Pod Save America - “Live, from the Tulsa overflow” (with Jon Stewart!)

Episode Date: June 22, 2020

Trump tanks in Tulsa with a small crowd and rambling speech, fires a U.S. Attorney who was investigating his allies, loses a legal battle to stop John Bolton’s book from being published, and loses the Supreme Court decision over DACA. Then Jon Stewart talks to Jon Favreau about money in politics, the media, and his new movie, Irresistible.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. We are coming to you live from the overflow crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Big pod today. Jon Stewart is here to talk about politics and his new movie, Irresistible. Very cool. Before that, we get to talk about quite a lengthy list of bad news stories for Donald Trump, his disaster of a rally in Tulsa, his former national security advisor exposing a few more impeachable offenses,

what looks like a botched attempt to shut down investigations into his allies, and another loss at the Supreme Court, this time over immigration. But first, love it. How was the show this weekend? We had an awesome love to leave it. Nicole Byer was so funny in the monologue. Adam Serwer came by to talk about the DACA decision and Juneteenth, Phil Picardi who has a new pod with us

came to talk about faith and spirituality and Lindsey Graham. So we had a great episode. Also we we quizzed some organizers in our six adoptive states. So it was a great episode. You should check it out. Nice. Cool. Also, join us on Wednesday night

for Crooked's first and hopefully last annual at-home pride parade, a live virtual event featuring Crooked hosts and special guests to raise money for LGBTQ organizations. The fun begins at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific on youtube.com slash Crooked Media. Love it. I hear you're going to bring glitter. I bought some glitter. That's all I'm saying.

But it's going to be great. We have an amazing lineup of people. It's going to be very fun. It's all for a good cause. So check it out. Very cool. Also, before we get to the news, let's talk about Tuesday's big primaries in New York and Kentucky. Three races we are watching in New York's 15th district.

We're trying to stop a very Trumpy Democrat named Ruben Diaz Sr. from winning the primary. He has a history of homophobic and anti-choice statements, but he has very high name recognition. He is bad. statements, but he has very high name recognition. He is bad. A recent Data for Progress poll has the progressive New York City Councilman Richie Torres right behind Diaz. There's also plenty of other good Democrats in the race, including our friend Mike Blake, who's a New York Assemblyman. But the most important thing is we need to coalesce behind one of these Democrats because Ruben Diaz Sr. was in the lead, at least in the last couple of weeks, and he is very Trumpy for a Democrat. So that's important.

Also, in the New York 16th, the Democratic incumbent, Elliot Engel, is in a very tight race with a progressive school principal named Jamal Bowman, who is an incredibly impressive candidate. Tommy, you and Ben talked about Bowman on Pod Save the World. You want to say a little more? Yeah, I know. I just think this is a cool race that's worth watching. I mean, Elliot Engel is a nice guy. He's been a rep for that district for, I think, 16 terms. But this really has become a generational fight.

I also think people are concerned that Engel has been a little too conservative on foreign policy. He heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He voted against the Iran nuclear agreement. And that really hasn't pressed the Trump administration hard enough at a lot of things. So a lot of people are excited about Jamal Bowman. He's young. He's an educator. He's exciting. Some people have called him the next AOC. So check out that campaign. Go to BowmanForCongress.com. You can still get involved. You can still donate money. You can still help them with turnout efforts. It's an exciting race. He is the kind of person I think we need in Congress.

So check it out. Check it out. One last race, the Kentucky Senate primary, the winner of which will take on Mitch McConnell himself, has turned into a real race between former fighter pilot Amy McGrath and Kentucky's youngest black lawmaker, the very progressive state representative Charles Booker. Again, you know, he released a digital ad a few days ago that's up on his Twitter feed. And it has to be one of the most impressive videos with one of the most impressive messages I've heard in a while. So check that out. That is a that is a race to watch. So that is that is Tuesday races to watch races to watch races to watch we're gonna have a key race alert here soon yeah i mean unfortunately the one of the big things is gonna pop out of that closet yeah he's in my yard uh but one of the scary things though is that this

is um gonna be a test for whether states and municipalities can get it together to do vote by mail in time. And was a little concerned right now that New York state has not gotten everybody their absentee ballots. We'll be watching that closely. We need to get this right. Everyone, come on, be competent here. All right. Let's get to the news. So, guys, you know, it's been a pretty rough 2020 so far. We've covered a lot of sad news, scary news some very serious news uh and that's why today for just a short while just a short while we're gonna let ourselves savor every moment of the humiliating fiasco that was donald trump's saturday night rally in tulsa oklahoma

uh his campaign told reporters that this was their big general election kickoff. Just last week, Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale, was bragging about how nearly a million people had signed up for tickets. I think he said over a million. It got to over a million by the end. And here's what Trump said to reporters as he was leaving the White House for the rally. The event in Oklahoma is unbelievable. The crowds are unbelievable. They haven't seen anything like it. Haven't seen

anything like it. The crowds are unbelievable. Well, Bank of Oklahoma Center can hold 19,000 people, but the fire department estimated that only 6,200 showed up. At the last minute, the campaign was forced to cancel the remarks that Trump and Pence were scheduled to deliver to the overflow crowd outside because there was no overflow crowd outside. Instead, the New York Times reports that Trump, quote, gazed at the empty arena in horror while yelling at his staff for the endless rows of empty blue seats. He was also reportedly furious that it was reported that six of his staff tested positive for COVID. furious that it was reported that six of his staff tested positive for COVID. Tommy, before we even get to the speech, how did this event turn into such a clusterfuck?

Well, let me count the ways, John. So, you know, to Trump's point that you've never seen anything like that kind of crowd in Oklahoma, somebody did a nice list of all the other artists and acts that had had bigger crowds in the same exact venue. And it included John Tesh. So you would have seen something like that crowd if you had been early to the John Tesh show before it actually filled up. But I really would start with two numbers. One is two point three two million. The other is one hundred and twenty two thousand. That's the number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths. And so Trump has decided to restart the campaign and pretend the coronavirus is over and that we're all moving on. But people are scared about getting sick. They're scared about going into an enclosed arena with no social distancing or mask requirements.

And they should be, right? Because six Trump staff members working on this event got COVID in the process and it came out that morning. So people were nervous. Even Steve Doocy, who, if you don't know this guy, he is one third of the dumbest anchor desk on television, Fox and Friends. He said this morning, like, who thought it was a good idea to put 20,000 people in a room with masks optional? He's, you know, overselling there. So, you know, the pathetic turnout is a sign that people are worried about getting sick and that Trump's momentum problems are probably real. It also shows to me that the campaign staff, especially Brad Parscale, the campaign manager, are bad at their jobs. An ironclad rule of politics is you under promise and you over deliver.

