Pod Save America - “Drunk on Coup-laid.”

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

The U.S. launches the largest vaccination effort in history as the first doses of Pfizer’s vaccine are delivered, the Electoral College meets to formalize Joe Biden’s victory, and the Republican Party chooses Donald Trump over democracy.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Levitt. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's pod, it's vaccine day and electoral college day. And we're going to walk through the challenges and opportunities presented by each of these milestones. I'm wearing a celebratory shirt as Michael O'Neill put a picture of a cake I made on a shirt and sent it to my house in honor of his friendship. Well, that's pretty cool. But first, Lovett, how was the show this weekend? Great, Lovett or Leave It. Sarah Silverman joined for the monologue, which was hilarious.

Then we were joined by the first woman to get the vaccine in the UK, but it was Darcy Carden. And Senator Brian Schatz joined for an update on negotiations in Congress. So check it out. Is Senator Brian Schatz a co-host of Love It or Leave It at this point? Listen, I just say, I say, get me shots. All right. And then we move heaven and earth to make sure that it works for his schedule in wherever he is. Tommy, you've got a very big show this week on Pod Save the World. Tell us all about it.

We're talking to a president, former President Obama later today about his memoir. But specifically, Ben and I are going to focus on all the foreign policy parts of the book, his record. So we haven't done it yet. So I can't tell you if it's any good or not. You know, I don't want to lie to you people, but check it out. It'll be out on Wednesday, normal time. We also want to give a shout out to Rachel, Rechna and the entire Hall of Shame team for a fantastic season of that pod. Hall of Shame is a cricket media show filled with fascinating and hilarious scandals in sports from Metta World Peace to Spygate. It's a great

binge lesson for the holiday season, so go check that out. Finally, early voting in the January 5th Georgia runoffs has begun, and your help is needed now more than ever. Head over to votesaveamerica.com slash Georgia to adopt Georgia and find something you can do right now. We'll also be sending new opportunities for you to donate and volunteer to support organizers on the ground in Georgia. All right, let's get to the news. Less than a year after the first documented coronavirus infection in the United States,

the Food and Drug Administration just authorized Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use. And the initial injections have begun today, marking the launch of the largest vaccination effort in American history. The doses will be distributed based on each state's adult population. And the states themselves would decide who gets vaccinated first, with frontline health care workers expected to be at the front of the line. The first shipment of 3 million doses, enough to inoculate 1.5 million people, were flown out of Grand Rapids, Michigan on Sunday after being transported from one of Pfizer's nearby facilities. And here's a clip of the crowd gathered to watch the vaccine leave the warehouse. Airhouse. Isn't it? Stop the steal. Isn't it nice to see a-

Stop the steal. Sorry. Get in the mood. It's just nice to see a group of people cheering science and not trying to burn scientists at the stake, you know? That is a good thing. For a change. Well, you know, it's like, that clip wasn't anything special for listeners. It could have

been any crowd, but like it's not often we've been able to talk about good news here, especially in 2020 on Pod Save America. So thought we'd play that clip. Lovett, you have any thoughts on the scope and speed of this scientific achievement and how it came to be? Yeah, you know, there's a, I actually would really recommend there was a deep, deep dive in the Washington Post that was, I think, pretty fair in looking at the achievement, Operation Warp Speed, Trump's impact, his negative impact, and inside of that piece, and I don't want to just make it about Trump, but I do think that there's something important in it because, you know, inside of that piece, which is really about like,

this is one of the greatest achievements in the history of science, really is. And it's born of an incredible focus over the last year. It's born of decades of investment in the public sector and basic research in systems that try to prevent the influence of politics, of, you know, corporate influence and interference on science, the building of public health infrastructure, of trust in institutions, like all of that. But then there's this senior administration official in the piece, and they're quoted as saying something along the lines of, in 20 years, people won't remember bleach. They won't remember him not wearing masks. They won't remember this.

They'll just remember Operation Warp Speed. And I saw that and I was like, oh, okay. Wishing is not going to make that happen. And what was striking to me in seeing the trucks leaving, it was bittersweet to me. I was watching the videos on repeat because what else am I going to do? And what I was thinking when I saw it is, look at this incredible achievement that these scientists and government were able to do together. It took everything that Trump hates. It took discipline. It took belief in institutions. It took not allowing political interference. It took public investment. Belief in math, science. science, and all of those things, you know, human ingenuity, human creativity, human discipline. It was enough to overcome the virus, and that's extraordinary, but it wasn't enough to overcome Trump. It wasn't enough to overcome the failure of leadership, the failure to give people resources

to survive, the failure to have enough masks, the failure to model best practices, the failure to model good behavior, the failure to celebrate the people that were doing the right thing, the failure to help the people that were doing the right thing, the failure to help the people that were doing the right thing, because there was no reason that this vaccine would come at a time in which the virus was completely unchecked in this country. And that is Trump's great failure. And it is a tribute to every single person who was involved in making this vaccine happen, that they were able to overcome the absence of leadership that has been basically the only consistent thing Trump has offered up and until him pretending to be a leader by badgering officials to make the vaccine roll out faster just before it is approved so that he could claim some credit and get himself in the news cycle.

