Pod Save America - "Criminal Apprentice." (with Anat Shenker-Osorio!)

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

Communications expert Anat Shenker-Osorio joins Dan as Donald Trump and leaders of The Trump Organization get closer to seeing the inside of a jail cell, the House votes to create a select committee to look into the January 6 attack, and a potential 2022 Republican blueprint for winning the midterms emerges. Then, Dan talks to NBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff about Trump’s latest visit to the U.S.-Mexico border.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Jon Favreau is on vacation this week. So joining me is communications guru and host of the podcast, Words to Win by Anat Shankarosorio. Anat, thanks for doing this. Oh, thanks for having me. We've got a big show today. On today's show, Donald Trump gets a few steps closer to seeing the inside of a jail cell, the House votes to create a select committee to look into the January

6th attack, and a look at the potential 2022 Republican blueprint for taking the House votes to create a select committee to look into the January 6th attack, and a look at the potential 2022 Republican blueprint for taking the House. Later, I talked to NBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff about Trump's latest visit to the U.S.-Mexico border. So we're not. In the long history of this podcast, we have become notorious in some small circles of people for having huge news break right after the podcast drops. But this morning, the news god smiled on us. Earlier this morning, Allen Weisselberg, the CFO of the Trump Organization and the former president's closest business advisor, surrendered to authorities. Later, he is expected to appear in court where he and

the Trump Organization itself will be charged with tax crimes. While Trump was not indicted, this move will put some additional pressure on Weisselberg to flip on Trump, something that prosecutors have been pushing him to do for months and Trump advisors have long feared. Anant, what is your reaction to this fortuitously timed and seemingly good news? You know, good news is good news, unless take it, unless be happy about about it especially quasi going into the weekend today um i think in terms of what that means among us uh great i think in terms of what that means for our public response i think that as much as we would like to have some well-deserved

schadenfreude here uh it's really, really important, and we're probably going to come back to this a bunch of times because of all the news, to retain the moral high ground. And what that means is that if our public response to this is like nanner, nanner, nanner, or some more sophisticated version of that, then we are quickly going to fall prey to the Republican backlash, which is, you see, they just keep relitigating the last thing, they can't get over the last guy, they're just vindictive, they just want blood, they don't care about this country, they don't care about truth, etc. And so what we need to do is we need to frame this

as it is, which is a win for truth, a win for integrity, a win for transparency, and a win for a country in which no matter what you look like, what's in your wallet or what position you hold, the laws apply equally to all of us. So are you saying that I should cancel the confetti cannon and tell the crooked media merch folks to put a stop on the order for convict Trump champagne flutes that they're planning on selling later today? I guess I'm telling you that it depends on your theory of change. If your theory of change

is permanent, lucrative money coming in for Crooked, then I definitely see the champagne flutes being a big seller. If your theory of change is that we're supposed to equip our choir with the songbook that they're supposed to then repeat to the congregation, then I would have to put a pause. Okay, that seems fair. Now, Donald Trump seems to be on the same page as you, because according to Politico playbook this morning, and I swear I'm not making this up, Trump apparently thinks these criminal charges are a boon for his potential 2024 campaign. He reportedly told his aides, just wait until 2024, you'll see, this is going to hurt Sleepy Joe. Is it really possible that Donald Trump is right here and that a rapidly expanding criminal investigation into his associates and businesses could help him reclaim the White House? Listen, motivated cognition is a hell of a drug. And what I mean by that is, I mean, we see throughout all experiments that we do, all different kinds,

all different disciplines, academia, political communication research, that people have a set of pre-existing ideas ideas and they will go out in search of information that reconfirms them. That is a serious and significant issue that we have in communication. And so if Donald Trump is able to render himself not just a martyr, but sort of a hero for the everyday man who is sticking it to the evil IRS, right, who is triumphing in the face of the deep state or whatever, the boogeyman, they decide to label it this time around, then it is possible that there will be a reanimation of his base, which basically is his only inroad. Do I think that that's, you know, plausible enough to take

him over the line? Not really. But, you know, in America, the implausible seems to be happening on a daily basis. Yeah, I sort of agree with at least part of Trump's logic here, which is, I have to tell you, you just used the phrase Trump's logic. I agree in a sense with the political analysis of this as relayed to Politico playbook without any sort of scrutiny anonymously by Trump's aides, which is Donald Trump and the right wing have done so much to sow distrust in institutions and done such a good job of building this hermetically sealed right wing information bubble that I think it is actually possible for Trump and Republicans to run around flying Blue Lives Matter flags, calling themselves friends of law enforcement, supporters of the police, the Law and Order Party, attacking Democrats as defunding the police,

and at the same time viewing any criminal investigation into a Republican as a product of a cabal of liberal elites and deep staters who are trying to take down the MAGA movement or whatever. So I think, I mean, what is a sad fact of life is, I don't think this is going to help him win a general election in 2024. But unfortunately, for American politics, and, you know, sort of just the state of life in American democracy, it's not going to hurt him as he should. In the old days, this would be the end. You're enmeshed in a legal morass, investigations left and right. That would be the end of your political career.

And here, it could probably help you win a Republican primary and it's not going to hurt you in the way in which you would think. So I think it's a this. They did. This is enjoyable. We will we will keep our schadenfreude inside. It's sort of the risk of helping Donald Trump in the situation. But I think the politics of it are not what we would hope for either progressives or just democracy generally.

Yeah, that's I agree. Moving on from crimes Trump may have committed before he was president to crimes he committed while he was president. After Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan independent investigation into their own attempted murder, the House of Representatives voted yesterday to create a select committee to investigate the causes of the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol. Representatives Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney were the only Republicans to join Democrats in voting against. Kinzinger had this to say. It's not my favorite option, but the point is we can't keep pretending like January 6th

didn't happen. We need full accounting for it, and then we can move on. And not. The substantive reasons for such a committee are, I think, beyond question. But this is a podcast where we talk about politics. So I feel compelled to ask you, is this a good political move for Democrats? It's the only move. And the reason why it is the only move, if you'll allow me to go deep for a moment, Dan. Go deep. And I really just want to blanket credit our mutual friend, Mike Podhorzer, for a lot of this thinking and a lot of this framing, so shout out there, is that it is a massive mistake to position, and you know, Kitzinger, the end of that little clip, the we can move on, like, that's problematic, that last part of the sentence. It's a massive mistake to let this fly in any way, shape, or form. And it's a mistake that this country has made

over and over and over again. What we need to recognize is that the people who attacked our country, the people who attacked our Capitol, the people who attacked our way of life and our way of governance, they belong to a faction. We can call it a Jim Crow faction. We can call it a Confederate faction. It's a faction. And as James Madison defined it, a faction is a small group of people, a minority that is intent, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. This is what Madison was writing about in the Federalist Papers that he feared. And we have had this faction as a facet of our history from the founding of this country.

