Pod Save America - “A feckless despot.”

Episode Date: October 12, 2017

Trump continues to sabotage Obamacare, threatens to pull media licenses, threatens the NFL’s tax exemption, wishes for more nuclear weapons, and yells that he hates everyone in the White House. Then Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow talks to Ana and Dan in Ann Arbor, and Michigan gubernatorial candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed talks to Ana and Jon. 

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On the pod today, we will be airing the interviews from our two live shows in Ann Arbor on Friday. The first is with Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow, and the second is with Michigan gubernatorial candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. Great interviews, both of them. So we'll be hearing those after Dan and I run down the news.

Good tour, Dan, huh? Did you have fun? Yeah, it was fun. It was great. And thank you to everyone who came out to see us. We had great crowds and really great questions from people. Our Chicago show is up as a live,

as a bonus pod right now. So that's good. The other ones are up as a live, as a bonus pod right now. So that's good. The other ones are up as, I think we have Cleveland up and we have Madison up as well. And then now you're going to hear the interviews from Ann Arbor. So good trip. And we'll see everyone. So much content. So much content.

So much. Speaking of content, Tommy's Pod Save the World. Tommy interviewed Elliot Cohen, who was a counselor to Condoleezza Rice during the Bush administration. He wrote a really interesting critique of Trump's foreign policy record from a Republican perspective. So they dig into that. They also talk about Elliot's views in Iran, North Korea, and what the hell it means to have a Republican or Democratic foreign policy worldview in the Trump era when everything is so scrambled. So go check that out. Everything is so scrambled.

So go check that out. Crooked.com is just swimming in pieces right now. Dan Pfeiffer has a piece up on Crooked.com about Democrats' gun strategy, which is excellent, Dan. I read it last night. Thank you. Alyssa Mastromonaco, friend of the pod, has her inaugural piece up on Crooked.com this morning, as does Ben Rhodes. Alyssa's is about her West Wing and how a president should fill the role of president. And Ben Rhodes is on the Iran deal, which Trump is expected to decertify tomorrow, which we talked a little bit about during some of our live shows.

And of course, Brian Boitler is just churning out content left and right as our editor-in-chief. So lots going on on cricket.com. Check it out. Before we jump into everything Trump, I wanted to talk about the wildfires that are continuing to just devastate Sonoma County in California, just north of where you are, Dan, in San Francisco. I think the latest count is there's 23 dead and still hundreds missing, which is very scary. Yeah, it's really so it's Napa and Sonoma County and sort of north of the Northern California, right. And you can smell I can smell the smoke in my apartment right now. Oh, wow. It's not physically close to here. Like so no, San Francisco isn't any danger. So I'm not trying to imply that

but it is but the wind is blowing the smoke into city, and a lot of people aren't going to work or going to school because of air quality. And so it's a reminder of how serious these fires are. And so there are a lot of different ways that our listeners can help, from large charitable organizations to campaigns to help individual people, then helping animal shelters and other local food banks. And so as opposed to running debt, spending 30 minutes running down all of those, I will tweet out an article from Fast Company that has links to the local shelters and local organizations and national ones who are helping because it's a really scary situation and it's getting, they are not making the progress because of weather reasons that

they had hoped to by this point. And so it's a very scary situation for a lot of people who, who are displaced and, uh, and whose property is in, has been destroyed or is in grave danger. Oh, good. Well, check that out. Uh, when Dan tweets that out, everyone and, uh, should also say that in Puerto Rico, the death count there is still rising. And there are still way too many people who don't have access to electricity. In fact, most of the island, there's still way too many people who don't have access to clean drinking water. There was a report this morning that people in Puerto Rico are drinking from Superfund sites, which are toxic because there's not enough clean water. I mean, it's really bad down there.

And, of course, did you see Dan Trump's tweets this morning about Puerto Rico? Just sort of out of the blue where he said, by the way, we can't stay forever. FEMA can't stay forever. Like, what the fuck was that? So, and then did you also see reports that the aid package for Puerto Rico is a loan? No. So we're going to help you, but you're going to have to pay us back $5 billion.

Chris Hayes has been tweeting and talking about this, and I think it's really worth listening to what he's saying. Because guess what? No one's saying that any day now FEMA is going to leave Florida or Texas, and Texas and Florida aren't being forced to pay back the money to repair their homes and give them free drinking water. But there's something unique about Puerto Rico that seems to irk Trump in a certain way. I'm not going to speculate about what it is, but it's something. Again, these are American citizens. They have all the rights of every other American citizen in every single state in the country. Just because Puerto Rico is a territory doesn't mean that these aren't citizens that have

the same rights as the rest of us. So this is, it's completely bullshit what Trump is doing, and we should not forget about it. And if you want to help Puerto Rico, go to globalgiving.org, and you can continue helping out the people there who desperately need help right now. So lots to talk about today in the news, all sort of swirling around Donald Trump. I think the theme of everything that we're about to talk about, Dan, is that Trump is not a happy camper right now. His legislative agenda has completely fallen apart. He has been president nine months, and he has not had one single major legislative achievement.

He has been able to get nothing through Congress despite having a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate. He doesn't have a national security accomplishment to speak of. About 60-something percent of the country think he's doing a shitty job as president. His approval ratings are lower than just about any other president in modern history at this point in the presidency. Just horrible press coverage, except for the MAGA media, Fox News and Breitbart, everywhere else, even conservative outlets like National Review and Weekly Standard, just terrible coverage for Trump.

And so he is angry. He's unraveling a bit. And so he's turning to executive orders because he has power there. He's trying to start culture wars. And he's tweeting about Kim Jong-un and other kind of national security issues, because that's all he can do. So that's sort of the backdrop to what we're about to talk about. And what he just did, what Trump just did, as we're starting to record this on Thursday morning, is sign an executive order on health care. This executive order would allow insurance companies to sell

shittier health care plans that don't cover pre-existing conditions and don't offer benefits like mental health care, maternity care, or prescription drug coverage. The idea is if enough healthy people buy these shittier Trumpcare plans, it will leave only sick people with the Obamacare plans. And as a result of that, prices will go up. At some point, this could cause insurance companies to pull out of entire counties or states. One thing we should know is that states can still regulate their own health insurance plans and make sure that their health insurance plans do cover pre-existing conditions and do cover some of these essential benefits that the Affordable Care Act tells you you have to cover, like maternity care, prescription drug coverage, etc.

So this executive order could matter most in red states, where Republican governors want to follow Trump's lead, and matter less in blue states. But either way, it is not a good thing for the Obamacare insurance markets. Dan, what do you think about this? Well, I like that you said that they want to follow Trump's lead, which I think is a very generous description of Republican governors. I like to think about it that they hate Barack Obama more than they love their own constituents. So they're willing to make them suffer. It feels like the Affordable Care Act battle is never ending, right?

