Pod Save America - MAGA Media Turns on Trump (feat. David Pakman)

Episode Date: April 19, 2026

Political commentator David Pakman joins the show to talk with Dan about the war brewing on the right between Trump and the MAGA influencers who once supported him. The two discuss whether this MAGA revolt is actually real, Trump's announcement that the Strait of Hormuz has reopened, and whether the White House's pivot back to the economy is their best message to win the midterms. Then, Dan asks David how the media ecosystem has changed over his career — and what it'll take for Democrats to build a media ecosystem that rivals the one built by the right.

There's a new book that I think is particularly timely. It's called Control, Why Big Giving Fall Short. Author Glenn Gallich offers a rare insider view exposing why billionaire and millionaire donors move so slowly while communities battle urgent crises. In control, why Big Giving Fall Short, Gallich reveals how our philanthropic system and culture encourage excessive donor control and keep over $2 trillion from reaching communities. By prioritizing wealthy donor interest, power, and control, this system doesn't simply slow social progress.

It structurally prevents it. world where you have all these billionaires who sign like giving pledges and talk about all the money they give away and their foundations. I feel like people didn't really think about whether they had ulterior motives for a very long time and just kind of like celebrated them. And then when you really dig into the details, kind of controlling a lot of things. Yeah, it's one of the reason we have a progressive taxation system in the country and don't rely just on billionaire philanthropy. But I'm sure Gallich gets into that in the book. If you care about how extreme wealth shapes our society and how to fix it, this is the book to read. Order your copy of Control. Why,

Big Giving Fall Short by Glenn Gallage from your favorite indie bookstore. That's Control, why Big Giving Fall Short out now. Welcome to Potts of America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. You're about to hear my conversation with progressive political commentator David Packman, someone I long wanted to have on the show. David's been covering the news and talking politics online longer than just about anyone, hosting the self-titled David Packman show since 2005 when it launches a radio program at a little station in Massachusetts. We hopped on Zoom to talk about the week's latest news, the Iran negotiations, and the White House's attempt to pivot

back to the economy, as well as the growing revolt against the president among the MAGA media. We'll get to that conversation in a moment. Before we do, if you want to support independent media, I hope you'll consider subscribing to MessageBox, my newsletter that gives you in-depth political analysis and cuts through the BS to help you understand what you can do to defeat MAGA in this election and beyond. And I have a special deal for Crooked fans. Go to Crooked.com for 20% off your subscription. And I hope you'll consider heading over to crooked.com slash friends to become a friend of the pod. You can get this episode, add free and get access to my subscriber show, Polar Coaster. Now, here's my conversation with David Packman.

David Packman, welcome to Pod Save America. Thank you. We wanted to have you on the pod for a long time. I'm very excited about this. I want to talk about the media ecosystem, how Democrats should communicate, your career and how you got to be one of the longest serving progressive political commentators, which is very impressive. But because this is a Pod Save America, before we do that, let's get to some news. This morning, Friday, when we're recording this, the Iranians announced at the Strait of Pormuz was now open. Donald Trump very cheerfully truthed about how this was a great deal. The strait was open. There would be a deal within a couple of days. We were going to get all of the dust, although there are reports that we're going to give the Iranians $20 billion for that

dust. But it seems like things are in a better place than they were a few days ago. What is your take on this? Do you think it's just a big win? Should we just give Donald Trump the Nobel Prize? Now, what do you think? I say we wait a little on the Nobel Prize maybe, but, no, I mean, listen, the theme is like arsonists setting fires and then declaring victory when they partially put the fires out after they've already done a bunch of damage. And I was going back and forth with some people on social media yesterday about how can't I just say it's a great thing to open the straight of Hormuz or straight of Vermuth, I think, Bessent called it weirdly yesterday. Yes, yes. thing. And of course, I want it open. There's no reason to start pumping up the price of oil, which leads to more expensive gas for no benefit whatsoever for the average American who's just filling up their tank. Of course, that's good. But I think if we just talk about that, we lose

sight of the fact that this was optional to begin with, that even the objectives changed and didn't make sense. And it all really goes back to Trump getting out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018. And I played that clip for my audience this week of Trump doing this big announcement where it's all presented as if he's just so strong and powerful and smart saying we are getting out of this deal. That was really the moment that led to 90% of what's taken place. And I said at the time, I'm not an advocate of the Iranian regime. I oppose right-wing theocracies. They regularly threaten the existence of other countries. And also, if I were them, from like a basic game theory perspective, it makes sense to go back to enriching uranium once Donald Trump says we're out,

if only to have leverage for future negotiations. So great, it's open. I think that that's a great thing, but it never should have been closed in the first place. To quote Trump, it never should have happened, as he likes to say. Right. It's like where we're going to end up here, if like, this can go a couple ways. This, the straight is going to be open for the length of the ceasefire. Maybe they're going to extend the ceasefire. Maybe they'll get a deal. This optimism that they're going to get a deal in the next three days seems a little skeptical to me. These are hugely complicated negotiations. But if they're on a path towards a deal, maybe the straight will stay open. We will stop bombing. Importantly, there will be a ceasefire in Lebanon