This is a faction that, of course, refused to join the United States until they were assured that they could enslave other human beings. This was a faction that nullified laws that they rejected. This is the faction that more recently refused to grant that President Barack Obama was actually a United States citizen, American born. This is a ethos and an idea that has been part and parcel of this country since its founding. And at every turn, we have not vanquished it. At every turn, we have not identified it. And if we do not understand that today's big lie, the big lie that the will of the people should be vacated, because of course we had the temerity to let Black and Brown and young and new Americans vote is simply the latest iteration of

the overarching big lie. The overarching big lie that we are in fact not created equal. The overarching big lie that there are certain people, African Americans, Indigenous people, newer immigrants, who will never be, in some people's eyes, full and true citizens. And so I think it's incredibly important to position this 1-6-21 investigation, this attack on our country, as a rooting out of a supremely undemocratic, unequal, unjust force that we need to get to the bottom of and to understand that this faction, it's not a political party. It's taken up host in the GOP, right?

It's a parasite on our nation, but it operates well beyond the GOP. It operates as a media syndicate, as you know better than anyone, right? Fox News, Sinclair, Newsmax, OWN. It operates through talk radio. It operates through state legislatures. It operates through social media.

It operates through paramilitary like the Proud Boys. This is a faction that every single American of good conscience needs to care about, needs to get to the bottom of, and it is something that we simply cannot continue to live with as a nation if we are going to be united and make real the promise of liberty and justice for all. And so once we recognize that this faction is sort of, it's a parasite on our nation, and if you'll allow the mixed metaphor, it's either a boil that we will lance, or it's a cancer that will continue to spread. Mixed metaphors are always allowed on this podcast. I am a frequent violator of that

grammatical edict. You know, obviously, I think Democrats had to do this. You cannot have an assaulting a head state's capital for the purposes of overturning an election that was violent and filled with white supremacist ideology. People fly in the Confederate flag inside the United States Capitol 100 years after the Civil War. You can't not investigate, right? That is not an option. What is hard about this is it gets to the structural challenges of politics in this polarized age with a political system which very alarmingly disproportionately awards political power to the faction to which you are referring. This is how we got Donald Trump as president. You have to investigate it. You have to have a historical public accounting of what will happen. My fear with all of this is the – and

this is not a critique of what Nancy Pelosi is doing. This is – her approach here is the only one available to her. But the January 6th assault is only the end result of a whole bunch of other things that happened during the Trump era, that happened in our politics, that have to be investigated, addressed, and explored. And I don't think this is going to help Democrats win the next election, or it's going to be this great silver bullet or anything like that. It's just something you have to do that is the important right thing to do. But I think if the only narrow thing is that we're going to come out with this report, it's going to come out five months before the election, it's going to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that Donald Trump did X, Y, and Z, and he fomented this, and these members of Congress took people on tours. accounting. What we really need is what you're talking about, which is a macro level accounting of how this faction gains so much power in our society when the, I think, naive hope is that

they would be in, you know, sort of fading into the sunset as opposed to rising in this moment in time, if that makes sense. It does. I think I'm going to take, well, I'm going to take issue with one thing that you said, and then I'm going to offer sort of, I agree with you that I don't think this is like the campaign slogan for 2022. I don't think this is like the banner thing. I think the campaign slogan and the banner thing for 2022, which we may or may not get to, is about what Democrats are delivering and about making people's lives better. And that is not this.

I think that the issue with calling anything polarization, polarization, I mean, it's a little bit like the fact that when we learned about the Civil War, right, we learned about it as a war between North and South, which it very much wasn't. It was a war between a seditious faction and the United States who won the Civil War, not the North, the United States won the Civil War, right? And so what happens when we say polarization is the same as when we learned that, you know, the North battled the South, and that's the best of it, right? That's if you learned that version of it. Some people learned it as the war of Northern aggression. If we talk about polarization, that is in fact, Dan, a both sides argument. It is somehow this idea that like, there is some

screwed up thing on both ends, when in fact, what is going on is there is a minority, a small and potent and powerful group of people who are determined to silence Black, Brown, Indigenous, young, new Americans, so that they can rule for the wealthiest few. That's actually what's going on. And when we name it problem of polarization, which I'm not arguing you're doing, I think you threw that off, not as a talking point, then we are falling prey to that same narrative that this is somehow is not a both sides problem. This is a one sides problem. And that one side is in a war of aggression, partisan and sometimes violent aggression against the United States as it stands. The idea, I think, of the polarization of my mention, my mistaken,

if you will, mention of polarization is that we have to recognize the persuasive, the limits of truly factual persuasion on some elements of that minority. Yeah, completely. And that's why, and I'm going to go out of here on like, I mean, I probably already am out on a limb, right? I took you out on a limb, I'm going to take you farther. I think that the fixation, the understandable fixation that we keep having with, you know, only X number of Republicans voted for X for this, this idea, or this many Republicans are doing this, or only Liz Cheney, or, you know, this constant reaffirmation of partisanship, this constant reaffirmation that this is sort of a Democrat Republican thing. I think that that's a mistake. And as much as I am sort of a

tried and true Democrat, because like, it's the best that we got, imperfections and all. I think that us continuing to fixate on that is really a big problem. And I think that when Nancy Pelosi is talking about, for example, who is who is serving on this committee, I think that it is a matter of these are the patriots who are ready, willing, and able to get to the bottom, to get to the truth. We offered representatives of this country the opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism, to demonstrate their commitment to truth, to demonstrate their belief that all of us are created equal, and that we believe in a peaceful, orderly transfer of power. And these are the folks who took us up on it. And these are the folks who refused.

You know, you're 100% right about sort of the day in our public language that we use, we too often, I think, you know, you're correct, validate the both sides narrative by talking in the context of Democrats and Republicans. And we'll probably get to this later in the podcast. But I think a big challenge for democracy is that we have two political parties, and one of them has been taken over by this faction, this very dangerous faction to which you referred previously. But I don't think that narrative is as well known and as well understood by voters, a lot of the media who cover these two political parties for a living, and stakeholders throughout the political process.

And so there is this challenge is like, how do you shake people to recognize that there is one path to saving democracy, as we said, to preventing more things like the January 6th assault from happening, that there's one party who is trying to expand and create and live up to the ideals of a multiracial democracy, and one that is trying to graspably hold on to the ideals of a multiracial democracy, one that is trying to graspably hold on to the birthright political, the seen as birthright political power of a white Christian minority, and that is Democrats versus Republicans. Because at some point, they're going to walk into a voting booth, or they're going to get a ballot, if they're lucky enough to live in a state where this is still allowed, mail it to their home, where they will have to choose among those two. And they may, in a presidential

election, you know that's Trump and Biden. In a congressional election, it is, for a lot of voters, anonymous person with an R by their name and anonymous person by a D by their name. And how do we, and the question is, I don't have the answers, this is like a much longer conversation, is how do we make sure that people associate the right characteristics with that D and that R since they will not know almost anything about the two individual people who they are voting for? Yeah, I completely hear you. And that is an absolute reality. And we, you know, need to think about that for 2022. I am thinking about that. You're thinking about that. Lots of us are thinking about that. But to the first point you made, you know, good thing that you and Crooked Media more broadly has a gazillion listeners because we actually do need to make this radical shift in understanding.