It ends as it began. Tommy, what do you think? Do you think we'll still remember the bleach in 20 years? I mean, the idea that any of these people can predict what we will or won't remember in 20 i feel like in 20 years our kids are going to be like so wait you guys could have put kleenex on your face and not had 300 000 people died and you chose not to what's what's wrong with you like you know so anyway that idiot is an idiot uh on a personal level i just feel like it has been like really nice for all of our mental health to wake up and read these stories and see these photos. Right. I mean, Hannah and I canceled our plans to see her family around Thanksgiving. We're staying in L.A. over Christmas instead of going to see my

mom and my sister and my brother in Boston. And it sucks. Right. I mean, holidays are a big deal to us. They aren't everybody. But, you know, finally, there's there's light at the end of the tunnel here. And, you know, to love its point, I mean, this vaccine is a miracle, 95% effective and created in record time. I mean, we are so, so lucky that is so much faster than anything in history. It is way more effective than your standard flu vaccine. So this is a miracle. And we should just be clear, the Pfizer vaccine was developed by a German couple, right? One of them was born in Turkey and emigrated to Germany when he was four. The other is the daughter of Turkish immigrants to Germany. So for all of Trump's credit grab, we have Germans and immigrants to thank for this Pfizer vaccine.

The Operation Warp Speed folks deserve some credit for buying 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine. They deserve our eternal hatred and shame for passing on up to 400 million doses at no cost to the US. I mean, we could have just like paid when we got it, right? But, you know, it's an extraordinary scientific feat. There's some really interesting research about how in the future we might be able to speed up this process even more. And we might be able to pre-prepare vaccines for almost all the major known viruses out there. We could maybe create a vaccine for 50 to 100 of the most, you know, sort of dangerous prominent viruses for the cost of the F-35 fighter jet program. So that seems like a pretty good deal compared to a plane we may or may not need to use. So lots of good news today. You know, feeling really good about this. And, you know, it was nice to see

people feeling less scared, basically. So I remember in april when this started dr fauci said 12 to 18 months for a vaccine hopefully and there were a bunch of epidemiologists scientists and others saying that fauci's timeline was way too optimistic for 12 to 18 months 11 months that's what this vaccine came in, 11 months. The shortest timeline previously for any vaccine ever was the mumps vaccine, which took four years. That was the record. And we've gone from four years to 11 months.

And like, you know, Tommy, you just mentioned about the 95% effective. FDA was ready to approve a vaccine that was over 50% effective. No, like the number of people that expected 95% effective. I mean, this is, it truly is a miracle. There were headlines back in the spring saying like, we may never get a vaccine.

So no, I had the same kind of, you know, hope and optimism. This section is John basically being so mad at like a series of articles in the Atlantic that were so annoying over the course of many months. It was like the doom and gloom publication of choice for several months. I, I, I've been,

I've been holding back on this because I think the Atlantic, the Atlantic has some of like the best journalists in the world and write some of the best fucking stuff in the world. But the number of doomsday, you can just Google them. The number of doomsday headlines in that fucking publication about how we're going to live forever with this and never go be the same is ridiculous. But anyway, no, so I was I was like, I was very hopeful and optimistic, too.

And kind of what you were saying, love it like it. It really speaks to the fact that, you know, our world is politics. We talk so much about politics. We're all obsessed with politics and politics is really broken. And the brokenness of politics has contributed to the death and disaster that has come from this pandemic. But other parts of society are not broken. Science is not broken. Like this was a feat of science and just like a modern miracle that that we should celebrate, even though, you know, politics failed us.

So every other way in 2020 and everywhere else, every other way, every other way. Well, I also just say, too, that like Fauci said basically that he was going to see this vaccine to the end and that the compromises he was making, you know, being inside of this administration, you know, we've we talked a lot about people saying they were compromising, you know, not telling the truth about Trump for their own political gain, failing to make any headway, failing to actually stand up to Trump, kind of doing the morally reprehensible and easy thing. But like, here's this guy Fauci, who I think like we will look back and say, like, did an extraordinary thing of serving his country, despite the headwinds that were presented by his boss, despite the incredible obstacles set up by

Donald Trump to make sure that this came to an end. And like, he's a real, you know, he's a hero. He is. So Trump did publicly pressure the FDA to speed up the approval process from Saturday to Friday, and his chief of staff reportedly threatened to fire FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn if that didn't happen. You guys see any problems with that? I mean, yeah. Look, let's just talk about this issue of credit for a minute because there's a debate

going on, too. But like when we're talking about the Pfizer vaccine, the U.S. deserves credit for making an advance purchase of that vaccine in July. They got 100 million doses. I already mentioned how angry I am that they didn't advance purchase several hundred million more doses, but whatever. But the thing that's incredible, again, about the Moderna vaccine is that that vaccine was designed January 13th, 2020. We've had this vaccine formula in our hands for the entire year because a very brave Chinese doctor

