Pod Save America - “An insult to banana republics.”

Episode Date: February 1, 2018

Trump’s first State of the Union is long on words, low on energy, and short on policy. Jon and Dan break down the speech, the reaction, and all the Mueller Madness that followed with their guest, Ashley Parker of the Washington Post.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On the pod today, we will have the White House reporter from the Washington Post, Ashley Parker. We also have our big show in L.A. on Saturday at the Dolby Theater. We have John Legend, Jimmy Kimmel, all kinds of fun surprises there. We have some tickets that are still, I think, available for our Phoenix and Las Vegas shows, which are going to be a week from today. We're in Denver and then Phoenix on Saturday and Las Vegas on Sunday. So come see us. How's it going, Dan?

It's going good. Just want to give you hats off for doing a great job on Colbert last night, representing the brand well. You know, we tried our best. It was a lot of fun. It was a live show and, you know, we just sort of rolled with it. So it was good. Love it, delivered a rant. Tommy was smart. I wore American flag socks, which people noticed. So that was it. That's, we all played our part, you know. I don't support the kitschy socks thing. Like, you're better than that. I don't usually. Unless, unless you're a sponsor, then I'm cool with it. We all played our part. I don't support the kitschy socks thing. You're better than that. Unless you're a sponsor, then I'm cool with it. I don't usually do it, but I've been on the road for a couple of days and they were just there. So there you go. I was in my local corner store the other day, which is very San Francisco. And there was a woman wearing a Too Dope Queens

t-shirt. I didn't realize they had merch too. And she was talking to the woman behind the counter and said, who are the two? What does that shirt mean? And she said, they're a great podcast. They're going to be on Colbert tonight. As I quietly bowed my head and waited my turn in line. We saw them briefly as we walked off stage and we got to introduce ourselves and talk for like five seconds. But I wanted to chat more.

They're awesome. Love that pod. Yeah. I watched their part of the show too. They were great. Great. All right, Dan. So President Trump delivered his first state of the union address last night an hour and 20 minute speech that offered almost no new policy at all because

america has already been made great again apparently what did you think what are your first thoughts dan well a couple One, Trump needs an editor. Yes. So long. The words. So long. Well, so here's the weird thing, though. I looked for a word count and someone said it was 5,300 words.

5,300 words is around the word count for a lot of the Obama State of the Unions. But Trump's speech was very close in length to the longest State of the Union ever, which is Bill Clinton's, which was almost 9,000 words. So his delivery was so unbelievably slow and low energy that he turned what could have been a much shorter speech into one of the nearly longest speeches in history. And I can tell you one thing that is not the reason for that. It's not like he had so many polysyllabic words that his words were longer. He was very low energy. He had a real Jeb thing going with the low energy delivery there.

Boring. That's my take. Boring. It was so boring. And poorly written. And there are a lot of convention, like White House presidential conventions that I have numbed myself to seeing Donald Trump do. Where I see him get on Air Force One or a pool spray in the Oval or doing a press conference. Wait, never mind, he doesn't do press conferences.

But if he were, I'd be used to that. But watching him walk down that aisle to be announced as the President of the United States for the State of the Union, that's a real gut punch. And then when he finally – he glad hands all the white nationalists in the Republican House on the way in, and then he gets to be greeted by Paul Ryan with the smuggest, most shit-eating grin on his face. That was problematic for my blood pressure, I'd say. Paul Ryan, as he's overseeing an all-out assault against the Justice Department and FBI, which we'll talk about later. No, so talk about the writing first, because that's the, you know, who cares about that? And then we'll get to the substance. But just a note on the writing. Like, cliches are very hard to avoid in speech writing. They are very, they're even harder to avoid in the State of the Union. The State of the Union is, at best, you know, a laundry list of proposals that you try

to string together in some coherent speech with some coherent theme. And as a result, it's not like you're making, it's not like you're writing an argument or an inspirational kind of speech. It's really workmanlike. And so it's really hard to write a State of the Union. It's like almost every speechwriter's least favorite speech to work on. That said, there were so many more cliches and just like hackneyed trite language in this speech than I can remember in, and I won't even use our speech as an example, Bush's speeches, Clinton's speeches. I mean, this is like stuff that would make Democratic and Republican speech

writers cringe. Here's a sample of the lines that really did it for me. If you work hard, if you believe in yourself, if you believe in America, then you can dream anything, you can be anything, and together we can achieve anything. We share the same home, the same heart the same destiny and the same great american flag together we are rediscovering the american way what the fuck that was all that i did that was all what a couple sentences all right in a row what the hell was that i mean do you think he like to try to put all the words on the paper that and just forgot to delete some of them i mean

you know they have the news called the new american moment which is a phrase you know that hillary had used and it's like everyone's like oh no plagiarism i'm like well it sucked when she used it too it's a shitty phrase it's not plagiarism because they they're too dumb to google it and find out what it is i I mean, we can't talk because we once used the term winning the future without fully comprehending the fact that it abbreviated to WTF. I know. Well, that's the other thing. Now that I am a few years out from having been a speechwriter, you also realize that people need to think of these speeches in a different way. You really need to break away from the usual language that so many other presidents and politicians use.

Like it's so important to do that, especially this day and age when, you know, authenticity is key and people don't want to hear canned bullshit. And, you know, it's funny. Like if there's one person who might be able to do something like that, it's Donald Trump. And instead, he just like sat there and read this fairly boring speech. And it's, you know, it's not like I wanted to hear him talk like he does on Twitter, because that's fucking scary as hell. But it just it was a real snooze, you know. Because you and I worked either in the White House or in an outside capacity on all of Obama's. And even if we were just looking at Cody's remarks in the last few years, trying to be helpful. And every year, particularly when I was in the White House, you'd go to that first meeting with the president and be like, we're going to do it differently this year. Yes. Less policy, not a laundry list.

We're going to go for 40 minutes. That's the meeting in November, and we never came close to achieving it. A couple of years there, we actually said, and I was suggesting this last night on Twitter, it would be amazing if some future president liberates all of us by giving a 20-minute speech on a single topic that they care about, that they want to make a persuasive argument about to however tens of millions of people are watching the State of the Union. I think that would probably be more useful and effective and impactful than just ticking off various policies and telling 15 stories about people.