Right. That's why politicians always hold events in small venues where they like cut off half the gymnasium to make it look small and then make a show of putting down more chairs right before the event starts and the press is watching. Instead, the Trump campaign was hyping the fact that they would have 19,000 people inside the venue and then 40,000 at a special outside stage. And then they were saying that a million people had registered for tickets and like that on its face should have told them that maybe something weird was happening. Right. Like why would a million people register for something that they can't go to? It turns out that it could be because K-pop fans like prominent TikTok users helped inflate those numbers by falsely registering. If that is true, you guys are heroes. I love you.

But like regardless, 6,200 people showing up in a Trump plus 36 state is terrible. And, you know, Brad Parscale is blaming the Tulsa Police Department for making it too hard to get in. They're trying to blame like Antifa and outside agitators. So they're just spinning for their jobs. But it was a catastrophic error by the campaign. catastrophic error by the campaign. Well, I love that they they're blaming also the media for warning people about the possibility that they may contract a deadly virus if they go. That is one of their that is also that's that the media got some of the blame. What did you think as you were watching the shit show unfold? So first of all, I was sort of like, oh, like, well, what if we create a what if we create a test to prove who who are the true Trump sycophants?

The really the worst of the worst of the Trump believers who will do anything he says, no matter what, how many people. Rain, shine or plague. And it's right. And it turns out it's about sixty two hundred people in Oklahoma. And so we know that, you know, Hillary Clinton might put them in a basket of some kind. But like, I found that really reassuring. It's like, okay, it didn't fill up all the kind of bluster, all the kind of punditry that's hard to piece out in polls because people tell pollsters what they think will help their side. People's actions tell you a lot, all right? And whatever the reasons, a lot of people looked

at this and say, I don't care what Trump says. I don't care about helping him. I don't care about politics. I'm not putting myself at risk. That's not about believing Fox News versus the mainstream media. That is people looking at something and making a decision for their own lives and deciding that regardless of what Trump says, they know what's real, which I understand must be pretty frustrating for people like Brad Parscale, because they've invested a lot in a whole apparatus supported by billions of dollars and corporations and billionaires to convince people not to listen to CNN, to convince people not to listen to mainstream news outlets about virtually any topic, including the virus. That isn't working. That just didn't work. And that's a really good thing.

Yeah, I mean, look, we should throw a big to be sure in here about crowd sizes, right? Like you can over interpret what a crowd size means, whether it's a big, excited crowd, whether it's a small crowd, what it means for actual electoral chances. But I do think a couple of things here, like the coverage has been devastating and just the Trump campaign. I mean, Donald Trump is down right now, right? Like he could come back. He could win the election. He could close the gap. All these things are possible. But right now, at this moment in time, he is down and the days are counting down until November. And every day he gets really bad coverage is another day that is a missed opportunity to sort of gain ground on Joe Biden. And if nothing else, now he has had another he said Saturday, Sunday.

Today is Monday. Another couple of days of looking like a weak loser. And I'll add another I'll add another sort of to be sure, which is, look, I was thinking about this last night when we were talking about crowd size. Arguing with Donald Trump makes you dumber even when you're winning. You know, it's dumber when you're losing and it's dumber when you're winning. Talking about crowd size is very silly. Talking about the ramp is very silly. It is not important.

But he brings us to these conversations and you have to win those conversations. But it's, you know, once we, I want want to we'll turn to the substance of the speech. But yeah, people didn't show up in Oklahoma. Right. That's a big problem. They made the story about people showing up for some reason because they don't have a message. We'll talk about that. But seven point seven million or some huge number of people watch the speech on television. Right. So you could actually imagine if they hadn't focused on then focused on crowd size the way they did. And by the way,

if you're watching a video, I got a I got the one guy in the crowd behind me. But the if if they hadn't focused on crowd size, we'd be talking about the fact that almost eight million people, maybe more, watch Donald Trump's kickoff for his reelection campaign. The problem is when you get beyond the fact that nobody showed up, what really matters is what he said. And he didn't have much to say either. Right. Like there's no good story for him coming out of this event. Look, I do think like the crowd size thing can be overstated, but I think for Trump, like big rallies are his whole strategy. It's the thing he enjoys the most. It's the thing he points to as his proof point.

And if they can't pull big crowds because of COVID, they're going to need to fundamentally rethink how they run this campaign, which is not ideal in June. I also think like the press loves a good comeback narrative, right? And if Trump had packed the box center and then spoke to 40,000 people in the overflow, it could have driven that narrative that the base is still there. He's coming back. People want to see him. Bad polls are a blip. Instead, this turnout shows that things are even more dire than we thought. And like, yes, there's a lifetime until the election. Right. We're basically at the midpoint between the Iowa caucuses and Election Day, which is unbelievable if you think about where our brains were in the Iowa caucuses. But like like John said, like everyday counts, people want to support a winner. And then, you know, if you're an at risk Senate candidate like a Joni Ernst right now, at some point you're deciding, like, how fully Trumpy am I going in this race? And you're looking at that event and thinking, oh, shit, maybe it's time to cut this guy loose. Right. Like he had a whole parade of sycophants with him, like Elise Stefanik, right, who became famous because of her garbage at the

impeachment hearings. And she's got to be looking around thinking, oh, my God, 6,200 people. What does this translate to in a sort of moderate-ish New York district? This ain't good for me. It's also amazing that after this event, he's going to go on like a COVID hotspot world tour, like he's going to Phoenix this week. He's going to end up in Jacksonville, Florida for the convention now since they moved. We haven't talked about that from Charlotte. So it is- I'm sorry, but on the Jacksonville front though,

is this worth pausing? Like, I think that there's something to be drawn from what happened in Tulsa, which is all this hype, all this propaganda, people don't show up. You know, he moved this. He moved his acceptance speech for the nomination to Jacksonville because he wanted to give this big speech.

Now, polls come out of Jacksonville showing that nobody in Jacksonville wants this and a place that voted for Trump is going to turn against him because they're like, do not bring your fucking plague bomb to my fucking town. Well, you can bet that in the future events like they are going to do everything possible to literally drag people kicking and screaming into these events to fill it up i don't know if they have to have like cardboard cutouts in the audience they're going to do it they are not going to repeat what happened um let's talk about the speech itself where uh trump basically rambled on for nearly two hours about things that made him mad uh including, as you alluded to, Lovett, a 15 minute rant about the media coverage of his West Point commencement speech, where he actually imitated himself walking down a ramp and proved to the crowd that he could drink a glass of water with one hand. applauded. Trump made no mention of the recession or the double digit unemployment rate, no mention

of the more than 120,000 Americans who died from COVID-19, no mention of George Floyd's murder or the protests against systemic racism. The president did refer to the pandemic as the Kung flu virus and said the following about testing. You know, testing is a double edged sword. Testing is a double-edged sword. We've tested now 25 million people. It's probably 20 million people more than anybody else. Germany's done a lot. South Korea's done a lot.

