Pod Save America - “Bolton’s bombshell.”

Episode Date: January 27, 2020

John Bolton’s explosive new book upends Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, Adam Schiff joins to talk about what happens next, and Bernie Sanders extends his lead in Iowa as other candidates raise electability questions. Then Ezra Klein talks to Dan about his new book, “Why We’re Polarized.”

Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. We have an insane amount of news to cover today. Adam Schiff is going to join in a few to talk about John Bolton's impeachment bombshell and where the trial goes from here. We're also one week away from the caucuses, and there are more polls showing that Iowans are feeling the burn.

And later, you'll hear an interview Dan did with Vox's Ezra Klein about his new book, Why We're Polarized. Before we get into all that, the latest episode of The Wilderness is out. This is one of my favorites. I sit down with Obama Trump voters outside of Milwaukee who backed Democratic candidates in 2018. And we talk to people like Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, Ilhan Omar, and other strategists and organizers about how Democrats can win back the Midwest in 2020. Their advice is very smart and worth listening to. You really got a who's who of people I actually want to

listen to on this show. Yeah, these are people who know how to win in the Midwest. It's not just theoretical. The woman in Pennsylvania who started the group on her own almost made me cry in my car. I love Angela Aldous. I just think, I don't know, I thought 15 minutes with Selena Zito was probably a little much. But I feel like I've heard some of it before. Now you know who to take literally and who to take seriously. Subscribe at thewildernesspodcast.com. Go subscribe.

Love it. How was this weekend's show? Great love it or leave it. Check it out. People in Iowa City are pumped that you're coming to their town. Iowa City. Big love it or leave it coming out. It was a very fun episode this week.

I'm very excited to go to Iowa. We have some exciting guests coming out for that show. If you're in Iowa, come check us out. You could be a guest. You could be a guest. Plucked from the crowd. All right, let's start with the biggest development since the impeachment trial began. Here's the lead in the New York Times that broke Sunday night. President Trump told his national security advisor in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former advisor, John R. Bolton. According to the Times and Bolton's lawyers, a draft of the book was sent to the White House on December 30th, which means that some collection of Trump administration officials

have known what's in there for almost a month. And now for a quick reaction to this news, we're going to go to Representative Adam Schiff. On the pod today, we have the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the lead House impeachment manager himself, Adam Schiff. Welcome back to the pod, Congressman. Thank you. Great to be with you. So, you know, I'm just looking at all this news coming in. John Thune just said on the Bolton revelations,

I don't think it changes the facts. I don't personally see it as a game changer uh... what's your reaction to that my reaction is the president says that john bolton is lying john bolton says they had direct conversation uh... evidently with the president in which the president said he was withholding all this military aid that ukraine to course uh... these investigations are or something along those lines uh... let's put John

Bolton under oath and find out the truth. Now, what Bolton said evidently is corroborated by every single other witness we've already heard from. So I would hope that Senator Thune and all the other senators would want to hear these witnesses unless they're prepared to say, want to hear these witnesses unless they're prepared to say, we think the president is lying and we think that there's no need for this. I think the senators should want to hear this evidence. So it's now clear that Bolton refused to testify to the House based on a lie, since he had already planned to reveal everything in his book. Does that constitute contempt of Congress in your mind, or is there anything else you can do as Intel chairman to pressure him to testify if the Senate refuses to vote for witnesses?

Well, look, I think the senators should want to hear Bolton's testimony. They should want to have him under oath and be able to evaluate his credibility. I see little point in bringing him before the House when the triers of fact should hear from him directly. So I would urge the Senate to move straight to live testimony. I don't think that it's necessary to do a deposition. I think the American people want to hear from Mr. Bolton as well. and people want to hear from Mr. Bolton as well. So I would urge that this important witness and others,

but particularly John Bolton now, come forward and testify before the Senate. Can you subpoena a galley of the book? You know, I don't want to get into specific documents, but frankly, I think the most important records are probably John Bolton's notes. Those notes, I would imagine, were taken contemporaneously. And so what John Bolton said after he had discussions with the president, I think the senators should demand to see. And so, yes, those could be subpoenaed. Obviously, any document could be subpoenaed.

But the most important may be the notes that he took at the time of these events. There was one particular detail that caught my eye in the Times story. Bolton's book will reportedly say that Trump didn't want to release the aid until Ukraine, quote, turned over all materials they had about the Russia investigation that related to Mr. Biden and supporters of Mrs. Clinton in Ukraine. That seems slightly different than the quid pro quo that other witnesses testified about, which was an announcement of the Biden-Burisma investigation. What did you make of that? Well, you know, this is a good reason why we should bring John Bolton in and find out exactly about that conversation. At the end of the day, though, the president's object is the same, and that is to use this taxpayer money, use this

leverage the United States had, or he had as commander-in-chief over Ukraine by withholding money they needed to fight a war with Russia to get something that would help him essentially cheat in the next election, get foreign help in the next election. And that could be obviously in the form of what is purported in this manuscript, information about the Bidens or Hillary Clinton that would discredit the Mueller conclusion. It could be specific information about Biden's firing of the former corrupt prosecutor general or his involvement in that. And so I think it is of a like character to what we've already had testimony about. But if he can add additional insights, why would the Senate not want to hear from him? It seems like he may, in this book, also implicate Attorney General Bill Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Do you believe we need to hear from Barr and Pompeo as well?

Well, look, I think that certainly all of these witnesses have insights into the full scope of the president's misconduct and people around the president. So they would all provide useful testimony. into the full scope of the president's misconduct and people around the president. So they would all provide useful testimony. But look, we're focusing, I think, on the most important that go to the president's misconduct, to go to the case why the president needs to be removed from office. But I do think the American people are entitled to the truth, the full truth, nothing but the truth about the length and breadth of this corrupt scheme. Who was involved? Who was in the know? You know, in terms of the Attorney General,

the Attorney General, the Justice Department had a role in trying to prevent the whistleblower complaint from getting to Congress. We now know that Bill Barr was made aware by John Bolton, if this report is accurate, that he was mentioned on that call. That is the subject of this whistleblower complaint. So by withholding that complaint from Congress, Barr was also, in effect, protecting himself. And you could see when that call record became public that Barr felt it necessary to immediately issue a statement saying, they never discussed it with me, I took no steps, I want nothing to do with this. And that only underscores, I think, just why Bill Barr's Justice Department wanted the whistleblower complaint never to be seen. Noah Feldman, one of the Democrats' witnesses at the judiciary hearing, recently said that if

there are no witnesses and documents, he believes this impeachment trial would be illegitimate. Do you agree with that? I agree it won't be a fair trial. And, you know, you can't have a fair trial where you deprive the House or the President from calling relevant witnesses, so it won't be a fair trial. And, you know, if there are no witnesses and no documents, there's no fair trial, there's no vindication of the President, and there's no exoneration of the President. And I think that the American people deserve a fair trial. So I think that if you want to give content to that oath of being a partial juror, you should want to hear the full truth. What are you hoping to be asked during the 16-hour question period that will happen this week?

Well, you know, I think I'd certainly like a chance to rebut some of the representations and misrepresentations in the president's argument, that of his lawyers on the Senate floor. But I think one of them has already been powerfully rebut, and that is one of the president's lawyers was on the floor saying there's no direct evidence the president told anyone to withhold the aid for these investigations. First of all, that wasn't true to begin with, because Mick Mulvaney said that he discussed this with the president and admitted there was a quid pro quo over the aid and the investigations. Gordon Sondland said he spoke to the president, and the president, while saying there was no quid pro quo, then went on to describe a quid pro quo in which the president of Ukraine had to go to the microphone and announce these investigations. Bolton would be the third direct witness, and he would also corroborate all the circumstantial evidence, the 2 plus 2 equals 4, that so many other witnesses testified in the absence of any other credible explanation for the withholding of the aid and knowing that the president was already tying the White House meeting to getting these investigations, you could reach no other sensible conclusion. Bolton just is a further increment of evidence in an already overwhelming case. But, you know, he should be brought forward. And if the president and his lawyers are trying to contest it, then we should not turn away a witness who's already said they're willing to cooperate.

But questions about what the president's lawyers are arguing and whether those arguments carry water, I'd certainly like a chance to respond to that. So substance of the case aside, as a former speechwriter, I have been in awe of the closing statements you delivered last week, all of which have gone viral. What was your process there? Were those off the cuff? Did you write them ahead of time?

I've had a whole bunch of people ask me this. Well, I've been doing really what I did during the testimony of the witnesses in the House, which is I would listen to their testimony during the course of the day, and I would jot down notes about things that were particularly striking to me. And so I had notes, but there was certainly an impromptu quality to them. To them, for example, when we played that clip of Colonel Vindman talking about his father, which I watched some of the senators watching that clip, and I saw them with tears in their eyes as he was describing how he told his father, don't a point worth returning to in my closing. And so that's been my process. It's a bit risky in a trial of this importance, but I think people appreciate it when you're speaking from the heart. And so I try to look for things during the day that are worth being emphasized at the end of the day. I will say, you know, I've watched you a lot over the course of this impeachment, and in your final statement, I don't know that I've ever seen you so passionate and emotional. Was that anger? Was it frustration? What were you thinking there?

You know, I don't know that it was so much a conscious decision. I don't know that it was so much a conscious decision. I obviously feel very strongly about what's happened in the country. I feel really anguished about what this administration is doing to the country. And I'm deeply worried about our future. And I think that comes out. And, you know, certainly when you're at this for hours and hours and you know the stakes, then things tend to resonate within you more deeply. And I think that's what you're seeing. Congressman Schiff, thank you so much for everything. Good luck with the trial this week. And we'll talk to you again soon. Thank you very much.

this week and we'll talk to you again soon. Thank you very much. All right. Thanks to Adam Schiff for joining. So guys, you heard the congressman. They're going to try to go get this guy testifying. So before we talk about how this New York Times story on Bolton affects the trial, let's talk about the story itself for a second, because there are quite a few gems in here related not only to Trump, but the rest of his goons. What did you guys think? Tommy, what was your first reaction when you read this story? I mean, my first reaction was, what an asshole. You know, the revolution will be monetized. Like John Bolton thinks we deserve the truth if and only if he gets paid for it in the form of a book or a corporate speech.

And it's just outrageous. But, I mean, he has the New York Times described it as dozens of pages describing the Ukraine extortion plot. Everyone that we thought would be in on the fix. Mike Pompeo, Mick Mulvaney, other shady idiots. They're all in on the thing. I mean, how many smoking guns do we need before we impeach this guy? As Gordon Sondland said, everyone was in the loop. I do think, Tommy, it was funny that like 20 paragraphs down in the story, the New York Times says Bolton told people he wants to testify now, so he's not accused of holding back to boost his book sales.