We need to make a radical shift in understanding away from this idea that, oh, we're trapped in this sort of worse than ever polarization as if it were just a matter of, you know, both sides being sort of equally obstreperous. And in fact, what's happening is that we are in a battle of a faction that is omnipresent. It has existed, as I said, since our founding, it has taken different forms. And let's be honest, right? It has had different hosts. It used to live inside the Democratic Party. This is why we had a reversal of parties. It was at one point called the Democratic Republican Party. It lived inside the quote unquote Dixiecrats. It has taken up different hosts. It currently, as we've said, operates through the Republican Party, but it is not the Republican Party.

It is a faction that is fundamentally at odds with America. And so the battle that we need to understand, that we need people to understand that we are locked into, is a battle of good-hearted, good-natured people who have also always existed since our country's founding in different amounts and different numbers and different levels of power and awareness, who believe, as you said, in multiracial democracy, who believe in reconstruction, who believed in civil rights, who believed in Brown v. Board and who in this most recent election turned out in record numbers, despite a pandemic and every barrier thrown at them to keep them, to silence their voices and to keep them from voting. And so that is also America. That is also us. And I think that when, I mean, obviously there's a million different interpretations, but one interpretation of what happened in 2020 is that people turned down in record numbers because they got it right.

They got that there was this supremely, I mean, problematic is not a strong enough word, but there was this extremely, let's call it demonic force that was just encapsulated and embodied in the figure of Trump, but obviously is bigger than Trump, precedes Trump, wouldn't have, we wouldn't have had a Trump were this not sort of a bigger part and a reality of who we are as a nation and, you know, our history and everything that's happened over time. And so if people do not understand that it really does go beyond DNR, it really does go beyond I'm team red and I'm team blue, which is a big part of what animates political participation, we know, right? It's tribalism and that's a big problem that we've got. If people cannot see in 2022 that we are at that same crossroads, we have not left that crossroads, right? party identity, tribal loyalty, to see that we have to stand united as Americans for the values that we at least pretend to espouse.

If I am correctly interpreting what I think you're saying, the way to think about how to talk about this dangerous trend, this faction, whatever you want to call it in American life, is to try to isolate it. And by using the term Democrat and Republican, we are ascribing essentially in sort of the public mindset, 50% of America to this, which then, and this will get to our next topic in a second, abuse it with strength and social proof. And the better way to do it is to consistently describe it as a minority as a – I mean, the word faction works for that too. And in doing that, which I think is mathematically and statistically correct, also isolates it in a way, right? Makes it seem less – and maybe even as the potential to separate it, if our first

primary identity, which a lot of social science research shows is our partisan identity, that trumps our policy views or anything else, by saying that it is not Republican, you're at least giving yourself a fighting chance with some collection of people who currently self-identify as Republican for rejecting that. Is that correct? That's correct. And in addition, that's absolutely correct. In addition to that, it removes us from the trap of what one of the many things people abhor about politics, or at least profess to abhor, which is, oh, that's all just partisan bickering. That's all just infighting. Republicans say crappy things about Democrats. Democrats say crappy things about Republicans. That's just how

this is, which is, as we see in public opinion, a lot of what people think. That's back to that, like it's all just polarization. And this is sort of the way the game is played. And this is why, quote unquote, I hate politics. I can't stand it. I don't even want to think about it or talk about it, which is a view that many sort of Americans, not listeners to your podcast, I would imagine, but lots of in fact not true, and that is not in fact sort of the way that things are operating, when we also put things in partisan terms, rather than being Americans United against this faction that is just sort of supremely against every one of our ideals, and yes, in political terms, we have to defeat it by turning out and voting against the people with the R against their next to their name. We have to change this understanding. So, Anat, when you were on this podcast in 2020, you and I talked a lot about how Democrats were inadvertently helping Trump with his voters by calling him an authoritarianism is growing as a political force in America.

Just this week, a Morning Consult poll found that 26% of Americans now qualify as highly right-wing authoritarian within the context of one of our two political parties. That trend seems to be growing, not receding, even as Trump has receded somewhat to the background of at least the daily political conversation. What's your level of concern that this focus on the stolen election and these big things you think are really important could wind up with Democrats making that same mistake again about inadvertently helping Trump by talking about the thing that his voters most like? Trump by talking about the thing that his voters most like? Well, since the editors work for you,

I'm going to pick on your language again, Dan, and take this out. I would never, ever use the phrase stolen election. That's their phrase, not ours. There was a stolen election. So that's not a thing. I would call that the big lie. But going back from nitpicking to your actual question, I still hold the same concern. I still hold the same idea that, I mean, obviously know, we've seen this over time, we see it with Duterte, we see it with Bolsonaro, we see it with Orban, we see it in Poland, we see it to a certain extent with Brexit, Boris Johnson, it's like, it's not a US only thing, it's a global thing. Still, in terms of public messaging, not in terms of like academic descriptors of what is happening in the world, but in terms of strategic communications, labeling what the right wing is doing as authoritarianism still does have that same problem of the cynicism. And what I mean by that is that what we often see in the research that we do is that broadly speaking, our opposition is not the opposition, it's cynicism. It's not that people don't think our ideas are right, it's that they don't think our ideas are possible. So why bother? And if it is indeed the case that there is this, you know,

giant, overwhelming, authoritarian force that's just going to come through and clobber us, for many of our high potential voters, which is my term for what are traditionally called low propensity voters, because we don't call them that, for high potential voters, that whole why bother instinct is very strong, right? Because we need to remember that in every single election, there are actually three candidates. There's ours, there's theirs, and there's stay at home. And stay at home has the literal home team advantage because the person's at home. So when we're thinking about how do we mobilize people for something, how do we get people to believe that this is worth in some of these states intentionally standing in epic and endless lines and having to endure a

poll watcher army in any measure of indignities and horrors that people are being intentionally subjected to by these right-wing lawmakers who are intent to want to silence people's voices, they have to feel like it's a fight that's worth participating in, which means it has to feel like it's a fight that is winnable. Most people do not want to sign up for a lost cause. And so that is why we want to position them, yes, as powerful, I mean, yes, as damaging, yes, as destructive, yes, as nefarious, but not as authoritarians. And that also is the reasoning behind this sort of faction idea and language, that there are potent, lying, horrible group of people that have a hold on many, many things, not least of which is the media, right? Especially their own media channels. But that this is something that we have vanquished before.

And it's something that we have vanquished before. And it's something that we can vanquish again. One of the things, I don't know how many friends you have, you know, that regularly follow US politics, I'm sure outside of the country. But one of the things that was most heartening to me personally, after the 2020 election was my friends in Australia, where I have lived and work and my friends in the UK where I've also done some work saying to me, whoa, holy shit, y'all dealt a blow, not a fatal blow, not enough, don't mistake me, but y'all dealt a blow to fascism at the ballot box. That has never happened, right? The only check that we have had in history on fascist forces has been through military action. And their view, my friend's views from abroad of our election was like a shot in the arm, at least for me to be like, yeah, we did do that. We did do that.