They call me, they say, the job you're doing, here's the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you're going to find more people, you're going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down, please. So the Trump campaign has later said that he was joking. But the Biden campaign has told reporters that they'll be focusing on these comments all week. Tommy, how damning do you think these comments were? I mean, look, I think it's pretty damning. I mean, you can't like he's not kidding. He wasn't kidding. They're trying to pretend he was kidding.

He was not. He's downplaying the coronavirus. He's trying to act like it's gone away. And he's repeatedly made this kind of comment that, boy, if we didn't test so much, it wouldn't be a problem. And that's that's a scandal. I mean, this is criminal negligence, right? I mean, when COVID reemerged in Wuhan, China, the government tested all 11 million residents. That's how you effectively handle an outbreak.

You don't hide from it. And so instead of coordinating this national response, John, you said he's going to go do more campaign stops. He's going to be in Arizona and then Wisconsin. said, he's going to go do more campaign stops. He's going to be in Arizona and then Wisconsin. And the whole event, like it flailed around like this, right? I mean, clearly their core message is suggesting that Joe Biden is old or not like totally with it. I don't think you draw a great contrast there by telling a 12 minute story about how a ramp was too steep. That is not an effective, vigorous sounding candidate. So the whole thing was just a fucking mess. That is not an effective, vigorous sounding candidate. So the whole thing was just a fucking mess.

Well, you've written your share of rally speeches, campaign campaign stumps. Sure. Could could you detect a reelection message in that speech? Well, there's a negative message. There's a negative message about Biden. There was no positive. Tommy was just talking about. Yes. So there was a there was a negative message about Biden. I mean, what what I found just like looking at it as a speech, which is hard to do. Right. It was it was a work of art. It was a work of art.

Yeah. Right. And it is and it is best to be approached as a work of art. Each of us can draw our own conclusions, find our own meaning in it. But but first of all, I think we were talking about this on Slack that like it's jarring to see one of these things again because we're all out of practice of seeing him like this. He's also rusty, which is great. He's definitely like got up there and like, oh, like where's the where was his usual kind of he really struggled.

But you put all that aside. Like so I just want to say on the testing thing, the context, right, is I think as of today, cases are rising in 23 states. And it's not just because of a rising amount of testing. Like that's just not true because we're also seeing rising hospitalizations. We're not, the testing isn't exaggerating what we're finding. It's actually showing that this is spreading. It's real. And it shows us that Donald Trump is the obstacle to us taking on this pandemic. He is not, not only not helping, he is an active hindrance. He was asked today in an interview about those comments. The White House has been saying he's joking. Pence has been trying to dismiss it. He was asked directly. He refused to disavow it and just

restated his thesis that the testing is showing the cases that the testing is the problem. You know, when Trump goes and gives a rally speech normally, and you look at how the media covers it for like, not for cable news, but just sort of the local news or an AP write up or the kind of summaries, usually those help Trump because they take two hours of rambling and they crystallize it down to his core message, right? Donald Trump came to Wisconsin to argue for his economic vision and attack Joe Biden, right? Now, in reality, there was no coherent anything. It was two hours of insanity that most people won't see

because most people are busy and not watching cable news on Sunday like us because we're psychos. But in this case, he never did that. He never got to the part of the speech where he argues for his reelection. It just didn't come. He did the 15 minutes about the ramp.

He did a whole diatribe about Joe Biden. He went in various tangents over the course of two hours. He talked about the different names for COVID-19, but he never actually said, I'm running for reelection because here's how we have to make America great again. He never did. Or here's how we keep America great. Never said it. No slogan, no nothing. It was completely absent. And absent that core thing, it's especially damaging for him because all that's left is two hours of rambling. And there's no easy way to summarize that for people. So you're just left with the very fact of it being chaotic, the fact of there being no message, the fact that people didn't show up. I mean, in 2016, all of his speeches had plenty of crazy anecdotes like this, plenty of tangents like we saw, a lot of lies, a lot of racism, a lot of offensive comments like all of it was there. But there was a core message there that he was this outsider who was going to like fight the corruption in Washington and restore America to what it looked like in the 1950s, whatever. You could disagree with it, but there was a message that came through over and over again. What has been absent from this entire re-election campaign, and look, it's harder for presidents

running for re-election to have a message when you're not the challenger and you're the incumbent, especially when you're the incumbent at a time when 70 to 80 percent of the country thinks that it's going in the wrong direction, right? So you defend your record and then you sort of paint sort of like, you know, two different visions, the vision that your challenger represents and then the vision that you represent. There is no vision that he represents, at least not that he has articulated yet, not that his campaign has articulated yet. It's just not there. And then as Tommy was talking about, you know, the message we should tell with the message about Joe Biden. Right. Which is basically Trump said Joe Biden is not the leader of his party.

Joe Biden is a helpless puppet of the radical left. If Democrats gain power, then the rioters will be in charge and no one will be safe and no one will have control. So it's basically like, you know, Joe Biden is too senile to stop Antifa from burning your house down. That's that is the and I just I wonder if it's just a few too many dots he's asking people to connect there about Joe Biden. Yeah. My reaction to the Joe Biden portion was, oh, they're really struggling. They have polling. It seemed to me that it revealed polling that showed direct attacks on Joe Biden, calling him a leftist, calling him Antifa, calling him an AOC type Democrat, saying he's too far to

the left don't work because he made a point of saying Joe Biden's not the issue, right? Basically saying that like, he might as well have said, I like Joe Biden. You like Joe Biden. We all like Joe Biden. The problem isn't Joe Biden. The problem is these other people, right? That was sort of like baked into it. And then of course, attacking him as senile, saying he's not up for it. Trump made a point at some point in the speech saying something like basically saying Joe Biden is senile. And that's not something you can overcome. Right. There's no way to argue against it. There is no way to fix it, because I think there was this there's a inside of what he was saying is a realization that they're really struggling to find something that sticks to

Joe Biden, that works on Joe Biden. And I think that's that's that to me was was interesting. Yeah, it's just, you know, if radical leftists were in charge, Biden wouldn't be the nominee. So that's sort of confused. It's like they did a control F for Biden and replaced it in their like Bernie message they had at one point. And, you know, there's a more potent message in there somewhere that was, you know, Biden's been in D.C. for decades, but he hasn't fixed all these problems we're talking about. And that's why you need me. I can see that maybe working. I do worry about the smear campaign of calling Biden old and infirm just because it's simple and it can get in your head with like misleadingly edited videos that Facebook giddily allows you to run on their platform. But again, he did a 15 minute bit

about how hard it is to walk down a ramp like that's not the contrast I would have drawn if I were Donald Trump in that in that moment. No, it's what it's exactly what you said. I think you tweeted this, Tommy. It was very funny. It was like the the calling your calling your opponent like senile or saying that he's suffering from dementia when you sound like a fucking old guy who just escaped from the retirement home telling stories. He doesn't present him. Mental acuity is not really the issue that Donald Trump should be seizing on when talking about Joe Biden. Chief just threw the water cooler through the window and you ran out after him. Like that was the vibe I took from that speech.