Love it. What do you think? Well, you know, he's refused congressional subpoenas. It's pretty baffling.'s it's just not defensible to say that i can't say these things to congress but i can say these things in a book because then it raises this sort of philosophical question is what would happen if you read the book out loud in congress or not in congress or anywhere so he's you know he's full of shit you know like i you know i feel like i've said this a million times but i think john bolton cares about two things preemptive war and john bolton and so he doesn't he's not trying to protect trump he's not trying to hurt trump he's trying to do what's best for himself and it seems like he cares about another kind of regime change right

now yeah yeah i mean it's just he's really he is nothing if not consistent yeah no he definitely loves a good preemptive strike i mean that's for sure it's like we we have an hour and a half long tape of of trump saying take out the ambassador we have the national security advisor detailing the entire extortion racket over dozens of pages like what else do we need i mean like this is this is nixon tapes-esque it's uh yes it's it's it just, you know, we'll get to the politics. But what does this show us? Well, it's yet another. And this is what she said as well. It's yet more confirmation of what we already know. It's another camera angle. You know, we already have. It's it's as if we're watching this car crash and we have we have a fucking recording from inside the car. We have footage from this direction. We have footage from that direction. And now we have yet another angle on this fucking on this on this wreck. And the the the reason I think it's made such a big deal is not that it's really told us something we didn't already know.

It's that it's harder and harder for five Senate Republicans to say with a straight face that we don't need to hear from John Bolton in the Senate. A few other nuggets from the story. Bolton says that he, Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper basically asked the president to release the aid a dozen times. A dozen times they asked him to release the aid trump said he wouldn't do it until ukraine turned over all materials they had about the russia investigation that related to joe biden and hillary clinton which is you heard me ask chef about this it's just sort of one the way it was phrased in the times it was very odd like what does the russia investigation have to do with joe biden and hillary clinton like it could very well be possible that Donald Trump has all of his fucking conspiracy theories

mixed up. Yeah, I'm going to go Occam's razor and just say that Donald Trump is very stupid and probably garbled his words. But yes, he could also have in his head a whole bunch of other conspiracy theories that haven't been debuted yet and able to be on Rudy's new podcast. Yeah, I don't even think, look, I'm happy for Donald Trump to be stupid. I don't even think he needs to be dumb in this case. He just needs to be imprecise and not really care what he's getting. He just really wants, whether in some cases he was saying, I want them to announce an investigation, whether in other cases he's saying, just give me anything that's documented that I can use against Joe Biden.

You know what I was thinking about when I saw that, right? It's, you know, Pompeo is a liar and a fraud and, you know, as Tommy Tommy likes to point out has been referred to as a heat seeking missile for Trump's ass but what you see in this weird action damn right but the but you see

this sort of like all these people whatever they're saying publicly however they're covering for Trump clearly behind the scenes they understand that this is wrong. And they're going to try to get him to do it over. Please stop this. Please stop this. And then Trump seems sober, seems like maybe they've gotten their fucking hands around

this thing. And then he just go takes a fucking whip it off of Rudy Giuliani and they're back to where they started. It's like Rudy Giuliani. Yeah, the huffing Rudy was a tough,, was the explanation for this whole thing. It is. Rudy Giuliani, Rudy Giuliani was a drug for Trump because it was a, it was a, it fed his narcissistic obsession with something that could help him, something that could vindicate his conspiracy theories about 2016 and, uh, uh, tip the scales in 2020. So there was nothing, I mean, this is something that Schiff said in his closing. Why

wouldn't, why on earth would you listen to Rudy Giuliani over Christopher Wray? Why would you listen to Rudy Giuliani after over all these career National Security Council people telling you that what you're doing is wrong, unhelpful, dangerous, etc, etc, etc, illegal? Well, just because he liked theton will also implicate a few other members of the Trump administration. Pompeo told Bolton that Marie Yovanovitch did nothing wrong and that Rudy was trying to get rid of her, probably to help his own clients. So that's great. Bolton says that he told Attorney General Bill Barr that Giuliani was running a shadow foreign policy and that it was a problem. And now, of course, the Justice Department, through a spokesperson, is saying, no, I don't know what you're talking about. You never told Bill Barr anything. What are you talking about? Their denials are always so specific and so thinly sliced. I just don't believe a word he says ever. It's just, I mean, I think, and you know, I shift this, like, forget about just Bolton and

Mulvaney. Let's get Pompeo in there. Let's get Barr to testify. Ask for all of it. Donnie Jr. was at the Lev Parnas dinner. He got some things to say if we're going to do Hunter Biden. All right, so let's talk about what happens next. The timing of this was exquisite because the core argument that the president's defense team had been making to the Senate over the weekend is that the president didn't withhold the aid because he wanted an investigation and that no one who spoke directly to Trump has testified otherwise. The Bolton story has completely destroyed that defense. So what

happens now? How does this affect the trial? Well, first of all, I do just want to say, you know, look, we don't know where the as of this recording, I haven't seen that we know who leaked the information from the manuscript, whether it was from someone in the White House, someone from Bolton's camp that they denied it, someone from the publisher. If you are the person who put this out today, I want to applaud you for your political fucking acumen. Just really crushed it on the timing. Nailed it. acumen. Just really crushed it on the timing. Nailed it. My guess is, so what happened is the Bolton's lawyer sent a manuscript to the NSC for preclearance and they are saying they did not send it to anyone else. Do you think, Tom, I'm interested in what you think about this. Maybe there's someone still at the NSC who's loyal to Bolton who decided that they would want to get it out

to help Bolton? That was my guess because, I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, you know, that sort of preclearance process where you review a book for classification issues or executive privilege or whatnot is supposed to be handled by technocrats. But we know those people no longer exist anymore. So it probably got just forwarded around to the entire executive team and whoever leaked it, leaked it. It's also Lev Parnas with a highlighter. I mean, it's also's also like i don't know i don't know who to trust in this situation i don't trust anybody and it was pretty notable that the book cover popped up on amazon like 15 minutes later right interesting so yeah it'd have been them i mean you know or they might have just said ah we got to get some pre-sales right they could be taking advantage of the opportunity they were

trying to make money either way they don't even have to think they're heroes here. Oh, John. No one thinks they're heroes. I'm sorry. Do you think... I don't think John Bolton's a hero. I just want to make sure that's out there. I don't know who's listening. Should we have not started the podcast that we're in development?

That's the title. I don't want to see this. John Bolton, American hero. It is just waiting. Welcome to the resistance. I mean, this does raise questions that this manuscript got to the White House on December 30th. So at least some combination of Trump administration officials knew that this was coming out, knew it when they forbid John Bolton to testify. And, you know, we don't know for sure, but there's a question whether the Trump's defense team knew it when they just told the Senate that there has been no evidence that

anyone talked directly to Donald Trump about a quid pro quo. They're liars. Yeah. I also would love to know if Mitch McConnell knew about this existence and the contents of said book, because look, Mitch's entire game plan here has been to prevent this testimony from happening. And it wouldn't shock me for one second if he was in on the fix as he told fox news he was coordinating every day all the time with their team and this isn't like a this isn't like a a memoir about like you know what it's like to be on air force one and leadership you know yeah right like the the the apple slices from the mess like this is a fucking like this is a bombshell book like this goes up the chain of command people are aware of this this is a bombshell book. Like this goes up the chain of command. People are aware of this. This is, this is if I did it,

right? This is if that's what I look, the, if I, if I did it and the room where it happened, Bolton's name of his book have a very similar energy. And I will just say, uh,

tough weekend for Lin-Manuel Miranda. I know. Tough weekend for all of us. All attention is, all attention is good attention, right? Yeah. Um,

so let's talk about the Republican reaction to this development so far. It's a tough weekend for all of us. All attention is good attention, right? So let's talk about the Republican reaction to this development so far. And we're recording this as it's still unfolding, as they're still trying to get on the same talking points. So Romney has basically said, I've said before I want witnesses. Now I really want witnesses. I want to hear from John Bolton. Susan Collins put out a statement saying,

I think this strengthens the case for witnesses. Also notable that both of them have not just said, spoken for themselves, but they said, we've now been talking to some other people. Romney said, I think it's likely now we'll get some witnesses. But then Sam Stein at the Daily Beast put a list together of other Republican responses so far from senators, which has been, he's not telling the truth. He's not saying anything new. He may not be a firsthand witnesshand witness which was josh holly josh holly said i don't know is he a first-hand witness i don't know josh can you read can you fucking read anything is he the national security advisor because i'm pretty sure he talked to the president united states which is what the report says so i don't know you know um he won't change the outcome that was from a couple republican

senators won't change the outcome which is really telling on yourself yeah uh he's aggrieved that the republican national committee is attacking him on that uh and of course some of them are falling back to the house should have called him the house should have called him which is outrageous so i don't but i will say that because they haven't all coalesced on a single excuse for this and they're canceling press conferences left and right and romney saying this and calling canceling on npr they cancel on npr i do this adam driver shit i do think it shows that this is um you know i saw a lot of people yesterday when this broke like nothing matters nothing's gonna change i know i'm like those people maybe you're right what do you think that we don't think you're right you think we're all fucking naive and hopeful and optimistic

we're fucking not i don't think they're right? You think we're all fucking naive and hopeful and optimistic? We're fucking not. I don't think they're right. I mean, look, the polling has already been like 70 percent in favor of calling new witnesses and hearing people. I do think this book makes it untenable for these Republicans to not hear from John Bolton, for Murkowski, for Collins, for Romney, for Lamar Alexander, although he's retiring, for Cory Gardner, who's still in the witness protection program. for Cory Gardner, who's still in the witness protection program. I mean, this, you have to think the pressure is building on them to have witnesses. What, what possible excuse could you offer to voters in your state or in your district for not calling these people? It's all going to come out in a book. Of course, the biggest Trump defenders are going to go out and say what they've been saying this morning and say, fuck it, who've already made up their minds. But like, and look, do I think that Mitt Romneyney and susan collins are gonna you know show some great courage and vote to convict donald

trump i still think that's highly unlikely but political pressure works and also if you're mitt romney and you're gonna vote no on john bolton as a witness why put yourself out there and say i want witnesses i've been saying it all along and now i think it's more likely we're gonna get it why do that why not just say walk by reporters and say i'll talk to. I've been saying it all along and now I think it's more likely we're going to get it. Why do that? Why not just say, walk by reporters and say, I'll talk to you later. Well, it's also, you know, okay, you're very sophisticated.