And we can do it again. When I think about how to talk about these things, right, and whether you want to use the phrase stolen election or not, there are two ways to think about a stolen election. One is the idea, is the very specific idea. Did Trump ever, was Trump ever actually in danger of remaining as president because despite losing the popular vote in electoral college? No, that was never really in play. But we came within, whatever it was, tens of thousands of votes in four states of the person picked by an overwhelming majority of Americans not becoming president, which is, you know, that is an alarming factor of our system that is getting worse every day. And it's something that I think we need to talk about and address. But when I think we, like, this is going to be the conversation for the next year, whether it's the commission investigation,

whether it's the attempts to pass the For the People Act in the Senate, you know, the Supreme Court today, further weakening the last remaining shred of the Voter Rights Act. Like, this is, I mean, this is the thing. This is the, literally, the elephant in the room that we are dealing with. So the question is, how do you talk about it? One of the ways that I think Democrats need to do is they need to ascribe these efforts to – and I say Democrats, which I know you're about to correct me on, but I say Democrats because it's Democratic politicians that I want to say the right thing. But also any American in their water cooler conversations, their Facebook posts, their

now, thanks to Joe Biden, in-person family reunions, but is to ascribe the things that are happening in Georgia, Texas, Arizona, elsewhere. The big lie is something that arises from weakness, not strength. Yeah. That is because they do not have the ability to win fair and square, to appeal, to have ideas that appeal to the majority of Americans. They have to resort to these extreme measures. The part that I think gets really hard is while, like you as one of those people who in the run-up to the election and in the period afterwards before the January 6th assault was trying to calm people and say, Donald Trump is not going

to steal this election. That is not something that happened. These sort of state legislatures and certification issues all ran into huge problems that you, or this one was a famous one, Donald Trump's going to cancel the election, that like 13 seconds of Googling will show you that that is not an actual thing that can happen. But I do think the threat of an actual subversion of the election results is much greater in 2024 if Republicans take the House. You have all the sorts of things that are happening in Georgia, in Arizona, and elsewhere with being able to replace election board members, all those things. But it is a real challenge of how do you raise concern about it? Because I am deeply concerned that, as of this moment at least, no one with the power to do anything seems to be doing anything in terms of federal legislation,

even if we were to get the For the People Act, as currently written, does zero to deal with the certification problem without doing exactly what you say, which is make people think their vote does not count, that it does not matter because no matter what you do, Republicans will just steal the election. And that is this fine line. We dealt with it years ago when I worked for President Obama in 2012. How do you talk about voter ID laws and lines and all of that without convincing people to not vote? I think it's a really hard and tricky balance to try to strike over the next 18 months or so here. So my answer to that is we've been looking at this for a very long time, doing in some, daily research, weekly research, fielding all sorts of different instruments, beginning in October and continuing on now,

you know, through the insurrection, post-election, up until today. And basically, what I would say is that the encapsulating value or phrase that keeps popping and rising to the top is freedom. or phrase that keeps popping and rising to the top is freedom. And what I mean by that is that we need to talk about this as an attempt to take away your freedom to vote, an attempt to take the freedoms that Americans of every race, place, wallet size, walk of life, hold dear and cherish. And so a message that threads that needle that you're talking about, which I think is exactly the needle, I agree with you entirely, is that in America, we value our freedom. And right now, a handful of lawmakers want to take away our freedom to vote so that they can rule only for the wealthiest few. And then whatever the ask is, right, if the ask, and I take your point about the For the People Act being an insufficient rejoinder to the certification problem, so I'm not pretending like it's the be-all.

I'm not pretending like it's the be-all. But to make the ask framed as a protection of, a preservation of, a continuation of our freedoms, because what we find is that when we try to talk to people in terms of democracy and saving our democracy or having a democracy or protecting our democracy or whatever, first of all, we run into the challenge of the fact that we've never had a democracy. And there is very, it's very difficult to sort of make a language formulation. We can, it's a little bit tortured that says, you know, like create a democracy or make the promise of democracy real that doesn't fall into that trap of implying that we've had one when we haven't. And secondarily, what we find is that democracy is an abstraction, right? Democracy never bought you dinner. People do not sort of have a tangible feeling about it.

And so what we've seen is that we need to make arguments around these anti-voter laws, arguments around these anti-election integrity laws that Republican state legislatures are passing in places like Arizona, Georgia, et cetera, we need to frame them as them trying to take away your freedom, them trying to silence certain voices, them trying to rule for the already rich. And this is a lot, and I grant that this is a lot, but we can't let the voting conversation and issue, we're also seeing this, wander away and be in its own space. We can't let it wander away from what those votes deliver. So what I mean by that is, you know, in America, we value our freedom, the freedom to raise our voices and to cast our votes so that we can elect leaders who deliver

on our priorities from creating jobs to expanding health care to ensuring rights for all. But today, a handful of lawmakers want to take away those freedoms so they can rule only for the already wealthy and powerful few. By coming together to pass the Affordable People Act or by coming together to vote in record numbers or whatever the ask is, we can ensure that this is a place of freedom where the leaders that we elect govern in our name and act in our interests. We have to still keep in that piece that is about essentially good governance, that this is about the delivery of things that we want, whether that be stimulus checks, whether that be sort of the ability to vote freely and fairly, whether that be

affordable health care, et cetera. I want to put a spotlight on something you just said, because it is the absolute most important thing that anyone who is listening to this podcast, who works in politics or talks about politics with people in their lives, is you have to explain who benefits from these laws, these things. And it can't just be politicians because people naturally assume that politicians will do things to keep themselves in power. And so that is priced into the baseline of people of an inherent centuries-long cynicism in American politics. But you have to tie it to, and this is exactly right, corporations, the wealthy benefiting, right?

Like that is just so important, which is a perfect transition to our next topic. Earlier this week, Axios laid out the GOP's supposed blueprint for 2022. According to the report, Republicans plan to win back the House by pushing the narrative that, quote, Biden Democrats are soft on crime, soft and ineffective on illegal immigration and reckless and wrong about government spending. This blueprint is already being put to use. Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott visited the border yesterday to stoke fears and spread a bunch of racist and inflammatory bullshit. And now what do you think of this strategy? Is it surprising? Does it give you concerns? I don't remember who said this, so I feel badly not being able to credit, but you know, you'll never go bankrupt betting on racism as a strategy from the right wing. So does it surprise me? It surprises me precisely 0%. For all of the reasons that I raised earlier, they have one strategy, they have

always had one strategy, it was sort of raised up and articulated in Nixon's quote unquote, Southern strategy, which is whatever, it's the oldest trick in the book, right? Machiavelli wrote about it, it's called divide and conquer. Anytime you want to try to win from a minority position, meaning a position that the minority of people actually espouse and hold, you have to create a scapegoat. You have to create some sort of other of them because there is no quicker route to the construction of an us than the manufacture of a them. route to the construction of an us than the manufacturer of them. And so if the answer is that, you know, Democrats are aiding and abetting, enabling, quote unquote, inner city crime, which of course is just black, is code for black people, or, you know, helping new immigrants, which of

course is just code for brown people. When people say new immigrants, I don't think they're envisioning Swedish backpackers who overstay their visa, right? And even though immigrant is a dog whistle, even though inner city crime is a dog whistle, even though law and order is a dog whistle, right? It doesn't name race. It does not say the name of a race. It's racially coded. This is work that of course, Heather McGee and Haney Lopez have spelled out over and over and over again. And it's part and parcel of the research that we conducted in 2017 and have kept doing and applying through 2020, which is something we call the race class narrative. Do I think that it is a winning strategy? I think that's what you asked me, right? I went off on my little soapbox.

