Pod Save America - “Joe Biden, Antifa General.”

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

The President commemorates July 4th with a racist speech at Mt. Rushmore, the Biden and Trump campaigns focus on the pandemic response, and Senate Republicans weigh distancing themselves from Trump as they fall behind their Democratic challengers in the polls.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's pod, we'll talk about how Donald Trump celebrated the 4th of July with a racist speech at Mount Rushmore, how Joe Biden is responding, what can be done about the record number of new COVID cases, and we'll check in on the most competitive Senate races ahead of November. First, Lovett, how was the show this weekend? Great episode. Emily Heller back for the 4th.

Hari Kondabalu came by. He has that film, The Problem with Apu, but he talked about all of this sort of Hollywood reckoning around who portrays cartoon characters, diversity, hacky standup. It was a good conversation. Dr. Anne Ramon on what's happening in terms of COVID coming back or never having left. It was a great episode. That's it. That's great. Also great. What a day is back.

After a much deserved break, Akilah and Gideon are rested and ready to guide you through all the harrowing and hopeful news of the day. So if you haven't already, subscribe to What a Day wherever you get your podcasts. If you haven't subscribed yet, I don't know. You're missing a lot. I don't know. I don't know what you're doing out there, but you want 15, 20 minutes of news delivered by

two of the most wonderful people, Akilah and Gideon. You know, check it out. Everyone's listening. So go for it. It's a great dog walking length. It is a great dog walking or any kind of walk, you know. Also, i did not even realize until i saw this in the prep that there's a brand new wind of change bonus episode out today check it out exclusive to spotify patrick talks to joanna stingray the daughter of an anti-communist who smuggled music in and out of the soviet union there's an international love triangle high fashion and an explosive ending how about that guys great names on window change the joanna stingray episode could have been uh an entire series in and of itself i highly recommend it

i'm excited for this all right let's get to the news uh i i'm not sure why i chose to punish myself by watching uh donald trump's speech at mount rushmore on Friday night. But there I was watching Fox. It really made me long for the times when he doesn't use a prompter, which is saying a lot. So the speech actually began somewhat normal. Here's a clip. As we meet here tonight, there is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for, struggled, they bled to secure. So what could he be talking about?

Is it the pandemic that's killed 125,000 Americans? Is it double-digit unemployment? Is it police brutality, systemic racism? Let's find out. Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, to fame our heroes, erase our values,

and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders to face our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities so that's it guys um that's the growing danger uh he went on to talk about uh cancel culture as well um love it since uh since you were a presidential speech writer in your past life, I'm going to go to you for analysis of the speech itself. Why not? What do you think? What do you think? You know, there's been this debate for a long time as to like, oh, you know, when are we going to call Trump a fascist? Is he a fascist? Is it too far to call him a fascist?

How far down the fascism line of reasoning do you have to be before it's OK to use the term? And I don't really care about that debate in this context, just because whatever Donald Trump's authoritarian leanings may be, his sort of like improv authoritarianism, all rooted in his own ego and all the rest. are definitely natural fascistic thinkers. Like that is where they go. When people like Stephen Miller, C plus Santa Monica fascist, try to write a speech, they try to do big, soaring, sweeping language because an impression of the kind of thing they think they're supposed to do in these jobs. These are not talented people.

These are not particularly bright people. These are the dregs of Republican politics. Ideologues and just some of the worst human beings to ever walk through that building. And when they try to do patriotism, when they try to do sweeping, what comes out is just sort of proto-fascistic garbage because nationalism is just patriotism for assholes. But even putting aside the terribleness of the words themselves, what is so striking about this is Donald Trump's brand of white nationalism and fomenting of division and chaos and hatred. It is a luxury for a better time. It is the kind of TV based riling up of people if they weren't in a state of crisis, if we weren't

in the midst of a pandemic, if there wasn't actual genuine need for actual genuine leadership. And so I do think it would be more frightening if Donald Trump's polling was better, if he were in a better position politically. But because he is in such a bad way and because the words are falling, I think, on deaf ears and he is in the process of losing the country, it just comes off as this disgraceful display for the last vestiges of his supporters. Tell me, what did you think? Unfortunately, both of us were texting during the speech, so I know that you watched it as well. Yeah. I mean, that's a sad commentary on my life, but that's a different question. I mean, so the content was a moral abomination. It was racist. It was divisive. But I also just think like it's so divorced from the reality of people who are

trapped in their homes because of the pandemic or out of work. It's also completely discordant. I mean, holidays are supposed to be fun. You guys have written remarks for presidents about like Christmas, Thanksgiving, July 4th. And usually presidents try to lift people up or make it in some way joyful. This was none of that. And the delivery on these teleprompter speeches is usually so bad and monotone that it's hard for me not to get caught up in that and frustrated by that. I do try to check myself in these moments because obviously I don't like Trump, as listeners

might know, but authoritarianism can work. And I wonder if there's a method to the madness. But I don't know. I don't think there's a strategy here. But there was a recent Quinnipiac poll that found 52% of voters support removing Confederate statues from public spaces. And that was a 19-point swing since August of 2017. They were about evenly split on renaming military bases. There are other polls that show the issue in a worse place, slightly underwater. But all the polling I've seen have shown the numbers consistently moving towards support for taking down Confederate monuments

and frustration with naming anything after traitors. And so I think sometimes Democrats and pundits, we obsessively read the news and watch Twitter and cable and we miss the big story. In this case, I think it's the exact opposite. I think Fox News coverage and right wing outlets are distorting Trump's view of what people actually care about. If you watch the pre show on the for the big Fourth of July speech on Fox News, there was no discussion of the coronavirus. It was all media grievance. It's all Tucker Carlson and Hannity focused on the culture war. And Jonathan Swan at Axios actually did a little side-by-side of things Tucker Carlson has said compared to Trump's speech, and it's nearly identical. So just like mainlining Fox News.