You are saying that you're very sophisticated to predict that a very likely outcome is a certainty is not interesting or smart. It doesn't make you savvy. We all get it. We all know what the deal is. It is, you know know it is obviously very likely that donald trump will not be convicted by the senate saying that something that is very very likely is a certainty is just playing the fucking odds but

you know on the witnesses you know we're so we're so in it like the case for witnesses at a trial is that it's a fucking trial you know like we are so beyond like we are in outer space now the case for witnesses was ironclad the day he was impeached it's the case for witnesses is how trials work it's in the fucking bill of rights you know it's like this is this is what we do you have a trial you call witnesses otherwise it's just opening statements and there never was a trial. There was a Maggie Haberman tweeted that, to your point about them not really being on the same page, that many of the senators felt that they were just blindsided by the existence of this manuscript, which I find delightful. It's blindsided. It's very much just I'm horrified to discover that there may be evidence that there was gambling in this casino.

Well, you can tell they're already starting to try to move on to other excuses, right? So now they're saying, well, even if there was a quid pro quo, even if he did condition assistance on investigations, now they're prepared to say, well, Ukraine didn't feel pressure. Ukraine didn't know, which is also not true because witnesses testified that Sondland delivered the extortion scheme to the Ukrainians, told them about it, told them this was going to happen. So they're going to say the Ukrainians. And of course, when he got caught, he eventually released the aid. That's what they're down to that now. They're going back to the Mick Mulvaney response that he just debuted a few months too early, which is this happens all the time. Deal with it. I don't care.

Right. which is this happens all the time. Deal with it. I don't care. Right. There is an interesting, they are really stuck because they're, you know,

I've seen sort of on like, you know, national review and a few other places like what's the real story here? What's the real thing they're telling themselves? And, and one of the arguments went something like, obviously what Trump did was terribly inappropriate. However, there's an election at the end of this year.

The aid was released. This was discovered. He has paid a political price. It is not worth removing him over this. But the reason they can't fucking go out there and say this is because they're terrified. Like the equivalent of this in 1998 is saying Monica Lewinsky has never met Bill Clinton. All of this is made up. It's a right wing host.

Bill Clinton did nothing wrong. They've been trying to get him from day one. I mean, we know why they're not like if Mitt Romney and Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Lamar Alexander and maybe others go ahead and vote for witness vote to hear from John Bolton. The tweets from Donald Trump and the cry from the conservative media echo chamber is going to be deafening. I mean, it is he's going to be fucking defcon one they're scared saying threatening all of them it's great it's going to be amazing to watch he threatened adam schiff yesterday they threatened matt geitz who has been their number one water carrier because he dared to vote against war with iran right i mean he's the most vindictive president in history and like i just love the projection from these

guys like pat cipleoni is calling the dem case a plot to subvert the election. It's just always projecting. Always, always. Right. A plot to make Mike Pence president. So Republicans maintain control of the White House. Like at least like the whole overturning election thing is just a fucking it's just another story. It's not an argument. It's not it's not actually it's just it's just a talking point to give them comfort. The one other thing here is this it it now seems like you know i think john thune was saying uh there's gonna be a vote on witnesses friday or saturday of this week maybe uh and everything usually goes longer if they do say yes to witnesses at this point doesn't look like donald trump's given a state of the union after uh after an acquittal that sure doesn't so that that's fun. I would say the one little,

the one fear is that Romney, Collins, the others that have gotten themselves, they get themselves pretty far out there. They can lose what, three? They can lose three, yeah. Lamar, yeah. And they just hold,

they get Cory Gardner just sort of, he thinks he's done, he doesn't think it's going to affect him. They get Lamar as just sort of a fucking final, like, do it, you know,

do it for us, do it for the team. Like, don't, they could get it. Or, and look, we shouldn't be, I mean, we get witnesses, Collins and Romney

and all those people feel good about themselves that they voted for witnesses and then they vote to acquit the president and then they can go back and say, well, I was very moderate and reasonable because I voted for witnesses. I'm like, that's still where we're landing.

But again, our task here is to give voters this information to drag this on a little bit longer to let him make sure he doesn't get a full acquittal and full exoneration and scream about it. And, you know, really damning testimony from John Bolton on the way out the door at the end of the trial, that's not a really, that's not a full exoneration and scream about it and you know really damning testimony from john bolton on the way out the door at the end of the trial that's not a really that's not a full exoneration for donald i'd like to see that and one sign that i think even some of the senate republicans are starting to come to grips with the fact that their witnesses is john cornyn is back to floating you get your witnesses we're calling biden we're calling hunter we're calling we're calling adam

schiff again i i think calling adam schiff is a real. Yeah, please catch that car. So believe it or not, the Bolton story is not the only piece of new evidence that emerged over the weekend. On Friday, ABC News released excerpts of a recording of Donald Trump talking to indicted Giuliani associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman at a 2018 fundraiser, which proves that when Trump said he doesn't know them, he was lying. Let's play a clip of that tape, which was apparently made by Igor Fruman. The biggest problem there, I think, where we need to start is we've got to get rid of the ambassador. She's still left over from the Clinton administration. Who are the ambassadors? Ukraine?

Yeah, and she's basically walking around telling everybody, wait, he's going to get impeached, just wait. Really? It's incredible. Here we go tomorrow i don't remember so one of the things that will be now that we have a secretary of state that's been this morning get rid of her get her out tomorrow okay get her out tomorrow take her out okay do it take her out. Okay? Excellent. Do it. Take her out, said the President of the United States, to a random goon.

That he just met. That he just met. I guess this is how hiring and firing happens at the White House. Listening to these clowns laugh excessively hard to every one of his jokes is so painful. I know. I know it's a side point. No, it's a good one. I would just also say, Trump's comments about Ambassador Yovanovitch are maybe not the worst part about that tape.

It's like an hour and a half of him schmoozing with these rich donors, including foreign nationals, who are just presenting Trump with their policy wish list that they are buying access to. And so there's one guy who's a Canadian steel magnet. He wants to limit steel imports to the U.S. and he wants to get rid of safety rules for truckers because that's a safe job. Apparently, he gave one point1.75 million to a pro Trump super PAC called America First Action. Now, that is illegal because he's a foreign national, but he routed the money through one of his subsidiary companies in the US. So it's just like, this is the most brazen corruption you could imagine. There's one guy who's trying to get

Trump to hold the Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un at a property he owns in Korea. I mean, nothing is sacred in this meeting. You can buy access to Trump. You can buy your way onto the policy agenda. It is disgusting. And I will say, you know, we're talking about this before the podcast, but like that story Ken Vogel wrote in the New York Times about all this pay to play stuff going on at this meeting and at the Trump Hotel in general. I mean, this is stuff that voters will really care about if Democrats tell this story right. The idea that Trump promised to drain the swamp and has failed to drain the swamp, not only failed to drain the swamp, but like built an entire new swamp,

really does piss people off. And it pisses the Obama-Trump voters off. It pisses our base off. It pisses enough people. We've seen this in our polling.'ve seen another polling so i do think um you know we've talked a lot about how impeachment is not really breaking through to average americans in any way but this kind of shit will All right, so let's talk about 2020. The Iowa caucus is a week from today.

Wow. And we have four new polls, three of which have Bernie Sanders in the lead and one that has Biden in the lead. The big one was the New York Times-Siena College poll, where Bernie's at 25 percent, Pete's at 18 percent, Biden's at 17 percent,%, Warren is at 15%, and no one else is in double digits. I think Klobuchar's at 8% in that poll. Guys, any specific takeaways from any of the numbers in this poll or any of the polling you've seen over the weekend? The only thing is just, you know, Bernie's momentum doesn't feel like noise anymore. It seems like it's really evident across a wide number of polls. The fact that there are still other outliers just tells you that nobody knows anything.

But Bernie goes into the Iowa caucuses in a very strong position, having kind of weathered a heart attack, come back stronger, having been through a number of just really strong debates, having actually not really drawn that much heat from his fellow candidates over the course of the last six months as one by one, whether it was Pete for a while, Biden for a while, Warren for a while, became the potential front runner, faced a bunch of heat and scrutiny and attacks, and then kind of lowered in the polls. And just faced a bunch of heat and scrutiny and attacks, and then kind of lowered in the polls. And just Bernie was sort of rock steady through that whole period. So I just got back from Iowa on Saturday. I was there to tape the final episode of my Iowa miniseries on the Iowa caucuses that comes out Tuesday morning. So keep an eye on that.

A few things. One, we did an exclusive poll for that episode with Change Research, and the results of that poll will be in that episode tomorrow. So that's my way of baiting you into listening. You don't get any hints. You got to listen to Pod Save America on the ground in Iowa tomorrow. You know hints. The biggest takeaway I had was how weird it was to be there with impeachment. We were there Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. There were almost no candidates on the ground. Some were stuck in DC, but also Pete and Biden weren't really there when we were there. Only Andrew Yang was like really working it hard. The guy's doing a 17 day bus tour with four or five stops a day. Yeah. Yang, keep an eye on Yang. He's doing something interesting. The thing that's notable though, is like, no one knows what's going to happen,

but people feel like the Bernie campaign is a mystery. And then I went and spent some time with Bernie staffers and went to the AOC event that they did in Iowa city. And they feel like the Bernie campaign is a mystery. And then I went and spent some time with Bernie staffers and went to the AOC event, uh, that they did in Iowa city. And they feel like they have the biggest volunteer base. They feel like they're doing really well in terms of their field numbers. It's notable.

They had like the biggest surrogates in the state. They had Mike Posner, they had AOC, they had Michael Moore doing these big trips. I didn't see other candidates filling the void, uh, for, void for having their bosses out of town for impeachment the way they were. Amy Klobuchar's daughter was there. She did really great events, but we're talking about 30 people, not 800. Yeah, who else was there?

Amy Klobuchar had a professional curling coach who was doing events. So people are trying. Elizabeth Warren had Jonathan Van Ness. But this thing, who knows where this thing will go? It does feel like there is some pretty undeniable Bernie Sanders momentum right now. What are people saying about some of the other campaigns out there? And like who's got after Bernie? Is there any campaign where people are saying like, yeah, they could they could make a run for this? Well, I mean, I think the problem is it's just set up as this big prisoner's dilemma. I mean, if you look at the New York Times poll, 55% of respondents said they want a choice that is more moderate than most Democrats. So that would make you think, okay, that's well set up for Biden or Klobuchar or Mayor Pete. But all of them are splitting that so-called moderate vote. And when you look at Bernie's support over time, it is gained and has lost nothing. His people are rock solid, ride or die Bernie. They probably have second choices. I'm not saying they're Bernie or bust. There's anything nefarious here. But,

you know, Warren has risen and fallen. Pete has risen and fallen. Biden sort of been all over the place. Klobuchar has surged a bunch. We'll see how that goes. But Bernie just has this base. It's not going anywhere. But the other interesting thing was, so they asked the, do you want a candidate who's more moderate or more liberal than most Democrats? And the moderate candidate wins by like, it was like 55 to 36 or something. It was a really healthy margin. But then they also asked, do you want a candidate who's going to bring big change to Washington and shake things up or something like that, or one who will return to before Donald Trump. And on that one, the big

change won out. Not by a lot, but by like a couple points. So I do think, you know, ideology, as we've said for a long time, is sometimes, you know, discussed a lot among pundits and in DC. And the way that voters think about things is not necessarily in neat ideological lanes. They think about candidates who are going to bring change, are going to take things back to normal, like they might be thinking about this race in different ways. And there's just a conflict inside of people's intention when they're going to vote here because they feel that the country is broken in some fundamental way. The election of Donald Trump shows that. And they are receptive to the arguments that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren make about the need for big and dramatic changes to get out of this mess that we're in.