Someone should do it at some point. Yeah, and we always thought we would say that. Obama would want to do it. We'd want it. The communications people would want to do it. We'd want it. The communications people would want to do it. And then the policy people would be like, well, you've got to hit this topic. You can't not talk about this. I mean, we got in trouble one year because in the foreign policy section, we mentioned every continent except South America.

And there was a big problem that we didn't mention South America somewhere in the speech. And all the South America people got upset. mention South America somewhere in the speech and all the South America people got upset. That's the kind of pressure that you're under in the State of the Union is you get everyone from every corner of the government saying like, no, you didn't include this, you didn't include that. So it's always a mess. They should retire it. So Dan, what did you think were the political goals of the speech? Normally, and I thought you guys did a good job of laying this out on Monday, but the normal goal of the State of the Union – and one year I ran the – coordinated the State of the Union policy process. And the goal is to really set the agenda for the year in two ways.

One, to tell the Congress and more importantly the public this is what I want to do between now and the next time I stand here. Here's what I hope to – here's what I accomplished the last time I was here. Here's what I hope to accomplish before the next time I stand here. Here's what I hope to accomplish. Here's what I accomplished the last time I was here. Here's what I hope to accomplish before the next time I'm here. And in addition to just being a public messaging goal, it is a organizing principle within the government, right? And so all the agencies get the, everyone wants, as you pointed out, everyone wants their thing mentioned, say the union. So you tell all the agencies, go come up with your best policy ideas and bring them to us. And then we decided which ones will make it. And some of them end up being very, you know, clever, great things for the speech. Many of them end up on the cutting room floor, even if they end up being our great policy that will go on and change the country in some way,

just it's not speechworthy. And Trump did not do that. I have no idea what he wants to do in 2018. And that is because, that's not a head fake, he has no idea what he wants to do in 2018. He has not thought about that. They don't think beyond the next airing of Fox and Friends. I think that was one of the most undercovered aspects of the speech in the media. The fact that, I mean, I could not imagine, and I'm sure you can either, if we were heading into the State of the Union and the policy folks didn't give us new policy for Barack Obama to announce in the State of the Union. Because reporters back in our day used to be like, what, there's nothing new in the speech? What are you

giving it for? Like they would just be hungry for whatever the new announcements, new policies are. And he didn't have any of that. And they didn't try to do any of that. And that's like, and I noticed in some of the stories today about where they went into living rooms of various people to ask them what they thought of the speech, you know, and some were Trump supporters, some weren't. But even the people who sort of like Trump, one of the biggest reaction, one of the most common reactions from some of these people were, well, he might have said something good about the opioid crisis, but there was no plan. Or he might have said something about veterans, but I didn't hear him offer any plan. somewhat favorable, even if they somewhat liked it last night, there's going to be no long-term benefit from the speech because he didn't lay out any, he didn't tell people what he's going to do, which is sort of like the basic job of a speech like that.

The other thing that people do in this speech is address an immediate political challenge. Right. That's true. Right. Like after in the 2013 State of the Union, which was the last one you worked on, I believe, from the White House, that was right after New Town. And so how we were going to address the challenge of addressing gun violence in this country became a big part of it, right? More than just one part of an element, it was reacting to that news. We at times were staring down the barrel of government shutdowns, budget fights, debt ceilings, and use the State of the Union to set the stakes for those fights because it's your biggest audience. Right. And then the other thing you

would do is you would try to sell your accomplishments. The economy is getting better. Here, ignore what you've heard on Fox News. Obamacare is working, and here are the five ways it's working. Trump did try to do two of those things. One, he tried to sell the tax cut in the context of a roaring economy, even if most of the things he said were factually incorrect. He did use his moment in the sun for that, and he used it to address the looming immigration challenge that is intertwined with the shutdown, with long-term budget issues and everything else to lay out. That was the one place where he did a four-point

plan, four pillars, if you will. Right. No, I mean, I went through the speech again just before we started recording this to think about what the goals were. It seems that the ones that I wrote down were convince people that the economy is booming and that Trump's trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich is responsible, convince people that hordes of immigrants may kill them, and then convince people that Donald Trump is some great bipartisan unifier. It seems like those were the three main goals because everything else were sort of just throwaway lines. So let's go through each of the big goals there. Let's talk about the economic message that sort of revolved around the tax cut. Do you think this is working? Not just last night because I think last night is sort of ephemeral.

But do you think that his message on the economy, both saying that the economy is great and talking about the tax cut, is moving people? Yes, I do. Yeah. I mean, there's a Monmouth poll out today which shows that in December, the tax cut was 2647, fave, unfave, and it's now 4444. That is probably a bigger swing.

There's probably some noise in that swing, but he is using every opportunity to say, I mean, when he's not attacking morning show hosts or Chuck Schumer, but in those other moments of the day, he is telling everyone that the economy is booming. from all of our research working for Obama that people's view of the economy is not affected by the jobs numbers, and it is most certainly not affected by the stock market, which can actually have the opposite effect because it can piss people off when rich people are doing, in their mind, rich investors in Wall Street are doing well and they're not, is affected by their personal financial situation. And so if wages are not going up as high as they say, that could matter in a year or two as he gets into 2020. But he is out there selling the tax cut, and it is certainly getting Republicans who don't really like Trump.

So if you assume Trump's approval rating is in the high 30s, and this is now around 44, then he's moved some people, some quote-unquote unquote Republican voters to think that this is the right thing to do. And Democrats have to be very wary here because if we lose the battle on defining the tax plan, we are not going to win the house. Yeah. And look, I mean, you heard me say this on the Monday pod, like this cannot be one of those fucking issues where Democrats are like, I'm a little scared. Like all the reporters are saying that Trump's strong in the economy and that's the narrative. And so we've got to find other issues like we have to fight this battle. And we have a winning argument here. You know, I just don't think Democrats are.

I mean, part of the issue is a lot of times Trump is on a different page than the Republican Party and what they're arguing, different page than the Republican Party and what they're arguing, mainly because, like you said, Trump's like making fun of talk show hosts and tweeting crazy things and Republicans are trying to drive a message. But now they're all sort of united on trying to sell the tax cut. And I think that Democrats need to have a strong and consistent message here, which, you know, I think Democrats just need to be out there saying he gave a trillion dollars in corporate welfare where bonuses trickled down to only 2 percent of Americans and everyone else's wages haven't gone up. Three million people have lost their health insurance and factories like the fucking carrier plant that he stood in front of are still shipping jobs overseas. That's that's what's happening right now. And Trump can tell the economy and how the stock market is doing great.