sequenced the genome and publicized it. And there were these advances in mRNA technology that none of us actually understand, but it allowed us to pull this off so quickly. And now the problem becomes logistics. But I mean, in terms of like threatening the FDA chief, I mean, there's a huge problem with that. I mean, even the term operation warp speed is horribly problematic if you think about it from a medical point of view. Like we know Trump wants credit for the vaccine being developed quickly, but this isn't fast food. Like no one is really pumped about like a rushed medical product, right? Like no one's getting the fastest created Tylenol ever, right? I mean, it's a bad idea to talk about this and to talk about it as something that happened quickly or in a rushed manner. And so going even further to politicize

the approval process is a bad idea when you've got like, you know, obviously there's some subsets of the anti-vaxxer community that are kind of super aggressive and dangerous and spread misinformation. But then there's other people, especially in the black community, who have read about the Tuskegee syphilis study and have some understandable hesitation based on that history about a new drug. So this is going to require a serious science-based public awareness campaign. And that's really important because there's a lot of people in this country who desperately want a vaccine but can't have it, right? Like if you're getting chemotherapy, you can't get the vaccine.

If you're under 16, as of right now, you can't take the vaccine. It's not clear when it's going to be approved for pregnant women. And so if the virus is swirling around the country because a bunch of vaccine-eligible people just refuse to take it, that'll put others at risk. And so that's why, you know, it's just it's horrible that we have to read these stories over and over again of Trump's politicizing the process when if he had to shut up and stepped back and let the process work, things would be better. In fact, Pfizer didn't take Operation Warp Speed money because they were worried that the government might slow them down. Yeah, I mean, like Trump is the worst

offender here, but it is going to be a major challenge to get the public communication around this correct, you know, even for the Biden administration, who's going to approach it in good faith. You know, even, you know, the FDA approval process, you know, it wasn't it wasn't a unanimous decision. And some people were like, oh, why did some members of the panel vote against it? Well, it turns out the people who voted against it were just saying, oh, I don't think it's ready for 16 and 17 year olds, just those two specific ages. But it's like that's the kind of thing that you actually need to make sure you communicate clearly to people, because if you just see a number, oh, some people voted against it, you think it's dangerous. It's not. It's just they

had a problem with the ages so far, you know. So there is going to be like there's no such thing as too much public communication around this vaccination effort. And it really has to be consistent and done very well. Well, I mean, look, there was something such a to me was such like a signal example of what Trump has done throughout this period, because, yeah, he was complaining that, oh, they held back the saying that the vaccine worked because they didn't want to help me in my election. Right. That was just in the past couple of weeks. But this was like he knew the approval was going to happen. It had nothing to do with him. He wasn't going to speed

it up. He wasn't really going to slow it down. The vaccine was going to be delivered on Monday. So he like Hector and Hector and Hored to achieve some made up results so that he could look like a TV president. The other piece of this too, is there's a lot of stuff that should have been happened that hasn't happened, right? Like there should be a public campaign going on right now that doesn't exist about how the vaccine is going to be distributed, where it's going to go. Like there's all the aspects of presidential leadership that have just been completely missing, right? Like it's why there aren't enough N95 masks right now. It's why there's, there, there may be supply problems down the line with the vaccine. And it's why right now we don't know how people will get it. We don't know where it's going to go. We

don't know the process because there's been no public education. And some of this hasn't even out. Trump administration officials have said they hope to vaccinate up to 24 million Americans by mid-January. And Joe Biden has set a goal of 100 million vaccinations within his first 100 days, which would bring us to the end of April. What are some of the bigger challenges in getting every American inoculated as quickly as possible? You know, we've already covered sort of the demand side of it, which is making sure that enough people want it and trust it. But what are some of the other other issues involved in this, Tommy? I mean, I think it's this is now just a massive logistical issue. You know, when you think about 100 million, 200 million, 500 million doses, if everybody needs two of them, all of those doses need to be contained in a little vial and they all need to be manufactured and they all need to be shipped somewhere and they

all need to be doled out by states that are really short on cash. And so it really is like, thank God Joe Biden and his team are coming in because it really is just about competency. And so that's where, you know, again, I feel a little more hopeful. I mean, I feel hopeful in a lot of ways with Joe Biden and not Trump, but it's something we should all feel hopeful about that. Maybe we can speed up these timelines. I guess the thing I don't understand, and look, I'm totally out of my depth here, is why the U.S. governmentPA or use the government to say, hey, Pfizer, all your doses are for us. They're not for other countries. Like that's immoral. And it's not feasible because they manufacture a lot of these doses

outside the country, too. But like at a minimum, we could use the DPA to ramp up production of PPE or we could use military assets to to ship some of these vaccines, especially the ones that need to be stored at super cold temperatures. We could ramp up the availability and frequency of testing to do a better job of identifying outbreaks. I mean, I do think like the thing we were just talking about was the broken messaging and clarity about what's going to happen and what's going to expect. And the Biden team will fix that along those lines. I mean, I think one of the best things that, you know, the media could do is commit to not reporting on or amplifying Trump's COVID related lies or misinformation starting the day he leaves office. You know what I mean? I mean, he is like the biggest problem in terms of vaccine hesitation

right now. And we should all agree that we are moving on from this asshole if you're not, you know, a Fox News host. I sort of get the sense that the DPA is like, and it's tough to figure this out now because we still have the Trump administration here and we don't know what the Biden administration is going to do. But it's almost like a last resort thing that you use if all of the different private companies aren't cooperating and doing what you want them to do fast enough. And of course, it's like there's a whole supply chain issue, right? So there's supply of the vaccine, but there's glass vials, syringes, needles, cooling systems, ultra-cold freezers, GPS thermal sensors.