And it was not well. And it just, look, it's a hard thing to, you're right. Like it could, with misleading videos, misleadingly edited videos, right? You can make an issue of this. It doesn't work well if Joe Biden just shows up and acts like a normal politician. That's where the strategy falls apart. All right, so the law and order president also had quite a few legal issues over the last week. On Friday night, there was somewhat of a botched attempt to replace a prosecutor who's been investigating Trump's allies with Trump's SEC chairman. First, Attorney General Bill Barr announced the resignation of Jeff Berman, who's the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

He managed the Michael Cohen investigation and had reportedly been investigating Rudy Giuliani. Then Berman announced he wasn't going anywhere. So legally, the only option was for Trump himself to fire Berman. But that meant that Berman's deputy, Audrey Strauss, will take over instead of SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, who Barr and Trump initially wanted. Tommy, what did you make of this debacle and how big of a deal is it? And how big of a deal is it? I mean, we had a little mini constitutional crisis on our hands for a few hours. It was quite exciting. I think people should know, like, Berman's not some deep stater, right?

Like, Yosemite Sam Jeff Sessions named him to this job temporarily. He's a registered Republican. He gave money to Trump. And I think the obvious tie here, the reason Bill Barr went after him, is that SDNY has been investigating a bunch of sensitive cases that are linked to Trump, right? He went after Michael Cohen in Berman's office named Trump as individual one in that document. They've been looking into Rudy Giuliani. SDNY issued an indictment last year of a state owned bank in Turkey for allegedly violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. And according to John Bolton's book, which is very exciting, Trump promised President Erdogan of Turkey that he would shut

down that investigation, but he couldn't immediately do it because the SDNY folks were not his people. So that brings us to today, right? So that gets us like this bizarre moment over the weekend where the attorney general at best was just brazenly lying in a press release saying that Berman had resigned and literally naming Trump's golf buddy from like two weekends ago to replace him. Pretty clearly the fix was in here. And we know that Berman wasn't getting fired because he was bad at his job because Barr floated a promotion for him. He said you could lead DOJ's civil rights division. Right. So this was about protecting Trump. And so it was an attempted Saturday night massacre, which was a moment in the Nixon administration people can Google. But it shows me that like this ongoing effort to punish enemies is still happening. It shows that Barr is willing to lie repeatedly and publicly. It shows that DOJ is just fully a tool for Trump to wage war personally and politically against people he doesn't like. And they're trying to make it

impossible for SDNY to operate independently, which it historically has done. The good news for those who care about law and order, as John said, his Berman's deputy is going to take over. It's not the person Barr wanted. So hopefully she can protect some of these investigations. But it's very frustrating because D.C. people treat Barr and Mike Pompeo with respect because they're viewed as competent. But this was wildly incompetent. You don't want to create a massive public fight with your own U.S. attorney and lift up these cases. He's just a right-wing hack. And Bill Barr is as dangerous a person in this administration as we can find. And this was, I think, a very scary, very fraught moment for several hours over the weekend. Love it. It does seem like in the ongoing battle between incompetence and malevolence in the Trump administration, incompetence won this round, which is which is unusual for Bill Barr, because like Tommy said, he is, I believe he's the most dangerous person in the administration. Yeah, no, I mean, look, this was a week

where incompetence saved us. Incompetence saved us on DACA, incompetence saved us here. It's also just worth remembering that, to Tommy's point, Bill Barr has been sorted into the non-Trump serious category because he's soft-spoken, and he crosses his T's, and he dots his I's, and he speaks in the language of Washington. He speaks in a the legal language, the serious language. He chooses his words very carefully. That said, he gave a speech outlining his sort of overarching view of American politics. And it was a radical speech in which he basically viewed the left as a threat to the United States against which really

all means were at his disposal, all means were necessary. He views liberalism as something that's attacking the core institutions of the country and therefore justifies, I think, some of his more egregious pro-Trump, pro-executive actions. Beyond that, you know, pro-executive actions. Beyond that, you know, thank goodness this guy refused to go along with it. He just, he called out the game and it worked, right? I mean, there was an alternate reality where Barr's statement was taken as fact and they were able to put whoever they wanted in this job and Clayton, a guy with absolutely no experience in prosecution, who's just a Trump loyalist, could have been put in this job to protect Donald Trump. Instead, there was a few hours we thought, OK, we got some legal wrangling and there's a chance through that wrangling we'll be able to have a real prosecutor

stay in that job. But because he spoke out, we now have somebody we have somebody kind of to continue those investigations. But the fragility of these investigations, the ease with which Barr is able to do this is chilling. It's chilling. Yeah. And one more point that should encourage you all to go register some voters and donate to some candidates. Like William Barr tried to do this in June of an election year. Imagine what's going to happen if Donald Trump does not have to face the voters in a second term. What Bill Barr and other people like that are going to do in this administration. Imagine this is what he did with just a couple months to go until the election. It's stunning. All right,

let's talk about new resistance hero John Bolton. Over the weekend, Trump lost a legal battle to prevent the publication of his former national security advisor's book, The Room Where It Happened, though the judge also noted that Bolton is not immune from criminal and civil liability for publishing classified information. It's what we call a win-win here at Save America. So Bolton's already been on his book tour. Here's a clip of his first sit-down interview with ABC's Martha Raddatz. You described the president as erratic, foolish, behaved irrationally, bizarrely. You can't leave him alone for a minute. He saw conspiracies behind rocks. He couldn't tell the difference between his personal interests and the country's interests. I don't think he's fit for office. I don't think he has the competence to

carry out the job. Yikes. Tommy, what was your reaction to the book? What parts jumped out at you? The beautiful, the writing. I know you joked about him being a resistance hero. I do think people should just remember that John Bolton sucks. Don't pay him money for a shitty book. Thank God he's good at taking notes. But that's like the only thing I respect him for. I mean, I haven't read the full book, but the excerpts in that interview, we just played a piece of pretty much confirmed the worst case scenario about Trump. Like there is no foreign policy vision. All of his decisions revolve around whether or not they'll help him get reelected. Bolton paints a picture of a president who has no interest in learning even basic facts. He doesn't read. He only gets his intelligence briefing maybe once or twice a week.