It's like you defeat it. You know, it's like you're sticking your finger in the dike, right? Like we beat Skinny Repeal. We beat BICRA. We beat ACHA. We beat whatever the thing is that we last beat that caused him to give up.

And then Trump just takes out his pen and signs an executive order that potentially has grave consequences for a lot of Americans. And, you know, I was talking about it with Hallie this morning, and she's like, you have to talk about the executive order. I was like, trust me, we're gonna talk about the executive order. And I was like, but what's so hard about it is on the other battles, you could say, here's what you can do, call your member of Congress, right? Protests show up. And here is this is, in could say, here's what you can do. Call your member of Congress, right? Protest, show up. And here is, this is, in this situation right now, we feel the consequences of losing presidential elections, where with just a pen, our president can do something incredibly damaging. But what we can do is Congress has the power to affect the implementation of these orders. They

can use the power of the purse to infect them. They can use the congressional review process in other ways. And so if you needed one more possible reason, and I can't imagine that would be the case, but if you did to care about, organize, and go vote in 2018, this is one of those reasons, right? Like the battle against Obamacare is going to go until the day Trump leaves office, but we can make progress in 2018. Yeah, there also could be legal and there will be probably legal challenges to this executive order as the agencies try to implement it. The executive agencies are the ones like the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor.

These are the people who are charged with actually implementing this executive order. And so how they will do it, when they will do it is unknown at this point. The other thing is, you know, we talked a lot on the tour about Get America Covered, an organization that sprouted up to try to sort of take some of the outreach effort into their own hands from, because since the federal government decides, has decided that they don't want to do an outreach effort to get people to enroll in Obamacare. But the more people we enroll in the Affordable Care Act, the less of an impact this executive order will have. And again, if you are someone who qualifies for subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, if you signed up

for health insurance and you qualify for subsidies, insurance companies raising premiums and raising prices on these plans will not affect you because by law, your subsidies rise with the premiums. So if the premiums go up, so does your subsidies go up. So those people, so basically what this executive order could do is cost the federal government a lot of money because subsidies will rise along with the premiums for a lot of people. A lot, the people that will really affect is people who sign up for health insurance for the Affordable Care Act who don't qualify for subsidies, which are a lot of middle class people. And so this is who Trump, these Trump care plans are really going to hurt middle class people who sign up, who need to sign up with pre-existing conditions, who try to sign up for Affordable Care Act plans, don't qualify for subsidies and suddenly get hit with these rising premiums because this executive order could potentially really fuck up the insurance market. And that's a real problem. But, you know, if you

go to Get America Covered, you know, we have a very small window because of the Trump administration to sign people up for the Affordable Care Act over the next couple of months. But we need to make sure everyone knows about it or as many people as possible know about it so we can, so we can, you know, keep helping people sign up for this law and get health care. And people in their own lives, right? You can support Get America Covered by going to their website and supporting them there. But you can also take some agency on your own and use your social media feeds, talk to your friends and family about it. And use your social media feeds.

Talk to your friends and family about it. The odds are you know someone, whether it's a coworker or a friend from school or whatever else, who would like to know about this deadline. And so you can carry the message yourself as well and try to get people to sign up. Because most people want to sign up. The reason they don't is they don't know about the deadline. Right. And so they may go looking for insurance in January and find out they are frozen out of the market for another year.

It's really about informing people. Information is what's keeping people from signing up. So tell all your friends, annoy them about it, try to get them to sign up. Yes, definitely do that. So let's talk about the question of the moment this week is, you know, is Trump melting down here? Is he unraveling even more than usual? We should probably start with the Hannity interview last night, which, Dan, I know you DVR'd.

I did. I missed it. I followed the highlights on Twitter, but I did not watch the Hannity interview. Do you have any highlights you'd like to share with our audience? Well, it was, Trump was not at his craziest. He, it's like, he really usually isn't with Hannity. I don't know. Well, he's relaxed. He doesn't have any, doesn't have anything to worry about, you know? Yeah. Yeah. He's not angry. I will say that for those of you who listened to the bonus pod from Chicago or in the audience where we did, okay, stop the love it or leave it game with the Hannity Huckabee interview.

Yeah. Or the Trump Huckabee interview is that Hannity makes Huckabee look like Tim fucking Russert. It is not – like there aren't even really – every question is – like sets a context of trump's success right yeah and but there's like the optics were weird because you know you have you've been in the room for one-on-one interviews where there's like tight shots and they make the people the interviewer in the interview we sit super close together right like almost where their legs are almost intertwined. But they did that on like this weird island in the middle of a huge crowd at this military base. I think it was an Air National Guard base in Pennsylvania. But it's just like they're sitting, like their faces are right next

to each other, which is I'm sure what Hannity wanted. And so that was weird. But some of the things that were, I mean, some of this is like pat me obvious, but it's just interesting to see again, because you don't really see Trump do interviews. He has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. Yeah. Like there was one point where he claims that we have halved and almost eliminated the national debt because the stock market has created value of almost that much, which those two things could not be less related. I have the quote here because this is the one part that I saw. So they borrowed more than $10 trillion, right? He's referring to the debt that went up during the Obama administration. So they borrowed more than $10 trillion, right?

And yet we picked up $5.2 trillion just in the stock market. So you could say, in one sense, we're really increasing values. And maybe in a sense, we're reducing debt. But we're very honored by it. No, there is no sense that you're reducing the debt because the stock market went up, you fucking moron, in the words of Rex Tillerson. I will say there was one interesting, he railed about the media. He's very mad at Colin Kaepernick. The, you know, per usual, he and Hannity talked about African-American communities as if they were Fallujah, because neither of them ever been to an urban community. Right. They said he said minorities want police protection more than anyone.

Have you seen what's going on there? And they need it more than anyone. And they need it more than anyone. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But Hannity, I mean, push is the wrong verb here, but Hannity tried to tempt Trump into saying that he would require the wall for helping the Dreamers, and Trump would not take the bait on that. Oh, interesting. And actually made a case for the Dreamers. Like, 800,000 people, many of them don't even many of them don't speak

the language of the country they're from, because they, you know, he Trump said they'd never been there, which doesn't make any sense. But his point, I think, I think that's actually just misspeaking, was, you know, the point that we've made for years and President Obama made is that they left when they were small children, they've been living in the United States their whole lives, they're American in every way, but their papers, but Trump was he actually defended the dreamers in a way that was, you know, it was it was i think telling of how we ended up with the original egg foo young deal and then the last thing from that is there was a discussion about recalling it recalling it the egg i just went with i went with that i was trying to find the the appropriate