Trump's aides told the New York Times they think some people are lying to pollsters about their support for the protests. I think that's a bad bet. You're also seeing background quotes from Trump staff who want him to move on from the racially divisive topics that he prefers to talk about. So I just I can't see a scenario where that speech helped him politically in any way, shape or form. I'm no pollster. i i uh find it hard to believe that the election might turn on um statues of dead people yeah like i just it is talk about missing the mark like to me it just seemed like a really pathetic sort of display like they clearly decided that you know tulsa was bad because the president like went off prompter the whole time and just did his

usual crazy routine. He's talking about the ramp for 15 minutes and all that. So they try to get him on prompter. This is not just something that Trump decided to tweet. This is a strategy of the campaign right now, a broader strategy. Trump is reportedly upset with Jared Kushner for pushing him to talk about issues like criminal justice reform and policing reform. Trump and his advisers think that statues is a winning issue, which is why he also announced during the speech that he's signing an executive order to create a, quote, National Garden of American Heroes that will include statues of historically significant Americans. Like I just I I mean, like you said, even in the best of times, right?

In 2018, in the midterms, before we had a pandemic or a terrible recession, you guys will remember he made the last month the campaign about this immigrant caravan. It did not work then, right? He always needs an imaginary enemy. So he made it about the caravan in 2018. It didn't really work.

Now we are in the midst of a pandemic. You see polls everywhere showing people are more afraid of the pandemic as the days go on and the infections rise. People are worried about their jobs. People are very concerned about systemic racism and police brutality. Trump is not on the right side of that issue with the majority of the public either. So these are all the concerns facing the american people and he's gonna go up there and talk about statues even if you say that

like he's he's he's not with the american people on confederate statues most americans want confederate statues down so then the campaign even if then they say like well it's about washington and jefferson and other statues like these issues are just not fucking driving people's vote choice in the midst of a national crisis. It seems so crazy to me. It's also, you know, there were sort of two things that I thought were interesting about this over the weekend and then today. One is that there was this Gallup poll that came out that showed Donald Trump is now losing

independence. He's at 33%. Obviously, he's in single digit with Democrats, but he retains 91% approval amongst Republicans, right? That capture continues, which is better than George W. Bush did when he lost the country, an extreme difference between what independents and Democrats say and what Republicans say. So there's this conversation going on just amongst Republicans in which he feels this strength. At the same time, Trump has now threatened to veto a big defense bill over fucking statues, right? It's a big, giant defense bill with a raise for service members and includes Elizabeth Warren's amendment around renaming Confederate bases that are currently named after

Confederate generals and traitors. And he's threatened to veto it. And what you've seen now is a bunch of Republicans in Congress basically ignore it under the presumption that that veto may be overturned, that they'll be able to pass this thing with a veto proof majority. So, I mean, compared to 2018, Donald Trump starts fomenting about the caravan, about the caravan. He has a bunch of willing participants in that. That's not really what's happening now. Yeah. I mean, threatening to veto a $740 billion with a B defense funding bill because Elizabeth Warren wants to change the name of 10 military bases from Confederate traitors to something else, I think is the perfect anecdote that speaks to how divorced

from reality their political strategy is. And unless you think that they were trying to, you know, sort of narrowly slice this issue and make it about, you know, people trying to pull down a statue of Lincoln or Washington as opposed to Confederates. No, this morning he's tweeting his rage about the Washington Redskins potentially changing their name, or he's attacking Bubba Wallace, a NASCAR driver who found a noose in the stall where he was working out of, and he's attacking him and calling it a hoax and saying that and the flag decision has caused the lowest ratings ever

in NASCAR. The flag decision there was about banning the Confederate flag from NASCAR events. So he is going for the maximalist racist portion of this debate and he's doing it on purpose. Yeah, it's not even working for sort of the other Republicans who are following this strategy to trying to make Democrats have to be like Antifa lovers. And that's partly because of the who the opponent is, who Trump's opponent is, Joe Biden. There's this interesting Twitter exchange over the weekend where Ted Cruz tweets, Dems support the riots, the vandals, the anarchists. And AOC quote tweets him and says, yes, that is precisely why the party nominated Joe Biden.

That's very funny. That's very funny. Yeah. It was very funny. But I thought that sort of encapsulated the entire party's problem, like heading into this November with the strategy of the Democrats are standing with the radical left and all they care about is mobs and burning things down and statues. Like, it just doesn't comport with the reality of how most voters either view the Democratic Party or view the issues that are sort of driving the conversation.