And in that briefing, he spends most of the time talking, which is not how it's supposed to work. That means that like right wing zealots like Pompeo or Bolton fill in the rest, right? They fill in the rest of the policy and that Trump can be manipulated by people like Vladimir Putin. Bolton talks about a 90 minute meeting with Putin where, you know, Trump just sits there and like takes notes and does whatever he says. And the example that most thoroughly upset me that has come out of the book was one about China. So the Chinese government is building massive concentration camps in Western China. They have forced an estimated one or two million Uyghurs into these camps. It's a minority group. And the only crime they're accused of basically being Muslim.

So these people are ripped away from their families. They're indoctrinated. They're beaten. They're tortured. They're often disappeared. The Chinese government is trying to eradicate their religion and their culture. And they've created this dystopian surveillance state, hell in Western China. And Bolton quotes Trump telling Xi Jinping, the president of China, that he should build these camps and that it's the

right thing to do. And so a lot of people have noticed that Trump has not spoken out about this horrific human rights violation. But the truth is so much worse in that he was actually encouraging it. So that excerpt won out in terms of the worst thing I'd ever heard in my life. But it was just over saying Trump saying it would be cool to invade Venezuela. That was a close second. But, you know, supporting the construction of concentration camps is just like historically evil stuff. Love it. What do you think? Agree or disagree? Yeah, I mean, also just adding to that, that the China conversation also included him asking for help on trade so that he could win reelection.

And it's also worth putting in context the fact that Xi was able to kind of praise Trump and kind of butter him up. And that may be part of the reason Trump was so open to praising China early on in their response to the pandemic. These things are all connected. Yeah. I mean, look, we've gotten very used to Trump assholes. John Bolton is a Bush asshole, okay? And one of the lessons of the last four years is that Bush assholes and Trump assholes actually don't do that well together. But they're both still assholes.

And so that's all. That's all I have to say about that. It was a very team America. I like it. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say, I thought it was going even further. I mean, I think John Bolton just made so many ads for Joe Biden and you can see them all in the Martha Raddatz interview.

Like there was the clip that we just played, which was pretty devastating. He also said there really isn't any guiding principle that I was able to discern other than what's good for Donald Trump's reelection. And to me, that sort of sums up the whole thing. It fits with the larger message about Donald Trump that Joe Biden has been delivering, that we have been talking about for a while. He is an incompetent goon who cares only about himself and not about you. And that clearly is how he has approached foreign policy over the last several years. I mean, Bolton goes into this whole thing about China where he's like, he just keep talking about a deal with china he didn't care what the deal was what was in the deal he didn't know about trade he didn't know about it like he only wanted a deal because he

thinks a deal looks good uh in terms of media coverage and photo ops same thing with north korea same thing with it is the same thing he got impeached for trying to ask you get ukraine to help his re-election now he's doing the same thing with fucking china i mean like this guy just goes around the world meets world leaders sucks up to dictators not even because he's necessarily some secret scary authoritarian because he just wants to win re-election he only cares himself, which is in a way stumbling into authoritarianism, which we've talked about before. But that's who he is. On the North Korea example, Bolton gave another interview where he talked about the fact that Trump had absolutely no aptitude for why we were in the negotiations,

what the goal of the negotiations, whether we should be entering a summit with North Korea at all. All he wanted to make sure was that if somebody pulled out, it was us pulling out, not the North Korean pulling out, because it's better to dump someone than to be dumped. That's the sort of level we're operating at. One other just point about all this is, you know, there's that famous SNL sketch where a kind of dopey, out-of-touch Ronald Reagan

closes the door to the press and he turns on and he becomes incredibly on top of his shit, calling out orders, being really fast moving. What we have learned from all of these different sort of internal deliberations, these books, these articles, when Trump shuts the door, there's no other guy. There's no other type of Trump. There's no there's no other guy. There's no other type of Trump. There's no it's what we see is what we get. He is as unhinged, chaotic, disconnected from the facts, ignorant, selfish, self-serving. When the door is closed is when the door is open. There is no better version of him. There is no secret group of people who have figured out how to get what they want out of him. It is chaos all the way down. Yeah, I just don't get it's on the level of like,

why do you want to get reelected so badly to a job you don't even like doing? It's just it annoys me. Also, I saw Jerry Nadler say on the Sunday shows that they weren't going to call Bolton to testify before Congress. Why not, man? Why not? Why not do a full day on these books? Like, well, let's talk about all these comments about China. Trump is trying to make this the focus of his campaign to say that Biden is soft on China. We have volumes of evidence now that Trump has caved to the Chinese, that he's begging them for help, that he literally asked them to help him get reelected. Put him on the stand, put him under oath. What the fuck are we doing? At the very least, it's another day or two of coverage about how the uh president

united states is unfit for office as we are again heading towards this election and trump needs every day to come back do it put him on the stand also remind remind everyone about all the republicans who said we don't need to hear from john bolton before we make up our mind on whether to uh convict the president of high crimes and misdemeanors. We don't need we don't need we don't need to hear from John Bolton. Well, here he is. All right. The final legal debacle for Trump last week was also a victory for American immigrants in a 5-4 decision. The Supreme Court blocked the administration's plan to end DACA, which is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protects hundreds of

thousands of young immigrants from deportation. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court's liberals and wrote the majority decision, which he said was not about whether or not DACA or its repeal were sound policies, but about how the Department of Homeland Security failed to consider, quote, what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients if the program was eliminated? Trump responded, these horrible and politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or conservatives. And then he followed up with,

do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn't like me? Again, it's just all about him. Tommy, what does this decision actually mean and what can Trump do about it now? I mean, I think Lovett made the point earlier that, you know, this is a week where we are just saved by incompetence. Basically, this ruling doesn't weigh in on whether DACA was sound policy. It basically says that the agency didn't comply with a bunch of procedural requirements that require them to provide an explanation for their actions or think through all the ways that they might create hardship for the young people affected by this hearing. So what will likely happen is the Department of Homeland Security cooks up another memo, tries to end the DACA program all over again. It gets hung up in court for a couple of years, but it does speak to the absolute necessity of winning this election. If

we want to protect hundreds of thousands of kids who came to the United States because their parents brought them when they were very small, have never lived anywhere else, maybe don't speak the language, have served in the military, have gone to school, have gotten jobs, are a key part of the society. If we want to help them remain in the U.S., we have to win reelection because Trump will make another run at this. Love it. What was your reaction to the decision? It was incredible relief, right? I mean, this is people's lives are on the line. So the decision, the outcome was the most important thing. I'm glad it landed where it did. It is another example of us being, as we said, saved by incompetence. That is true of the first time Trump took a run at his Muslim ban. That was true in the census

decision in which basically the court said, you can't lie to us about your reasons because they were so ham-fisted in trying to add a citizenship question to the census. And their arguments were so obviously false on their face that the court wouldn't allow it. That happened in this case too. It's worth remembering that the Roberts court has participated in a bunch of right-wing decisions on immigration. So there's nothing stopping Trump with this court going back and figuring out how to do this. That's what they did with the Muslim ban as well. You know, Sotomayor in her dissent made the point that basically you need to look at the racial animus that propelled this decision, the rhetoric Trump uses, the rhetoric people around Trump use as one of the

justifications because it raises an important equal protection argument under the Constitution. And I think that that's really important. It's really important because what I think Sotomayor is saying in that opinion is a more competent version of this decision is still really dangerous. And that is something that I think the conservatives are actually right about when they say that Roberts sidestepped the big questions. He did. say that Roberts sidestepped the big questions. He did. The opinion does sidestep the big questions. And it just sort of it just does raise the stakes of the election. I also do think, you know, we're happy with this outcome and we should be happy with this outcome. It's very important. It helps a lot of people.