Well, it's doing great for all of his rich friends and his billionaire cabinet. But most Americans still haven't seen their wages go up in years. And by the way, the fact that we gave a trillion dollars to the richest people in this country means that we can't spend that money on health care and child care and paid leave and infrastructure and all the rest. I mean, that's the message. They should just go around saying that all the time. And here, I'm sending out the bat signal to Democratic billionaires. If you really want to invest in winning the House, spend money on Facebook and digital ads right now. Yeah. Making that argument right now. Make Trump and the Republicans own, like they got a shitload of

great press coverage for those Walmart bonuses for people who had been there two decades, whatever the details were. I haven't seen a ton of coverage about despite the massive tax cut they got, Walmart closed a bunch of the Sam's Club stores and laid off a bunch of people. Make them own that and make the moral argument. Things have changed a lot in politics, but one thing that has not changed is when rich people get over on everyone else, it pisses people off. And this is a textbook way – you cannot ask for a better way to make that argument. And we should be making it right now. Like the longer we wait in every speech, in these thousands of candidates who are running in every race across the country, talk about this and nothing else. Tie it to your local district. Do that and get out there and do it now. And people who have money, spend it.

Because you know who's spending it? The Koch brothers. Right. And it works on every single issue. So know, so I saw, I mean, people talked, oh, he's going to talk about his infrastructure plan. Infrastructure is the thing that Democrats like. And so, you know, Democrats should go along with them. And are they trapped by this infrastructure thing that Trump wants to do? No. Let's talk about what Trump's infrastructure plan is. He says it's $1.5 trillion. It's not. It's maybe $200 billion of actual spending. And then the rest of the money,

he hopes that the private sector is going to pour in. He put this council together on infrastructure that are all his developer friends. So he hopes to give all these developers that he knows, fucking crony contracts to maybe spend on infrastructure, hopefully. And that's his big plan. And then they can collect tolls for themselves on roads that they build someday. It's a bullshit, crony, shitty plan. Democrats already had like a trillion dollar actual infrastructure plan and by the way, we could pay for that

if we didn't have a fucking trillion dollar tax cut that went to corporations that are making record profits. We could create jobs by people building roads and bridges and internet and all the other stuff. I mean, make the argument, people. There is a story, I saw all the other stuff. I mean, make the argument, people. There is a story. I saw it on CNBC, I believe. Via Twitter.

I don't actually watch CNBC. I want to be very fucking clear on that point. Thank you. Thank you. It is that based on a survey of businesses, the overwhelming majority of the tax cut is going to go to buyback, stock buyback. Which is just profits for rich investors in the company. Yeah.

So you know what we should do? Make sure everyone sees that story because, but you can do that by using it in advertising. And we are wasting time here. The idea, and I've talked to some people who are planning to get involved in the elections and they say, everyone's, say everyone's spending money now, people aren't paying attention. It will not make any impact. We got to wait till Labor Day or towards the summer. Those are old rules. We lost by the old rules. Everyone is interested in politics. Politics dominates every conversation. People can't fucking sleep. They're interested in

politics so much. They're not interested. They're fucking terrified of politics. They can't turn away. What are you talking about? So get out there now, because there is a massive propaganda apparatus that is serving Trump's interests here. And it is going to be aided by millions upon millions of dollars from the very people who will spend a small portion of the giant tax cut they got from Paul Ryan and Donald Trump to sell the tax cut to voters. And as you can tell, I'm worked up about this and I have concerns about it. I'm glad I was, I've been worked up about it too. So I'm glad we're both worked up about this. And it's not like, like I I'm, I'm partly so worked up because I'm so confident that we are on the winning side of this argument, you know? And it's, it's not like this is one where I'm like, uh, the polling is tough and this is just the morally right thing to do and so we need to fight.

This is the morally right thing to do. But it's also the politically advantageous thing for us to do. Like we've seen the polling. Republicans have seen the polling. It's one of the reasons that Donald Trump is president right now is because he pretended to rail against rich people and hedge fund managers and all the other shit. He tried to be a different – he told people he was a different kind of Republican because people are upset about income inequality. They're upset about super rich people getting tax cuts

and all kinds of breaks and the middle class getting nothing. Like that's what's driving people's anger in both parties and has been for a decade. And you can tie that so easily to the rampant amount of corruption that is happening within the Trump administration and the Republican Party. Yes. One example being the CDC director who had to resign today,

I think, or yesterday, because she was investing in tobacco companies when her job, one of her main jobs is to convince people not to smoke. I mean, yeah, the rampant corruption, rampant corruption. Convince people not to smoke. I mean, yeah. Rampant corruption. Rampant corruption. Okay, well, let's talk about immigration. Immigration was the next one. So here's how he kicks off the immigration section.

Tells, you know, open borders have caused the loss of many lives. Never mind that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than native born Americans. And everyone agrees that undocumented immigrants who commit felonies should be deported. But, you know, never mind. Open borders have caused the loss of many lives. And then he offers a deal that would, on one hand, provide 1.8 million Dreamers a path to citizenship, but only if we cut legal immigration to this country by nearly 50 percent to levels that we have not seen since the 1920s. Why? Why do we need to cut legal immigration in this country? Trump doesn't say. Don't make an argument for it. Just say that the legal immigration system that we've had in this country somehow isn't working and we need to have the amount of immigrants who come to this country. What did you think that that meant for the possibilities of a deal on the Dreamers? I think it is very clear that there is no comprehensive immigration legislation that is passing this Congress between now and election

day 2018. Yeah. What about a smaller deal on DACA or Dreamers? We talked about this a little bit last week, but I think this is where Democrats are getting wrapped around the axle by allowing Trump to conflate a deal to solve a near-immediate problem about the Dreamers, which everyone agrees they want, with a whole bunch of really complicated things that much smarter presidents were unable to do with much less crazy racist members of the House of Representatives. So I think we should start separating. Like, Durbin and Graham should have their negotiation. They can come up with something. But we are going down a rabbit hole if the only way to help the Dreamers is for the House, for Durbin and Graham to come to a deal that Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and John Kelly

sign off on, that then can pass the Senate, and then the idea that Paul Ryan is going to put that on the floor of the House because he can't not abide by the Hassard rule. There's no way Paul Ryan has the moral courage to put a bill on the floor and allow it, an immigration bill to put on the floor and allow it to pass with mostly Democrats, which is what it would take. And so that's not happening. There's just nothing. I hope I'm wrong about that, but there's nothing I've seen in the last year that suggests that that can happen, particularly – and every day we get closer to the election, the less likely Republicans are to start a war within their base for this. So if we want to help the Dreamers, I think we've got to get back to the Dreamers for border security deal. Right.