I mean, if you read some of these stories about what they have to do to get this vaccine around, it's incredible. And it's like so much more than just needing enough actual vaccine. So the coordination and logistics are just like mind boggling. Also delivering them, right? Like you need the first batch of vaccines are going to hospitals that can handle ultra cold storage, which is not every hospital. Trucks that can handle ultra cold storage, which is certainly not every truck. And then you have the issue where it's like going to be harder to reach rural and underserved areas that just don't have the right

healthcare capacity. How do you get it to them when you don't have the right trucks and hospitals there? Like it is a, it's a, Biden administration has quite a challenge on there. We need the Moderna approval to come through because that can be stored at more regular temperatures and that will, I think, help. For sure. And I do sort of wish AstraZeneca hadn't just told doctors to kind of, you know, give people two or three fingers worth. You know what I mean? Like, you know, two fingers for most people, three fingers if you're like, you're, you know, really thirsty for the vaccine. Yeah, that was not a good idea.

Because not great. Not great. And I wonder what's going on with Johnson & Johnson. Come on, Johnson & Johnson. But Tommy, you said this a couple times but we really should hit on it like this fucking the fact that the trump administration could have bought 400 million more doses from pfizer had the this was a new york times story a couple weeks ago had the chance in july and then i didn't realize until i saw scott gottlieb the former fda

commissioner was on uh cnbc this morning saying is or as late as November, this November, the Trump administration had another chance to buy another 400 million doses and didn't. And we still don't know why. Like, I keep looking for, I'm like, are we just, is this hyperbole? Are we like not, no, no. There's no explanation anywhere,

as far as I can tell, of why they passed up in November the chance to buy another 400 million doses. I get that they're hedging their bets and buying from a bunch of companies. But again, like, in the grand scheme of things, first of all, I think we had to make the payment upon receipt of the doses. So if we didn't get them from Pfizer, we wouldn't have to pay the money. But in the grand scheme of things, spending another eight billion dollars on vaccine doses is nothing, nothing compared to the cost in lives, in our

economy and everything else. It is it is baffling. It is absolutely mind and everything else. It is baffling. It is absolutely mind boggling. It is baffling. I don't get how this happened. This is a fuck up of just epic proportion. And I don't know, hopefully we'll figure out who did it. I bet the email was like unopened in Jared's inbox somewhere with one of his, you know, his college roommates, you know, told him not to do it or something. Yeah. I've been looking too. It's like, there's really is, you can't find any plausible explanation because it was not, the money was no risk. There was no risk. It just was like, if it worked and I was like, I was like, are they, were they, were they worried about getting the super cold version where they were also counting on Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson? Is there

any explanation? So far there's been no explanation whatsoever. It's crazy. You touch on this, but you know, experts say that it's going to cost about eight billion dollars for the states to distribute all this. And it's not just its distribution. It's storing the vaccine, hiring medical workers, running public awareness campaigns. Federal government picks up some of the tab, but a lot of this is on the states. And of course, states don't have any money left because of this recession. And they have been begging for local and state aid for months that Mitch McConnell is holding up single handedly. In fact, he's holding up the entire COVID relief bill over this because he doesn't want states to get a penny of additional money. It does seem to me like Democrats should just hammer this issue relentlessly and like turn

the state and local aid issue into an issue about vaccine distribution to states. Yeah. I mean mean just before we were recording it looked like some of the negotiators were putting out kind of two versions right they were going to put out the version of the bill that was just the relief portion and they were going to separate out the state aid and the liability portion because they probably know that that's not going to pass and they're like all right we'll just fucking set that loose well it does seem like if we if we really are separating out liability and state and local aid, it does seem to doom liability protections in state and local aid because Mitch McConnell

won't budge on state on state and local aid. And Democrats obviously don't want liability protections. And I don't care what what that negotiation looks like. It's it's a maddening thing. You know, I talked to shots about it in Love It or Leave It. And it really is. It's a maddening thing. You know, I talked to Shotz about it in Love It or Leave It, and it really is. It's worth remembering. This is taking a really important part of protecting people and helping people during this crisis and adding a completely unrelated thing of immunizing corporations, which does nothing to help us get out of this crisis. But it does seem as though separating those things out makes both far less likely to happen while making direct payments maybe more plausible. I don't know.