Yeah, Biden can't be a grandpa hiding in the basement and an Antifa. He can't be both. You have to really make a choice there. Yep. Well, let's let's talk about Joe Biden's message, which he's been delivering in a series of new ads that focus on his biography and his positive vision. Here's one of them that just started airing called Taught Me. It's the values we pass around the kitchen table that we remember all our lives. The values that Joe Biden has fought for all his life, he learned around his own family's kitchen table.

His parents taught him about the dignity of work, that when you're knocked down, you get back up. That success means looking at your child and realizing they turned out better than you. These are the values that built this country. They help us push for progress and bring us hope in our darkest moments. Today, people are hurting, scared, and angry. But to heal this kind of suffering doesn't take brute force. It takes empathy and understanding, a belief in dignity, resilience, and the American dream. That's what Joe Biden's family taught him all those years ago. And it's why he'll fight as hard for your family as he does for his own.

Tommy, what do you think the Biden folks are trying to do with that ad? And do you think they accomplished it? I mean, I think that there's been a lot of polling that's shown us that people don't really know that much about Joe Biden. It can be hard to believe when you're, you know, obsessed about politics like we are. But I think there's a lot of people that know him as Obama's vice president. They don't even know the story that we all used to know of him as like middle class Joe from Scranton, the guy who was in the Senate forever. Right. So they're doing

some basic foundational education that I think is valuable and important. There's another ad that talks about being the father of a young man deployed to the military that talks about his son, Beau. I think, you know, sort of understanding that piece of Biden's biography helps you understand, for example, his outrage about the Russia bounty story and how it can be driven by that experience. So I think it's probably sort of phase one of telling Joe Biden's story. I think it's probably sort of phase one of telling Joe Biden's story.

I think that phase two is likely to focus more on how Biden managed the Recovery Act and hopefully have some details about his plan to help pull the country out of the depths of a recession if he's elected president. But I think laying down this stuff early is important. And so I was glad to see that they put out these spots. Love it. What do you think? They're great ads. I watch them. They work on me. I was receptive to them. I will say dignity, empathy, resilience. I felt you can see them on the PowerPoint that led to the creation of the ad, which I respect. I mean, it's just pretty direct, like dignity, empathy, resilience. These are words that are kind of great

to describe what Joe Biden's trying to project about his campaign in opposition to Donald Trump, who obviously lacks empathy. I don't believe he has seen dignity in quite some time, wouldn't know it if he met it. And Donald Trump has not been obviously projecting resilience in how he has managed this crisis. So clearly, like they are trying. It is actually a really difficult task. I mean, obviously, Trump has been hurting himself a lot, but it's a difficult task to think through the complexities about how you message your campaign in this moment. It's a it's a unique moment. There's not a lot of corollaries you can draw, right? You can look at the financial crisis in 2008, for example. You

can look at other moments of crisis in our history. But a massive economic crisis, a period of protest and tumult, this health crisis. So it creates a set of challenges. And I think they're navigating that really well. I like the ads. Yeah. It's interesting. Those, those words that you pointed out, dignity, dignity, empathy, resilience, like there's another universe where they can be parodied as sort of political cliches. They work and are meaningful because they sort of meet the moment that we're in. And, you know, I think the best kind of ad and the best kind of message will both set forth your own positive vision, but then have an implicit contrast or even an explicit contrast with your opponent. And, you know, we just talked about how Trump and the biggest one of the biggest problems with his speeches lately and his like obsession

with the statue issue is that it completely misses the moment and misses the reality that most people are living in right now. And I think what Biden's doing is he's not just doing bio ads about like, here's how I grew up and here's everything about my past. Like halfway through that ad, he starts talking about how today people are angry and they're afraid and they're scared and, you know, and they're hurting. And so he sort of acknowledges both the fear and the anger and the pain that's out there right now, then says we can sort of move to a better place as a country. And it's only striking because you get none of that from Donald Trump, from the guy who's the president of the United States. you know we're used to president especially incumbent presidents during crises whether it's barack obama or george bush someone we didn't agree with at all at least trying to win re-election by saying we're going to move this we're going to keep fighting and move this country to a better place you just don't even get any of that from donald trump right now yeah you know one other

just about the message you know there was another ad that was that felt actually more like a uh like a beer commercial but the beer was joe b this music. And like, obviously, that takes a president. That is an ad not named aimed at Twitter leftists and not and certainly not Twitter liberals like myself. But but I appreciate it. And what you see also in this ad is like these are non ideological, right? These are not ads about policy at all. And I was thinking about what, you know, Roberta Kaplan, who's one of the lawyers who fought for marriage equality all the way to the Supreme Court, you know, she talks about like dignity as the conservative word for equality. And so you just feel in this ad, like an appeal to independents, appeal to people,

they're trying to peel away from those sort of soft Trump voters or non-voters in the past. Yeah. And in the Trump version of that type of strategy had me worried for a while, right? For a while, we were reading about how they were opening offices in African-American communities and doing outreach in places that Republicans usually pass over. His Super Bowl ad was touting bipartisan issues like criminal justice reform. Now it is all monuments all the time. I mean, it is, I don't think it's hard to explain to people that it's weird to release an executive order that threatens to put people in jail for a decade

if you deface a monument while essentially disbanding the coronavirus task force. Like, I think people can kind of get that. Yeah, look, obviously we're not fans of Trump here on Pod Save America, but there's a version of this campaign and a message from Trump that I think would would scare me a lot more than what he's doing right now, because he could try to make it a more sort of unifying approach and try to win back independents and swing voters. But as of now, he just isn't trying at all.