What Trump was trying to do is incredibly dangerous. But I do think it's worth remembering we're not happy because we have some philosophy as liberals around the Administrative Procedure Act, right? There's no deeper liberal philosophy at stake. And I do think one thing liberals need to be thinking about more is when we talk about judges, not just talking about outcomes, but making sure we're doing what conservatives did for 30 years, which is build a framework for their legal arguments around originalism that gives them a kind of larger base from which to operate their arguments around the court that I think liberals have not always done a good job at. Yeah, I don't think there's any evidence from this that John Roberts is some kind of moderating force on the on the court at all. I think that he is an

institutionalist who takes a dim view of sort of the incompetence in the Trump administration. He he basically held the same view in the Trump administration. He basically held the same view in the census case. That's why we won the census case, just because they're a bunch of incompetent buffoons. And Levitt, like you said, I mean, you cited Sotomayor. She was the only one that raised the equal protection concerns. Even the other liberal justices didn't. So I do think we are, I mean, we don't talk about the court nearly enough in why it's so important to win in November because Trump looms so large, but it is very likely that the next president will appoint one, at least one, if not two or more Supreme Court justices that will

shape whatever legislation comes out of Congress and whatever executive orders come out of the presidency for a generation, for a generation. And I do think like we may be saved for now because, you know, Trump could have DHS turn around a memo tomorrow and try to start this process again. I do think, you know, they're sort of sending mixed signals on this. They're talking about wanting a legislative fix from Congress. Part of the reason may be the popularity of daca by 78 to 12 uh this was a june 2020 poll from politico and morning consult americans want dreamers to stay and receive legal status that includes 68 of republicans so again in june of an election year do you want to actually end this program um on a 78 12 issue who knows trump's? Trump's an idiot, but that's where the politics are.

Okay, when we come back, I will talk to Jon Stewart about his new movie, Irresistible. Joining us today, the Emmy Award-winning former host of the daily show he's also the writer and director of the new movie irresistible which is out june 26th john stewart is here john welcome to pod save america hello john thank you for having me and thank you for spelling your first name correctly i think that's hate those h's hate the h's we were so poor growing up we couldn't afford one but it's always nice to see a fellow john um so you have emerged uh into our current political hellscape with a film uh it is dumb it's about a raging inferno and i'm in the corner like, anybody want Fresca? There's your Fresca. It's great.

So I watched it this weekend. It's about a mayor's race in rural Wisconsin that becomes nationalized when this small town is invaded by a bunch of super PACs and D.C. consultants. So I will say you really captured the dickishness of the consultant class quite well. To what extent do you hold what you've called the industrial political complex responsible for the absolute shit show that we're living through right now? You know, it's certainly not that. The reality of the world is it is a complicated place where divisions are real uh you know i think where i hold it responsible to some extent is that i see it as an incredibly valuable tool that could be utilized to our benefit. And it's unfortunately too often gets tangled up to our regret. And maybe that's what it is. I certainly don't view it as, you know, this whole problem would be fixed if only the media wouldn't, you know, if this whole problem would be fixed, if only the media wouldn't, you know, generate clickbait. It's not that. I view it as kind of, and always have, kind of like an immune

system. And in a time like this, literally a pandemic, we need all the tools to fight ills that we can get. And I've always been a firm believer in that system. I think what I believe is that like any system that makes money, it tends to propagate the parts of itself that make it the most money and grow. It's like, so if you own a football team, right? And you start out and you're playing like 12 games and it's like so if you own a football team right you know and you start out and you're playing like 12 games and it's fine and you're making good money and the guys are getting paid enough well now it gets a little more popular and the TV comes and you're like I have an idea let's do 14 games and you know

what else would be really cool wild card let's throw a wild card in there and then that goes for a while, and you're like, I think 16 games makes a lot more sense. And why don't we add 10 teams? And why don't we have a longer play? And maybe 18 games. And the players are like, you know this hurts our brains, right? Like the more we do this, the more our brains die.

And the owner's like, I totally get that. That's very cool. 17 games. What about 17? Systems that are incentivized for how they make money tend to just, and so, and especially with Citizens United, the political industrial complex has grown. You know, when Eisenhower said, beware of the military industrial complex, I don't think what he was saying is that, you know, war profiteering and all that is the cause of war,

but it makes slowing conflict down that much more difficult. Yeah. And I think as, and by the way, the billions of dollars in our electoral system is the least of its corrosive effect, because that's not factoring in how that money changes the way people govern. raising money that could be spent and the incentives in their careers to maintain accessibility to those that they think will keep them in power and keep the status quo. So it ripples through the entire system.

I mean, you mentioned Citizens United. It's like, obviously, a constitutional amendment or a new Supreme Court would be the ideal way to start fixing this. Short of that, it seems like, you know, the best we can do right now is maybe a system where you have more candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who are funding their campaigns with with small donations only. Other down ballot candidates do this, too. And then, of course, you have like Republicans doing exactly what they're doing right now still. Do you think that would still make a difference if we just had more candidates sort of deciding to swear off big dollar donations? Well, sure. I mean, you know, but again, it's it's sort of an unfortunate situation

that swearing off big influence is considered a bold move against the system. That's sad that a system is built that way. I think what I would love to see is to not make the system permanent. Don't make it 7-E-11, where it's always open and we're in a constant campaign scenario. At this point, I think quarantining it would actually be

maybe a better move for us. There's no other country in the world that I know of that engages in the permanent campaign like we do. That it's just electioneering and the powers that be, and it's all working together. We've set up, and by the way, the pandemic kind of blew out what would have been an incredibly tedious past few months, where the narrative that would have been set up is Sanders against Biden and will the Bernie bros forgive?

And you notice that without it, it's kind of fine. Like we're not less informed because they haven't fully embraced like a runaway narrative that doesn't really exist and didn't hammer it into the ground. There's certainly vestiges of it, but the point being, when you create a permanent campaign, like expanding football, like it's there to continue to make money and it's going to keep pouring money into this system.