I just, one of the things that drives me the most insane about Washington is that it's all about expectations management when, in terms of press coverage, right? So like the worst you are as a human being, the more terrible you are consistently, the less likely you are to like get hammered over an issue like this. And when it comes to Mitch McConnell, he has spent months refusing to engage with Democrats over COVID relief period, right? Like, and now he wants to punish states because their finances have been decimated by lockdowns that were made necessary by a federal response that was absolutely miserable. And again, like Love, his top priority is liability protection for businesses. What? Like Mitch McConnell has blood on his hands. People are waiting for hours in

food lines because of Mitch McConnell, right? Like states have to decide who gets this vaccine first. They have to distribute it. They have to do all these logistics and he's preventing them from getting that money right now. Mitch McConnell is blocking a bipartisan bill to prevent patients who have insurance from getting surprise medical bills for unexpected out-of-network or emergency care. Why? Because he cares more about private equity-backed insurance company profits than regular people. McConnell is one of the worst people in political life, in political history. He's disgusting. He's a corporate stooge. He's cynical. And like the coverage of him in how he acts is, is talked about as sort of

savvy or tough and impressive. The reality is he's a monster. He's a monster. He's a bad legislator. All he does is block shit. Everything they do is via some ominous bill. Like it's just, it's so frustrating. Tommy, you got to tell us what you think about him. It's like you get, you get, you get punished for trying. You know what I mean? It's like everyone's hammering Pelosi online for engaging or not engaging fucking tweeting up pictures of the amount of ice cream she has in her freezer. Like Mitch McConnell is the clear enemy has been all along. But this is, this is what drives me nuts. It's like, and you know why Mitch McConnell

is going to get his way on this. And this deal is probably going to pass with all of the shit that he wants in it or doesn't want in it is because he's got the fucking numbers and he's got Donald Trump in the White House. Like I thought, you know, Bernie Sanders said the deal is bad and we shouldn't support the deal. And like, I agree with him in the sense that the deal is fucking bad. The bipartisan compromise is bad. Now that they've separated state and local aid and liability protections, what's left over is even more inadequate than the bipartisan compromise. It's shit for sure. But like, what's the what's the choice here? Like, you're going to you're not going to negotiate a better package with these Republicans. Who are you going to get to vote for more money? You're going to get Susan Collins and Mitt Romney to vote for more money and Lisa Murkowski? No, they said this is as best that they would do. And if you don't take the deal and we don't win Georgia, we're not going to get a better deal when Joe Biden's president and Joe Biden's not going to have a mechanism to force a better deal because Mitch McConnell is going to sit there and say, fuck you. I have the numbers. I don't have to pass a deal. If they really do pull out state and local aid and they pull out the liability protections, which obviously none of us think should be part of this at all. It makes no sense. And they have said from the beginning they won't do a trillion dollars.

I mean, keep in mind, Democrats, right, we've come down from three trillion to two trillion to one five. Now we're trying to get to one. What I don't know is what happens if they replace the state and local aid as it was drafted with direct payments. Does that become something that gets people like Bernie back on board? I don't know. Maybe maybe you try that. I mean, Bernie is one thing, but like like Josh Hawley or some of these Republicans who want direct payments. Yeah, I would I would try to get as much in there as I could, you know, and I would

try to push more direct payments for sure. But like at the end of the day, I would also take whatever is left because of course is better than nothing for people who are struggling, even though it's not much. Look, Congress doesn't do anything well anymore. What they do is they jam every bill they're ever supposed to pass together in what's called an omnibus. And the deadline for that bill, which is currently, I think, $1.4 trillion with the T dollars is Friday or else the government shuts down.

They're going to try to jam whatever like COVID relief measures they can into that. And that's kind of like the best and only shot we're going to have until February, March. I don't know. I also what I was going to say is, yeah, that's exactly right. And so like this. If there's going to be something close to a trillion dollar relief bill, it will be inadequate. It will be terribly inadequate and people will be suffering next year. And if what you're doing is replacing state and local aid with direct payments to people, you are kind of changing where that inadequacy and where that pain will be felt. And basically what you're saying is next year, you want states and localities to be put in incredibly difficult positions, right? As hopefully we're emerging from this to cut transportation, cut schools, cut public health, defund the police,

something Republicans seem to believe is something that they oppose, and every other local service. So it really is like, because we are talking about a completely inadequate stimulus, no matter what happens, we are really just talking about who do we want to unnecessarily subject to pain. You want an adequate stimulus? Vote for two Democrats in Georgia. That's how we're going to get an adequate stimulus. There you go. It's the only hope of something next year. The only hope of something next year. Yeah, that's it. Other big news today is that it's the day assigned by the U.S. Constitution for each state's electors to gather and cast their official ballots for president based on the winner of the popular vote in that state.

As the founders intended. As literally. You gather and hide. Yeah, with police protection. Yeah, exactly. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm too hot today. It is a day that it's a day that usually passes without much fanfare, except for this year, when Donald Trump and most Republican politicians in Congress have so far refused to accept the results of a presidential election for the first time in American history.

Even though their false conspiracies about voter fraud have essentially been unanimously rejected by election officials and judges from across the political spectrum, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican. The latest and likely last legal challenge to invalidate every ballot cast in four battleground states was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. Only two justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, believe the court was obligated to hear such a case. But even they refused to hear this particular pile of steaming garbage. They were like, yeah, basically these kind of cases, I don't know if we can shut them down. Oh, but this case, yeah, no, no, definitely this case. So on one hand, we have a complete rejection by the Supreme Court that comes after 59 other rejections by judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents, including Trump. On the other, we have 17 state attorneys general and 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives.