So let's talk about how both candidates are handling the most important issue of the campaign, the coronavirus pandemic. There's a there's a new Washington Post story about this today. Talks about how Biden advisers are, quote, using the stumbling response and renewed surge in cases as a way to paint Trump as uninformed and capable of empathy. Like you said, love it. And only concerned about his own political standing. Then it talks about how Trump's advisors have also come to believe the pandemic could decide the election and are looking to reframe the president's response by sending health officials to swing states, quote, even as the president himself largely seeks to avoid the topic because he views it as a political loser. Trump's weekend events had no social distancing or mask requirements. And in his 4th of July remarks, he said that 99% of COVID-19 cases are, quote, totally harmless.

Like, so is Trump's COVID strategy just herd immunity now? Is that what it's come down to? I don't think he has a strategy. I think his strategy is try to talk about other things and distract us by talking about other things. I mean, if we're like taking your question literally here, right, like herd immunity would mean like 60 or 70 percent of the country got coronavirus, which would mean millions of people were dead. So I don't think that's actually it. I mean, I think he just wants to talk about literally anything else.

And look, you know, his response to the pandemic has been the most egregiously bad. I do think you're seeing government officials at all levels fail to figure out how to message this crisis right now. Even in Los Angeles, where we acted earlier, took a whole bunch of draconian steps, It does feel like this thing is getting out of control. And the message has gone back to everybody just stay at home again. And I think that's very hard to sell to people in this moment where they just sacrifice months of their lives. They feel like things are getting worse and it's not opening back up. So I don't know what Trump's coronavirus strategy is. I mean, saying 99% of cases are totally harmless is completely crazy. It is not accurate in any way and is likely to lead to many more people to go out and live their lives like they did beforehand and catch this thing and infect their parents and their grandparents and their friends.

So it's all just it's a mess. I don't even know what to make of it. I don't know how to interpret it. Love it. They said that the in the story, the campaign's goal is now to convince Americans they can live with this. And the White House hopes that Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll. Yeah, it's it's beyond what are we supposed to say? You know what he's supposed to say? It's so awful. You know, there's all these stories in the past couple of days about whether we should

be doing something called pool testing. I didn't know anything about pool testing. I don't know if you know about pool testing. The doctors in Love Relief, it was talking about it. And pool testing is basically when you don't have enough tests, basically you mix the blood together, test a bunch of blood. If any of it comes back positive, then you test the individual samples. And it's a way to make the tests go further. Okay. Two things. One, we have now, we are still unable to test enough people. We still don't have the capacity to test. We're still fighting that backlog. But two, that only works if there aren't enough cases in the population that every time you test 10 samples, it doesn't come back positive, right? That we have now gotten to the point where some of the mitigation efforts to not mitigate the coronavirus, but

mitigate our lack of preparedness are not able to work because the disease is spreading so far out of control. We are like six months into this. And I remember like a month or two ago, we were talking about the failures that took place in February and March. And I remember the three of us were just like, we are still failing right now. We're failing right now. And it's ongoing.

We're still doing that. We are still in the midst of this epic failure. And, you know, the confusion around what we should do, right, like Tommy pointed out, the lack of leadership, the in and out, the what should be open, what shouldn't be open, the lack of leadership on masks, the lack of direction for what we as individuals should do when we did our part and stayed home and tried to mitigate the risk for the country, only to discover that in the months we did that, no preparations took place. Nothing happened to make life easier. Everybody is starting to make risk assessments. Everybody's starting to say,

fuck it. I want to do something. I want to find a group of people to hang out with. I need a life. I need something outside of this. So like the country is breaking, right? It's the failure of leadership. It's the failure of Republican governors across the country. But it's also just our collective exhaustion with this after six months. And that's it. You know, we're just we're out of no one has a great outcome for this. No one has a great thing to tell anybody. We're just fucking trapped. Yeah, I mean, Nate Silver tweeted this and said this over the weekend on one of the Sunday shows, that the best thing Trump could do to improve his reelection chances is mandate masks, which is sort of like a bit of an oversimplification, but I did think it was an interesting comment

because like, obviously we can all agree Trump's response continues to be fucking awful in that it sort of ignores the very real sickness that's out there and like the rising death toll and case count and all that. But it's also just really fucking short sighted and stupid from a political perspective that the only way like he could improve his chances, improve his reelection chances if he got the virus under control or at least did a better job.