And yet at the same time, after three years of a disastrous, mean-spirited, vicious, hateful, chaotic administration, and at a time in which the economy does seem to be doing better, there is also a fear of just chaos and uncertainty as well. And I think that that's a completely reasonable place for a lot of people to be. One of the things, it seems like no one has figured out how to take on Bernie or even tried. Even when they were all piling on Elizabeth Warren over Medicare for all, they did it in a way that was complimentary to Bernie saying he's going to raise taxes, at least he's honest about it. No one is even trying to

lay a glove on him. And I don't know. I'm not sure who the right messenger for that attack should be, but they should hurry up. The Washington Post over the weekend, there was a story about how Bernie's opponents are starting to confront him directly. But all it has in that story is Mayor Pete sent out a fundraising appeal that said, quote, we risk nominating a candidate who cannot be Donald Trump in November. Klobuchar said his Medicare for all position wouldn't be viable in a general election. She went after that. But like Joe Biden has just not really been attacking him at all. So I think that's changing today. Yeah. So Weigel is Dave Weigel is at the Biden event right now. Biden is not referring to Bernie by name,

but he is saying things like, as one of the leaders of the Medicare for All effort said, I don't know how much it's going to cost, but we have to do it. That's not how a bill gets passed. Hey, man. I'm never a fan of, I'm not going to name the candidate because it's a...

And then he said, I show how I'm going to pay for everything in my campaign. Others say they're going to spend 60 trillion. I don't think you win with that. I think it scares the living daylights out of people. He's not saying the name, but that you see it's a he's too far left critique plus a he can't win critique in there. Yeah. If I were them, I would try to figure out how to make an electability critique. And look, I'm not saying that that's the right thing to do morally or objectively accurate. I'm

just saying it's the tack I would go. The other challenge, though, is that like Bernie has this online cash register that he just rings every time someone attacks him and then a couple million bucks just rolls in. And that's got to be terrifying for these candidates. He's also done a pretty good job of creating his own media infrastructure. They're streaming more events. They're doing things that are different and interesting and not going through the media filter.

And like, look, Joe Biden's schedule is very light. He's like doing a couple events a day, maybe three max. Just now he's like Pete's now in town in Iowa and not leaving. I assume Biden will be the same, but they have so much catching up to do. They do. And, you know, the New York Times had a story this morning about their poll where they said that there's a certain segment of Iowa voters who voted in the Democratic primary in 2018, which was a primary and not a caucus, and then now are saying they're probably not going to caucus because caucus takes a lot more to caucus than it does to vote, as we've talked about. And Biden is leading those voters by 11 points. And so, and they're older.

And so one of we were just talking about one of Biden's challenges this week is to mobilize older voters, which is a tough challenge to do. And people who are comfortable voting in a primary, but not necessarily going out to caucus. Doesn't it sound a little familiar from 2007? This is a very Clinton Obama. 2007? This is a very Clinton-Obama. And how about just a surprising uptick from the insurgent who is going to head out. If Bernie were to win Iowa, he leaves Iowa with just money kind of falling out the back of his pickup truck. You talked about this. A state that he won last time in 2016, next up on the calendar, New Hampshire,

which he's doing very well. And now Joe Biden is not doing very well. And, you know, you got you and Dan talked about this, but it remains true. You know, we don't know how much money Biden has to leave Iowa with. But, you know, I remember in 2007, it wasn't just that Hillary Clinton was surprised in Iowa. It was that her strategy left with very few resources after Iowa and New Hampshire. And it seems like Biden might find himself in the same position. If you're a potential Biden supporter and you're like, let's say you're 75 years old and you are deciding whether to step outside on a freezing cold night where it's icy out and potentially fall and break your hip or not, like that's not a tough call. They're not going to do it. This is literally the kinds of considerations people are making. And the challenge for Biden is

that no one seems to think he has a good organization. No one seems to think he has a field team that's doing get out the caucus calls and setting up rides for people and making sure these folks get to the poll. Bernie's got a massive volunteer base. And like their whole strategy is to bring in brand new people to the caucuses for the first time, potentially Latino voters, young voters. And if they're able to do that, they are going to just swamp these precincts. And we're going to have a turnout number for the Iowa Congresses in aggregate that's higher than anyone expected, which will benefit him. Just to return to the New York Times poll on this, I think it does tell a pretty simple story here.

And it's not just this poll, it's most of the polls. And that is that Joe Biden has basically maintained his level of support since the beginning of this race. He hasn't moved up or down, but that's part of the issue. He hasn't gained almost any new supporters over time, right? He's just kept his base. Bernie Sanders in all these polls, all of his momentum, all of the vote he's gained, or at least most of it has come at Elizabeth Warren's expense. It's a pretty simple story. Elizabeth Warren fell in the polls. Her support went to Bernie Sanders. Joe Biden stayed the same. And that's why Bernie Sanders is either ahead or tied with Biden. Now, I will say on the electability argument that you were talking about, Tommy, in the same New York Times poll, 56 percent of caucus goers. This is the poll where Bernie is leading by eight points. said that they thought a Democratic socialist would have a harder rather than easier time defeating Trump, which is a higher number than those who said the same about a woman,

a gay candidate, or one over 75. Then they did general election. It's funny to sort of like, ah, electability, what's your poison? You're right. Then they did general election matchups against Trump in Iowa. So the poll didn't just poll caucus goers, it also polled some Republicans and independents too to do a general election poll of the state. Trump beats Biden by one point in Iowa, 45 to 44. But he beats Bernie by six points, 48 to 42, which was the second worst matchup of any Democratic candidate just ahead of Mike Bloomberg, who did the worst. Now, you know, you can look at this a couple ways. Donald Trump won Iowa by about 10 points in 2016 against Hillary

Clinton. So that's all of those are much closer than that. But, you know, Bernie's campaign will put out a bunch of polls saying Bernie beats Trump. And if you look at all the averages, Bernie is currently ahead of Trump nationally by a couple points. And but when you get to the battleground states where he needs to win, I think Bernie is ahead of Trump in Michigan, But when you get to the battleground states where he needs to win, I think Bernie is ahead of Trump in Michigan, close in Pennsylvania, close in Wisconsin, not even close in Arizona or Florida. And Joe Biden is ahead of Donald Trump in Arizona and Florida. So could Bernie win? Yeah, absolutely.

But are there real electability challenges that so far his opponents have not been mentioning or explaining at all? It seems like it with all the data, with the caveat that, of course, polls are a snapshot in time. We campaign hasn't been run yet. We don't know what's going to happen. Joe Biden could fare worse against Trump if he's the nominee in a campaign goes on. Bernie Sanders could fare better against Trump as the campaign goes on. But that is where things are right now. And it's also just worth, you know, we talk, you know, oh, there has there hasn't been that much of an electability argument made against Bernie. And that's and that's certainly true. But part of the issue here is we're not dealing with a decision between two people. Right. For all we know, there's a lot of people out there who are looking at Bernie and being like, I really like where he's at. But I just feel for for electability, I want to be with one of the moderates.

But you have Joe Biden in a car in the moderate lane with a bunch of moderates stuck behind him trying to pass him and they can't get around him. And, you know, Bernie's just passing them on the left. And there may be a bunch of people over there in that moderate lane that that that wish they could get behind one person and speed ahead. But they just haven't had the opportunity. And I think there's really just one of two possibilities here. Either Joe Biden will be the nominee of the Democratic Party, in which case all of this past year has been the story of a slow and steady march to an inexorable nomination in which their strategy was correct. And there were enough people out there who were just ready to just go for the safest pick. Or Joe Biden was the Jeb Bush of this race, and he held the moderate spot, but wasn't able to make the moderate the nominee and it left it open for someone else. So one note for Warren is that I do think she has probably the best organization in the state. And maybe that can help her sort of keep the support or build it or grow it in places that people don't expect. What's really, I think, surprising.

First, what's surprising for her was how much Medicare for All and that fight hurt her among young voters, according to the New York Times poll. And two, that she was just fighting an uphill climb from the very beginning over these electability concerns, which are entirely sexist. Yes. And that just really sucks. I mean, her team is doing a great job. They're fighting it out. It's by no means over. But I was trying to imagine how I would have felt in 2008 if Barack Obama lost the Iowa caucuses because a bunch of voters said an African-American couldn't win. And I would be fucking outraged.

Yeah. I mean, she did. So she got the biggest endorsement in Iowa, the Des Moines Register editorial board over the weekend, who wrote, warrants competence, respect for others and status as the nation's first female president would be a fitting response to the ignorant sexism and xenophobia of the Trump Oval Office. At this moment, when the very fabric of American life is at stake, Elizabeth Warren is the president this nation needs. It was a great editorial. As you said, she's also maybe got the best organization in the state, but she's probably fallen the most of the top four candidates in these polls.

How much do you think the register endorsement and the organization sort of could matter in this last week here? I think the organization could matter significantly. I think the Des Moines Register endorsement, like Hillary got it in 2008. Obama still won. I think it's I don't think a lot of people pick up the paper and they say, oh, the register endorsed this person. Therefore, I will. I do think it is a good news story and a good argument for the candidate who gets it at a key moment when people are really paying attention. So it's obviously a net benefit, but it's probably not going to move a lot of voters. I mean, the good thing she can do is you recut your TV ads, you put in endorsed by the Des Moines Register, you throw up some really great quotes, and it feels like a local validation of who you are.