term i mean it's taken me a month to get to that. So it's like, it's, it's really like a, it's like a jerk store sort of situation. But he also, when he, they were talking about Republican senators and John McCain, in particular, the crowd booed viciously. It was just really interesting, which goes to sort of really got him whipped up versus Trump.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he didn't have to do like, the crowd was very calm for this whole thing it was like it's a studio audience basically and when he brought up republican senators and john mccain they just started booing to a point that was like even striking for trump i think man this is getting uh getting getting like a like a north korean rally here Yeah. Also, also the commercials on Fox are,

it's like, there's, there's a whole alternative. It was just a whole alternative world. Like you really listening to Hannity and the commercials. It's just, you can under, it's an alternative universe with no connection to reality where the economy

was terrible. And Obama it's magically fixed under Trump. Trump is in his own words basically solved the problem of undocumented people crossing the border basically solved but he still would like the law because he had to get that like last one percent but it is super it's the fox mentality and it's not healthy i appreciate the congrats so that so his interview with hannity comes after uh he had quite a day yesterday after an NBC report that during a Pentagon meeting in July, the military presented Trump with data that showed how our nuclear arsenal had fallen from 32,000 warheads in the late 60s when we were in the middle of a Cold War with the Soviet Union union to 4 000 warheads now and apparently trump responded in the meeting by saying he wants us to go back to having 32 000 warheads lovely uh secretary mattis later denied

that trump quote called for a tenfold increase in our nuclear arsenal which more of a non-denial denial since yeah what trump really said is that he quote wanted a tenfold increase he didn't actually the report was not that he called for it and specific use of a verb right and of course we should tell everyone that this whole episode this report uh this was the episode that led rex tillerson to call trump a in quotation marks fucking moron um first of all what did you think of this report i mean it it actually did not surprise me you can come because trump doesn't know anything about policy history governance national security he knows nothing about any of this nothing that has not been on fox and friends in the last month that is that is the entirety of his knowledge he doesn't

read his briefings he doesn't listen really during staff meetings. He doesn't know anything except for what he sees on television. So if you show someone like that a chart that shows the United States with all these warheads back in the 60s and many less warheads now, the most basic thought is, why don't we have more? don't understand more equals a stronger country more equals greater defense so we should have more right i mean it seems very obvious that he would have that reaction yeah i'm not surprised by this i am i guess i'm surprised that this was the point that caused tillerson to call him a fucking moron because we have this isn't even a near the dumbest thing trump has said privately or publicly in a very long time.

And it's fairly consistent with his own general ignorance about foreign policy and national security and his simple-minded approach to the world of more is better, right? Whether it's nuclear weapons, whether it's gold toilets, you know whatever it is more is better which and so it's it's so it's just so dumb like i don't know what to think about like how many times does he want to destroy the world you know does he did he see armageddon too many times and thinks this is part of our asteroid uh contingency plan i just don't know what he's thinking other than more is better it is very it's very scary in the sense that like you don't see him as some like authoritarian bent on destroying the world and you know global dominance and stuff like that it's just a it's just a very dumb person

or ignorant person maybe there's some inherent intelligence that he hasn't you know there's this debate is he a real moron or not you You know, like whatever the case, he's ignorant. He's ignorant of all facets of U.S. policy, of all facets of government. He doesn't know anything about any of this stuff. He hasn't bothered to try to, and he's been on the job nine months. He hasn't bothered to try to learn any of it. He doesn't care, you know? Yeah.

The, and two things. One, as you remember, just, I guess it was yesterday or the day before he challenged Rex Tillerson to an IQ test because in his IQ it would certainly be higher. I'd take him up on that, Rex. Yeah, I think you're going to win that one, buddy. And then it does make sense. Like, I mean, Trump really is the lab rat who would get confused in the maze which is like he only thinks in very straight like there's he doesn't understand context or nuance and so if the like in his mind if we are go if someone like if like he goes to department of defense and says present me options for war

with north korea and they're like one option is we do these strikes and then we send in troops and we, you know, we, you know, there's a one, there's a conventional approach, which includes casualties, you know, of American soldiers and takes longer. And then someone's like, or you could nuke the entire country in one day. Right. Without like, he can't think beyond that moment of like, well, if you do do that the entire world will you know will reject america and have all these other consequences and like he so you wonder the simplicity of a nuclear war is you can see why that is appealing to him which is fucking scary not a lot of cost benefit analysis going on there so trump responded to this nbc story story twice on Twitter and once in the Oval Office on Twitter by threatening NBC and the media in general, tweeting that their, quote, license should be challenged and possibly revoked. In the Oval, when he was asked about this, he said that it is, quote, frankly disgusting the press is able to write whatever it wants to write, which is sort of the whole point of a free press.

I don't know if he understood that. Now, this is, you know, sort of the whole point of a free press. I don't know if you understood that. Now, this is, of course, bullshit. People should know there is no single license for NBC or any other network. Licenses are granted by the FCC to individual local stations. NBC doesn't even own most of the stations that broadcast its content. The FCC makes these decisions about giving licenses to local affiliates. The president does not make that decision. But by nighttime, he had, you know, Trump was encouraging people to challenge their local stations licenses, which is a thing that you can do and you can complain about it to the FCC. This is very Nixonian. Apparently Nixon did this when a friend tried to take over a license held by the Washington Post and failed back when Nixon was president. You know, all these threats led to, you know, everyone freaking out about, you know, Trump being an authoritarian, stepping on the First Amendment, which he clearly did by

tweeting this. Ben Sasse, conservative Republican senator from Nebraska, tweeted last night, tweeted at Trump to ask whether he was recanting his oath of office by refusing to defend the First Amendment. He joins Bob Corker and sort of sounding the alarm about, you know, the dangers of President Trump this week. Now we have we have two conservative senators in the Republican caucus trying to sound the alarm about this guy. And we're all just sort of moving on like it's no big deal. Dan, what do you think about this? Is this a real thing we should be worried about? Is this just Trump venting? Is it somewhere in between? I guess there's a couple ways to look at this. One is Trump actually wants to find a way to restrict the free press in this country.

That's option one. If he could wave a magic wand, he would do it. Yeah, 100%. Two is he wants – or he's just angry, right? So it's not even – he's just banging his head against the wall because that's all he can think of. right word. It is a tactic, I guess, to that Trump does periodically, which, if you believe this theory is that Trump knows that the press loves nothing more than to cover itself. And so he's got all these other problems happening, you know, with Rex Tillerson, with Puerto Rico, with failure, you know, just failures up and down his government, Ryan Zinke in big trouble right now, you know, just failures up and down his government. Ryan Zinke in big trouble right now.

You know, a bunch of other people being investigated for charter flights, Russia collusion, Mueller. But if he seems like he's threat, if he gets in a fight with the press, that will be a dominant story. Yeah. I don't know that we have to pick among those. I think they're probably all somewhat true. I think we always say don't try to force – view Trump's actions through strategy. They're more temper tantrums. But I do think the one thing he is good at and does understand is how to make the press do what he wants them to do. He sort of gets that dynamic.