And I think part of what we're seeing, as you guys are both saying, you know, with even local governments and state governments who took pretty strong restrictions like ours did in California early, still failing to get the virus under control, is that policy is one part of public health response, but communication is a huge part, communication and education. And there is just, there's no consistent message from anywhere, partly because Donald Trump decided early on that the federal government was not going to run this response, that government was not going to run this response, that he was just going to leave it to states and localities. And you can't have a patchwork response in a country like ours, as big as ours, right? You can't just have 50 states

running, each of them running their own coronavirus response and not having a central form of both like responsibility in the federal government and a type of communication that everyone can tune into. Eric Garcetti and Gavin Newsom can give press conferences all day long. They're not reaching as many people as the president of the United States would. I mean, look, the responses may be different in different places, but if we were all operating from a set of guidelines and a set of kind of expectations on people, the mass guidance. You know, look, it was not a foregone conclusion that mass would become this political idea.

You could imagine the exact opposite of mass becoming a way that Trump could talk about how we get to open back up. He could take that on any moment. So much of this is simply him being unable to just admit a change or make a change. It's just a personal, ego-driven decision that costs hundreds of thousands of lives and pain. You don't have mini MAGA rallies popping up in front of signs that say, no shirt, no shoes, no service. It does drive me crazy the way the media is, and I don't mean to blame them for this, but often you see the

press sort of eagerly fold into this argument that this is a politicized thing now that masks are political when actually the data doesn't really show that it's a bunch of super intense extremists who have decided that, you know, mask wearing is attack on their liberty or whatever. And then there's on the left, like a bunch of people who, you know, ret wearing is attack on their liberty or whatever. And then there's on the left, like a bunch of people who, you know, retweet a bunch of Karen videos and people in supermarkets. And I think most of the country is actually like, tell me what to do. Tell me how to stay safe. Tell me how to keep my friends and loved ones safe. I will do what you tell me. I just need some sort of clear guidance. And you're absolutely right, John, like that starts with Trump. It starts at

the top. The fact that he won't wear a mask, the fact that he won't advise people to do it is, I think, the single most damaging thing. But we do need some consistency. We do need like bite-sized, actionable guidance to help us guide our own lives. And I don't think that if some state or municipality tries to tell their citizens that you need to lock down as hard as we did in March again, that they're going to trust them. And that's the really scary part. I totally agree with that. And I worry about that.

I mean, in what is hopefully a Biden administration, hopefully Joe Biden wins. If he does, he is going to face sort of all of these challenges. And primarily the number one challenge is to communicate to the American people about what we can do to control this pandemic in a way that is consistent and also maybe focused on harm and risk reduction. Right. Like take these sensible steps and you're never going to totally eliminate the risk that you might contract this disease. But at least you can reduce harm as opposed to like swinging. You know, remember, first we were told not to wear masks. Then we were told to wear masks. We all locked down really hard. Much like are we going to go back into a lockdown now like

when are we just going to keep locking down and not locking down and until we get a vaccine over and over again like we've got to figure out you know is it safer outdoors should we tell people if you're going to see people do it outdoors stay apart as opposed to telling everyone no one ever see anyone ever right like there's got to be some like you said tommy and some actionable steps that people can take that are consistent coming from our leaders and we're not getting that now so we are in bad shape guys we are in bad shape it's the the yeah masks masks no big indoor events right like it, that's so much of this. But then on top of that, it's like, there was so much like beach goer shaming early on. And I can't even remember if I participated

in it. I don't think I did because I was like, aren't they outside? Isn't this taken from an angle where you have no idea how close they are? Why are we closing? The angles, Tommy, the fucking angles, right? Every fucking, these are too many, they're umbrellas. The fucking angles. Right. Every fucking, these are too many, they're umbrellas. Umbrellas naturally create social distance. Right.

Especially if you're taking it like lengthwise of a three mile long beach. Yes, everybody looks pretty close. But yeah, you have this weird phenomenon where places are reopening bars and restaurants too early and then locking down into draconian fashion on parks and trails and beaches. And it does seem like the data we're getting and learning from based on the protests show that mask usage outdoors really can help us be better. So why are we closing the beaches? I don't get it. It's so frustrating. Literally, you know, to not make it all about Trump, like Eric Garcetti one day is like, it's alfresco dining in L.A. and everyone's going to be outside now. And welcome to our, you know, we're opening outdoor restaurants.

And the next day is tweeting, cancel all your plans. Stay home. Right. July 4th. Don't leave your house. And I'm just like, this is it's hard for people to follow the mixed messaging. And again, like you said, Tommy, it goes back to an issue of trusting our leaders. You've got to be consistent.