Finally, let's talk about Pete, whose closing focus in Iowa seems to be voters who supported Obama in 2012 and shifted to Trump four years later. Campaign officials told CNN that he's building an electability argument and is looking to seize on the fact that Iowa has more so-called pivot counties, those places that went Obama to Trump, than any other state in the country. He'll be campaigning in those counties all week. And he also headlined a Fox News town hall in Des Moines on Sunday night. What does Pete need to do here? What did you hear about Pete on the ground when you were in Iowa? I think the strategy is interesting. I mean, I think what will happen on caucus night is there will be a bunch of different ways to spin the results. You could say, oh, I got the most in the raw vote total. The traditional winner is a person that gets the

most delegates. So obviously that will be seen as important. But if you can make an argument that says, I, candidate X, or maybe just Pete, did really well in these counties that flipped from Obama to Trump, that is an interesting spin on electability. Now, a lot of these counties that we're talking about that flipped are like way gone. There was one that flipped by 40 points, 41 points. So I don't think we're winning them back. But it's a narrative coming out of Iowa that is certainly interesting. I wonder if it's a story he's getting ready to tell, preparing for the fact that he may be in second or third or even fourth and that there's still a good story for him to go on to New Hampshire. that he would try to be the better Biden as opposed to attack, just show everyone that he is the moderate

who can win this race. And I will say that where he does have an advantage, although it's also a challenge, is he's the candidate in the New York Times poll where people said, I want a moderate and not a liberal, right? And so Pete fits the moderate category, but also Pete supporters,

people who are supporting Pete, believe that he's a candidate who can deliver big change in Washington and not go back to the way things were. So he's the only, the Biden and Klobuchar supporters both think they're just the candidate who can beat Trump and take us back. The Warren and Sanders supporters think they're the candidates of big change. The Pete supporters are mixed. The Pete supporters actually think he could represent big change because he's young and outside of Washington, but also that he's not quite as liberal. But again, as I'm making that argument, that's like a very on paper sort of argument.

And, you know, voters sometimes just vote who they like. Yeah, I think that's true. But it still works if you get to the simpler argument underneath. And I go back to what Pete said in an interview, I guess, months ago at this point, where he basically said, if you believe Joe Biden's going to be the nominee, you're not in this race. If you're in this race, you believe he's not. And if you believe he's not, this is what you do. And so, you know, who knows how we leave Iowa. But he clearly is a very smart guy.

And he's clearly thinking, well, I'm not going to out Bernie Bernie and I'm not going to out Liz Warren, Liz Warren. But if I out Biden, Biden in Iowa and Biden has a abysmal performance in Iowa, which is not predicting it, just if that is were to happen, he would leave in a strong position. Yeah. I think Pete probably needs to beat Biden in Iowa. I mean, someone I was talking to in Iowa, I forget who it was, described him as America's favorite grandson, which I thought was like a pretty good description. It's notable though that, I mean, he's by far the youngest candidate in the race and he has terrible numbers with young voters. So, I mean, he's by far the youngest candidate in the race and he has terrible numbers with young voters. And look, this isn't predictive of the results, but it was notable to me how universal the dislike is for Pete among the other campaigns and staffs. Like they all kind of get along.

But holy shit, if you bring up Pete, they really have a bad taste in their mouth for him. So why do you think that is? I don't know exactly. I look, I mean, I think it's probably case by case. Like if you were, uh, on the Cory Booker campaign and everyone was talking about a young mayor who was a road scholar, you could get why that would kind of trigger you and piss you off. Um, but I also just feel like they don't, they don't trust him. And, you know, again, like I irrationally hated other candidates that we ran against the Clinton campaign in particular. I was totally wrong about her. She was a wonderful person to work with, a great secretary of state.

But it was just notable about the sort of intensity of feeling around each campaign that I heard from almost everybody. Yeah. And yet, you know, it's and of course, on Twitter, Pete is, you know, scary. Yeah. And yet, you know, it's and of course, on Twitter, Pete is, you know, scary. No one likes him on Twitter, but it's notable in all these polls that he is extremely well liked in Iowa among caucus goers, even among people who aren't supporting him. I don't think this feeling extends to voters per se. Yeah, right. I guess the last person we should just talk about, even though she's not in the top four, Amy Klobuchar. Like she's gotten endorsements from the union leader in New Hampshire. She got the Quasity Times in Iowa.

QCT. QCT. Does she still have a chance here? What is Klobuchar trying to do here in this last week? Because she's not hitting viability in almost any of these polls, even as she's surging. Yeah. Mini-surging, I should say. I don't know.

I mean, she certainly seems to have some momentum and got a bounce out of this thing. But I think the bar for success for her is a lot lower. I mean, I think if she can get a surprise third or even a really close fourth, that would make an argument for her to go on and really keep competing inbuchar and think of all of them as a spoiler for the others. And so I don't know how they sort this out because each of them, look, we've been running a campaign for a year or longer. There's no way in hell you're giving up because you're worried that you're the spoiler. You think you deserve to win. That's why you're in this race. But, you know, there's a chance where those three end up making a path for Bernie a lot easier. And look, we should just say, you know, we've been looking ahead a little bit, but when you look ahead a long way, you know, Bernie wins Iowa, let's say, wins New Hampshire, even wins Nevada. There's a very good chance Bernie could win the first three states. Joe Biden wins South Carolina. We go to Super Tuesday. Bernie wins the biggest

prize of Super Tuesday, California, where he's currently leading. Even if that happens, there's a lot of states to go. And there'll be a lot of candidates who probably dropped out by then and a lot of vote consolidated behind someone so we could be in it for many this could be a very long drawn out primary yay you know good times guys on that note oh wait all over okay we come back, we will have Dan's interview with Ezra Klein. We are now pleased to be joined by the founder and editor-at-large at Fox, the host of the Ezra Klein podcast, and the co-host of the Weeds podcast, and now the author of the new book, Why We're Polarized. Ezra, welcome to Pod Save America.

Pleasure to be here again. As I told you before we got on mic, I read your book over the weekend. It really caused me to think deeply about a lot of things, confirmed some of my biases, made me question a lot of things I've thought about politics. But I want to start by asking you, based on my intro, you're a very busy guy. Why is the topic of polarization the one you wanted to explore? So we've been talking for years back, including when you were at the White House. So I've covered, my background is covering policy. And as I covered healthcare politics, the Affordable Care Act fight, as I

covered the Dodd-Frank fight, the stimulus fights, the unemployment insurance fights, the effort to reauthorize No Child Left Behind, everything I've ever covered, it always had really the same pattern, which is you begin and you're in these rooms with members of the Senate from both parties or think tankers from all sides. And there's this big zone of potential compromise. Policy, as you know, is it's a positive sum thing. Usually you can come up with a policy proposal that would make things better for a lot of different people simultaneously. Doesn't mean everybody gets everything, but you can really construct things to be better. And then by the end, there'd be these wars, right? And it all would just collapse down to that party line vote. I mean, you remember during the Affordable Care Act,

at the beginning, Chuck Grassley, one of the central senators in that saying, oh, we all agree on 80 to 90% of health insurance. We all agree on having an individual mandate. And then later on, he's voting for a point of order in the US Senate calling an individual mandate unconstitutional. And so one of the things that I found again and again in politics is that a lot of the stories we told about it, the stories we told about individuals and the ways we seem to think at work just weren't true. They didn't describe outcomes. They weren't a framework that was usable. And slowly I came to realize that you had to understand things through the lens of party polarization, because in the end, it was party polarization that was driving the outcome of every vote, driving the outcome overall of elections.

It's why Donald Trump ends up putting together a coalition that doesn't look like something fully new in politics. It looks like Mitt Romney's coalition with some changes on the edges. And so trying to come build a ground-up theory of how polarization works, how it works on us psychologically, how it sorts the parties into coalitions, how the media is involved in it, seemed to me important to just have a way of understanding politics that described what was really happening as opposed to what we wished was happening. And when you talk about polarization in the book, you make it pretty clear that this is a trend we've been on for a long time. But it's not necessarily a bad trend. In fact, there was a point in time where political scientists thought we needed more

polarization. Can you explain that? Yeah. And I think it's useful here to say, we don't even define that term well. So polarization just means things are clustering around two poles, right? Think about it in terms of magnets. If you have a bunch of metal filings on a table and two magnets on the sides, if polarization, if the magnets are weak, you have a lot of filings all between, then turn up the power on them, the magnets go to both sides, now you have a polarized thing. And we did not always have the parties function that way. During the mid-20th century, which is where a lot of people in American politics baseline their understanding of what American politics should look like. It's a period of time where American politics is thought of by historians and political pundits to have worked best. The parties were not polarized. And this is genuinely weird to immerse yourself in this

history because they were called Republican and Democratic parties. There is a superficial similarity, but you have liberal Republicans in the Northeast, you have conservative Democrats, particularly in the South. You functionally have a four-party system of Democrats as we think about them today, Dixiecrats in the South, liberal Republicans in the Northeast, you functionally have a four-party system of Democrats as we think about them today, Dixiecrats in the South, liberal Republicans in the Northeast, and Republicans. And during that, you also have a lot of demographic mixing in the parties. So the parties just look pretty similar. You have rural Democrats and you have rural Republicans, urban Democrats and urban Republicans. You have a lot of black Republicans. Jackie Robinson famously is a Republican. And what happens in this period is that the Democratic Party becomes a party of civil rights. And race was fundamentally the thing deforming the party system. You had a very conservative wing of the Democratic Party in the South that was Democratic, not because ideologically they were liberals, but because the Republican Party had invaded the South and occupied it. And so they were Democratic.

Party had invaded the South and occupied it. And so they were democratic. And this was not actually as good a period as our political histories like to pretend it is. And I think it's an important point because we use polarization so often as an epithet. It's bad if things are polarized. And sure, it can be and often is. But oftentimes, the alternative to polarization is suppression. And one of the things that kept the American political system depolarized in the 20th century was a lot of suppression of particularly racial justice issues. Southern Democrats use their power in the Democratic Party to block anti-lynching laws, civil rights laws, and so on. So Civil Rights Act changes this. Barry Goldwater then converts the Republican Party, which had voted in pretty high numbers for the Civil Rights Act in Congress. He converts it into a home for white backlash politics. The Democratic Party becomes more of a party of racial justice.

This creates the conditions for the Democratic Party to become the liberal party and the Republican Party become the conservative party. A lot of these Southern Democratic conservative senators like Strom Thurmond turn over. They become Republicans. And when they become Republicans, notably, they become very conservative Republicans, right? They had always been very conservative. And once that happens, it creates this space for this huge demographic sorting. And we can go into the numbers on this, but you end up having now these parties are sorted very heavily by race, by geography, by religiosity, by psychology, by culture, and by ideology. And as you stack these pretty powerful identities on top of each other, you get a huge amount of collision and conflict between the two-party coalitions, which, fine, fair enough, as you say. Political scientists thought, I think, understandably, that we needed to have two very different-looking parties in this country so voters could make informed choices and then have those choices honored. The problem is,

you know from the White House, is we don't have a political system where you can govern effectively if you can't get high levels of compromise. And what polarization fundamentally means is you cannot get that kind of compromise. So the problem on some level is not actually polarization. It's that we have a political system where you cannot govern amidst conditions of polarization. And you write in the book very persuasively about how identity drives polarization and that political identity has essentially become – or partisan identity has become almost a mega identity, which supersedes everything else about you, right? Whether you're – you know, you talk about your own identity as someone who was from California and owns a dog and is a father, but ultimately the identity that drives so much else is your partisan identity. That has not always been the case. What made that happen?