And so it's not going to end, but they don't realize that the effect of it is we never get a chance to take off the uniforms. So we remain enemies all year long. Talk radio, 24-hour networks, constant barrages of things. It entrenches those divisions and it is not incentivized to ever fix them. Because if you start to problem solve, your moneymaker diminishes.

Right. So, so we're, we're stuck in a place, you know, what I find that's always shocking in, in the world that you inhabited with some of the political stuff is there's no accountability.

Like at all, you know, they still call in Bob Shrum and go what do you think and you're like did that guy ever win in the life like what are we doing there's always there's always a green room waiting for you somewhere always and so it's musical chairs and when the music stops nobody ever takes away a chair and so everybody is i used to say at the daily show we'd be sitting in the writer's room, and I'd go, just remember, when we leave here, the only friends you will have are in this room. Because we tried very hard not to become a part of a complex.

Now, we were parasitic. We were still making money off of that carcass. But the intent was to be some of that immune system, to be some of that filter. I mean, you know, we talked a little bit about sort of fixing it on the political side with too much money in politics. Where do you even begin on the media side? Because I feel like, you know, since you've left The Daily Show, the media has more than proven your point that the entire business model, the punditry, the conflict obsession, the algorithms, like none of it is designed to give us the information we need to make educated political decisions. How do you

start to change not just individual behavior, but the entire incentive structure? entire incentive structure? Well, so it's a generational project. The right has done a really impressive job over a 60 year period. You know, they got to a point where they thought, you know what? The institutions in America that people rely on for clarity and for authority are not comporting to our point of view. There's too much the best and the brightest going on and not enough love it or leave it. We would very much like some more love it or leave it. So for 60 years, what they decided to do was we will build an alternative structure. We will build our, you know what? Academic institutions are rotted to the core with liberalism. We will build our own academic institutions.

Think tanks are rotted to the core with liberalism. We will bring our own think tanks. We will bring our own media. And this was a conscious strategy. Some of it real because they thought a point of view needed to be served. Some of it cynical in that part of the design of the project was to discredit the institutions that other, so they were comporting, it's like they do this today. You know, sure, we have Limbaugh, but you have NPR and you're like, they are not even in the same universe of activism.

They used to say to us all the time, the Daily Show, what's your responsibility to the, you know, Donald Trump is your fault because you made fun of Republicans for so long. They get tired of it. I'm always being asked to be introspective about my impact on the discourse. I have never seen any moment of introspection from the right-wing media and the right-wing institutions

that were built that corroded the authority purposefully of maybe liberal leaning, but certainly not activist. And to that extent, you know, did we make fun of conservative causes? Yeah, I'm sure we did. But for 60 years, if you have an AM radio, 24 hours a day, years, if you have an AM radio, 24 hours a day, they preach Democrats as enemies. Oh, yeah. In no uncertain terms, they are raising a generation to feel as though those people are enemies. to feel as though those people are enemies. And it blows my mind that they play victim to this day.

But disassembling that, you're not going to. You're not going to be able to, you know, look, even in this moment, how hard is the right working to make sure they're seen as the victims of this moment of racial injustice? What's the real tragedy of this moment? We might lose a statue or two which are on the cusp of having slaves. Or the liberal mob will come for you and call you a racist. If you're more concerned in this moment about the language police, I mean, and by the way-

It's grievance. It's pure grievance. That's all they got. And it's bullshit. Look, I get it for Trump. What's he gonna run on? His record? Come on.

But talk to Mitt Romney about cancel culture. There's a pretend amongst the right, and I can't tell how much of it is cynical and how much of it is religion. And when I say religion, I don't mean Christian religion. I mean the religion of the right that has them give no introspection to, you know, Eric Trump in the middle of a pandemic in Tulsa, the site of one of the worst massacres in United States history of black people in 1921, the day after Jim Teens was railing about,

we're going to finally be able to say Merry Christmas again. Merry Christmas. The phrase in the English language that is said maybe more than any other phrase other than with cheese, like, what are we doing? And yet we still pay attention to them. So my feeling is we've got to stop reacting to this nonsense because it's nonsense. And start building a culture that earns that editorial authority back from the audience.

That isn't just responding to the moment of what they've done. Right now, it's purely reactive. It is. I mean, I think about this a lot. We think about this here at Crooked Media, like, how do you build sort of a progressive counterweight to what they have? And what's always on my mind is, and you've talked about this a lot, like, how do you get beyond the endless political warfare, that sort of permanent campaign you're talking about, we're always divided against each other, with the version of the Republican Party we've had for the last few decades. Like, I don't like spending my time, like, freaking out about what a lunatic Donald Trump

is, reacting to his bullshit. I would love to have, like, honest, thoughtful disagreements with Republican politicians on this show. I can't really find them. And I think that they know that they benefit from the cynicism that's generated by all the partisan conflict. So they keep luring us into it. Like, how do we break that cycle? So what I truly believe is you disconnect from it.

So the business, look, you're also producing content and production of content. One of the main things that it has to be is sustainable. And when you produce content at the rate that it's being produced right now, the news media has taken on the circadian rhythms of Twitter as though that's the heartbeat of what news is. It's sort of like mistaking the Dow Jones industrial average for our economy. It's one of the more superficial indicators of it. And Twitter is one of the more superficial and volatile indicators of news. But that's what the news reacts to now. And if you go now and you watch the news, they're just trolling Twitter, picking out what's trending and then coming out and nobody's stopping, but they're picking it out. You we've let the right dictate the terms and they've dictated a terms of conduct that they don't abide.

that they don't abide. They don't abide by the, you know, all this nonsense about freedom of speech, like they're defenders of freedom of speech. How dare the left mob is coming for you and they're going to call you a racist because they hate America and they won't stop till you're silenced. So I can take a knee at a football game?

Leave the country. Okay, happy holidays. Damn you, atheist. Like, it's completely and utterly full of shit. And they won't accept any kind of, you know, introspection on it. They just hit that hobby horse that they're the real victims here, that they're the ones, the left polices language and polices conduct, but they don't. They're all for freedom. Really.

Tucker Carlson called the Nike Colin Kaepernick ad as an attack on America. And that if we let it go, it will be the end of this country. Like, so you have to, you know, they're the slippery slope people. If we allow this to occur, what's next? They'll topple this statute. Okay. It's a statute. They'll call you this statue. Okay. It's a statue. They'll call you a racist.