It may be more instinctual than intellectual, most certainly. But the other takeaway is that Trump – the committee was like, does this mean Trump is an authoritarian? Yes, Trump is an authoritarian. Yeah. the president has lots of power of you know too many powers probably to to enact their to you know sort of enact their will force their will on the country but trump is just so bad at it that he's just an ineffective authoritarian the feckless despot that's trump feckless despot oh i think we might have i think we might have hit on something there you go well so this all moves towards this this vanity fair piece that gabe sherman wrote which is it's quite a piece you should go read it. It's titled, I Hate Everyone in the White House Trump Seethes as Advisors Fear the President is Unraveling.

Very cool. Here are some of the highlights. Several people close to Trump tell Sherman that they describe Trump as, quote, unstable, quote, losing a step, quote, increasingly unfocused and, quote, consumed by dark moods. Yeah, no shit. What's causing it? Stalled legislative agenda. And then very particularly, he is very upset that he backed Luther Strange in Alabama and that Strange lost the race to Moore because it showed trump that the cult of personality around trump does not hold that that perhaps trumpism itself is more powerful and more influential than trump the person i thought that was pretty interesting dan is trump melting down or unraveling or

whatever the right term is is kind of a question that answers itself yes he is on a he is on a slide since the inauguration yeah he started out in a really bad position yeah and it has gotten worse every day and it will continue to get worse as long as he has an office which may not last that long per steve bannon in this article right um well source close to trump said that he vented to Keith Schiller, who was his former private security guard who became like his director of Oval Office operations, who left the White House recently. At one point, Trump screamed to Schiller, I hate everyone in the White House. There's a few exceptions, but I hate them all. That's what he said. Trump, I'm with you. I hate them all, too. We can agree on that point. I'm with you. I hate them all too.

We can agree on that point. And then there's reports that John Kelly, the chief of staff, is miserable and might leave but is there to prevent a disastrous decision. West Wing aides have worried about Trump's public appearances. One advisor said, quote, he's lost a step. They don't want him doing adversarial TV interviews. Again, no shit. Lost a step from when? When was the part where he wishes... When was he on firm ground?

Yes. When was he in a commanding position? I don't remember that. Two sources said Bannon told Trump the risk to his presidency was an impeachment but the 25th amendment. The 25th amendment is where the majority

of the cabinet can vote to remove the president. Trump responded, what's that? What do you think about this? We've talked about the 25th Amendment thing before. Seems a bit far-fetched because not only does the majority of the cabinet have to vote to remove the president, but then immediately that goes to Congress to sort of ratify. And so you'd still need huge majorities in both houses of Congress to confirm the cabinet's decision to remove the president. Here's just a little lesson in life, whether it's a 25th Amendment, whether it's impeachment, whether it's congressional oversight, whether it's going to the grocery store, any plan that requires Paul Ryan to play a leadership role is doomed to fail.

And so what is actually the danger of this idea in, you know, we hear this all the time. We heard this a lot from the folks we talked to during our tour is that everyone wants results right now. Right. It's like, what is the plan? Trump's been in for nine months. What is the plan to get him out by next week? You know, is it impeachment? Is it 25th Amendment? Is it Mueller frog marches him out of the White House into jail? What is the thing? And there is some danger in Democrats just holding out hope for things we have no control over. We cannot impeach Trump. We cannot enact the 25th Amendment. We cannot make Bob Mueller arrest him. Those are not things they can have. The only thing we can do is organize a stoppage agenda and then win elections.

And a plan that requires Steve Mnookin to vote with some of his colleagues like Ben Carson and Trump's billionaire friends, Wilbur Ross and Betsy DeVos seems like an unlikely thing to hang our hat on. No, this is this is incredibly important because there's this feeling that like maybe Bob Mueller will save us. You know, maybe the impeachment ferry will save us. You know, maybe the impeachment fairy will save us. Like something, some outside circumstance that leads to Trump's removal from office that is not an election where we work our asses off and organize and mobilize and elect a Democratic Congress, elect a Democratic House, try to elect a Democratic Senate, and then ultimately elect a Democratic president. Those are the only things that are going to remove Trump from. I mean, look, yeah. Off chance could impeachment work of something truly horrible comes to light. Maybe.

I don't know. Why even bother predicting it? Why even bother predicting it or not predicting it? No, it's not. It's not happening. There is no crime that Trump could commit that would cause Paul Ryan between now and 2018 to impeach him. None. Trump could murder someone and Paul Ryan would be fine with it. And I'm like, that's,

I'm not kidding. I'm actually not kidding. I think you can already see the world in which like Fox explains why it was actually, and it was actually in self-defense while Trump killed this person. And everyone won't believe it. Like there is no, like Paul Ryan will do nothing to save us. Yeah. I think we've all realized. I don't like Paul Ryan. No.

If that wasn't clear. I don't think he's on the level. Someone asked him about the Trump threat to take away media licenses today. And he said, I'm a constitutional conservative and I'll just leave it at that. Cool. Cool. It's like asking someone, what is your response to this racist thing someone said? I don't like racism.

I'm an American citizen and I don't like racism. Also, Paul Ryan has an oath to defend the fucking Constitution. Yeah, right. We'll see. The last thing about that Vanity Fair piece, which I thought was interesting, is Bannon apparently said that Trump, and this was an associate of Bannon, someone close to the Trump White House who revealed this to Sherman, said that Bannon said Trump only has a 30% chance of making it through his first term, which is, after everything we just said, it's very interesting. I don't know if that, I mean, it's an interesting thought from Bannon. I have heard, I mean, we've all heard from reporters and people who talk to Bannon

that Bannon has sort of given up on Trump as a figure, as a president, in achieving everything that Bannon hopes to accomplish. But, of course, Bannon has not given up on the idea of Trumpism, what sort of fueled their whole campaign. And that is why he's mounting challenges to all these Republican senators with, you know, a bunch of lunatic candidates like Roy Moore, just to try to fuck up the system and take everything down. It's hard to see the world unless the only way i can see trump not

finished a term is to be if he for some reason decided he just didn't like the job and you know and decided to go home but i don't think there's any seems unlikely because that would that would that would uh force him to concede that he lost something you know which i don't think he can do so the last thing he's been doing this week uh to sort of just stir up culture wars because he can't do anything else because he's a feckless despot he's continuing to go on his uh tirade against the nfl and the players who are taking a knee during the national anthem this week he threatened the nfl's tax exemption which you know doesn't really exist right yeah they gave it never really mattered very much because it's the individual

teams who could benefit but don't but then even even given that 2015 the nfl gave up that tax exemption right so that was just it doesn't exist yeah so much like the the media license thing it's just you know a threat sort of an empty threat um it seems as if Trump has persuaded at least some of the folks in the NFL to go along with him. Roger Goodell had a statement that the commissioner of the NFL this week said he believes players should stand. And now the owners of all the NFL teams are meeting on this. And already Jerry Jones, the owner of the Cowboys, said that his players must stand or lose their jobs. What do you think about this, about all these rich billionaire owners coming around to Trump's view on this? Well, the NFL owners, almost to a person, are bad people.