And you write in the book about how this has been happening on sort of an inexorable trend for a long time, right? Bush was the most polarizing president ever. Obama was the next most polarizing president. And then he was superseded by Trump. So with like the last three presidents have each been the most polarizing in history. That is very different than Bill Clinton, who at the end of the nineties was, despite being impeached, had an incredibly high approval rating. So do you have a sense of what, is it that something happened around the turn of the century that sped this process up to make it

so much more extreme than it felt then? Because I've been in politics since the last year of Bill Clinton's presidency. My first campaign ever was Al Gore's presidential election. And I can see the difference dramatically over that time. And so I'm curious what you think are the factors that are making it happen faster, if that's the case. So I should say that Bill Clinton was in his time, the most polarizing president in polling history. So it has been rising in its way for a long time. You have a bunch of interesting stuff in there. So let me take a couple of pieces of it. One thing you've mentioned that is super important to the analysis of the book is we make a terrible mistake in talking about identity politics as a singular identity as if we have one.

But we all have many hundreds, thousands. Right. I mean, as you say, I'm Jewish. I'm a Californian. I'm a father. I'm a dog owner. I'm a vegan. I'm a liberal and so on and so forth.

What has been happening in politics is a fusing of identities. and so forth. What has been happening in politics is a fusing of identities. So that when we are challenged politically or inspired politically or simply asked to think politically, it's queuing up a lot more parts of ourselves than it would have been at other points. And the way political scientists talk about this is cross-cutting versus unified identities. Cross-cutting identities is, think about a voter who is a Democrat, but they're a white evangelical male in the South. That's a voter who might vote for Democrats most of the time in an urban area, an atheist, etc., the Republican Party is going to be much more threatening to her because the Republican Party, both in terms of its policy proposals, but also in terms of who it honors, who it respects, who it includes, has a lot less respect for her way of life. And we have a lot of data on this. In countries where

there are more cross-cutting identities, civil war is 12 times less likely than in countries where they become very unified. So that, I think, is one important level of it. The way I understand polarization of this kind is as a kind of flywheel. You're asking, why does it seem to be speeding up? And my answer would be that it's building on itself. So the first half of the book is about building this sort of history and psychology. How do we think about identity? How do we understand information when we're looking at it through the lens of identity? And importantly, identity being something we all have, not as we sometimes say it in politics, something only more marginalized groups have.

But the second half of the book is all about the ways it has created these feedback loops with institutions. And this is where I think we really get into this story of acceleration since the turn of the millennium. So a couple of examples. One is in media, which I'm in, which you're in. When you go back, when there were local monopolies, you had three networks that had airwave monopolies, you had a local newspaper, you had some radio stations. The business model was built on trying to not offend anybody because you needed everybody who might watch advertising to justify your monopoly. That was how the whole system functioned.

As we've moved into choice-based media, you have cable news, you have digital news, you have podcasts, you have everything, this entire smorgasbord of information that we benefit from and sometimes are overwhelmed by. It becomes a situation where you're competing for an audience that, one, has a lot of other choices, but two, because they have a lot of other choices, people who opt into political news are very polarized. They've chosen a side. They have something they're fighting for, right? They're here because they care. But that over time does change the way you operate. It changes the kinds of headlines that get clicked on. Even if you're trying to do pretty non-polarizing work, if what is going viral on social media is your most polarizing work, because that is what connects into people's identities, that's also going to change people's perceptions of you. But what happens then is if the media polarizes to reach a more polarized audience, that then polarizes the

audience more, which then polarizes the media more, and so on. Elections are another great example. There is both on-the-record discussions from the Bush team, like Mark McKinnon, but also political science suggesting that for most of, say, the 20th century, the way that political consultants and campaigns thought about the electorate was you had these big groups of swing voters, and you were trying to hit that persuadable middle. Bill Clinton was a candidate who was designed to hit a persuadable middle. He was a Democrat, but he was a Southern white man. He made a persuadable middle. He was a Democrat, but he was a Southern white man. He made a big show of moderation. He challenged the Democratic Party on key issues. He

was a DLCer. And so what they were trying to do was create a Democrat who could get the base because he was a Democrat, but having lost two presidential elections before that could win over these sort of wavering voters in the middle. What begins happening is that the number of those voters begins shrinking. And it's the Bush administration, particularly the Bush team in 2004, that looks at the 2000 results and realizes there just aren't that many persuadable voters anymore. What we should be doing is running base mobilization campaigns. And so Bush in 2000 runs as this almost quasi-Democrat. He makes a big deal of his relationship with his Democratic lieutenant governor in Texas. He runs on closing the racial education gap and runs basically as a Republican. Democrats can feel okay about. Maybe not going to love, but feel okay about. That's where you get Ralph Nader and

this Tweedledee and Tweedledum stuff. By 04, he's a Republican. Republicans can feel great about a much more divisive campaign. And this kind of thing stacks as you get campaigns that are much more about drawing sharp lines to inspire your base. That makes it so there are fewer undecided voters because the choice is clear. That then further incentivizes you to run that kind of campaign, which makes fewer persuadable voters and so on and so forth. So it all has this flywheel quality building on itself. In the book, in the intro, you talk about how we look at a broken political system. It seems like just a giant shit show, but it basically boils down to rational people acting rationally within their own interests. What do you mean by that?

I think that we have a tendency to look at when things are broken and say, either somebody is screwing us over or they're bad people. If we could just get a different person in there. The thing to understand about American politics is it is a system and the system shapes the incentives of the people who are in it. And I think one of the truly radicalizing and frustrating things of American politics is there's this endless fight to, we see things are broken and so we try to replace the people, but we don't make the system work better. And I think you see some of this playing out in the Democratic Party right now. One theme of the primary has been a building critique of the Obama administration. Why didn't it get more? Why't, you know, pass on the thing. And you and I have been through this a lot. I think there's a real under-emphas Ben Nelson's vote on the Affordable Care Act and he's the structure of Congress and what is happening in the campaign finance system.

Because ultimately, people are going to make the decisions that make sense for them to make. And the reason things work the way they do is not because American politics is somehow failing. The very scary thing is it's working as we've designed it to work. In some ways, Mitch McConnell is the best example of this. He has been doing a string of things that drive liberals absolutely crazy, and I think correctly so, Merrick Garland being only one of many, many examples here. But he has been rewarded for it again and again. He has won more power. He has won a lot of his policy objectives. And I think the thing to read from his success is

to recognize that he understands how to operate in a polarized system and is willing to do that. And so if you don't want that to work, you need to understand why it is working in the first place. It can't just be Mitch McConnell's a bad guy. Mitch McConnell's responding to a world around him. And if you don't want that kind of strategy to be the one people choose, you need to change the actual rules of the game. When I read the part about you saying people acting rationally, I agree with that in terms of their short-term incentives. Because you talk about the 2012 RNC autopsy, where after Obama wins, the Republicans all look at this, all the Republicans get together from the far right to the middle, every established Republican at least, looks at

and says, we have to change who we are if we want to win again. And it's not just a win in 2016 strategy. It is a long-term strategy that the demographic trends are working against us. And if we don't become a party that appeals to a broader group, then we cannot win elections. Texas will eventually go blue, Central Electoral College lockup. Is there a short-termism here that is pushing at least the Republican Party in this direction? There's always a short-termism. Let's talk about the Republican Party for a minute, though, because I want to note that their incentives are strange and warped. And something I want to be very careful not to seem to fall into a trap of is some kind of false equivalence. Polarization is a structure that we are all operating in. The systems that we are all in

are affected by it. But the Republican Party has responded very differently. And I think for two reasons that really relate to what you're saying here. One is that the Republican Party feels itself to be, and in some ways is, the representative of what has traditionally been a demographic majority with a hammerlock on American political power that feels itself losing it. And there is very little that becomes as desperate as a majority group that feels itself declining in numbers. And I have a lot of evidence in the book that shows that when you confront people with the feeling of demographic change, and a lot of things that are happening in our society right now do confront people with the feeling and reality of demographic change, Obama being just one of them, they become

much more conservative. They become more conservative on issues in terms of what party they support. And we are living through this very intense era of change. According to demographers, we'll become a majority minority country racially in the 2040s. The same thing is true on religion. By then, it is expected that people who claim no religion will pass Protestants, which are currently the most numerous group. It is true on immigration, where we've gone from about 4% of the country being foreign-born in the 70s to about 14%, 15% now, and we're moving towards a record number in the next couple of decades. And so the country really is changing, and that is, I think, one of the important contexts

to see in our politics. And the Republican Party, it represents the part of the country that is feeling those changes very acutely and feeling very threatened by them, particularly white Christians. And so what happens around that autopsy is that a part of the party that does not feel personally threatened by this, it just wants to hold and win power, says, well, let's change. Let's become more accepting of immigrants. Let's become a more open and inclusive party. And Donald Trump is one of the people who recognizes that that is not what the Republican base wants. What the Republican base wants is to hold power in the form that they are currently in, not to be told they have to change their form. The other thing, though, that I think is really

important about this is another way in which the Republican party has been able to act in, I think, very strange ways is that they do not have to run by the normal rules of democracy. So if you think about the major power centers in American politics, the House, Senate, White House, and Supreme Court, three or four of them are held by the party that won fewer votes in the relevant elections for those offices. Donald Trump, of course, won a few votes in Clinton. Democrats won more votes in the Senate over the past three cycles than Republicans did.