It may not be as generous as the one that Trump offered, but let's do something to protect the population right now. And then we can readdress it, expand it, codify it in a different way in a comprehensive immigration deal. And frankly, if we take the House, we're going to have a much stronger hand to have this negotiation because a Senate, a Durbin grand bill could pass the Senate and then a Democratic House. pass the Senate and then a Democratic House. Yeah, no, I mean, the immediate priority is to protect these young men and women from deportation. And however we can do that, you know, even if it's a long path to citizenship, even if temporarily it's no path to citizenship, but they just can renew their work permits and stay in this country and not be deported, you know, we have to find a deal that will do that. And, you know, it's one thing to have a price for that deal being, you know, more money to throw at border security. It's another thing to say we're going to change the entire legal immigration system

and just, you know, radically alter it for the first time in a century. We're not going to do that. So then, so the last goal is this whole, you know, this is what they pitched to reporters from the State of the Union. Trump is bipartisan. Trump is unifying. So, you know, you go through the speech. He called Obamacare disastrous. He took a shot at NFL players who kneeled during the anthem to protest police violence against black Americans. And, you know, he used the word bipartisan once in the speech.

And it was in a reference to a meeting he had on immigration in the past. I had had a bipartisan meeting, which was also a section of the speech where he said, my duty is to protect Americans and defend their safety because Americans are dreamers too. So I don't really buy that this was an attempt at bipartisanship or unifying seats. You're so cynical. What is up? I mean, like, why? How easily fooled are people? I don't understand. You're so cynical. What is up? I mean, I just like, why, how easily fooled are people? I don't understand. I mean, look. I mean, do you think people were fooled? So I think, here's the deal. And now we can get to the section on the press reaction to the speech.

I think it is clear that if you put together a speech that is carefully worded and you spend a long time on it so that it's as popular as possible and you know all of your if you have these racist dog whistles they're they're quieter than trump usually makes them when he's just tweeting or saying something off the cuff you know if you get that all together you can put together a speech that a lot of people who watch it will say that was a fine speech either they really like it or they say it's somewhat fine. It's bland. It's boring. Whatever. He said America a lot. He told nice stories about people. Great. Fine. But then it is the media's job to go through that speech and tell people, you know, what was true and what wasn't true. you know, where he said things that he said contradictory things in the past, where he's made promises that he's made all he's also made those promises in the past and broken

them or hasn't fulfilled them yet and hasn't even tried like on prescription drugs and some of the other things he did. So that's like the basic role of the media when they're analyzing the speech. It seems as though a lot of the coverage, at least a lot of the early coverage, was based on the White House spin that this was going to be a bipartisan unifying speech. I will say that as the night wore on and we got into today, the new coverage started resembling the truth of the speech, which was that it was much more divisive and partisan than the White House told people it would be. So I do think the media reacted in the right way over time. But we still had the like, you know, a couple initial pundit takes that were eye rolling, to say the least. What did you think?

That's always going to be true, right? I think the press did a fine job. They did much better than last year. And in fairness to them, they have a year of data on Trump being an erratic lunatic to do their reporting. He'd only been president for like six

weeks at that time, so maybe he... I mean, it was naive to think he would pivot, but it was still theoretically possible, I he, I mean, it was naive to think he would pivot, but it was still theoretically possible, I guess. I think those partially the way this goes is, as you and I know, the White House immediately prior to the speech coming out sends out embargoed text of the speech. All the media outlets take one person and they go away and they write off that embargo text, the first story, the first one that hits the wire, the first one that hits the Post website, the New York Times website. And it's just on the speech. It's just like, here's what he said.

And that's what happened. And I think all the things – I saw lots of good fact checks. I mean, I can't believe I'm defending the media here, but I saw lots of good fact checks. I thought the analysis pieces and the Times and the Post were right on. Like, Trump says this. We really have no reason to believe he'll actually do it, but this is what he said. Like, I thought Peter Baker's piece and Dan Balz's piece, they were fair analysis. I do know the mentality within the newsroom, which is this is a day, and it has been this way for Clinton and Bush and Obama,

where the papers decide they're going to tell you what the president said. We would do a background briefing on the day of the speech. I did it almost every year I was in the White House. I'd bring all the White House reporters in, we'd walk into the strategy speech, and I'd tell them what the headline was. And most of the time, it would be like, Obama calls for winning the future, or Obama calls for – lays out economic blueprint. And most of the times you get that, and I think they probably thought, in our lead story on the speech, we're going to do that for Trump too. And is that – I mean, does he deserve that? No.

He doesn't deserve anything, really. But it's fine. It's fine. Yeah, no. I found myself not that angry about it. But it was – I thought that the dynamic was interesting where the initial stories were, like you said, what the White House gave them. And then as they were updated, it reflected the reality of the speech and what he said and the setting and, you know, all the other stuff that we now know. And also, to be completely honest, and no offense to all the people who worked really hard on writing these stories, it doesn't fucking matter. Yeah. It just doesn't. I mean, Trump, since he last stood on that stage, he has obstructed justice on multiple occasions. He's lied 10,000 times. He has sided with Nazis. He's lied 10,000 times. He has sided with Nazis.

He's attacked a civil rights hero. He's threatened North Korea. And he's accused President Obama of wiretapping. And he was at 37% approval rating then. He's at 37% approval rating now. This was an anachronistic ritual we all had to go through, and nothing has changed. anachronistic ritual we all had to go through and nothing has changed. Let's talk about the response by Joe Kennedy III, Congressman Joe Kennedy III, friend of the pod. What'd you think about the response? What'd you think about the speech? I was, when I heard friend of the pod, Joe Kennedy had accepted this task, I was very worried for him because many a career has been ruined for this and i was like joe kennedy he's

a great guy young you know our party needs more young charismatic figures who were really in it for the right reason and he really said to see joe kennedy's career end because he answered the phone when chuck schumer called him and so but so i was very nervous about for him i like it didn't doesn't matter in the end for the world? Like, are we going to tip the balance of the 2018 election based on this? No. But I said this last night. This is the highest wire in politics.