And if you do change your mind because the facts change, that's okay. But you've got to be clear about why, you know? It's also, you know, like all of these decisions about opening and closing were predicated on this being a very short-term thing. And now that it's clearly not going to be a very short-term thing, we need a different risk assessment

because so that it's sustainable. Even if it's a little bit more risky, we need something long-term and sustainable because this is our new normal for a while. It has been, but it will continue. Totally agree. That is the original sin of the messaging was bend the curve, bend the curve,

and let's just not even talk about what comes after. And I think like if you paid attention, you knew that this thing was gonna be around for a while. The virus wasn't gonna go away in the summer like everybody, like Trump told us, right? And that there would be mitigation steps, but we need to really focus on the mitigation steps now. Because I mean, the scariest thing is we're not even talking about hard decisions. We're talking about whether restaurants will be open at 50% capacity, not whether parents won't be able to

do their jobs because they're providing childcare and teaching their kids all day as well, starting in September. I mean, this is about to get so much harder. Obviously, it's not just the absence of Trump's harm, but the present of something different. Imagine a president who in June was saying something along the lines of, we have three months to solve this together

and get cases down enough so that our kids can go back to school. Let's all do this together for our children. We all want the kids to go back. It's for the teachers, for our economy, for their futures, so that parents can go back to work. Everything hinges on September. We have a new deadline, everybody. It's to get this down by September. Like there's just such a, we can criticize Trump, but it's not just, it's, there's a whole host of things a real administration would be doing that's completely absent. And the fact that we'll get to it, but like the fact that not only is Trump failing to provide that, but Republicans are failing to point out the mistakes, failing to point this out is just so harmful.

This is not a Trump problem, right? There is this there's been this strain of like sort of phony bad faith libertarianism in Republican politics for a long time. I will never get over the time when Greg Abbott, the current governor of Texas, told the people of Texas that he was sending the Texas National Guard to monitor a military exercise called Jade Helm that was going on in Texas because somehow he didn't trust Obama to not invade their state and take it over. Right. Like now Greg Abbott is getting fucking jade helmed by local Republican officials who say they won't enforce an ordinance to force them to wear masks. Right. So like they're all getting bitten by the same disease here that's existed in that party for a long time. And like, I have no

idea how to fix that. I have no window into the thinking of these people. I guess I asserted it's bad faith libertarianism. I hope that's the truth because the alternative is a sort of frightening belief in conspiracy theories. But I don't know. I guess we're going to find out. Look, and that's what happened here in California, too. Like, you know, there's plenty of county officials and sheriffs who told who told Newsom they weren't going to enforce a mask mandate. They're not going to do this kind of stuff so you're sort of seeing that everywhere on a local level as well the other issue with the lack of trust is uh we're going to see in the fall because right now we have a number of very promising vaccine candidates in their final

phase of human trials and uh there's going to be manufacturing going alongside of it. So like, theoretically, we could have by the end of this year, a vaccine that's getting ramped up and ready to use. But there's going to be a lot of people who wonder if it's safe, it's going to be safe and effective. Or is Donald Trump just telling us it's safe and effective because he wants to win reelection and thinks this is going to be a boon to him. And we shouldn't be in that position of having to wonder when it comes to something as important as a vaccine for this, right? Because it could be perfectly safe and effective. But anything that comes out of the Trump administration now, you have to question, which is a real fucking problem when we're talking about

life and death in a pandemic here. So. Well, let's talk about how all of this is affecting the Senate races in 2020. If Joe Biden wins the presidency, Democrats will need a net gain of three seats to flip the Senate. And the latest polls show Republican incumbents trailing Democratic challengers by wide margins in Arizona and Colorado and by smaller margins in North Carolina and Maine. Polls are also close in redder states like Iowa, Georgia, Montana, even Kansas. This might be why some Senate Republicans are starting to put some distance between themselves and Donald Trump. As Lovett pointed out earlier, they were mostly unfazed by the president's threat to veto a defense bill that includes an amendment to rename military bases currently named for members of the Confederacy. Some of them have also pivoted to wearing masks in public.

What a sad pivot with Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio openly advocating for them now. And then there's Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, who's a great example of someone who's trying to have it both ways. In the very same interview where she disagreed with Trump's positions on the protests and Confederate statues, she also rejected the characterization of Trump's pandemic response as failed leadership and said, quote, I think the president is stepping forward. Love it. The GOP strategy up until now has been to stick with Trump no matter what, because that's where the base is. Is that still the smartest strategy for these Republican senators? Man, look, they don't have a lot of good options. You know, they don't. They don't. Right. I mean, there have been there's been some reporting that

basically Republicans are sort of watching Trump and they're going to if things don't change by Labor Day, they'll start abandoning him in droves. Let's see if that happens. You know, it's they're damned that they do. Right. Embracing Trump right now is obviously not a winning strategy at a time when his approval rating is dropping. But at the same time, when you decide to distance yourself from Donald Trump, you have to basically figure out how close you can get to the electric fence before he fucking zaps you. And their collars, these Republicans, their collars are starting to buzz. Jody Ernst is criticizing Trump walking towards that electric fence. She can't see it, but she knows it's there. And then she backs up.

He's stepping forward. He's stepping forward. The interesting thing about the question Jody Ernst was asked is it was actually using her language about Ebola, right? Like the Collins, Ernst, a bunch of others, these senators have these quotes about how Barack Obama's failed response to the Ebola outbreak was a sign of his terrible leadership as president. And then when Joni Ernst is confronted by the fact that she made that point now that 130,000, many more, are dead from coronavirus, she has nothing to say because there's nothing she can say. Because of course, she knows that Donald Trump is an abysmal failure on this issue, but she's afraid to say it. say, because of course she knows that Donald Trump is an abysmal failure on this issue,

but she's afraid to say it. Yeah, the Iowa Senate race is the most interesting and instructive example to me. I mean, Iowa has been trending conservative. I didn't really think that this race was going to be on the map. And Joni Ernst is certainly an example of someone for whom Donald Trump has made this a really brutal year to be running for the Senate. But like you said, love it. Like she's not a victim here. She was happy to attack Obama when two people died of Ebola and call it failed leadership. And now her cowardice is on display because of crediting the coronavirus response. I do wonder for someone like Joni Ernst, I mean, this threat to veto the NDAA, again, a $740 billion bill to fund the military, to the question of like, is it too late for them to jump ship? I think historically you can get away with changing your positions in an election.