But because Republicans were able to sort of leverage their geographic advantage into majorities there, they were also then able to hold the Supreme Court. And so the Republican Party has been able to run a strategy that actually would not work for Democrats, which is to cling on to a shrinking power base that is very well geographically distributed. But that has, I think, put them and the country in a pretty dangerous place because instead of being able or being forced to reform and to open themselves up, they're like tightening down. And in part, in order to hold on to power, becoming much more skeptical of small d democracy itself, trying to restrict who can utilize a franchise, trying to restrict how money flows such that they're quite advantaged by it. how money flows, such that they're quite advantaged by it. And one of the things that really scares me is a dawning legitimacy crisis, where you have a party that does not win majorities using geography to keep power and using that power at the Supreme Court level, at the Senate level,

et cetera, to make it harder for the other side to ever win power, to gut public sector unions, et cetera. That's a kind of conflict where you're fighting over not who best represents a country, but who will be able to be politically participating in the country that is both very unfair, but becomes very dangerous for political systems in the long run. I think you write very persuasively about the challenge that Democrats have is that because of geography, electoral college, gerrymandering, all of the structures in our democracy, Democrats have to appeal to voters who are much more conservative than, as you said, the median Democratic voter, which limits the ability to succeed pushing, obviously, more ideologically,

traditionally leftward ideas potentially, right? But there is this non-policy ideology part of the Republican Party strategy, which is about power accumulation. That is voter suppression. That's McConnell in the Merrick Garland seat. It's gerrymandering. When I read your book and I look at all the forces that are moving America into a more polarized way, way. It does raise this very uncomfortable question for Democrats is, what is the argument, other than just doing the right thing, against Democrats doing the inverse of what Republicans are doing? So examples of that would be, and I think that they are not morally equivalent,

but it's the inverse idea. So as soon as Democrats have power in a state, why not, the sort of Democratic reforms that we look at are pretty – they're very important, but they're pretty common sense. Automatic voter registration, more early voting, vote by mail, that sort of stuff. But you could go much more aggressively on ex-felon voting rights. ex-felon voting rights. You could do things like keep, like in the Senate, you know, why not add two Supreme Court justices and get some rulings for a few years, right? Like what is the argument? Why not break California into six states? Right. Why not break California into six states? Why do we need two Dakotas? All kinds of questions.

Why do we need two Dakotas? That is a fundamental question. As someone who lived in South Dakota in my life, it's a question I ask a lot. I guess my question is, why shouldn't Democrats follow the short term? I understand the long term implications of Democrats sort of adopting McConnell-esque nihilism, like prevent if we take the Senate but lose the White House in 2020. Why not just say there will be no Supreme Court justice full stop until the 2024 election? I expect actually Democrats will say that if they take the Senate and not the White House. But putting that aside, I think there are two answers to your question that for me point in a little bit different directions. One thing I want to say is I actually worry more about the reverse. I think that one of the very dangerous things is the idea of democracy becoming a partisan issue. Somebody made this point to me recently, but can you imagine now a constitutional amendment that would bring voting down from 21 to

18? Because obviously those voters would be Democratic, so it would never pass, right? Because it'd be understood as a way to create more Democratic voters as opposed to something just fair to do, given that we are sending 18-year-olds out to die in wars. And I've heard this from a lot of different Democrats talking to them out in the Senate and in the House that they have in some ways bought into something that I think is a dangerous idea, which is that even if it is grounded on correct values, they shouldn't advocate for things that might have the side impact of giving them more power. So things like D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood, we should do because it is the right thing to do. The filibuster we should do because it is a better way to govern, to allow

majority parties to govern, and then the public can judge them on what actually happened. A lot of these efforts of democratization, I think they are the right thing to do and that they should be argued for that reason. But because it's becoming a partisan idea, bringing more people into the political process, it's becoming something that people feel a little bit dirty arguing for. There's actually a book by a political scientist named David Ferris called It's Time for Democrats to Fight Dirty, which was making the argument for a lot of these plans, which in my view, they're just good governance plans. And he would say the same. But the very framing that to me was a problem, the idea that he'd be fighting dirty to have

automatic voter registration. Now you get into this harder thing, though, which is what about the things where you are just really trying to fight over power? So you hear Democrats talking about court packing. Should the answer to what Mitch McConnell did with Merrick Garland be, as you say, if they had enough power to do it, to add seats to the Supreme Court? Garland be, as you say, if they had enough power to do it, to add seats to the Supreme Court. There was more recently a proposal to add something like 120 states, and that could balance the Senate back out. So you didn't have this very strange, not that any major Democrats are behind that, but it was a legal proposal. And I've seen a bunch of different things like this. And to me, the thing you get into there is there's a version of politics,

which is a finite game, as they call it. You're trying to win there is there's a version of politics, which is a finite game, as they call it. You're trying to win right now. And a version of American politics we also have to keep in mind, which is an infinite game. You're trying to maintain the system's legitimacy so that we continue having a system that can be governed, that we all agree is relatively legitimate. In America, we don't have a recent history of constitutional collapse, but other countries really do. And the idea that America will survive forever is foolish. And so we should have, in this way, a somewhat philosophically conservative view that protecting the legitimacy of a clear power grab. That will become the norm. And when you escalate against that norm, I mean, we've seen this in history over and over again, you eventually destroy the system you're in. So to me, there's a real difference between saying the Democratic Party should be the party of democracy because democracy is a good value

that is worth fighting for and always has been versus they should do whatever they can do or want to do to amass power, no matter whether or not it is connected to any deeper values or is justifiable behind any kind of veil of ignorance. This is one I really struggle with. I am someone who obviously agrees with you on the filibuster. I am actually for court expansion. thing for Democrats to do because in my view, the alternative of like, this is the stat that keeps me up at night all the time is when Brett Kavanaugh is Ruth Bader Ginsburg's age, my daughter will be 32. She turns two in May. Um, so it was a very, like, that is a very scary thing. And there is this danger for democracy when every year you have, with greater strength perhaps, a conservative white minority governing a progressive diverse majority. And that is a very dangerous thing for the system. But putting that aside for a second, the real challenge here, I think the thing you said, you talked about Democrats feeling dirty about power.

I think the thing you said, you talked about Democrats feeling dirty about power. That's actually not even a new thing, because I have wrestled a lot with why did Democrats not make D.C. a state in 2009? Everyone supported it. Obama supported the campaign trail. Bill Clinton had the taxation without representation license plates on. And it's something that I have come out for publicly in recent years. And people ask me all the time, like, well, why didn't you do it? And I can't even think of a single conversation that did not involve a phone call with Eleanor Holmes Norton about the topic. It was never even considered. And it speaks to this Democratic Party reticence about political power, where Democrats sort of view political power as this ends to a means of policy and Republicans think of it as an end in and of itself. this ends to a means of policy and Republicans think of it as an end in and of itself. And do you think Democrats, both going back to 2009 and now, don't fully understand the consequences of polarization? Are we as a party naive about that? I don't think Democrats at all understand. To be fair, I don't think most of us have a good theory of polarization, which is why

you should buy my book, Why We're Polarized by Simon & Schuster. us have a good theory of polarization, which is why you should buy my book, Why We're Polarized by Simon & Schuster. But no, look, part of this book is an effort on my part to wrestle with Obama's legacy. Here's somebody who his own life had been a rejection of polarization's course logic, right? Here's somebody who, in some way, if you looked at the system too simplistically, he's never going to be president, this African-American guy with a funny name and the big ears and from Chicago. You remember the conversation in the Democratic Party after 2004, right? I know, it worked covered him quite a bit. on this country's political divisions and thought about it a lot and structured rhetoric in that way. I mean, my God, looking at some of the things that people tried to blow up into scandals for him from this vantage point in the Trump era, it's just maddening. And yet that presidency, for all of his goodwill and good intentions, it ends in Donald Trump, right? It creates

symbiotically the backlash that leads to Donald Trump. And so, yes, I really do not think Democrats have a clear theory of polarization. I think in a somewhat sick way, they've become accustomed, they prefer the dangers of inaction and paralysis to the possibilities and dangers of power and action, which if you believe in a progressive governing agenda, I think that you should believe that if Republicans got enough power to actually repeal the Affordable Care Act and kick 20 million people off of health insurance, that voters would notice and be upset. I think that is true. But Democrats act often as if it isn't, as if it is so much more dangerous that Republicans would

be able to govern than dangerous that they can't. But at some point, the American people need to see the difference and be able to make decisions based off of it, or we just end up in this endless symbolic war. And I love your example about D.C. and Puerto Rico, but I would say that, my God, think about what that ultimately means. The Democratic Party is more comfortable with disenfranchising the primarily black and brown residents of D.C. and Puerto, then with the perception that in giving these American citizens representation in Congress, because they would freely choose potentially Democrats in the Senate and House, it would look bad. Like if you say that aloud, it's deeply offensive, but it is. It's where we've gotten. And I get the wanting to be careful of the system. I think a lot of Democrats, and this is maybe a broader point into the book, but I think the other problem is that a very naive view of polarization is to say, we have polarized more. The system has become less functional as we have polarized. So, of course, the thing we need to do is turn back the clock on polarization. For reasons I lay out in the book, you're not going to do that.

do is turn back the clock on polarization. For reasons I lay out in the book, you're not going to do that. But I think because so many Democrats operate in that space, they remember the 80s, they're afraid of things that would make the situation worse. When at this point, we're just in a new situation and we need to retune our governing structure so that it can work in that context. I think something that makes polarization worse is government becoming less and less effective. And so you would actually, in some ways, I think, take some of the pressure out of the system, even if the fights would be bitter and real and divisive. The fact that one side or the other could ultimately govern if we had a more sensible system would, I think, allow things to be better resolved and would allow people to see the consequences of their various political decisions and allow them to make better

decisions in the future. I have enough baseline faith in the American people taking care of their own interests that if we had a system that allowed them to translate those interests into policy, I think that they would make decisions, maybe not always the ones I would make, but better than the mess we're in now. One of the things that fascinated me in the book was it has been an article of faith among Democrats, including the Obama administration, that is, that was, if we could just give people more information, rational arguments, facts, science, we could persuade them of what was in the best interest of the country or themselves. How'd that go?