That is more than half the Republican caucus, including minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who wants to be fucking speaker of the House in two years. All these people publicly supported an attempt to overturn the results of the election, publicly supported and lent their names to. What do you guys take away from that, Tommy? I mean, I take away that the Republican Party is no longer a party. It's a cult. And the cult leader is about to be out of office, but he is still mixing up a big vat of Kool-Aid. And he has not loosened his grip on these people at all. I mean, it doesn't matter how irrational the demand is. It doesn't matter that the demands are illegal. The MAGA cult does not believe in democracy. They believe in Trump. And, you know, I just people love to both sides it and decry partisanship like we should just be clear. This is a very new thing. Like the

Democratic Party was supportive of Obama. But if he had said falsely that the BP oil spill was fixed when everyone was watching oil gushing out of it on live TV. Zero Democrats would have fallen in line behind him, right? But like Trump's COVID denial is worse than that. This electoral fiction he's peddling is worse than that. And so it's a very scary thing. I would like to believe that it will be destructive for the Republican Party and then maybe Democrats can win. But the odds are that 2022 is going to be brutal because of redistricting. And so we shouldn't count on it. And I don't know the way around it. I hope that people will get tired of his shtick, but that was my hope in

2015 and then 16. And then the Republican primary happened, and obviously that didn't happen. I hate to say it, guys. Well, one obvious thing that would be helpful is winning these Georgia runoffs but then I hate to say it but it would it would also help I think if Brian Kemp survived his primary challenge that's going to come I mean like we need some anti-Trump Republicans to start winning so that they're all not living in fear of a primary challenge from a Trump backed candidate otherwise the guy is just going to hold a grip on the party a grip on Fox News a grip on Newsmax and it's we're stuck in this cycle. I think we have to beat them all. I mean, I don't I just like there's no I look, I know how hard the House is going to be in 2022. I don't know if everyone realizes this, but it's going to it was

going to be hard no matter what. Now with redistricting, it's going to be even harder. But like, I don't see an option besides winning the House or holding the House in 2022. Because if like, you know, I have been saying that a lot of the concern over Donald Trump successfully overturning this election is is a little overhyped because we have Democrats in all the right positions because we control the House of Representatives, because we control the governorships in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Like that's the only reason that I felt safe in saying that Joe Biden is going to be president. If we have a Republican House in 2024, not only do I think they'll have impeached Joe Biden by then, they'll just make up some reason to do that. But then in the 2024 election, if the Republican candidate or if it's Trump pulls what Trump pulled again, it goes to Congress and now you have a Republican House. And do we really think the Republican House is going to play by the rules after what happened this time? I don't think so. Yeah, I think we should not confuse the fact that this coup will

fail and that its instigators are silly and buffoonish from how dangerous this moment is. I don't think, I think that that's sort of trivial. I think we all get that. But then I do think then there's this problem. It's like, okay, well, what do we do? Well, we know what we need to do. We need to win elections. All right. And the problem is we just ran a national election in which we won. We won by 4.5% of the vote, but given where our voters are, given some of the inherent anti-democratic aspects of the Senate, it was not enough to win the Senate, and we still managed to lose some House seats. And those fundamental problems are not going anywhere. We're not abolishing the Electoral College in the next four years. We're not getting rid of the Senate. We're

going to have some really bad redistricting that's going to hurt us because we did so poorly in legislatures. And so to me, I do think we have to split these things into kind of two big, difficult conversations. One is, how do we win inside of democracy? And the other is, how do we preserve democracy and fight for it against a party that has abandoned it? I no longer am interested in stories about how Republicans behind the scenes say they don't really mean it. No, you do mean it. This is it. You're not in private saying that you don't support what you support. Actually, in private, you're pretending to hold a set of beliefs that nothing in your politics, nothing in your public statements is true. You're pretending to not believe it while everything you do subverts democracy. You know, Ted Cruz is not putting on a

show. Ted Cruz is doing what he thinks is in his best interest. He's not doing it. He's not going above and beyond. He's not saying he wants to argue before the Supreme Court because he's afraid of Trump. He's chosen a side. He's seen where his people are going so that he can lead them. What they learned from Trump is that shame is not a useful attribute to have in politics. So they are all shameless. You cannot shame these people. All we do is, oh, these Republicans got to learn better. We're just going to put pressure on them. We're not putting any pressure on them. Pressure is not going to change their behavior. Shame is not going to change their behavior anymore. They have to be beaten. That's what I go by. Like, I know, like we, you know, we, we did win this time and he