I mean, Marco Rubio made an ass of himself. Bobby Jindal made an ass of himself. Many Democrats have made asses of themselves doing it. And he didn't. He was really good. You know? I mean, I know people have some critiques on the use of his chapstick, but he gave a really good, optimistic, unifying message, and he delivered it very well. And kudos to Congressman Kennedy and his team for resisting the usual way, which is we're going to make you do a hostage video and a direct-to-camera in some weird room that was decorated by someone's great aunt.

No one should ever do a direct-to-camera State of the Union response, ever. A crowd is much better. The setting that he had was much better. No, look, I listened to it last night. I thought he did a really great job. And then when I had time, I actually read the speech over again this morning on my way down to D.C. And I thought the speech, it's an excellent speech. Whatever you think about Joe Kennedy, the choice of Joe Kennedy, whatever, every Democrat should look at the message in that speech. You know, even if you don't like the exact way it's written or the word and whatever, look at the message. I mean, the section that actually that stuck out at me the most is when he talked about the Trump administration. He said, for them, dignity isn't something you're born with, but something you measure by your net worth, your celebrity, your headlines, your crowd size, not to mention the gender of your spouse, the country of your birth, the color of your skin, the God of your prayers.

Their record is a rebuke of our highest American ideal, the belief that we are all worthy, we are all equal, and we all count in the eyes of our law and our leaders, our God and our government. That is the American promise. I thought that was maybe the best indictment of Trump that I'm surprised that no other Democrat has really landed on, which is this guy, it sort of combined Trump the plutocrat with Trump the valueless celebrity. And so it's this sort of populist critique of Trump, both economically and culturally, in contrast with like the founding ideals of America. And I think it's a good contrast. And it's a good indictment of Trump. And you can do a lot with it. I mean, we can have you can make that economic argument, you can make some of these social and cultural arguments, you can make the like, Russia subverting our democracy argument, you can make a lot of it, those arguments within that message frame. So I was I was really impressed by it. Yeah, there's a lot to learn there for as we

think about the 2018 elections. And the I mean, I would love to know, we used to focus group, do dial tests of the Republican ones after we did the dial test of the Obama ones, and they were always pretty miserable. So I'd just be curious. My gut is he probably focus grouped very well. But, you know, there is a thread

that runs through why that speech worked last night, why Doug Jones won, and why Ralph Northam and that whole ticket won, which was they managed to find a way to offer a unifying message in a progressive frame. And because unity can sometimes be mushy middle centrism, and that's terrible. That does not work, and we should not do that.

I would say that his was even sharper than Jones or Northam was in their messages. Like, it was a sharper critique of Trump. I mean, it was a liberal critique of Trump, but it was sort of cloaked in a more unifying language. It's very similar. I mean, this is the most trite thing any Obama people say. Right. It is similar in its worldview to the Obama 2004 convention speech. Right. us into a ill-gotten war and done horrible things. And he tried to separate the American people from

the polarization in our politics. And I felt some of that in what Representative Kennedy was doing. And I think that's something to really think about. Yeah. And he updated it for The Times. And I think every Democrat, if you do look at that speech, you can't take Joe Kennedy's language and talk like Joe Kennedy, and you can't talk like Barack Obama. You have to put it in your own voice. And like you said, you can't lose that the central challenge of our time is, you know, economic inequality and challenges posed by globalization and jobs and wage and stuff like that, and who's responsible for that. You can't lose that, but you still have to somehow find these unifying themes that can tie it all together.

What did you think of the critique that was made by, you know, I saw a whole bunch of progressives make it that like, oh, the Democrats chose a white dude whose last name is Kennedy from this, you know, dynastic family at a time when, you know, there's all these young people running who are women and people of color, and we need new voices and new faces. What did you think of that? I think totally fair. Yeah, totally fair. I mean, it is, you know, Congressman Kennedy did a great job. And I think he rose to the occasion. And I think it is a totally fair critique that the year and a half after someone from a dynastic family lost the election, that we would have another person from a dynastic family. Or that as the party is becoming more diverse and we have all these new faces from different walks of life and different backgrounds, that you end up with a white guy named Kennedy. That's a totally fair critique. It is totally fair. I would be concerned if we were to like leak out that the answer that the reason we chose Joe Kennedy was because we need to we need to court white working class voters.

And so we need a white man to do that because an African-American woman or a Latina or a Latino would scare them off. That would make me I'd be very disturbed about that choice. I'd be very disturbed about that choice. I hope he was chosen for what he showed us, which is he is a very powerful messenger who speaks to young people who feel disconnected in many ways from the Democratic Party because a lot of our most famous faces are older and have been around for a long time. And so what I take from this is this is why in 2020, I hope everyone runs. Right. I thought the same thing. This is a unique challenge in that it's one of the few instances where the party chooses someone.

And I think the party is always going to be in trouble and face difficulty when they have to choose because then it's like here is the choice that came down from on high from the party elders who we don't trust right now anyway. that came down from on high from the party elders who we don't trust right now anyway, you know, versus in 2018 and 2020 when it's going to be a busy crowd, a bunch of crowded primaries where a whole bunch of people run. And then the voters get to select who they want to represent us, you know, and then it becomes, you know, literally much more democratic than the party saying this is our person. So I get the critique, but I don't think it's something that's going to be replicated often, you know, in the coming years, which is good. But if you're angry about it, I get that. I totally get that. And as you point out, we'll see who the Democratic Party decides should be its standard bearer in 2020. And it could be

someone like Joe Kennedy or it could be someone who looks very different than Joe Kennedy. And we'll see. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about our banana republic here. So I want to see if I got all this straight here because I've been trying to catch up on the news all day. I've been running around. In the last few days, week, year, I don't know, we learned that Donald Trump tried to fire special counsel Robert Mueller last spring. Yesterday, we found out that Trump forced out the deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe. Also, that he once told McCabe that his wife was a loser. We also found out that Trump has been floating the idea with friends that he might actually prosecute Mueller, prosecute the man investigating him. And today we found out that in December, Trump asked the Deputy Attorney General overseeing the Russia investigation,

