that. There's a lot of jobs in that. You save tremendous amount of energy. Why Americans want our infrastructure

to resemble that of the rest of the developed world. They would like our airports and roads and bridges and railroads for God's sakes. So just even resemble the rest of the developed world.

There's lots of things we want to do. And again, Again, we're going to have to get rid of the filibuster. There's no question about that in my mind. But it's going to be rough. This guy is so invested in tearing people apart that, man, he's not going away. Well, let me ask, do you think that the future of the Republican Party resembles more closely, you know, a Don Jr. or a Nikki Haley? And that's not to normalize Nikki Haley because I don't think that she, uh,

deserves normalization, but, you know, in terms of the, you know, the extremist versus what the Republican version of a moderate is. I don't know. I do know that his base is his base and it has become the party of Trump. I love their platform was, whatever he wants. And I don't know if you saw this interview he had with Sean Hannity where Sean Hannity asked him what his goals were for a second term and he had nothing. In fact, he was asked that question four times. He had four attempts on Fox News

and every time it was just this rambling diatribe of just words falling out of his mouth and, you know, with no real through line and he never gave an answer. We've had four attempts. And even the convention, you know, the convention was his opportunity to to give his vision for for trump's america and his vision was don't elect joe biden because everything that's happening in trump's america

will happen in joe biden's america look at biden's america there's rioting in the streets there's you know how the guy when he did the uh about rushmore speech i was on uh one of the ms NBC shows and I was asked about that and I said I thought he had the racists I thought he had them but evidently there's a whole untapped group of racists that didn't vote in 16 and the fear that again the brandishers brought and just the some of the speeches they were so apocalyptic. They're going to lock you in your homes. It was pretty bizarre. The fear porn is what they rely on. I don't think that this party, the problem with the Republican Party is that it's so predicated on this like this Fox News fear mongering that when they actually have the chance

to govern, they don't, they're not prepared to govern because their entire brand is predicated on just scaring people into not electing Democrats, and they never got to the second part, which is what to do when they're in power. Look what the, uh, that Han did at the FDA on convalescent plasma. He lied, the head of the FDA. So that Trump could present this as, uh, like another miracle cure like hydroxychloroquine. And he, he allowed that to, go out too. Europe is not going to take our products. You know, Minnesota has a big medical device industry. Those have to be approved by the FDA. Europe is not going to take our pharmaceuticals. They're not going to take our medical devices. If the head of, if the commissioner

of the FDA is lying. I don't even think Americans are going to take our products. Here is the huge danger of this. Last night, he said we're going to have a vaccine by the end of the year, probably sooner. Of course, he's going to announce it before the election. Who's going to take that vaccine? You know, between hydroxychlorically and drinking chloroxin, this guy is ridiculous. And we have enough anti-vaxxers as it is. but would you take it or would you you know you're young so i don't i wouldn't recommend

it being the first one to take this it's a legitimate question because uh because obviously like you know i'm the furthest thing from an antivaxer but but you've seen what he's what he's done to our cdc and the fda and you you can see right off the bat i mean they just uh they just changed the guidelines that said that you don't have to be that you don't have to be that you don't to be tested if you're not showing symptoms. Well, that was the whole issue in the beginning is that you can spread this thing asymptomatically. And so if you don't test people who aren't showing symptoms, then you're missing out on a huge swath of people who are still infected with this virus. That's would allow this thing to explode in this country in the first place. So, you know, it's a good question.

And of course, you know, I'd be the last person to say, don't take this vaccine, but I'm not going to stick something in my body that I don't think is safe, you know, and I don't think anybody else would either. And I'm definitely not going to do it to appease the ego of somebody who's trying to shoehorn a vaccine and to help himself politically. The number one thing that a president asset that a president can bring to a crisis is trust and credibility. And he had squandered that long, long time before this crisis, obviously, by lying all the time. And but, but, but, But he's just continued to do that throughout this. You know, remember early on at the CDC, he said, anybody wants a test can get one.

And the fact is, is that you have to wait so long to find out the results of your test that it really almost borders unuseless. it this has been handled so criminally and the result is i mean this is a hundred and 80,000 and counting and we know where it's going and it isn't like he's a guy who can't admit a mistake so there's been no like okay uh really should have we really should be working hard at developing a test that as an instant, you know, you get a result right away. We really should do contact tracing. We really should isolate people. You know, Andy Slavitt, the former head of Medicare and Medicaid under Obama, and Scott Gottlieb,

who is head of the FDA prior for Trumps, this is bipartisan, months ago, put together a plan to do exactly what I was talking about, which is to do contact tracing and then isolation, including taking people who have tested positive and isolating them in a hotel. We've seen these hotels going, you know, going under or suffering, having no business and put a workforce together of, you know, 180,000 people. who would be going, literally going door to door or contacting people. And this is how, this is how you do that. This is how we eradicated smallpox.