tried to steal it, but it was enough. It was a big enough margin that he was not able to steal it. And we, the only thing we can do in the future is to beat these people. And like you said, like we were not going to eliminate the electoral college before then, before we beat them. We're not going to fix gerrymandering before we beat them. We're not going to fix the Senate before we beat them. All roads lead back to beating them in elections. There's nothing else. Yeah. And I would say, too, like the next the the conversation we should have is obviously not about shame. But I do think we should be talking. I do think it's a much longer term challenge than even what we'll have to do electorally to keep the House and to keep the White House. And it is like, all right, they're shameless, they're mercenaries, they're

doing what they think is in their interest. We need to talk about the fact that they don't view defending democracy as in their interest, right? That that propaganda has so thoroughly taken hold, right? Like when you say like they don't respond to shame, like what does that mean? It means that like virtue, integrity, these qualities no longer matter in our politics. Being honest, caring about the basic civic ideas that are the bedrock of our country, they're not important anymore, which tells us something, which is like, like it or not, yeah, our institutions may have been just strong enough to get us through this, right? But like this fascistic way of thinking, like it's taken hold of a lot of people. It's taken hold of a lot of people in this country and it's really, really dangerous. And we have to talk about those

incentives and those levers because this will get worse unless we start looking up river. When we start looking at propaganda, what Facebook is doing, what Fox News is doing, and actually having conversations about how we combat it, how we don't just lament it, but we actually combat it. So there's one more play they're going to try here. Lost all their legal challenges, couldn't pressure any Republican election officials to illegally refuse certification of the results,

couldn't find any Republican state legislatures to illegally send their own slate of electors. So now they're looking at January 6th, which is when the electoral votes are officially tallied in Congress and read aloud by none other than the vice president, Mike Pence. So that's fun. Here's the rules. If a member of the House and a senator together both raise an objection to a slate of electors, both houses of Congress have to vote on whether to reject or accept the objection. Of course, already a few House Republicans. No surprise there. They're all fucking yahoos. And a few senators like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin have said they may object. Like this is it's not going to work because democrats have a majority in the house and will vote down the objection and there are now enough senators in the senate who have said that

joe biden is president enough republican senators that there's also a pro-democracy majority in the senate so it's not going to work but it is interesting to me that it's now going to put every single republican member of the house and the Senate on record as whether you were for or against the coup attempt. And so the ones who are trying to hide, like Marco Rubio, but just doing the hand wave thing, they'd be like, oh, it's forget about the coup. It's the it's the left wing outrage. That's a problem. Left wing outrage about the coup. That's the real problem. Those are Marco's tweets. I'm not taking this beyond Twitter. I've said what I have to say on Twitter. I'm not going to bring it to our podcast, too. Look, didn't a couple Democrats object in Bush v. Gore, and they couldn't find a Democratic senator to do it, and it kind of went by the wayside?

Yeah, in 2004, they did it with Kerry in Ohio, too. But this is madness. And it'll go nowhere. It'll go nowhere. And this time, they'll have a senator, but it'll still go nowhere. This is drink the Kool-Aid. This is their moment. All of them will be on record. Oh, should we call drink the Kool-Aid. This is their moment. All of them will be on record.

Oh, should we call it the Kool-Aid with a P? That works. Hey. Hey. That kind of works. The Kool-Aid. Hey. Nice, Tommy.

Thanks, guys. I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing to have all these guys on the record as for or against the Kool attempt. I'd like to think it's a good thing. I don't either. Because maybe we could hold it against them in elections. I don't know anymore. I don't know anymore. It's not like I think it's going to be sad. I think we're going to be sad. I think it's going to be a sad moment. Every Trump thing

starts as like zany, but then like he just goes all in on every maddening, insane right wing, like conspiracy theory that he that he latches onto. And here we are. I don't know. It's like when you say something ironically and then all of a sudden it's just something you say. Yes. You know what I mean? All of a sudden you're typing LOL and you hate yourself. I think it's going to be a really sad moment

because one of the institutions that have stood up really well during the coup attempt is the judiciary. And we've seen liberal judges, conservative judges, Trump judges all throw out these challenges. But at the end of the day, selecting a president comes down to Congress. And you're right, like we are going to have to vote, which means that in the future, if they do this, it's not going to matter what the courts do. If the courts throw them out, because it'll ultimately come down to the January 6th moment in Congress.

And what if you have a majority in Congress? One of these days that says, yeah, we're going to throw out some, we're going to throw out some electors and, and, and overturn the results. That's all it takes.

Very bad. That's all it takes is just Congress doing that bit by bit. Let's talk about the damage that the coup attempt is already doing beyond our Republican politicians. The Texas Republican Party responded to the Supreme Court decision by calling for secession. That's that's true. That's actually happened. Alex Jones said that Joe Biden, quote, will be removed one way or another. Sidney Powell, a former member of Trump's legal team joined other MAGA lunatics in calling on the president to suspend the electoral college and set up military tribunals. Many of these lunatics descended on Washington over the weekend where right

wing power military groups like the proud boys attacked police counter protesters and defaced two historic black churches. Four people were stabbed and 23 arrested. Like where do we go from here? These are fascists. These people are fascists and these are their brown shirts and they're storming around

through Washington. And it is incredibly scary and unsettling. And where we go from here feels uncertain to me. I hope we can get through inauguration and like Joe Biden will be in office

and maybe these people can recede to the back. But I do think it's going to it's going to take a conscious choice for all of us, the media politicians, to stop covering Donald Trump like he's the national narrator of all U.S. events. We cannot center this man in our politics for four more years and rid ourselves of like the cancer of this MAGA fascist mindset. You know, like we have to try to move on from him somehow.