Rod Rosenstein, if he was, quote, on his team. So that goes in the Trump obstructing justice in as many ways as he can category. In the other category, we have the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, with the full support of Speaker Paul Ryan, has basically opened an investigation into the FBI and Department of Justice in order to protect Donald Trump. Nunes has written a memo that supposedly shows that the FBI and DOJ got a court order to approve surveillance on former Trump aide Carter Page based on nothing but the infamous dossier. Reporting says this is not true. The FBI, which is led by Trump's handpicked FBI director, released a statement today saying that it's not true and that releasing the memo is dangerous. The Department of Justice, led by Trump's handpicked attorney general

and handpicked deputy attorney general, says the release of this memo would be extremely reckless. What do we do here? What is going on, Dan? First, this is an insult to Banana Republics. I mean, if this was happening in another country, we would unceremoniously mock them and then be deeply concerned about the state of their government. And I mean, it's terrible. And honestly, we have there's very little we can do we control nothing yeah you can't get 60 votes for to do anything that would help protect the mother investigation i mean paul ryan has just decided that he's gonna obstruct justice at every opportunity uh he could give two shits about the rule of law in this country. Like he gave this – he went and did a press conference about the release of the Nunes memo because he was clearly feeling sad that people were being mean to him about this.

Right, right. So he went out and he's like, this is an important thing to do. Sunlight is important. And then people were like, what about the Democratic memo that you won't release? And he said, I'm not taking questions anymore. And he's like we should separate this from the muller investigation focus only that it's so like that's the whole point of it it is a gambit to give cause to trump to fire muller and if trump is unable to do that because

sometimes he can't tie his shoes in the morning then it will at least create a permission structure for republican congressmen and republican voters to dismiss whatever Mueller's findings are when they come out. And so we can just pretend like it never happened and we can all go on with our business of governing this country very poorly. How far do you think Democrats should go and what tactics should Democrats use in trying to protect Mueller's job? I mean, again, we're in a situation where there was bipartisan legislation in the Senate, a couple different bills, Lindsey Graham authored one, Tom Tillis authored one that would protect Mueller from being fired on, you know,

by Trump. Like, do we use our leverage? I saw someone float that, you know, Democrats should use their leverage on government funding again, like we did with the Dreamers to protect Mueller. I don't know. What do you think about that? I think we need to draw more attention. There are a couple of things about this. One, I'm pretty convinced that Trump is probably going to fire Mueller. And even if he doesn't, Mueller is going to present his findings to Congress in some sort of report, which is going to just lay out in great detail the multiple ways in which Trump obstructed justice. His campaign colluded with Russia in some way, shape, or form.

We're involved in massive amount of corruption, money laundering, all of that. And Paul Ryan will put that in a stack of reading with all the other bad stories about Trump and will not get to it until after the election. And it won't, it won't matter. And so what we should just do is just win the fucking elections and then do real investigations and find out what actually happened here to butcher us what Mueller did. But I do think that we are barreling towards a constitutional crisis.

Yeah. And some Democrat, I can, there are many candidates for this, but should grab the floor of the Senate and not give it up for 24 hours, 36 hours, much like Rand Paul did on surveillance in 2013, and call for a vote on the bipartisan legislation to protect them all investigation we should at least i don't think that's going to move mitch mcconnell who doesn't care about anything other than the accumulation of power but it will draw attention to it and we should force both republican senators and republican house members to take a stand on this legislation and if you are against if you think trump should be able to fire the person invent crim doing the criminal investigation into him then let's take that case to voters. Yeah. I mean, look, I have a hard time with this too, because, you know, you could look at any poll and voters care way more about the economy, way more about healthcare than they do about Russia. But this has reached a level that this is not about Russia. If Bob

Mueller comes back and there are no crimes connected to Russia but there are crimes of obstruction, which we're seeing out in the open right now, that to me is like – this is a president that is like waging war on the Department of Justice and the FBI. Like this is about the rule of law. This isn't even about Russia anymore at this point. Like this is outrageous. And at some point, you're right, Like it's barreling towards a constitutional crisis. If he gets away with it now, if he gets to shut down an investigation into himself, into his own administration, then like think of what he'll do next. Think of what he can do next with the Department of Justice. Think of what he can do next with the FBI. Like the corruption knows no bounds. And like I do

think that voters care about that. Maybe they don't care about what's going on in Russia. Maybe they don't care about some Russia thing. But they certainly care if the president of the United States has decided that he is above the law and could do whatever the fuck he likes and just fire people and get rid of law enforcement if they're investigating him and do all that kind of stuff. And Democrats should run on this, but not in the world. I mean, yes, you can talk about Russia, but the Russia thing is a little bit of a red herring, no pun intended, for the massive destruction of governing norms in this country.

And we mentioned this on previous podcasts, but Democrats need a five-point plan for how they're going to codify the governing norms in this country, right? There are some pretty simple things. Like one, you could pet this law to prevent President Future from firing special counsels who are investigating them. You can make the president subject to the Hatch Act. You could close the loophole that allows the president not to be subject to the ethics rules that every government servant is subject to. You could make the House open a FOIA so we could find out whether Devin Nunez was coordinating with the White House.

There are some very specific things, and we should make a case about that, which is part of a fixing Washington agenda. Right. To your point, let's mix it with the corruption, which ties to the tax cuts. And I think the corruption tied with Trump and Republican members and billionaires enriching themselves at the expense of taxpayers is a very powerful message. And there's history that it works. The other thing I'd say about the danger of this is, here's the thing. Hillary Clinton made a very dumb mistake by using her personal email server and getting herself under FBI investigation. And that was done by a non-politicized FBI.

We can talk about how Jim Comey addressed it, like his letter, which probably could tip the election to Trump, all of that. But if we get the squeakiest, clean Democratic candidate ever, we take them directly, like they have been taken to valid poverty. They've done nothing wrong. We take them directly – they have been taken to valid poverty. They've done nothing wrong. Trump will badger Sessions into opening a criminal investigation into that person.