I mean, it's not like I don't – I think that they're – they treat the players as disposable human beings, right? NFL players can't get guaranteed contracts. They for years just – up until there was public pressure, would just roll them back out on the field no matter how many concussions they had. And there was this moment where like, well, we all like the owners because they all for one Sunday kneeled with the players. And then in many of most – a good portion of them gave over a million dollars to Trump, either through the inauguration or other means. And so in this, that was like one moment in time. And I think they definitely got some blowback like the, and have reacted to it. I can imagine Jerry Jones, who is a Trump supporter in Texas,

you know, got blowback. But the thing that is, you know, I guess Goodell did not had said previously that he thought they should stand. Yeah, I thought like that was his personal view. So that wasn't a new thing. I thought it was a mistake for the NFL to announce that they were going to address this. The NFL has not made a policy decision on this yet, but they're going to meet to discuss it, both players and owners. But it was a mistake to make the announcement that that was coming on the same day that Trump threatened their mythical tax exemption because it just seemed like they were doing what Trump wanted. And of course, this is why you can never try to appease Trump is as soon as they did that,

Trump tweeted out that Roger Goodell and the NFL was finally doing what he told them to do. So it just makes their problem worse. You're almost better just ignoring Trump in this situation and just doing what you think is right. I just don't really understand. I mean, I think Roger Goodell is 100% wrong in his opinion that people should stand. I think both, yes, he may have that personal view, but as the commissioner of the NFL, a league with a majority of African American players, he is making the situation, trying to make them all stand for, we're not protesting the national anthem. They're protesting police violence and systemic racism in this country. Something that gets lost a lot in this debate as Fox News, and you heard this in the Trump Hannity interview, was trying to turn it into

disrespecting soldiers who died fighting for this country, which is an absurd, that is a very legitimate point of view for individuals to have. You could make a decision that you believe the national anthem represents that and is right, and so you should stand. But it is a bad public policy to say that you cannot express your opinion. It's a First Amendment right. This is fucking ridiculous. I just, I mean.

Also, the owners don't have as much leverage as they think. If Dak Prescott or Ezekiel Elliott of the Cowboys, the two most important best players on that team, if they knelt on Sunday, Derry Jones is not firing those people. That is not happening. I hope a player calls him out. Yeah, this comes down to the players. And in that meeting, you said it's going to be Goodell and the owners and players too. The NFLPA, the Players Association,

which is the union that represents all the players, they've got to stand up pretty strongly on this. They cannot allow this to happen and and the players have to be united in this and and that means white players that means black players that means players who have knelt that means players who haven't knelt whatever you believe you can't allow the owners to push you around on this one let's all enjoy a fucking you know sunday in the nfl without any players maybe the owners can just run around on the field themselves i mean give me a fucking break you know like yeah the

players have all the leverage here like colin kaepernick has suffered has been you know targeted and penalized for this and if anyone who watches sunday football knows that colin kaepernick should be in the nfl right now there are a lot of very bad quarterbacks playing football right now. But it would be really great if star players, either white or black, were more powerful than the NFL and their individual owners did something about this, right? Whether it's Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady or J.J. Watt, who I know is injured, or Dak Prescott or Ezekiel Elliott or, you know, any of the most famous recognizable NFL players who would make it very hard for the NFL or their team to to penalize them. Trump said in his interview, it was like basically if Goodell had just suspended Colin Kaepernick for a game or two games when he first did this, then none of this would have happened, which I think is a pretty stupid way of thinking about it. You know, the last thing on this is

the NFL is in a tough situation because there's that poll, you know, we saw that poll yesterday that now Republicans view the NFL more unfavorably than Democrats view Fox News. Republicans view the NFL more unfavorably than Democrats view Fox News. And that is a dramatic change in a short period of time. Yeah. It's like these polls that you see where, you know, all like Republicans thought that the economy was doing poorly right before Trump became president. And then like the second after he became president, suddenly a majority of Republicans think the economy is doing well. And, you know, nothing substantively changed in the economy in the couple weeks between the election when Trump was inaugurated. But suddenly they just have a positive view of how everything's going.

It's just another indicator of how tribal politics has become, which is just particularly on the Republican side, it is asymmetrical in how people view these things. Yeah. And it also is proof that the stick to sports notion or to keep politics out of things,

it would be nice if there was some part of life that was permanently walled off from politics where Trump supporters and Clinton supporters and Bernie supporters could all get together and pretend like they have no differences,

but that doesn't exist anymore. If football is now becoming this battleground, you know, it's a proxy fight for all the other differences in the world and political differences in the world, then, you know, that's just how life is. And which leads me into, I just want to say one thing about ESPN's decision

to suspend Jemele Hill. Oh, yeah. Which was, me into, I just want to say one thing about ESPN's decision to suspend Jamel Hill. Oh yeah. Which was, you know, Jamel Hill was suspended for, we're not entirely sure why suspended, but basically she was reacting to Jerry Jones and saying to, to her followers on Twitter that if you care about this and you want to stop

it, the only way to, to exert pressure on individual NFL teams, the NFL itself is via sponsors, whether it's boycotts or whatever else. Which is true. It's basically the only way in which Fox was forced to deal with Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes was because advertisers were backing out because individual citizens were putting pressure on advertisers. Now, that is not a controversial statement. on advertisers. Now, that is not a controversial statement. It is also a patently obvious statement. But this idea that you're going to talk about politics, be forced to talk about

politics all the time on ESPN because of what Trump's doing, and Jemele Hill will get suspended for two weeks to do it is a sign of just the ESPN once again, and we've seen this many times, again, and we've seen this many times, giving into, you know, placing their desire for sponsors and the relationship with the NFL above that, above the loyalty they have for their employees. And it's a really bad, dumb decision in this world. We are past the point where someone like Jemele Hill can or should be prohibited from having an opinion on anything other than the very specific issue ESPN wants her to talk about. And especially in a world where ESPN, because of the way it's suffering broadly because people are cutting the cord and everything else, has banked everything on individual personalities. They asked Jemele Hill to host The six because she had this her a personal following and you know and I sort

of a very appealing interesting personality and then when she expresses one portion of that personality the suspender it's just it's stupid and it's stupid it's like an it's a very old media way of acting too it's like and it's heavy-handed and it's from the top and it is just it is absurd and the idea that like she shouldn't be talking about this this is a and it is just, it is absurd. And the idea that like, she shouldn't be talking about this. This is a huge, as we just said, it is impossible now to wall off politics from sports. This is a huge issue in sports, a huge issue in the NFL. And so as a commentator on sports, of course, she should be talking about this. And of course she has opinions, just as political commentators on the news, on CNN also have their opinions about politics.

just as political commentators on the news on CNN also have their opinions about politics. Yeah, it's like if she just was on a live broadcast of SportsCenter and yelled out what she said, yes, they can suspend her. That's her place. But Twitter is a different space. And to your point, there's an old media way of thinking about it. So the way ESPN has handled Jamel Hill, the Jamel Hill situation, is a metaphor for why they are struggling so mightily in the changing media environment. Yeah. Bad stuff.