Okay. It's like in the Black Lives Matter movement. It's all about the slippery slope. Well, okay, let's play out your slippery slope. So if you get to the bottom of that slope, what is your life? Are people now following you in stores making it harder for you to get a mortgage maybe redlining your neighborhood so that the value of it goes in other words

their worst case scenario is still better than how many people are living right now in this country is still better than how many people are living right now in this country. But they portray it... And by the way, for all the free speech complaints, they have, you know, a couple of the biggest megaphones in the country to blather on every day. They're trying to censor us, and you can check me out on my podcast, Muzzled. And you can then go to our website at youwont stop me.com and also i'll be on hannity

you know it's it's nonsense but they have to play the victim because they don't have another card to play so my advice is do not buy into the paradigm. Don't talk about, I want to set up a progressive network. Say, I want to think about setting up a network that understands the difference between corruption and clarity and integrity, because that's what will improve things. Because that's what will improve things. I tend to think that progressive politics are more on the side of integrity, but that doesn't mean you have to be willing to know when the people you

believe in are also corrupt. Right. And you will gain credibility by pursuing that with the same intensity that they are pursuing victimhood. I mean, you told the New York Times last week that one of the things you hope people take away from Irresistible is that participation in this corrupt system is inherently a corrupting process. So one of my biggest concerns over the last several years is that this younger generation, which I think is overwhelmingly progressive in its values and its activism, will look at electoral politics, rightly sometimes, and say, you know, if this is such an inherently corrupting process, why even bother participating? How would you answer that? So the process is designed to keep you out.

It's designed to be exclusionary. And that's what's corrupt about it. So the answer to that corruption is not to reject that system but to take it over to insinuate insinuate your values into it and change it from the inside that's where we will begin the process of you know when I was in Washington trying to lobby for legislation, I was stunned by the cluelessness on the right and the left of how their insular system is so, looks so cancerous on the outside.

You know, we went down to this hearing, and it was a subcommittee, but within that subcommittee hearing, there were supposed to be 14 members of it. Twelve of them were marked present, but there were never more than like four or five of them in the room. And I was trying to figure out like, A, why is no one here? And B, why does it count that they're

here? So in that hearing, if you come in for a minute, you're counted. And then you can leave. Oh, yeah. That's what Jim Jordan and Louie Gohmert did. They came and they sat down for a minute and then they left before hearing anybody. They got to go make a fox head probably. That's so they've got to what? Help their brand

because this is a business now and it's money and it's branding and it's all those other things. So Louie Alvarez, who ends up passing away two weeks after testifying and who that night his liver shuts down and he ends up in hospice, gives this incredibly powerful, moving plea to no one. Four or five people. four or five people. And when I point that out, the head of the committee,

the Democrat, maybe it wasn't the head of the committee, pushes back Steve Cohen and says, you know, I take exception to that. You know, members are very busy. Now I'm sitting next to a man who's literally died.

And who's come down with oxygen tanks and all kinds of things. Because he was invited to make his plea, not for himself, because he knows this is the end. But for his brothers and sisters and cops and firefighters and other people suffering this and you have the balls to say hey man our time's very valuable here so you can't expect us to be in the room and in that, you realize they are fucking lost. Yeah. Because A, part of why you're so fucking busy is because you've got to raise so much money and do your hits. And you scheduled eight meetings. Then don't schedule it.

If only a legislative body could get together and make the rules more manageable so that members could actually attend hearings that they think are being called. Like, that's the part. It's incredibly isolated and insular in Washington. And the one thing that does give me hope is you're seeing at the grassroots level, people coming up, not as, uh, organized, like the right's very good about they've organized their activism.

You go to work for the right, right. They've got a feeder system and there's money there. You want to go work for them them there's money and there's a system in place minor leagues are there you can play single a double a they'll move you up to triple a at regent university and before you know it you're on the supreme court like they've got a whole feeder system they've built this parallel universe and now they're running people through it to create the pillars of power that they need to put in place. The left is getting somewhat wise to that.

But what I'm seeing from them is a real authentic grassroots, fuck this. I'm going to run. And it may be a little more chaotic and harder to wrangle, but I love it. Yeah, you can't manufacture the energy. So the fact that the energy is there is the most important part of the whole thing. Right.

You said that the enemy is noise and the goal is clarity, which I love. Who in the media or politics or anywhere in public life do you look to for clarity these days? Well, I mean, I think that so I don't look to any individual for that. I look to individual works, an article I'll read or an analysis that I'll see, you know, things along those lines. an analysis that I'll see, you know, things along those lines. And there are certainly really incredibly talented people that bring things to the fore,

but it can come from anywhere. The problem isn't that there aren't talented, smart, and people that are not cynical, that are idealistic, in the media. The problem is the weight of the noise. Like, we just need, it's bigger than individuals. We need systemic filtering. And that only occurs from a left, It's like when you need government action on certain issues that just won't be effective as individual action. And which is why the right is so successful. They work systemically.

Fox News works systemically. systemically. Now, admittedly, like you almost feel bad for them now, because for eight years, they had, you could almost have pretended that there was a principled opposition to Barack Obama. And now that Donald Trump is in the contortion, I mean, it's like watching some sort of, you know, pathological Cirque du Soleil to watch them now justify executive power or ego or anything that he does. Morality, immorality, rule of law. He's the rule of law guy who just fired the head prosecutor at Southern District of New York. You know, law and order. Yeah, right.

He's law and order unless he's not. So what you realize is, oh, they're now completely just a subsidiary of the Trump organization. And there is no principle but power. That's just clear. I mean, they can talk about, you know, we're for the Constitution, except maybe right of assembly. Yeah, that part, I don't know. And, you know, so it's all nonsense now. But at least we know who they are. Right. But what they do so effectively is they provide the infrastructure

for that propaganda. And they do it really, really well. Now, I'm not saying take that bait and react to that with the opposite. Well, we'll do the same, but for the left. I don't think that's what's needed. What's needed is a Fox News for clarity and integrity with the same energy and weight and effort behind it. I think we're building the wrong thing. I agree. Well, that is a very good mission.

And I will say that when we started this, I took a lot of inspiration from you and what you guys did in The Daily Show. So I appreciate that. Thank you for coming by. And everyone go watch Irresistible. when we started this, I took a lot of inspiration from, uh, from you and what, what you guys did in the daily show. So I appreciate that. Thank you for coming by and, everyone go watch irresistible. It is out,

uh, June 26th, both on demand and, and in some theaters. So thanks for stopping by. Much appreciated. Good luck to you guys. Thanks to Jon Stewart for joining us today. And we will talk to you guys later john now i didn't hear the interview but i understand he had some specific words about a podcast is that true is

there something he might have said in the interview i just i don't i don't know he he did use the phrase love it or leave it at least four different times. Oh, did he? I don't know. He knew he was referring to you or your podcast. Did he think he was on the wrong show? No, no. He was basically referring to like America, love it or leave it, you know, that kind of things. But he said it a couple of times.

I smiled. I do think we should clip it. I think we should clip it. I think we should use it as promo material forever because he actually said the words, we need more love it or leave it i think at one point but it might not have been about the podcast maybe that's what some some people are saying that but you could interpret it many different ways many different ways bit of a downer. Pod Save America is a product of Crooked Media.

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 Kemp, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.