And we will once again – they will be able to muddy the waters on Trump's criminality and corruption by saying a Democrat is that. And when the Department of Justice and the FBI becomes a wing of the RNC, that's a big fucking problem. Yes. You can believe that Hillary Clinton was unique in the baggage that she carried around in that race and also believe that any Democrat is susceptible to this president and his party and this party painting them as corrupt and investigating them and making everyone believe that they're a criminal. Anyone. anyone is susceptible to this in this environment that we're in right now everyone should know that things are dark it's it's scary stuff i tweeted the other day was this was all happening because it really it was happening so fast i think it was

monday it was like right after you guys finished recording. And it's like, democracy also dies in the light. You don't even need darkness. Like, they're committing all the crimes out in the open. We know about all of them. No one gives a shit. It's really bad. It's really bad. I did see that you see the report that the FBI agent there, Strozek, Stroke, I don't know how to say his name. This is the guy that's been trading the text messages with this other FBI agent that he was having an affair with. And supposedly these two were like the lead in the conspiracy to help elect Hillary Clinton's emails in the fall of 2016 and helped Comey write the letter that he released a week before the election that you know may have caused Hillary Clinton the election may have been the straw that broke the camel's back so whatever everything is so stupid it's definitely so stupid it's not like you have to be a fucking genius to uncover this absurd conspiracy.

Like, it's all right there. It's so fucking stupid. It is the stupidest conspiracy. When I see, like, the fucking people from The Federalist and fucking Fox News people and all these right-wing lunatics on Twitter talking about this conspiracy and actually buying it, it's so annoying. It is unbelievable. The argument is the FBI conspired to steal the election from Donald Trump and now is engaged potentially in a coup to overthrow him when the facts are very clear that the FBI's intervention in the election elected Donald Trump. It's like, how does this pass the fucking laugh test? But

when you live in a right-wing bubble with a right-wing propaganda machine and a bunch of nimrods who are republican members of congress this is what you get oh they're such idiots okay dumb people dumb people there you go when we come back we will be talking to the washington's Ashley Parker. On the pod today, we have White House reporter from the Washington Post, Ashley Parker. Welcome back to Pod Save America, Ashley. Yeah, thanks for having me back. Slow news day. Let's start with the State of the Union, which I think happened last year. So in your piece after the speech, you wrote that the speech was a chance for President Trump to

act presidentially at least for a night. What did you find instructive about observing him in environments like the floor of the House giving the State of the Union address, him in environments like the floor of the House, giving the State of the Union address, where he's now given two speeches, big speeches, where it seems like the biggest goal for him is to act like a normal person. So I actually sort of came to this conclusion from following him on the campaign trail. And there were a number of moments where sort of voters and the Republican Party and pundits would say, well, after this, he'll become presidential or he'll become, you know, like a good candidate we can be proud of. And so it'd be, you know, after the debate, we'll see a different side of him or as soon as he locks down the Republican nomination or as soon as he officially accepts the nomination at the convention or as soon as he becomes president or he wins the election. often give a very compelling, elevated, you know, unifying bipartisan speech.

But having covered him, I sort of understood that he could do that and then he would need a release valve when everything would fall apart. And so in these moments, like in the House chamber, you know, he is very capable of reading words from a teleprompter and sort of, you know, elevating his rhetoric, but it often doesn't last for that long. Do you think he enjoys that? Like my reaction to the speech last night was, you know,

it's not like I wanted him to speak like he does on Twitter because that scares everyone. But, you know, it seemed like even his delivery, he was like sort of bored. He was a little low energy at the end. He's just sort of reading the words off the prompter, going through the motions. And I couldn't tell if he feels like that's something that his staff is making him do. They're forcing him into this constraint and he'd rather just be the normal Trump or what? Like, does he like these things or? I think it's mixed.

I think he likes the praise and the adulation and the good cable news cycles he gets after those moments. That's why he performs this way and is capable of doing it and delivers these speeches. But I also think he's gonna pay for the wall? Mexico, right? Like, those are hallmarks of the Trump show. And when you take them out, the episode loses a little bit of its steam. Ashley, I'm just curious about how you think about covering this, because there is this tradition of how State of the Unions are covered, right? There is the rollout beforehand. There's the preview story. What is it going to say? What's the policy agenda for the year? There's the analysis piece from the Dan Balls or someone afterwards putting it into perspective.

Which I think we actually had. Yeah, there is one. I know, I know. It's great. But it's like, so there's like this, like it is a normal convention of presidential action and reporting on a president. But in a world, like there's this, how do you address the discordance of trying to cover this very normal presidential ritual for a very abnormal presidency? Whatever you think about President Trump, I think we could all agree it's an abnormal presidency.

Sure. He's definitely non-traditional. It's an abnormal presidency. Sure. He's definitely non-traditional. And I should say here, which is actually true, that, you know, we don't cover him any differently than we would cover any other president past or future. It's just some of the things he does are a bit different. And so I think we did have some of those initial lead up pieces, although this White House didn't give us as many policy details.

And it turns out that's because there weren't actually that many policy details in the speech. He did sort of go through immigration four steps. But beyond that, it was sort of broad goals of how much he wanted on infrastructure spending, but not really how he was going to get there. So we try to do all of the normal rituals and story types, of course, although we did in this case try to put this in the context of, you know, this is a president who for the past year, his words have not necessarily matched his actions. And that's something to be on the lookout for this address as well. Right, right, right. What's the White House's mindset going into the next phase of talks about immigration? It seemed like last night, you know, Trump, he didn't have too much new to say on the substance,

still had this deal out there where he was offering possible citizenship to 1.8 million dreamers, but then only if it was accompanied by cuts in legal immigration and, of course, increased security. Do they want a deal? Are they willing to compromise on that? What's your sense from talking to people at the White House? I think they are, but immigration is such a tricky issue for this White House because it's one of the things where Trump, for decades on a visceral, raw gut level, feels very strongly in a sort of hawkish hardline way. But he is also fairly moved by these images and these stories of the dreamers. And if there was one takeaway from the State of

the Union last night, it's that Trump sort of understands personal narratives as a way to tell policy and to tell stories. And so he is really torn. But what we've seen so far, and I think what we might see again, is that whenever he faces a backlash for reaching out to Chuck and Nancy or offering dreamers a path to citizenship, his inclination at the end of the day is always to revert back to where some of the more hardline or restrictionist people in his West Wing are. So the Stephen Millers and the John where some of the more hardline or restrictionist people in his West Wing are. So the Stephen Millers and the John Kellys of the world. And so it's not necessarily that then Miller and Kelly are sort of driving the policy and