It's just something that voters are willing to go along with. But in this case, like Levitt said, like he is going to savage you and he's going to do it over and over again. And it's going to actually depress turnout among some of those base voters they need. So I do think I think the time look, there's a lifetime ahead of us between now and the Senate race is happening. But I'm not sure that I'd know what I would do if I were the Senate candidates. I really don't. It's tough. I think, yeah, it is tough. I think, yeah, it is tough. I think that the time to burnish your reputation as an independent minded Republican senator has probably passed. That's right.

Because I think, look, I think voters are not stupid. They get that the closer you get to an election, you know, if you're you know, you change your mind here and there. Like, look, Susan Collins is an example. Right. Like, look, Susan Collins is an example, right? If Susan Collins had played the last couple years differently, if she had decided not to fucking vote for Brett Kavanaugh, if she had decided not to vote for the tax cut, which is incredibly unpopular, if she had decided to vote to impeach Donald Trump, right? This world where like Susan Collins like maintains this reputation for quasi-independence in Maine, which is another state that has sort of like drifted a little redder in recent years, decides, yeah, you know what? We're a purple state. We elected someone who was a pretty moderate Democrat in 2018 to Congress, Jared Golden. And we'll return Susan Collins because she has this reputation for independence.

in and we'll return Susan Collins because she has this reputation for independence. She doesn't have that reputation anymore because she decided to just like throw her lot in with Donald Trump. And you're right. The reason she did this is because what if there had been a primary challenge against Susan Collins from some Trumpy candidate on the right? That's what they're worried about. But that's the calculation they made then. And then now they're all going to pay for it because it's harder to run away from them now. Yeah, it's interesting. There's, you know, each of these states has a different

makeup than the country as a whole. And there's a little bit more of a path in some of these states for the Venn diagram of appeal to enough Republican voters and then appeal to enough of those independent voters to kind of build a willing coalition. It's actually why Donald Trump stands a better chance of winning the electoral college than he does in the popular vote. But one thing we're seeing in these polls is as independence, as Republicans stay firm with Trump and independence starts sliding away from him, that overlapping little bit of sweet spot on messaging gets smaller and smaller and smaller. I don't know how you appeal to the people that Donald Trump spoke to at Mount Rushmore while also appealing to the rest of the country

that finds that pretty repellent at this moment. It's a very difficult job to do. Yeah, I think that's right. Look, the other interesting thing is I assume at some point he's going to pivot back to immigration. We're going to have another round of caravan-like stories or demagoguing of immigrants. But last month, the number of migrants apprehended at the U.S. border was down 83% than May in 2019. So, like, there almost is no immigration happening right now. He's furloughed half the workforce. It's like they're taking these draconian actions on some issues.

The coronavirus is so bad in the U.S. The job market is so bad in the U.S. They're like all the boogeyman he usually looks to might be harder to find this time. I'm sure he'll try anyway, but it's just like I don't know what their their path looks like. Yeah, I mean, look, Martha McSally in Arizona is going to have to win in order to win is going to have to win votes of people who voted for Kyrsten Sinema in 2018. Susan Collins is going to have to win votes of people who voted for Jared Golden in 2018. Tom Tillis in North Carolina is going to have to win votes of people who voted for some of the congressmen in sort of the North Carolina suburbs, Democratic congressmen, North Carolina suburbs like these these Republican candidates in the Senate have no choice but to try to appeal to people who voted for Democrats in 2018. And in some cases, in many cases in 2016, in a lot of these states that are sort of getting a little bit more purple or blue. And that's a really hard thing to do when the guy at the head of the party is like

basing, like you said, Tommy, basing his entire campaign about protecting statues of dead people from vandalism. You know, Donald Donald Trump became president because he was trying to goose his apprentice numbers right now. He's running for reelection by appealing to the group of people that will make up the audience of some future Donald Trump TV network. Is it possible that he manages to win reelection by doing that? Of course it is. But that certainly doesn't help these Senate candidates who are not trying to build an audience for a future right wing nationalist TV platform. There's just there's no help for these senators coming from Donald Trump right now. Donald Trump is forever trying to win the Republican primary. That is the entire strategy entire strategy. And like, it's just, you know,

it was enough for him in 2016. It's not enough for him and it's not enough for, it's probably not enough for him and it's not enough for many of these Senate candidates in 2020. And so, yeah, they're in a very tough spot. If you want to help them lose,

which you should, you can go to votesaveamerica.com slash getmitch. This is our getmitch or die trying fund where your donation will be split between many of the Democratic challengers for the Republican Senate candidates in some of these very competitive states.