Is there any positive note to end on, Dan? Yeah, Trump's super unpopular. Super unpopular. here, but we met awesome, inspiring, activated people on our tour who are looking for things to do. They are engaged in politics in a way they've never been before, which is, that doesn't say that we engage them in politics, but they have come to listen to us, I think, because they've become interested in politics. And talking to the people that we talked to throughout our trip actually made me feel really good about the future of progressivism, the future of politics, the future of our party. I thought that it was a really inspiring group of people, both the candidates and the people we talked to, like Tamar Manasa, who from Chicago and her bravery and inspiring activism on the South Side of Chicago to prevent gun violence.

Like there are great stories out there that if you could just exclude stories that say the word Trump, you really see some really great people doing great things in their community. The amount of people who came out to us and said they were running for office for the first time. I mean, dozens of people that we met in the various cities, which was really cool. I thought that was especially true. And, you know, we went to two colleges while we were on the road. We went to University of Wisconsin in Madison, and we went to University of Chicago and went to the Institute of Politics there that David Axelrod runs. And especially the students, you students. You would think at a time like this with the news that we read every day

that they would be pretty down and cynical, and they were not at all. They were inspired, and they were ready to go do something about all this. And the most common questions to us were, what can I do? I want to go help. How can I help in the most effective way possible? And so that was good to see. And now we just need, look, we need to see that not just in 2020, as we've been saying, and not just in 2018, but, you know, we've got a couple of big races in Virginia and

New Jersey and in state houses all across the country in a month now. We got an election day in November 2017. And then we all got to get to work to make sure we don't have low turnout, especially among young people in the 2018 elections. And if we show up in 2018, you know, we will be having very different conversations about Donald Trump and what's going on in Washington after November of 2018 than we've been having this year. So that is one thing to keep in mind. The one thing I always think about when I think about the 2018 elections is basically presidents have to address the media after an election. And I think about what that press conference would be

like if Democrats took the House back or the Senate, House and Senate, like how the look on Trump's face. You know, we went through that twice in 2010, 2014. It's no fun. And I would like Trump and his team to have to go through that painful process and us get to watch it in real time. Yeah. Well, all right. Keep that in mind as we get to work over the next year. Okay. When we come back, we will have our interviews from Ann Arbor with Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow and Michigan gubernatorial candidate, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. Nual El-Sayed. Okay, our first interview in Ann Arbor was with Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow,

conducted by Dan and Annamarie Cox, who was on the road with us for all of the Ann Arbor shows. So here it is, our interview with Debbie Stabenow. We are so grateful to be joined by your senator, one of the leading progressive voices in the Senate, a real champion for Michigan, Senator Debbie Stabenow. Good to see you. All right. I think they like you. Yeah. You know, they don't do that when I walk into like you. Wow.

Yeah. Wow. You know, they don't do that when I walk into the Senate. I don't know. I'm going to take you with me. Well, thanks so much for joining us. Absolutely. So we spent quite a bit of time talking about the most recent development with ACA and the Trump administration,

particularly the rollback of the birth control coverage mandate. How do you see the House and Senate responding to that? Well, first of all, it's terrible. And it's just one more nail, you know, in terms of trying to kill the ACA. And unfortunately, with the House and Senate being in Republican hands, we're not going to be able probably to turn that around. I mean, the good news is, in a very bad situation, is that democracy worked on health care and people got engaged and they pushed back and we stopped them. And you know what? That really is democracy at work, because they have 52 members in the Senate, as you know. We have 48. I like to call us the fighting 48.

But they had enough votes if they had stuck together. But people got engaged and had the courage, frankly, to tell their own personal stories and get engaged in a way that we've not seen in a long time that I'm really hopeful will carry over into so many other issues that we need to engage on. But it did show democracy works. On this one, you know, the Trump administration certainly is very willing to attack women and women's health care. And I think it's going to be tough to roll that one back. So a political question. Obviously, we were all shocked and disappointed when Hillary Clinton lost Michigan.

Did you see that coming on the ground here? And what can Democrats do to get back on top of it? And what can Democrats do to get back on top of it? Because there is not really an easy path to 270 without Michigan, which has been a core part of both of Barack Obama's wins and every Democratic win for a long time. Well, the last election, I think, was complicated. And one of 50 things, if it had changed slightly, she would have won. No question.

For me, the big question is what you said about the next election in 2020. And we're going to make sure that doesn't happen again, right, you guys? It's not happening again. It's not happening again. There's too much on the line here. I think a lot of folks kind of, there was a whole range of things that happened, including taking things for granted and assuming she was going to win and just various things. And, you know, we can critique it in a lot of different ways, including what we know now to be Russian involvement, as well as

mistakes made in the campaign. You can critique it a lot of ways. But this was a wake-up call. This was a wake-up call for all of us in our country about the importance of being engaged and involved and not taking for granted that we can stay home and not vote or not be engaged. I want to apologize to something you've already addressed. We joke sometimes about news breaking when we're up here, but you're one of many Democrats that got a donation from Harvey Weinstein. So have you decided what you're going to be doing? No, absolutely. In 2012, he donated to me. We're sending it back to the domestic violence shelter.

Yeah, right. I really, really appreciate you saying that. You know, this is not a partisan issue, right? Sexual predators exist. In the White House. In the White House, yeah. Fact check, true. Every fucking day.