driving the decisions themselves, but that Trump doesn't really know where he stands on this. Is that right? Well, I think he sort of feels both. So yes, the idea of them as these master puppeteers is a bit overstated, but they are the people who sort of remind him, as St goal is moving to a merit-based immigration system, then you have to more severely curb family migration. And they tell him this and he's like, oh, okay, so I can't do my deal that I just told Chuck that I would do. Correct. Got it. Ashley, there was a report today from the Congressional Budget Office that telling Congress that they were going to have to lift the debt ceiling earlier than they had thought. Do you have a sense of whether of what preparations or thought or plan the administration has for lifting the debt ceiling? And we were in the Obama White House, you know, whether it was, you know, Secretary Geithner or Secretary Lew

were in the West Wing a year in advance saying, this is the day we think it's going to be. This is the day we think it's going to be. It moved this month to try to force a plan on this. And I just have heard very little reporting, or it may have happened, I didn't see it, about how they're going to actually accomplish this goal, where if they fail, the global economy will probably collapse. So I have to say, I don't know. But admittedly, I've done almost no reporting myself on this. So it's possible they have a well-oiled plan I just haven't inquired about. But on the whole, you know, this administration sort of deals with the immediate task in front of them. And so they get through the State of the Union and up next is averting a government shutdown next Thursday and dealing with immigration. And then they'll sort of move on to the next immediate issue that has to be grappled with. What is their view on the upcoming CR next Thursday, the White House view? Do they think it doesn't seem like Congress has reached a long-term budget deal. It seems like we are where we were like a couple weeks ago.

And does the White House expect a shutdown? Do they expect that everyone's just going to pass another CR? What's the thinking in the White House on that? I mean, I think they correctly understand that it feels deeply tied to whatever happens on immigration. on immigration. And they think in some ways they're in a good position in that this deal currently on the table or this framework at least is, I think, any reasonable person could admit, quite generous towards DREAMers. It's way more than the number of people in the DACA program. And I think they think the Democrats will be in a tough political position to turn that down. Got it. Let's talk about the Mueller investigation. A lot of news on that today. We're trying to work

through here. There was a report that Devin Nunes may have, or he didn't answer a question. He wouldn't answer a question about whether he worked with the White House on this memo that now the FBI and the Department of Justice have asked him not to release. Do you have any sense if anyone in the White House was working with Nunes on this, if they were behind some of this? So as we record this podcast, this is something we're literally chasing. So I don't have a great answer. I will say if you look at sort of past behavior, you know, Devin Nunes is someone who got in a little bit of trouble last year when he basically held this press conference to announce with great breathless fanfare that he had discovered

all sorts of inappropriate unmasking. That was something he had overstated. And it turned out the way he had discovered this was he had been escorted on to White House grounds and White House officials had showed him the details. So he certainly worked with the administration in the past to help their cause. And oftentimes just having cover politics, you've been in politics, a non-answer is sort of your answer. But again, I don't know that definitively. Got it. Actually, I'm curious about who's within the White House is coordinating the response to the Mueller investigation, right? So there's a legal element, but we fortunately managed to not be under criminal investigation. We were in the

White House. So I have to dip back to previous administrations to see this. But whether it was, you know, in the Bush administration, Ken Millman, when he was a political director, or in the Clinton administration, people like John Podesta and Rahm Emanuel, who were quarterbacking the political response to scandal investigations. Is there anyone doing that in the White House? Or is it just sort of Trump fly by the seat of his pants? Anything? I mean, the president has a personal lawyer, and then a sort of an in-house White House lawyer who's handling the response. And then various other people, Jared Kushner, all have personal lawyers as well. And I will say,

this is a White House for as leaky as people may think it is when, you know, the word Russia or Mueller comes up in any email or context. It just immediately, in a very disciplined way, gets kicked to a lawyer, right? It's like, I want absolutely nothing to do with this. Call the lawyer. So they're learning. Correct. So this is the first White House you've covered. True.

It's quite a start. What have you learned? It's not like this, just for FYI. Well, that's what I'm saying. What has surprised you most over the last year in this role of covering the White House? So I, and to be clear, this was actually the first White House I was ever offered by an employer to cover. It's not like I've turned down plenty of White House beats. Noted, noted. But I was always hesitant and frankly kind of uninterested in covering the White House because I loved covering campaigns because they felt freewheeling and exciting and larger than life characters and adrenaline charge. And then it

felt like after maybe the first year of a new president, you get in the White House and everything is very disciplined and organized and structured and buttoned down. And I have actually been surprised and pleasantly pleased about how much fun it is to cover this White House and how much it feels like a campaign. Yeah. Do you, I mean, obviously the Michael Wolff book, you know, some of it might be true, some of it might not be, but he comes to a conclusion that many people in the White House do not feel this strong loyalty to Trump. They do not have a high opinion of Trump. You guys obviously talked to a lot of sources. You have these pieces that are like,

we talked to 25 administration officials. Do you get that sense? It's our most widely mocked line, I believe. It's great. I think it's funny. I love it. I love it. Oh, so every time we talk about a story

on Positive America with that, we list out the numbers and we're not mocking it. It's trademarked. So do you get that sense that people don't, generally don't have a high opinion of the boss? Yes and no. It totally depends. There's truly no sort of blanket way to look at that. There are some people who have no problem undermining their fellow colleagues, but sort of have a rule that if you're going to work in this White House, you need to respect the president and, you know, believe in his policy agenda.

Otherwise, why should you be here? And those are people who will not really say anything negative about the president and do seem to respect him, but they have no problem saying something negative about the guy across the hall. And then there's some people who sort of are there in a God-type complex of, you know, this idea sort of that they can protect the nation from what President Trump might do in an impulsive moment. And that sort of attitude is, you know, we get all this criticism, but you don't see the tweets he didn't send. Right, right. Or, you know, you don't see the bad decision he didn't make or, you know, we're the reason

he's still in NAFTA. Yeah, and we thank those people for their service here. We do mock those people. Yeah, okay, so that's a subset too, those folks. Yeah.

Ashley Parker, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Come back sometime. Totally. All right, take care. Thanks again to Ashley Parker for joining us today and uh i'll see

you dan in la on saturday at the dolby show yeah i'm super excited for that hallie's coming it's gonna it's gonna be a party it's gonna be great and that show will be monday's pod so uh you guys will all get to hear that we'll see you later bye guys bye Bye.