That is what I asked. Yes. That's good. It's good. One of us knows. I mean, to be fair, I had to look at my sheet to know for sure, but yes. So do I think it's a winning strategy? I think it is a winning strategy in certain places. And I think it is a winning strategy. If Democrats, I'm just going to go ahead and say it, if Democrats, I'm just going to go ahead and say it, fuck up and don't recognize that race neutral is not a thing. Race neutral does not exist. When we are fighting in an arena, you know, as I frequently like to say, politics is not solitaire. And so we need to recognize that our messages are not heard in a vacuum. Sometimes it just makes me laugh when people will on the phone with me or whatever, they'll be like, why don't Democrats

say this? Why don't Democrats say that? And I just really want to stare at them and say, do you actually think people's opinions about Democrats are formulated out of what Democrats say? Is that really where you think that idea comes from? I mean, wouldn't that be nice, Dan? Wouldn't it be great if the public's formulation of what Democrats are and believe and stand for actually emerged out of what Democrats say? Our lives would be so much better. We would like be sipping Mai Tai somewhere. I would be so happy if we were just in a world where people actually heard the things Democrats said because we weren't being drowned out by a right-wing media machine and Facebook,

et cetera. That would be a huge victory. We just get to that starting point, it would be good. Yeah. If they heard it, if that was the basis upon which they made their judgment about who Democrats are and what they stand for, that would be beautiful. But it is not. And so we need to recognize that in every one of these races, regardless of who the

person running is, they're going to be lobbed with charges of socialism. They're going to be lobbed with charges of wanting to defund the police. They're going to be lobbed with charges of, you know, law, not being for law and order and for handing out free money. not being for law and order and for handing out free money. And, you know, I don't even know what to quote unquote illegals as the right wing will say. And so if we don't have a rejoinder to that, if we don't have a way of talking principally about race, then what happens is that the only messaging that voters that could go either way are going to hear is race baiting from the right. It's not like the conversation about race is just going to go away

because we don't get to pick that, because we don't get to decide the entirety of the conversation. And so it is incumbent upon us and it is incumbent upon our candidates to be able to do what you just said, which I call ascribed motivation. To explain to people not just what the other side is saying, and certainly never to repeat what the other side is saying in a fruitless effort to debunk it, because that does not work, but rather to highlight the fact that they are, for example, shaming and blaming people of color or trying to divide us by race and by place, hoping we'll look the other way, hoping to distract us from their failures to contain and deal with this pandemic, which Democrats came in and did, hoping we'll look the other way and not notice that they voted against the rescue plan and the stimulus checks that we needed to get care, to pay off bills, to be able to buy our kid an ice cream cone or whatever folks did with that stimulus check.

We need to come over and over and over again back to that ascribing motivation for why it is that they're doing and saying what they're doing, not run away from it. and saying what they're doing, not run away from it. So as Republicans are trying to scare voters into voting for them, Democrats are taking a different approach, celebrating the Biden administration bringing the country out of the pandemic, restoring the economy. On Tuesday, the DNC put out a new television ad. Let's take a listen. In America, in America. The coronavirus has changed life as we know it across America.

This is truly an unprecedented situation. July 4th. The American holiday. A celebration of freedom. And this year, there's more to celebrate. The freedom to hug a grandchild. To see a baseball game in person. To come back together again.

America. Leading the world out of a global pandemic with honesty and compassion. America's journey continues. Through fireworks and parades. To build a better future. A future that only we, the people, can make together. America, we're coming back. In addition to that ad, the DNC has ice cream trucks touring the East Coast bearing the message.

Shots in arms, checks in banks, jobs coming back, and scoops in hand. I'm assuming the scoop part is specific just to this ice cream truck and will not be in ads in the fall of 2022. And now, do you think Democrats can really run on economic and pandemic progress when Republicans are throwing all this other bullshit against the wall? I think that it's a question of both and, right? So it's both about lifting up the achievements and accomplishments, and it's about that middle bit. And I say the middle bit because, as we've discussed before, order matters. It actually matters the order in which you construct your message. And the exact same message, the same three sentences, when we test it in one order and

when we test it in another, it has a really, really different effect in terms of whether or not it's persuasive. So it's about first setting the positive context that yes, we can, yes, we did, you know, this is all the stuff that we're delivering, this is the stuff that we're getting done, this is the beautiful tomorrow, etc. And then in the middle bit, the essential sort of shit sandwich or problem sandwich, it's calling out what the other side is saying and ascribing motivations. So for example, you know, no matter what we look like or where we come from in America, we value our freedom or whether we're black, white, or brown from a city or small town,

north or south, most of us believe that people who work for a living ought to earn a living. And today, Democrats have delivered relief checks, they've delivered vaccines, they've delivered a better tomorrow alongside the voters that turned out in record numbers. The thing that's really missing from that ad, I would say, is that we also need to remember that we have to start how we want to finish. That's true both in parenting and in politics. And so if you eventually want, and you know, that ad is far away from 2022, to be fair, when we are doing ads that are intended to inspire people to vote, we need to remind them that they were voters. And we need to talk about voting a lot, a lot, a lot, which isn't a fair condemnation of that ad because that's not its job.

But we want to make sure that we imbue the listener with agency, that we make it not just that Democrats delivered this, but voters turning out in record numbers to elect leaders did this. It was we, the people who did this in order to make people feel like those agents who will do it again in 2022. So you do that at the top. And then you say, but today, you know, this person that I'm running against, I almost said guy stats are on my side that if you're running against a person, it is guy. Person. This person I'm running against today is throwing out lies, just as he did about our election, hoping to divide us or hoping to scare us or hoping to distract from the fact that he wants to take away your freedoms, deny you your stimulus check, and refuse to deal with this pandemic like the rest of his party.