They now have a national role model, you know, seriously, which is disgusting, actually. And, I mean, this has been a very tough period for a lot of women, a lot of people that have undergone this kind of trauma. I mean, I don't necessarily want to ask about your own experience, but are a woman who employs other women, who employs other people, you've been in these very male-dominated environments. What kind of guidance do you have maybe for young women who might face this kind of situation in their professional life or personal life? Well, first of all, you have to believe in yourself

and have the courage to stand up for yourself. And that's easier said than done in situations. But then we have to support women and believe them when they step forward. Thank you. another contentious issue coming up in the senate is tax reform and you know how are the democrats going to fight back against a trump tax plan how would you tell the people here why this tax plan matters everyone understands why repealing the aca matters because taking all the care why does tax reform and lowering the corporate rate and all the other things we're talking about, why does that matter to the people

in the audience here today? Well, it matters for a lot of reasons. And I have to say that they're actually making it much easier to fight against it than I thought they would because of the way they have released it. You know, first of all, and I'm on the Budget Committee as well as the Finance Committee and involved in many of these issues. But we had a Budget Committee debate and budget resolution, which lays out what's going to happen coming year on budget and taxes and so on. And for them, it's all about the tax cuts. And it's not about a tax system that's fair for everyone or supporting families

or small businesses that are the fastest growing part of the economy or closing loopholes, taking jobs overseas, stopping companies from pretending to leave on paper when they're really here, but they then just don't contribute to clean air and clean water and building the roads and so on because they're not part of, you know, contributing to the country. There's a whole range of tax loopholes that we ought to be closing. They don't do any of that. So what they've done is say 80% of their tax cut goes to the top 1%, average $200,000 cut per person for the top one percent they raise the rate on the lowest income people they raise the tax rate and if you have more than one child you actually because they do away personal exemption you will pay more taxes so a mom

with three children pays thousand dollars more in taxes, potentially. And then, with that... This does not sound good. No, no, we're not done. Then, I hate to say it, but they come back one more time on health care because their plan pays for this, in part, by not only taking $1 trillion on Medicaid, and in Michigan, most of our seniors in nursing homes get their health care.

They're paid for in nursing homes through Medicaid, plus families and children. But now they, in addition to the Medicaid, which we just beat back twice, they take another almost $500 billion out of Medicare. So that's their tax plan. Their tax plan to cut health care. I think you sold it.

So, I mean, if we want to do it right, you know, I'm happy to do the right kind of tax reform and simplify the code, as I said, and close tax loopholes that companies like pharmaceutical companies are using to leave this country and not pay their fair share of taxes while they're raising everybody's drug costs. One last quick question for you. You might have a very interesting opponent. Do you have any reaction to this opponent who will go unnamed? Let me just say I also play the guitar just for the record. Is that how you're going to... I actually worked my way through college playing acoustic guitar.

All right. So we may have to have dueling guitars depending on what this happens here. But we'll wait and see. We'll wait. I love music and we'll wait. It could be a very, it could be very musical fall election.

Well, we will watch it very carefully. Senator Sabanow, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you for everything you do. Our second interview was conducted by Anna Marie Cox and me with Michigan gubernatorial candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. He's a fascinating candidate. If he won the governor's race, he would become the first Muslim governor in American history, which is very interesting and very inspiring guy.

Obviously knows a ton about public health as well. That's his background. He was the Detroit Health Commissioner for a while. So this is our interview with Abdul. At 30 years old, he became the youngest ever health official of a major U.S. city. He's the health director of the city of Detroit. He's now running for governor. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. Okay, so you were the public health director for the city of

Detroit. What made you decide to get into politics? Why did you decide to run? It's the first time you've ever run for office, right? Yeah, I was never supposed to run for office. I want to be a doctor because I loved people. I loved science. And I had this opportunity to come home to Detroit to rebuild the health department that had been shut down by emergency management, state takeover of the city's finances. And I was rebuilding it. We were doing things that were uncommon for a health department, building programs to guarantee kids access to glasses free of charge delivered at school, standing up to some of the biggest corporate polluters in our state, making sure that they were accountable to the fact that children in Detroit have triple the likelihood of being hospitalized for asthma than the rest of the state. And after we heard about

Flint, we realized that I had just finished inspecting the schools. I saw things like mice dead in the corner, some state of decay because they hadn't been cleaned up, kids wearing their coats until 11 a.m. because the boilers in their schools didn't work. And we realized in that moment that it was possible that our kids could be exposed to lead. So we got to work. We put together the country's first citywide protocol to have every single school, daycare, and Head Start tested for lead in the water. We tested all 360 schools. care and Head Start tested for lead in the water. We tested all 360 schools. We tested all 360 schools and we did it in six months. But that was a bit of a wake-up call,

right? I'm rebuilding an agency that had been shut down when the state took over the finances for the city, watching as the same system of emergency management was poisoning 9,000 kids in a city with a profile very similar to ours. And I thought about the kids that I got to interact with day to day at the health department, the people that I came to work for every day. And I asked myself whether or not I could persist answering one agenda item on someone else's agenda or resetting the agenda in the state around the things that should matter most, which are whether or not we are empowering young people to live the kind of dignified lives that every single kid deserves in this country. And so in that moment, and in that moment, I think it became pretty clear. And I'm also watching as Donald Trump is

rising to power at the federal level, taking ideals that to me are at core of who we are as a country and throwing them in the mud. And I grew up, I was privileged to grow up in a family where my father was an immigrant from Alexandria, Egypt. And my mom, who raised me from the age of three, my stepmom, she grew up in a place called Gratchit County, Michigan. Anybody from Gratchit County? Anybody? All right. That gives you the point there. And so, you know, I grew up in the house built by Mohammed and Jackie. And so I know that our country is big enough for all of us. I know that immigrants come here believing in the kind of society where their kids can grow up and do things like run for governor. And so, you know,

how dare we take that away from people? And so in that moment, I realized that there was a responsibility to stand up and it's been an incredible journey so far. and it's been an incredible journey so far. So this radical idea of applying science to political problems, I almost feel like it's probably always been true that the public health lens is useful to view political problems with, but right now we're facing a couple of things in the news and the headlines right now that seem like they need a public health lens, the opioid epidemic and gun violence. What kind of thoughts do you have about you're bringing what you know about public health to those two problems?

Yeah. And in Michigan, actually, let's talk about opioid epidemic first, because I'm sure these people know. 11 million prescriptions for 11 million people. Opioid deaths have now outpaced both auto accidents and gun violence. What do you do from a public health perspective as governor? Yeah. So my wife, I don't see her here, but you see a beautiful... There she is. Beautiful woman walking around with a very, very uptunded abdomen, eight months pregnant. She's a psychiatrist. And so there's not a day that goes by that we don't talk about the ways in which the opioid epidemic is fundamentally tearing apart the fabric of rural

communities in Michigan. And a lot of this has to do with a system that helps to create the means within which you have a lot of powers that be, corporations, large hospital systems, insurance industries, that create systems where incentives drive certain behaviors. And what public health shows us is that the circumstances that people live in have everything to do with the environment in which they live. And, you know, you drive from Ann Arbor, which has the highest life expectancy in the entire state of Michigan, to Detroit, it's about 45 minutes. In that drive, you also drive about 15 years difference in life expectancy in the entire state of Michigan to Detroit, it's about 45 minutes. In that drive, you also drive about 15 years difference in life expectancy. That has nothing to do with differences in biological mechanisms, has everything to do with access to a very basic