Like we said, many of which we didn't know would be that competitive. Who thought like Kansas, right? Georgia. Montana, you know, Georgia, two races in Georgia. Even as though the picture does become worse for Republicans, it's worth pausing here to remember that it's still an uphill job. It's still hard to win the Senate. And we still have to do really, really well and win in a bunch of places. Like if Doug Jones can't hang on in Alabama,

which is a really tough thing, you need one more seat. You start to need to look to places like Iowa and to look to places like Montana and Kansas. So like, you know, we don't want to be rosy. We don't want to be sanguine about this. It's going to be really hard and we need to win a lot more than they do. We need to really kind of like clean up to win the Senate. That's all. Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's a really important point because I think like Arizona, Colorado looking really good. Maine looking looking pretty OK. If we win those three and, you know, for some reason we don't win Alabama, which is possible because it's just a deep red state, even though Doug Jones is fucking terrific and you should donate to him, then we need North Carolina. Then we need Cal Cunningham to win in North Carolina, which is a state that hasn't gone to Democrats in a presidential year since 2008.

So that's not an easy race. And then fortunately, we have a couple different paths to get there. Maybe we pull out a win. Steve Bullock wins in Montana. Maybe we get one in Kansas, maybe one of the Georgia races or maybe Teresa Greenfield in Iowa. So we do have a lot of paths, but it is that sort of fourth seat, that final pickup that's going to be the tough one, even under the best circumstances. All right. Well, that's our show for today. We're guestless today. Yeah, we're guestless. I want to talk about two things.

Okay, let's talk about it. As long as we're in the outro, there's two things. One, very sad about Morricone passing away. One of the greatest composers in film history. You know the music. You've heard it a million times. You should just play it. Do yourself a favor.

Throw on a Spotify Morricone playlist. Entertain yourself. Inspire yourself. It's terrific. Second point I want to make, and this is not important at all. How dumb is Mal Rushmore? How fucking stupid.

This is the clip the RNC is going to play. I'm sorry. We blew up a mountain to carve four faces. You know. I've always sort of wondered about the choice of the four. The choice of the four presidents okay Washington Lincoln Teddy Roosevelt

Andrew Jackson and then it's like they gave up halfway through the detritus from the explosions is still under the fucking faces they never finished the goddamn thing Donald Trump next to Mount Rushmore didn't make me think

oh my god he doesn't belong on Mount Rushmore it made me think god he reminds me of stupid Mount Rushmore. The thing about Mount Rushmore is I wonder how many people in the country know that Stone Mountain Park exists in Georgia, which is literally a gigantic monument carved into the side of the mountain that glorifies the Confederacy that I believe was open to the public on the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. It is an abomination. Let's do it.

Well, designed by the same person, right? Let's direct some of that Pentagon budget towards blowing that thing the fuck up because there's no reason for it to exist. Tommy, cancel culture. Shame on you. I would cancel that mountain in a heartbeat let's cancel that mountain i support canceling that mountain yeah let's cancel the mountain and look i actually think that um and now this is what they let's get let's let's let's

let's send our antifa troops there yeah let's have um let's have uh joe biden direct a phalanx of antifa dynamitis or or whatever you call them and have them blow up, blow up that fucking Confederacy monument for that. And then if they have any dynamite left, I think with a couple of key explosions, you could turn Andrew Jackson into Barack Obama. I think you can actually get it done. I think. Fine. You don't want it. And listen. OK. OK, fine. We can do FDR. We can do FDR. But I, you know, just think about it.

Just think about it. The other thing that just drives me so crazy about the Confederate monument debate is like Nathan Bedford Forrest, his statue went up in Tennessee in the Capitol in 1978. Like disco was basically getting run out of nightclubs at that point. This isn't some long history that people were proud of. These are monuments to white supremacists put up pretty recently. And like, it's just, it's so infuriating. The thing about history thing is so fucking,

you want history, go into a fucking museum, read about history online, get taught history. There's plenty of ways to teach history. Our public places are limited in nature and what we choose to put there says something about what we are proud of. And I'm an idiot, by the way. It's not Andrew Jackson. It's Thomas Jefferson.

I was going to say, I think Andrew Jackson was on that. I forgot who was on Mount Rushmore. It's still very stupid, and I'm actually fine with it. You really just pick one. Honestly, you can redo the faces any way you'd like. Any way you'd like. We should have a vote. So just send a plastic surgeon in there is what you're saying.

I always forget who's on Mount Rushmore. I never think. Because again, what a fucking stupid project. I don't think Trump could name them. He was just there. I bet you. I still think one of the great one of the great questions Trump could face is perform the Pledge of Allegiance right now. There'd be a lot of mumbling. I'm into that. Let's get, yeah, well,

you can slip that question to first debate moderator Tucker Carlson, see if he'll ask it. That's right. That'd be good. Well, Tucker Carlson riding in a Ferrari he bought with PPP funds. Okay. All right. I think, is that everything everyone has to say? That's all I've got. Bye, guys. We'll see you in a couple of days. Bye. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production.

The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Reston, and Elisa Gutierrez for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn,

Nar Melkonian, Yale Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.