I think you're exactly right that this ad is not your GOTV ad or your 2022 ad. This is an ad about this for a moment. It's a different sort of advertising strategy that Democrat, the DNC, and a lot of the super PACs are doing this year, which I very much support, which is putting, is basically taking, diminishing the Democratic Party's dependence on the mainstream media to get our message to the voters need to see it. It's basically, I've always believed that particularly in recent years, Democrats have a huge last mile problem where because of the constrained reach and sort of things, sort of the topical biases of the mainstream media, the things we want them to know are the things they are least likely to see if we depend on the New York Times or local news or et cetera to show it to them. So you kind of got to throw money at it. And so you want people

to know that July 4th is going to be a different sort of thing. And it's because of these things that Joe Biden and Democrats did, then this is one way to do that. 4th is going to be a different sort of thing. And it's because of these things that Joe Biden and Democrats did. Then this is one way to do that. I think you're 100% right that a huge part of this is, as you get closer to the election, is pushing agency down to the individual level. You did this. And you're responsible for making sure it doesn't get undone or overturned or whatever. And that is a core part of Obama's message. It was Bernie Sanders,

there's not me, us. That needs to be a part of it. I don't think this is a real, this is sort of a press gimmick, but the DNC is also going to have planes flying banners across beaches in battleground states that say, thank you, thanks to Joe Biden and Democrats. And it's really like, thank you. Thank you, voter. Thank you, the majority of Americans who came together in a pandemic and stepped up to defeat what was before us, whatever that is. The thing that I sort of wrestle with here is doing popular things successfully that people want

and delivering is like table stakes. It's not enough, right? And I think how a big challenge for Democrats to figure out is how do we avoid complacency? How do we keep people who voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, but tell focus groups and polls now that they are very open to voting for a generic Republican over a generic Democrat? How do we convince people that what motivated them to step up in 2020 is still here right now. A phrase I've used recently is, the fire is contained briefly, but not out. And so you cannot step back. You cannot default to what you used to do, either how you used to vote or how you used to not vote. So I think that's this big challenge is that I don't think simply gratitude is not going to be enough to overcome the structural impediments for Democrats in this midterm. We're going to have to really figure out how do we play on other emotions to get that done. Yeah. And I think that that both brings us back to the

earlier conversation around this notion of a faction that is still very much alive and present and has taken a post in the GOP, at least in large measure, and exists well, well, well beyond the GOP as it has forever and ever. And that that is sort of still the clear and present danger and still the thing that we need to vanquish and get rid of that um i think that first of all doing that and then i think the other piece of it and you know it's funny if i was storyboarding an ad right now especially because what's top of mind for me i think understandably you as well i would guess is mobilizing people is mobilizing our base to actually be yelling bloody murder at all of these anti-voter decisions that are coming out of these states, and now most recently today, out of the Supreme Court. And the fact that people are not as hot and bothered, right,

that we don't have the number of people that we had sharing messages sharing outrage sharing action around count every vote that we had immediately after the election and then voters decided voters decided right that was like our narrative move it was GOTV messaging it was count every vote and then it was voters decided. And that was all very, very deliberate. The fact that we don't have more people up in arms screaming bloody murder about what's happening and sort of recognizing the danger, danger, danger, danger. And of course, you know, your listeners are like, what are you talking about? All of us are up in arms. And so I don't mean you. I mean, your cousins and your Facebook friends and people you went to high school with and so on and so forth. I mean, the fact that this is not like,

ah, outrage every day, every headline, every moment, that is really, really scary to me. And I think that the way that we pull on those dual heartstrings is to say, for example, and I'm just making this up on the spot, but the freedom you feel, the play basketball with your friends, hang out on the porch and have beers, hug your grandchild, you know, cash your stimulus check, pay off that bill, the freedom you feel, the 4th of July fireworks, the hanging out on the beach, that freedom you feel. The 4th of July fireworks, the hanging out on the beach, that freedom you feel, the say what you want, express your voice, cast your vote, pick the leaders who will represent you and deliver that freedom you feel, that's what they want to take away from you. And so it's both the like joy, accomplishment, and achievement. And yeah, it's the loss aversion.

Well, Anat, per usual, when you and I get together, we have solved all the party's problems. We have all the messaging answers anyone needs. 2022 is in the bag. Thank you so much for joining us. It has been fun as always. Thank you so much. On Wednesday, former President Trump joined Texas Governor Greg Abbott at the U.S.-Mexico border where Abbott plans to take care of Trump's unfinished business and build the wall. The pair used the event to tout Trump's handling of the border, criticize Biden's border policies, which Abbott called disastrous, an unusual and eerily familiar Trumpian form, stoke fears about migrants entering the country. Take a listen.

The people coming across the border are cartels and gangs and smugglers and human traffickers. Joining me now to help us make sense of it all and discuss the Biden administration efforts to unwind Trump's immigration legacy is NBC and MSNBC correspondent and author of Separated Inside an American Tragedy, Jacob Soboroff. Jacob, welcome to the pod. Dan, thanks for having me. Long time fan of the pod. Well, it's great to have you here. We've been trying to get this done for a long time, so we're excited about it. Let's start with Trump and Abbott's visit to the border yesterday. Trump said a lot of things while he was there. It's according to his account and Abbott's account,

somehow the border went from one of the most secure places in. According to his account and Abbott's account, somehow the border went from one of the most secure places in the world to some sort of dystopian hellscape just in the six months of the Biden administration. Help us separate fact from fiction about what is really going on at the border right now. Well, what I can tell you is what's not going on at the border because I can tell you what I've seen based on my own experience. And when you talk about a dystopian hellscape, the thing that comes to mind for me is what I saw with my own eyes, the separation of 5,500 children deliberately by Donald Trump and his administration as a matter of deterrence in order to scare people away from coming to this country. Physicians for Human Rights

called it torture. They won a Nobel Peace Prize. The American Academy of Pediatrics called it government-sanctioned child abuse. And that is a policy that was uniquely Trumpian. It had never been done before. It has not been done since. And that really, I think, is what Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and their allies, Mark Morgan, Chad Wolf, who were all down there with him this week, want to return to, if not explicitly family separations. And I write about in the book that he did want to return to family separations after they put that policy into place and then had to pull it back because of the outrage. Other restrictive policies that hurt people in order to prevent them from coming to the United

States. And the bottom line is, whatever it is they want to do, no matter how hard they want to damage people, it never works. It didn't work during the Clinton. I mean, deterrence has been the policy de facto of the US government for decades. It didn't work during the Clinton administration, didn't work under the Bush administration, didn't work in the Obama administration. And Donald Trump did probably the most heinous thing to migrants crossing the southwest border in the history of the United States and ripping them apart deliberately, children and parents, and still people are coming. And so what happened after, basically, it was like a greatest hits medley for them, a wish list to return to, you know, basically what the Biden administration has tried to move away from. I mean, it was a very surreal event, because as

you point out, there were Chad Wolf, Morgan, these former members of government doing what was a sort of an official government visit with an actual sitting governor was, is unusual. Have you ever seen anything like that before? No. And I was an advanced guy before I was a journalist. I was an advanced guy to Mike Bloomberg when I was in college. And it was very clear to me just looking at the images, even down to the name placards that were on the desk, they wanted this to look like a presidential visit. It was kind of sad, honestly, in my opinion. If you ask me, it was like they were longing for a time when they were the ones and they were the ones only who could have that cruel posture towards migrants. And they almost

were pretending that it was still their turn, their responsibility. And obviously, Governor Abbott is the sitting governor, and he's tried to complete this border wall, which Republicans and Democrats along the Southwest border will tell you it's not necessary to control migration into the United States. It was bizarre. I mean, I don't know. What did you think when you saw it? To me, it just struck me as former politicians, including Chad Wolf, who in the book, you'll see that he very explicitly was one of the first people to propose the separation policy to the Trump administration. It was like they were getting the band back together. They were sad that they weren't able to do all these things that they had done before. And it was like they were, it was almost like cosplay in a weird way.