Well, it sort of depends on how you look at it. I mean, there's like a longer debate we can have about that. But in the book, you talk about political science experiments, which actually show the opposite. Now, what struck me about that was, other than just being deeply depressing, was you started Vox, which is an explanatory journalism platform. And I remember talking to you about it when you were launching it, which was the goal of giving people a better opportunity to understand policy. How do you sort of reconcile those things? In some ways, I don't reconcile them. I say in the book that this research for me is a bit like staring into the abyss, and it really is. I think that the two kind of key ideas here, motivated reasoning, which is we often reason not to find the truth, but to attain different goals,

and then identity protective cognition, which is when information forces us to question our groups, question the people we trust, the people we love, we tend to reject that information or are very skeptical of it. So one, it is not the case that information is never under any context or circumstances useful. It's just, it's very hard to convince somebody like all the way into something they don't want to believe. But particularly if people already have some baseline faith in you, which, you know, hopefully people who listen to my podcast or read Vox do, then people are movable, right? I mean, you and I have talked a lot. And I think over years, like I remember you telling me things that really changed the story I was writing,

because I found what you're saying convincing. So it isn't the case that when your interests are sort of aligned to finding out the right answer that you can't ever find the right answer. But it is to be very careful with the idea that we hear debates, we hear political information as we are, not often as they are, and trying to be very mindful of that and thus a bit skeptical of maybe the naive view of political debate, which is that what is, say, happening on the floor of the House when 100 members of the House give two-minute speeches on impeachment? Is it anybody who's actually trying to or will persuade anybody? I mean, to believe that is to, at this point, defy all evidence before information. We continue to operate on this much more fantastical and optimistic view, despite all evidence to the contrary. So that's one thing. The other, to the point very specifically about Vox, is, look, there's a lot of media criticism and media wrestling in this book, because obviously that's part of where I'm rooted. And I think that we in the media need

to think very hard about the role we play, given how the ecosystem we're in'm rooted. And I think that we in the media need to think very hard about the role we play, given how the ecosystem we're in actually works. And to give an example that's even a little bit different from the question of giving people good policy information, we think about the role we play as fundamentally, we cover what is newsworthy and the power, the kind of disciplining power we have to the extent we have any is do we cover it positively or negatively? But what has happened is that has allowed people to hack our definition of newsworthiness. We cover what is outrageous, what is conflict-oriented, what is offensive. And so Donald Trump sucked up all the oxygen in the 2016 Republican primary, and to some degree, even from the 2016 Democratic primary, by just being unbelievably outrageous and offensive all the time. And what he understood was that negative publicity didn't matter for him. What mattered was that he was controlling the conversation. And so among other things, I think the media needs to think a lot more about its role as an amplifier.

all this talk about normalizing or abnormalizing Donald Trump and staying shocked. And I've made many of those arguments myself, and I wrestle with them all the time. But sometimes I wonder about what if instead of acting like a lunatic was a shortcut into dominating the political conversation, Donald Trump was ignored, more or less, except for the times when he acted like a president, that if he lied, he didn't get fact-checked all the time in the sense that the lies then got signal-boosted, but oftentimes people just learned to turn it off. His rallies, it's just such a perverse incentive system. And I don't have a great answer on this, which is why it's tough. Yeah, because the economics all push in the wrong direction. Right. I mean, it is such a perverse incentive system. You know how hard it was to get the media to cover a carefully constructed speech on manufacturing policy set at an Ohio steel mill that was actually a guide to what the administration was going to do versus if Donald Trump does a rally where what the media knows in advance about the rally is Donald Trump is super pissed off today because of impeachment or whatever it might be, and he's going to go out there and be nuts.

super pissed off today because of impeachment or whatever it might be, and he's going to go out there and be nuts, that rally has a great chance of getting covered live on cable. Say what you will, that's not a good incentive system for leaders. Right. And I have spent probably more time than I should thinking about what advice I would give the next Democratic president on how to conduct themselves based on everything that I learned in my six years working with president Obama, as all of these trends, particularly in the media are catalyzing on themselves and having watched what happened in Trump. Like what would the argument other than just transparency be for returning the white house briefing, which I think is a good thing. And I actually think it helps you govern better, which might

be the argument because it's an organizing principle. But other than that, it's like, what was the point, right? Like it's just a chance to get beat up every day. Or like, should you ever give a policy oriented speech? What's the incentive? And I think that's a really hard thing. I did want to ask you about one thing, because you brought up the Obama administration and efforts to persuade people. One of the things that we told ourselves at the end, because if you sort of think about the iterations, we get in financial crisis, but also huge Democratic majorities, a historic amount of legislation passed culminating in the ACA and Wall Street reform. And then the Republicans take over, then it is essentially no legislative progress, executive actions. But as we were thinking about the second term, I remember sitting down with President Obama right after he won in 2012 with all of his advisors and talking about what should we try to do, knowing we were probably overly optimistic about legislative

potential, but even that was very constrained to a small handful of issues. What would be success? One success would be moving the ball in terms of public opinion forward on things so we could hand it off to the next democratic president who we obviously thought was going to be coming in right after us. And in some sense, there was success in that, right? Like on immigration reform, more popular, right? The climate change is more of a threat, right? Like a lot of the things that we cared about, you know, sort of gain public opinion. But so is there a distinction between how polarized the American people are around issues and the ability to translate their policy positions into political action. I think that's a key distinction. I'd say a couple of things here, and I was probably a little bit glib earlier when I was asking how that worked out for you in terms of actually trying to persuade people. I think it would be going way too far to say that the lessons of these eras is that an

administration should not try to run a real solid policymaking process, should not do the work of giving speeches on policy that persuade, if for no other reason, then that creates good incentives inside the administration to actually work out your ideas, to come up with arguments for things, to consider counter arguments. I think the problem of the Obama administration was not actually that persuasion doesn't work. Obama was actually, in some cases, reasonably persuasive. And on certain issues like immigration, things got more popular over time. The problem with immigration was that John Boehner never brought the bill to the floor. And this is why, again, I do try to move things to this more

systemic analysis, because I think that if you had, like in a system that's parliamentary, where winning the election more or less means you have the capacity to govern, having a good internal policy process where you have good reasons for the things you're doing and you've constructed it on firm empirical foundations, that helps you govern well. And governing well, I still believe, helps you win elections. There's very good evidence that the state of the economy and the direction of the country really do matter for whether or not people vote to reelect a politician. The problem is that there is this huge disconnect between that policy-making process inside the administration and then what happened outside of its walls. And there was never a way to answer that. Obama would give speeches and then it's like, okay, but why isn't my job back? Why do things still feel this way? Why aren't these problems getting fixed? And so that's, again, one reason I try to raise the alarm much more on how the political system operates and translates all this in. Because look, one of the arguments I make is that imagine you live in a workplace, you're in a workplace, and your boss needs your help to

finish a project. And if you help your boss, he'll finish the project. And if he finishes the project, he will get a promotion and you might get a demotion and maybe you'll even get fired from your job. But if you don't help your boss, he won't finish the project and he might get fired and you might become the boss. And in addition to that, you don't like your boss and you don't like his project. So you're going to help. And that's functionally how Congress works. Like what I've just described is the actual incentive structure of Congress that the minority party, which usually does not like what the majority party is doing, has the power to make them succeed or fail. And if they help them succeed by working with them, the majority party will use that to win seats in the next election to make the minority party even

weaker. Whereas if they make the majority party fail, the minority party has a chance of becoming the majority party in the next election. And in a context like that, when those are your incentives, your arguments about why your health care bill is great aren't going to work, right? Like the amount of reasoning coming from that, and you can take this fully on the level, right? If you're a Republican, you're presumably a Republican because you believe it is better for the country for Republicans to govern it. Even if this bill would be better, overall, you think it's better if you're in power. This is a crazy way to run a railroad. When you just say it frontally, of course, things work the way they do. But we have so much mythology built in American politics about how it worked at another time when things worked

differently and the parties weren't ideologically polarized and they didn't cooperate internally well and so on, that we sometimes can't see it. And we expect just a good speech to change it the way it does in the West Wing sometimes. But hell, even in the West Wing, if you look at it, Jeb Harley, he didn't get very much done. There was a pretty weak presidency, all in all. Having to give up office because his daughter was kidnapped was probably a challenge, but- Yes so I mean, yes, I'm not saying they didn't face headwinds. But I do like you say that and that is how Republicans operate. But that is not how Democrats operate, because if that was how Democrats operated, they would not have done the potentially substantively appropriate but politically insane thing of approving

Trump's trade agreement during impeachment. I think this is trickier. And here's why. And this is a place where I think the geography issue matters a lot. Democrats are constantly trying to hold center-right districts that identify a little bit Republican in a way Republicans just don't have to do to win majority power. Democrats have to win somewhere between four and eight point majorities in the House to win power in the House. The average state, according to Nate Silver, is six points to the right of the average voter. So a lot of Democratic strategy is actually appealing to slightly Republican voters, and that makes them make other kinds of decisions. I don't know if it was strategically insane to do the USMCA deal or not,

but I think it comes from that. It comes from this thing where Republicans are competing to win a minority and Democrats are constantly competing to win more than a majority. And that just structures your incentives very strangely. That said, I do agree that Democrats operate in a much more conciliatory fashion. I think there are a bunch of reasons for that, but I think that geography one is a big one. Democrats can't win if they don't operate in a more conciliatory fashion, at least don't believe they can win if they don't operate in a more conciliatory fashion, whereas Republicans have proven to themselves and the world that they do it. And I spent much of my pre-Obama career working for red state Democrats. And there is a question now that I wrestle with a lot about whether geography is as important or whether all elections are national elections and whether what, so this is like, the question is, if you do something that helps, particularly in a presidential, if you do something that helps Trump, that probably hurts red state Democrat X more than being able to run an ad saying you voted with

Trump helps them. That's the question. I think that's right. And like 2014 was sort of a test case in this where you had all these Democrats in red states run against Obama and do just as poorly relative to the partisanship of their state as Democrats in bluer states. I think the idiocy of kind of quote unquote moderate Democrats, particularly in the Obama years, but in general is not recognizing that the best thing for them is that people believe the country is being governed really well. The idea that red state Democrats were trying to

chop down the size of the stimulus or make the Affordable Care Act worse with higher premiums and higher deductibles and no public option, and this was going to help them, it was very, very strange. Maybe voting against something, there is some evidence that showing real independence from party helps, but shaving it off on the sides definitely doesn't. I show a lot of evidence in the book about the way all politics is local is dead letter. I mean, all politics functionally is national now, and there's a bunch of reasons to look at that. And by the way, a bunch of challenges that really poses for the political system, a restraint on polarization traditionally, is you're able to appeal to people's local geographic interests. And to continue using the Affordable Care Act

as the example, the thing that happens at the end there, where Ben Nelson is from a red state, Nebraska, so he cuts this deal to get Nebraska a free Medicaid expansion. And then it becomes called the Cornhusker kickback. And his Republican governor in Nebraska says they won't accept it. In the past, that used to work. And it allowed unusual coalitions to form because maybe you didn't love the bill, but you did need the bridge. And now we don't have that in a way that's a real problem. But I don't think that means, I guess the way I'd put that is that what that seems to mean to me is that for the most part and over time, political power comes into alignment with the partisan lean of states and house districts. Not so much that individual candidates can do much strategically to navigate these waters, right? Just voting against Trump sometimes, voting for him. It doesn't do all that much. There are a couple of counterexamples, a guy like Joe Manchin in West Virginia,

but they're much more examples that prove the rule than they are models that most politicians seem able to follow. Yeah. Ezra, I could talk about this with you all day. I would encourage everyone to run out and buy Why We're Polarized. It is an incredibly smart book that will help you understand what has happened in politics and I think really help you understand what is at stake in this upcoming election in 2020. So Ezra, thank you so much. And please go check out the book, everyone. I really appreciate it. Thank you. And please go check out the book, everyone.

I really appreciate it. Thank you. All right, everyone. Thanks to Ezra Klein and to Adam Schiff for joining us today. And we will talk to you on Thursday. Bye. Pod Save America is a product of Crooked Media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez.

Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Carolyn Reston, Tanya Somanator, and Katie Long for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Narmal Konian, Yale Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as a video every week.