set of resources. So when we talk about the opioid epidemic, one of the big challenges that we have is number one, I think the House of Medicine has a lot of blame here. Physicians have not been as responsible for the consequences of this as they should be. We have the makers of opioids. I was going to say, do you take on pharma? Absolutely. Look, the makers... We have the manufacturers of a set of medicines that were intended to be used for a particular purpose who knew that those medicines could be repurposed and therefore consumed more, and therefore pushed those medicines in certain ways that actually built up and became Tinder for the opioid epidemic that we have now. And then

lastly, it's about being able to build the outpatient circumstances that we need for people to be able to get the care that they need. Now, in this state alone, we went from, there's a big transition in mental health care that took us from inpatient psychiatric units to outpatient psychiatric care. But what happened in this state is when we deconstructed the inpatient units, we then delivered a tax cut and nothing ever got built on the back end. And then the last thing we have to talk about is stigma, right? Unfortunately, almost everybody in Michigan knows somebody who's been affected by opiate use. And it's easy for us to see the people in our families and say, well, I know that person, they're a good person. But then anybody else outside of that circle, well, there's got to be something wrong with them. But if we were only

willing to take that empathy and recognize that actually everybody is somebody's loved one, and we have to de-stigmatize this issue if we're going to be able to take care of it. care of it. So you've said that you have family who voted for Trump and that they did not vote for Trump because of some animus from Muslims. They voted for Trump because they felt he was at least speaking to an experience that they faced. Talk about that experience. So one of my favorite uncles, born and raised in Gratchy County, voted for Donald Trump, he and my aunt, and just amazing people. I mean, this is the guy who showed me the beauty of a mustard pretzel. I don't know if you ever had one, but it's like its own meal in a pack. I mean, he's not somebody who hates Muslims in any way, but this is the guy who drove truck, and in 2008, when a lot of the small businesses in Michigan took a hit, his did too.

And he was in a position where he had to lay off people who he knows and loves, whose kids he knows and sees, who he feels deeply responsible to as a proprietor of a business. And since then, last 10 years, if you talk to establishment folks on either side, they say, well, the economy's back, right? Don't you see that stocks are trading at record highs? It must be that the economy's back, except for if you look at what happened in the intervening 10 years, if you look at statistics that people feel in their pocketbooks, things as simple as labor participation or real wage, they're not back. And so when you talk about his felt experience and the people around him, nothing has gotten better. In fact, it looks like

it's getting worse because it's stagnated for so long. And so he seemed in the general to feel like he was between a rock and a hard place. Somebody who seemed to be talking to people like him and saying all kinds of other crazy stuff or somebody who didn't seem to care at all, right? However fair that is. And so he voted for Donald Trump. And, you know, the good news is he's going to vote for me. How does he feel about Donald Trump now? Yeah. I mean, I think he's disappointed. But here's the frustration that I have with the conversation that we have about that individual. It's that every time we talk about him, it almost seems like people on our side of the aisle want to be like, gotcha. Don't you see? You made a mistake. And at the end of the day, there's no empathy there. If we really,

truly want to inspire people to see the world the way that we do, we have to understand the way that they see it in the first place. And if you're reacting out of the kind of frustration that my uncle was reacting out of, it doesn't help us to then be like, see, you're an idiot, right? That's not a fair conversation. The fair conversation says, listen, hey, I get your pain. I understand that you're frustrated. Now let's talk about how we can focus on the problems that you face and then posit a set of solutions that actually seem to actually be able to solve the problems. And what I've learned, I mean, we've traveled to 90 different cities,

45 different counties, spoken to hundreds of rooms now, and it doesn't really matter where you go. If you talk to poor or working or retired people in places like Detroit or poor or working, retired people in places like Kaukaska up in the pinky area of the hand, Michigan love, huh? in the pinky area of the hand. Michigan love, huh? People are talking about the same problems. They're asking very simple questions. How do we unlock the economy for people who seem to have been locked out for a decade? How do we rebuild schools in this state

that are worth the dignity of our children? How do we make sure that people don't have to make that evil decision between getting sick and needing the treatment that they need or having to put their families in deep financial straits? How do we make sure that people don't have to make that evil decision between getting sick and needing the treatment that they need or having to put their families in deep financial straits? How do we make sure that everybody in Michigan can walk tall for who they are? These are questions that unite us. And in this state in particular, we sit on 21% of the world's fresh water.

And it seems like we're told that we can either have our economy or we can have our environment. We can't have both, right? And those are the issues that people talk about, right? And so if we're willing to actually pay attention to those things, posit real solutions, and be credible on how those solutions can actually impact the lives of folks, I think there's a way that gets us beyond

having to look at the other guy and say, isn't he so bad? We were right the whole way along, right? If we want to justify our own feelings of righteous indignation from 2016, that's one thing. But if we want to win elections and we want, more importantly, to solve problems for people who are truly suffering big challenges, then I hope that

we can get past what happened in 2016 and start talking about solutions to problems that everybody faces in their lives. Because when we do, we win. Abdul, thank you so much for doing this. This is really great. It was my pleasure. It's an honor to be here. And thank you guys so much for having me. And go blue. All right. Those were our interviews with Senator Stabenow and Abdul El-Sayed. Hey, Dan.

It's Lovett. Lovett's here. Oh, I've spent so much time with you. I really felt it was like Phantom Lovett would not have you around these last two days. I just wanted to say one thing. And this is what I wanted to say. Don't you think it's strange that Donald Trump could have gone the other way on the NFL and chosen the Republican issue? Because he started out by talking about how they won't let them hit each other anymore, and they're trying to make football weak.

I feel like he backed into this. That's not a culture issue, though. That's not as clearly Republican. It didn't work. It didn't work. Anyway, that's all I wanted to say. Lovett, I thought your tweet about liberals getting the NFL and the divorce was top notch. Oh, you know what? I thought it was

fine, too. I thought it was fine, too, Dan. I literally said it out loud to John and Tommy. He did. Got a mild response. I thought, you know what? We chuckled. No, we I think it was a pretty hearty laugh. Yeah, you guys are an easy laugh. And so I tweeted it. I tweeted it and then all these people responded saying I stole a joke.

You know what? I didn't steal a joke as i you know what i didn't steal a joke i just had an idea that someone else had had because maybe it wasn't that original maybe that's my sin anyway well but i thought you'd learn the lesson about fake news better you brought up the controversy here now it's a whole thing you should have just said that leo was barking and you could have done more you know what well i was distracting with leo barking who makes it this far? Got a big love it or leave it tomorrow. There we go. We got a big love it or leave it tomorrow. Alright, everyone. We'll all

talk to you soon. We'll talk to you on Monday. Love it or leave it over the weekend. It's great. Bye. Bye, guys. Bye, guys.