Yeah, I mean, I sort of, it was hard in my mind to separate those images from the reports that Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a very public and presidential aspirant in 2024, if Trump doesn't run, I assume, sent the South Dakota National Guard down to the border, but it was paid for by a rich Republican donor. And it's just like, we sort of have private armies and former presidents. It is this very strange alternative reality where Republicans have sort of, not that there aren't very incredibly serious issues, but they've created an alternative version of what's happening, alternative reality where Republicans have sort of, not that there aren't very incredibly serious issues, but they've created an alternative version of what's happening and then gone about trying to

solve that problem in sort of very real and dangerous ways. You know, Biden made, President Biden made undoing a lot of Trump's immigration policies and border policy specifically a big part of his campaign agenda. Based on your reporting, where has he succeeded and what more work does he need to do to meet those promises? Well, look, the truth of the matter is I think that they have a really long way to go, but they've come in, according to advocates, with the right messaging, the right rhetoric. It's been lofty. They say they want to create a fair, safe, humane, orderly immigration system. And they really do want a departure from these decades of a deterrence-based approach. The approach that says, if we scare people, if we tell them don't

come, and every president has done that in the modern history of the United States, that they won't. And we know that that doesn't work. So I think what the Biden administration is trying to do, and for sure the Obama administration, as you know, attempted to tackle the root causes of migration. President Biden himself as VP sort of spearheaded that effort. And I think that they're trying to sort of supercharge that, take that and make that the guiding force for the Biden administration, the Biden-Harris administration, but it's not easy. It's not easy because these facilities that Donald Trump was able to put children in along the border were there before. I mean, the McAllen Border Patrol processing station was stood

up where the cages were during the Obama administration. The ICE family detention centers were open during the Obama administration. I mean, these are institutional systemic issues that you cannot undo like this. And in fact, the only reason Donald Trump was able to separate children so easily is because the apparatus, the infrastructure of punishment in our immigration system existed in that way for a long time, endorsed by Republicans and Democrats. So if the Biden administration is successful in undoing all of that, I think it would be a significant departure. They've already tried to get more families out of detention. They're trying not to hold people as long when they come into the United States. They're trying to get children out of those

border patrol stations and into health and human services as fast as possible. But this is not a, I don't think it's a months long project. I don't even think it's a one term project. If they're going to do what they say they're going to do, it's going to take a very long time. And it's not only the root cause, it's not only addressing poverty, malnutrition, starvation, climate change, persecution, it's also changing the approach to how migrants are dealt with when they come to seek asylum at the southwest border. Because if they don't change it, and Secretary Mayorkas has said to me directly, face to face, he would like a different approach. He doesn't want to lock up families. He doesn't want kids languishing over the 72-hour limit. If they don't do that, there'll be another increase in migration at some point, and you're

going to see this all play out again. The same thing we saw several times during the Obama administration, what we saw during the Trump administration, and what we saw here at the beginning of this administration as well. You cover the immigration advocacy community very closely. What are some of the things that they want the administration to do right now that they've not yet done or not yet been able to do for some assorted reasons? But that's the number one agenda item for immigration advocates at the moment. What Title 42 is, is a Trump administration CDC policy, supposedly, that bars migrants from coming into the country based on the idea it'll protect the US from COVID. Doctors, as an aside, say it's just not true and not necessary.

And the Biden administration kept it in place for the most part. They let in unaccompanied children, which the Trump administration wasn't doing. They've started to let in some families, but all single adults are immediately expelled when they get to the border. Many families are immediately expelled when they get to the border. And what that is resulting in is another form of family separation. Families are sending children ahead of mom and dad because the kids have an opportunity to get into the United States. And it is putting people, if you ask organizations like Human Rights First, who documents this stuff almost on a daily basis, into extremely dangerous conditions when the public health professionals would tell you, we actually don't need this as a public health imperative. It's really more about politics at this point. And that's sort of a, you know, it's not even a secret anymore, I guess is what I'm trying to say at the White House level. They're gearing up to try to undo this policy, but it's not happening

fast enough. Why do you think it's moving more slow? I know in the beginning of the administration, I talked to Daryl Lind, who was reporting on what was happening on the border. And one of the biggest issues was COVID. It made everything harder about how many people you could put in a facility. It was causing them to be in some of these satellite facilities that were even worse condition than the permanent facilities. Is that still an issue that's slowing things down? Is it the simple fact that government just takes longer than it should? Are there issues still, you know, one of the things we experienced in the Obama administration was even when you had a shift in policy at the top, getting, you know, sort of the line officers, the operators to do that, you know, what are sort of the challenges they're dealing with here? Well, Title 42 is separate and

distinct, I think, from capacity issues in health and human services. And I'm glad you brought that up because I think nobody wants these children to be in, once they get to the custody of HHS, which is where advocates want them to be, nobody wants them to be in what are called emergency intake sites like the one at Fort Bliss, for instance. There were these horrific reports in court documents that came out just over the last couple of weeks about kids having suicidal ideations and other really terrible stuff because of the conditions there, because of the scale, because of the types of personnel that are there. They're not licensed facilities. And those licensed facilities, to your point, have limited capacity because of COVID. They can't put kids side by side in beds, almost like in a dormitory style setting. And that's real. That's very real. And I was actually on a press call with Secretary Becerra the other day where they said they're trying to wind down those emergency sites that are less personal, that advocates say are more dangerous to children, and move to a

licensed bed type model. It's not as relevant with Title 42 on the border. The idea that COVID is running rampant is just obviously not the case. You see the president and the vice president and everybody going around the country not wearing masks anymore. I'm sure you and I, when we go out into the public, are not wearing masks anymore, unless it's a situation where you need to. And so when it comes to that, Title 42 on the border, I don't think COVID is an excuse at this point. That's what doctors are saying. Don't take my word for it. Take the professional's word for it. But when it comes to how we're going to house kids, I do think that it's still an impediment because obviously kids aren't vaccinated. There's been a lot of blowback among some of the immigration advocacy community over the statements about

don't come that were made during the vice president's trip to Central America. At the same time, you know, there was a report in Slate yesterday that said the president is working to make America's asylum system more humane while preventing anyone from reaching it. Can you help sort of unpack sort of the imperative behind why people are delivering this don't come message, what they're trying to say, and the challenges with the asylum system right now? To be honest with you, I think don't come, based on my reporting and based on my observations, is a fruitless message.