We have to get serious and actually focus on things that matter. Otherwise, we're going to be back here in four years and he's going to be the GOP nominee. And God knows what will happen. It was such a split screen moment for me over the weekend and just prepping for today's pod is on one hand, you have the vaccine development and distribution. And it's this it's this example of the entire world working together, scientists, health care workers, truckers, politicians, like everyone coming together to do something good and try to get people vaccinated. And then you have these fucking assholes descending on Washington, just trying to burn everything down, just trying to burn it all down. Like these people are awful, just awful. Yeah. And I do think we need to stop trying to convince ourselves that because they're silly, because they write things on their butts, because Sidney Powell is a bad lawyer because Rudy Giuliani's face melted.

Like we need to stop taking comfort in the fact that they're silly because like every dangerous, violent, revanchist, anti-democratic movement is silly in some sense. If they weren't dumb, if they weren't buffoonish, they wouldn't support that movement. And so like, we should just keep in mind that some of the most dangerous and reactionary forces that have had huge impact on this country that have pulled this country backwards in our history were, were no weren't geniuses, they were no, they didn't have to be. Because when you employ violence, when you introduce the specter of violence across our politics, it can warp things and change things without you having to be very sophisticated. And I just think that requires I don't know what to do with that information.

I don't it's but it's just something we all should keep in mind. Like, don't take comfort in their stupidity. We just can't. Yeah, it is. It's still an open question of how big their numbers are. And part of this is making sure the numbers don't get bigger. You're not going to do anything about the assholes who descended on DC, but there's other people who could fall into that kind of trap. And you want to avoid that. I mean, like there was a new CBS poll out over the weekend,

you know, and it gives the usual numbers. Only 18% of Trump voters think Biden's the legitimate winner of the election. Forty nine percent think Trump should refuse to concede, even if the Electoral College votes for Biden, which they will. And 75 percent think Republicans in Congress should try to keep Trump in power. But then I saw at the end, the last question was 40 percent of Trump voters believe that if Biden is the president, that Trump and his supporters should work together with Biden on making progress. Which was surprising because I'm like these same people who think they're the election is not legitimate. You know, 60 percent of them think never work with Biden on anything. So that's still a majority. But that 40 percent might be where you begin, you know, because that's the only option we have at this point. Well, I also just think it's interesting, too. It's important,

too, because what it does also show you is that these are in some sense, performative reactions, even to pollsters. We're all pundits now we're all on a team. And like, that's a good thing in the sense that people are saying things they don't totally mean. It's a dangerous thing in which beliefs themselves are now how you demonstrate your fealty, which means nobody is going to be telling the truth. And, you know, like, sorry, I'm going to, I'll, I'm going to do it. Vonnegut, the quote, which I think about all the time these days is, you know, you are what you pretend to be. So be careful what you pretend to be. You know, it doesn't matter. The difference between what people say and what they think is it doesn't really matter because what people say and what

they perform is what becomes our politics. I'm going to, I'm going to follow suit here. So I was reading Obama's book. And then I started reading like an old book I had from college from Václav Havel, who is a playwright, writer, thinker, political leader in the Czech Republic. And he talks about sort of how every country, every culture, every like society has these sort of polls, right? There's always sort of a fascistic camp. And there's always a more hopeful camp. And it is up to the leaders to decide which one of those you awaken. And Trump has spent four to six years awakening the scary, fascistic, right wing camp. And the next Republican, like Ronald Reagan was awful. He did immeasurable damage to this country, but he didn't do that. And we barely survived that.

And the next set of Republican leaders better be pretty goddamn careful about whether or not they decide to reawaken those fascistic forces, because right now those people were you know, they're in D.C. over the weekend saying chanting, destroy the GOP because they won't go along with a coup attempt. So, yeah, that shit will bite you back. They will. And, you know, you talk about future Republican presidents, but it's also, this is, this was part of Joe Biden's message in the campaign, talking about what you want to

project to the country and what kind of country that you want to have, you know, like, and do I have a lot of optimism that Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell are going to sit down and hammer out some deals together? No, I don't. But I think Biden's message was bigger than I'm going to work with Republicans in Congress. It's about, you know, a battle for the soul of the country and healing the nation. And I think projecting that image to the country, it matters. It matters what a president says and does. And oh, by the way, let's add to the list. As he projects that vision to the country, he also, perhaps without a Senate, hopefully with a Senate that's incredibly divided, regardless, he has to deliver. And that's like the single most important thing he can do to save the country from this, which is deliver. 100%. Well, that's all we

have for today. And everyone, check out Pod Save the World for the Big Obama interview this week. And we'll talk to you guys on Thursday. Bye, everybody. Bye, y'all. Bye. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somenator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Quinn Lewis,

Caroline Rustin, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Narmal Konian, Yale Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.