That's how you do it. And that was bipartisan. A lot of people signed on to that. Nope, didn't do it. And that would have more than paid for itself. It was like $45 billion, but more, more than many times. over. And everyone has to remember the economic cost of this. We talk about the human costs in terms of tragedy. There's human costs in terms of the economic costs. People are, you know,

tens of millions out of work. The gap, this has exposed, the pandemic has exposed many of the weaknesses in our society, the gap between those who are white collar, high income or upper income versus the essential workers that have to go to the grocery store and man that and who are the black and brown people who are disproportionately the ones who are are dying. This, this has, this has shown a lot of the weaknesses in our country that have to be addressed. So let's, let's switch over to you for a little bit.

How did you go from Saturday Night Live to the Senate, which isn't necessarily known for humor or, or joy? Yeah. And not lose your mind. Well, I had my eye on the prize. also there was some intervening years I did the years I did at SNL were I was one of the original writers 75 to 80 left when Lauren left came back I was a Lauren again writer so I came back in 85 and went till 95 and then after that I think when I left when I left SNL the first thing I did was right

was right Rush Limba was a big fat idiot and other observations and that was about lying and it was about, you know, the fact that Rush Limbaugh got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, there's no coincidence. Without Rush Limbaugh, there probably no President Donald Trump. And my next big New York Times number one bestseller was lies and lying liars who tell them a fair and balance look at the right, which, of course, was pretty much the same thing, but with a focus on Fox. and other right-wing wires. And so, and then I was doing it, then I did Air America, which was, you know, the number one rated progressive radio show for three years. And then I ran for the Senate.

But when I ran for the Senate, I, in large part ran, because Paul Wellstone was a friend of mine after he died very shortly before the election in 2002 Norm Coleman was elected and not long after he said to be blunt after he was in office

like two months and he said to be blunt I'm a 99% improvement over Paul Wellstone and I said, hmm, I wonder who's going to beat him. Would you run for office again? I'm not considering that. I love my job in the Senate. It was the best job I ever had. I started my Al Franken Giant of the Senate,

the ironically now named memoir. I started by saying a lot of people have asked me, is being senator as much fun as working on Saturday Night Live. And I said, the answer, of course, is no, but it's the best job I ever had. So I really love doing that. I love working for the people in Minnesota. So I don't know. I don't know.

All right, Al, where can my viewers and listeners find you? There's this thing called podcasts, I think, that you're familiar with. And if you have an app for them, as they say, wherever you get your podcast, there's the Al Franken podcast. You can also find me on YouTube every once in a while, like you.

I don't have the audience on my YouTube yet. Yet, I've been watching you now. You're smart. All right, well, if you're watching this and you're on YouTube, go on over to Al's page. Yeah, subscribe to my page. But, yeah, the podcast is the Al,

Franken Podcasts. It's an eponymous podcast. Well, you understand now in context what everyone listening and watching understands what

eponymous means. But my listeners, my podcast, knew what eponymous meant even before that because they're very well-educated, affluent,

which is very good. This is really just a message for possible sponsors. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Your podcast audience is a very, very affluent, evenly split now, female in the, in the coveted 25 to 45 demo. Yes. I actually don't know, but I assume that is not entirely true. I would recommend your podcast to folks, but you're listening to it now. Or watching it on the, yes, but I may, and so, yeah, check it out. It's great for a change. Every, what you're referring to for your listeners and viewers is that at the start,

I always say, well, we've got a great one today, you know, for a change. And then, and that's become my signature. Oh, enough for me to have to have gleaned it and used it for this. one. Yeah. So thanks for the homage there. And thanks for having me. It's been very, very fun. And congratulations on all of your success doing this and for what you contribute to the dialogue. And you're an explainer. I like that. We need explainers. And so on your YouTube very often, And it's just you take, you take, you know, the Chris Wallace interview with Trump and then explain, you take a piece of it and then explain it. My favorite part, of course, was him bragging about passing a dementia test.

And, you know, usually, usually you don't hear people brag about passing dementia test. and usually they don't give you one if you're really operating on all cylinder. They don't go like, Mr. President, you have been sharp as a tack lately. You know, it would be fun to see if you can identify an elephant. Right. What? Yeah. So your explainers are great.

Oh, thanks. Well, Al Franken, thanks so much for coming on. We really appreciate it. Brian, thank you. Thanks again to Al Franken. That's it for this episode. you next week. You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen. Produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, interviews captured and edited for YouTube

and Facebook by Nicholas Nicotera, and recorded in Los Angeles, California. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe in your preferred podcast app. Feel free to leave a five-star rating and a review, and check out Briantylercoen.com for links to all of my other channels.