It just doesn't work. I mean, you might remember the interview that President Obama did with George Stephanopoulos, where he very famously said, these kids should not come, right? And it circulated on social media, I think, during the Trump administration saying, look, this is not a new message. Trump sent the strongest don't come message possible. We will rip you away from your children and leave you with personal and lifelong trauma that you will never be able to undo and will have to endure for as long as you walk this earth. And people still came. The numbers at the end of his administration

were as high as they had been in the modern era. They went down with COVID and now they're back up. And that's another thing that I'd like to sort of do a reality check on is that everybody's talking about how the numbers today are as high as they've been in 20 years. They're not much different from the numbers at the peak of the Trump administration. And the only reason those numbers went down were not because of the cruelty. They were because of COVID. They were because people stayed home. People had no other option but to stay home. Now they have no other option but to leave the desperate circumstances that they are in. So Vice President Harris can say don't come. Donald Trump can say don't come with extreme cruelty. President Obama can say don't come. It does not work. It has never worked. And asylum, you know, so the other part of this is protected under international law and

is an international right that people have. And so you can say don't come all you want, but you're basically asking people not to exercise their right to step foot into the United States and say, look, I'm seeking a refuge, basically. I'm seeking safety and security from any number of issues. And I just don't think those two things are compatible, the don't come message with we're the United States of America. We are a place that represents safety, security, and a better life. And we will protect you once you make it to our, not our shores, but the Southwest border. I mean, in my time in the White House, there was no issue that I found more challenging to deal with.

And that's for all the reasons you say, right? You can send a message. You can do these things. The laws are so complicated and confusing. You end up with these unaccompanied children with not an obvious solution to do with them in a way that is safe and healthy. And you have, in some cases, the wrong agency in charge of it. But I think part of the challenge and the interpretation of the don't come message, and there's obviously some real issues that have to be dealt with, with the asylum process itself in the transition from Trump

to Biden and the transition from COVID to theoretically post-COVID world, but it's also, isn't some of the message, there are other ways to exercise your right to asylum than going on this very, very dangerous journey that involves in many cases, trafficking. I mean, some of the stories that you have written and others have talked about that have happened to children and women on these paths are, you know, just absolutely horrifying. The Central American Minors Program, which is the official name of basically the way to apply to get to the United States from your home country was was literally dismantled by the Trump administration. It was stood up when you guys were around. And now the Biden administration is trying to bring it back and scale it up. But the scale

of people who are able to actually go through that process and come here, you know, pales in comparison to the amount of people that show up on the Southwest border. And you're right. They, they, you know, how, I guess the question is, how do you prevent people from having to go on this dangerous journey? One of the most dangerous journeys on planet earth, president Trump called it a walk in central park or like a walk in Central Park. I've never heard something more ridiculous in the first place. How do you do it? And I don't think that there is an answer at this point. And that's part of the challenge of this. One of the things that happens during every administration as well is that they start leaning on Mexico and leaning on the Central American countries to prevent people from coming here. And I guess the question that I have is for

the Biden administration or for anyone else that wants to reform this, what part of having Mexico outsourcing enforcement, I guess, is the sort of the shorthand. What part of outsourcing enforcement telling people to turn around and just wait it out in your home country is building a fairer, safer, humane system? just because we don't do the deporting or expelling doesn't mean that Mexico doing it is not equally as harmful to some of these families. And, you know, you just can't tell families who, I went to Chiquimula and Zacapa when I was reporting the book in Guatemala, the dry corridor where people's livelihoods are literally drying up because of climate change,

climate variability, things like El Nino. They're not able to make money from other crops that they can go work on in the fields. There's no supplemental nutrition. And what happens then is you're either faced with a situation where you're going to stay at home or you're going to leave for survival. And that's what I found over and over again when I went to sort of those rural communities is that people didn't have any choice. There is not a single person that I met when I was there. I heard the vice president say this too, who will tell you, yeah, I want to leave. I definitely want to leave. And I want to take that journey across Mexico in order to make my way to the United States. It just doesn't

happen. Almost nobody will tell you that. But when faced with that choice, that is what they do. And so until, you know, they call, they will use the language about capacity, Secretary Mayorkas, the vice president, until they can figure out a way to build capacity and actually have these systems work in country in order to get people to apply and leave by airplane in order to come here, rather than take the journey, you're going to still see the same thing. And this is why I'm a journalist and not a policymaker. I actually don't know what that looks like, but it is perhaps, I think, the greatest challenge in creating the system that they say that they want to create. In the context of trying to unwind the Trump immigration policies, one of the absolute highest priorities is trying to reunite the children who are separated with their families. You reported yesterday that lawyers and outreach

workers have found the parents of 23 more migrant children. That brings the number of separated children to 368. What are the prospects for reuniting the remaining children and what sort of efforts are underway to do that? I think it's sort of a zero fail, to use the title of Carol Lennox book, project for this administration. I think it's sort of a zero fail, to use the title of Carol Lennox's book, project for this administration. I think that they're not going to stop, at least that's what they tell me, until they're able to track down and find

each and every one of them. It's actually higher than the 368. The 368 is just those who they have not been able to reach yet. They can't find them. They literally can't find them because of how horrible the record-keeping was during the Trump administration. There's over a thousand families who are still separated, many of them parents that were deported right after they were taken from their kids. So

they've been separated for years, three years, many at this point, maybe some of them maybe for four years. And so you've got, and I've embedded with some of these folks, you've got people going door to door in the United States looking for families who they cannot track down. You've got families in Central America. There are NGOs like Justice in Motion, Kids in Need of Defense, the Women's Refugee Commission, Al Otrulado, Seneca Family of Agencies. And the president said this too, that they're sleuths, they're detectives. They have to go and basically go through every piece of data that they can find. It was purposely done this way, I should say, and we should say it over and over again by the Trump administration.

And it's why I wonder, actually, I mean, there's the reunification piece of this, and then there's the accountability piece of this. And my question is, President Biden said as a candidate, he believed this policy was criminal. He told Jeff Bennett, my colleague, that the thorough, thorough investigation was going to happen from the Justice Department about criminality of this policy. I believe that the US government can entirely, working with these NGO partners, find and track down and reunite these families and hopefully give them permanent status in the United States. That's something that hasn't been guaranteed yet. The other question I have is,

what happens to the people we were talking about earlier? What happens to Chad Wolf, Kirstjen Nielsen, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, President Trump himself? I read about this in the new afterword of the paperback. They had a meeting in the White House Situation Room where they did a show of hands vote called for by Stephen Miller to move forward with separations. Think about the things when you guys were in office that the Situation Room was used for, most famously going after Osama bin Laden. The idea that these guys were sitting there and saying, hold up your hand. It's un-American if we don't move forward with family separations. They knew full well exactly what the consequences would be because they were warned by HHS,

they were warned by people in ICE, they were warned by people in DHS, all across the board, and they did it anyway. So will they reunite the families? I think if this administration does what they say they're going to do, yeah, they will. Do I think that it's happening soon enough? No, there is no soon enough for trying to heal these families that went through what they went through. But the next step is, will there be justice? And right now, I see no signs of that. And there's been no evidence, including Secretary Mayorkas in our conversations has said, reunifications are first, if accountability, that will come next. That's a lot to think about. Jacob, thanks so much for joining us. Check out his book, Separated, which is now out in paperback. Dan, thanks.

Thanks, Unad and Jacob. Lovett and Tommy will be back with a special July 4th episode out Monday morning. Bye, everyone. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Flavia Casas. Our associate producers are Jazzy Marine and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somenator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Rustin, and Justine Howe for production support.

And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, Yale Freed, and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.