with Israel. That is all important and good. But Donald Trump's best case scenario is probably a slightly lesser version of the deal that he ripped up in 2018. So this was like, to What end was all of this to just end up right where we were before? I'm so glad you brought that up because I did a breakdown last week of what was in the original 2015 deal, which was a terrible deal according to Donald Trump. It didn't make sense. Obama shouldn't have signed it, et cetera. And the administration by their own admissions were struggling to get even back to the full

strength of that deal. And it's, I mean, it's beyond parity. it would be it would make sense to laugh if it weren't all so tragic and so serious. And at the end of this rainbow, what we hopefully would have is something that resembles 80 or 90% of the original Iran nuclear deal. And so this this kind of goes back to something that's an important prism when analyzing anything Trump does, which is he wants to take Obama and Biden's names off of things. I mean, we think about replacing NAFTA with the USMCA. And there are some different is in there about the percentage of vehicles and parts that can be made in Canada, U.S. and Mexico,

but it's basically a recreation of NAFTA with a different name and slightly different parameters. This is the exact same thing all over again. And we, the priority seems to be not really ballistic missiles or regime change or nuclear. It's erase things that Obama has done and put Trump's name on them, even if they're operationally, basically the same thing. Even if a deal gets done, there are some longer-term consequences here because there really was, like while the Iranian regime is quite radical and quite anti-American, there was a growing, there were whole generations of Iranians who were raised to not necessarily hate America. They were looking for a more modern version of their country.

And we've now, you know, we blew up a girl's school. We've been bombing their country. We've bombed their country a couple times now. Like we've set back the possibility that one day, this regime will leave. And the one that comes in will be a more friendly, one that's more friendly to America. It has set the U.S. back in that longer-term effort, once again, to go right back to where we were in 2015. I think that's right. And that applies in a lot of areas.

I mean, when we're in and then out of Paris climate or WHO or WTO or WTO or. whatever. One aspect of it is, can we undo the practical changes that these decisions make? And so, like, in this case, we got out of a deal. Now we've bombed. They're trying to recreate the deal. Cool. But there's the broader problem, which is the U.S. as an increasingly not credible negotiating partner or signatory to deals of all kinds. And this is why I say that the effect of this, even if you undo 100% of it, which I don't think you can, but even if you could, what about when the next administration is here, but other countries remember that the United States has had these circumstances where you make a deal, you stick to it as far as anyone can tell. And then on the whims

of a president, they say, hey, we're out. I think this hurts our negotiating position even beyond Donald Trump. One thing I've heard from people over the last, since Trump's been reelected from people abroad or people who worked in foreign policy is our allies, you know, international organization in the world, we're willing to sort of accept the idea that Donald Trump's first election was this Black Swan event that just happened. He didn't, he didn't even get the plurality or majority of votes. There were all these crazy circumstances. It happened. The U.S. lost its mind for four years. And then we were back to the sort of the core American values and approach to foreign policy that has existed through both parties since the end of World War II. But now that's

happen a second time in a 12-year period. No way, you know, Europe is thinking differently, NATO's thinking differently. Like, there's a real question of whether you can rely on the United States to actually be the partner. It has always been because we're always four years away from, you know, someone like Donald Trump, I think is the issue. Well, even after President Biden won in 2020, we knew we weren't out of the woods because tens of millions of people had just voted for Donald Trump for a second time. And then now we have tens of millions of people who actually voted for him for him three times. I think the rhetoric around NATO over the last few weeks related to Iran is like a critical reminder of the approach of this administration and why other

countries are right to be skeptical of Trump or the U.S.'s commitment to those institutions. Trump spent years saying on NATO, nobody else is paying enough. We might not come to their defense under Article 5 if they don't pay what Trump believes they need to pay. And then Trump says, hey, NATO, they need to come to our defense by which he meant, we created a mess in the straight of Hormuz. Now there's consequences. Please come and help. Now, of course, Article 5 doesn't cover that scenario.

Article 5 is about attacks on NATO allies, not problems you create in non-NATO bodies of water that you then are desperate for help for. But on the one hand, Trump was saying even our commitment to Article 5 for other. countries is a question mark. And then going, forget about Article 5, come help us in the straight of Hormuz. That's crazy when you look at it from the point of view of our allies, and that is an impact. And then, and when you consider that just only a few months ago, Trump was threatening to invade a NATO ally in order to get Greenland. So which that also is not going to help things. Do you think, let's say this deal holds. And by the time people hear this on

Sunday, it may not have held, but just let's live in the hypothetical for a second here, which is, let's let's say straight. remains open. Maybe we have a deal. Maybe we are in indefinite negotiations with the Iranians to seek a deal. But price of oil starts to come down. Some of the economic impacts are to come down. Do you do you think that what happened over the last few months with Iran is going to have a lasting political impact or at least last long enough through November? Or will it fade if we memory hold like so much else in Trump in the Trump era? Well, if you're asking us to the effect on the November elections, I think that it very well could dissipate. I mean, it's a crazy thing to think of.

but primarily, I think voters are going to be going off of their perception of how the economy is, probably in the four to six weeks before the November election. Now, this isn't, the Iran situation is interesting because it's both foreign policy, but it directly affects the day-to-day economy of people, not to mention there's this ability to compare and contrast. You know, Donald Trump spent a campaign saying prices on everything will come down, and he's talking about the sort of stone that he'll be using on the columns. at his ballroom that no one asked for, the foreign policy decisions which affect oil and gas

and through transportation, affect everything else that people are paying for. His actions right now are very much indifferent to the average effect on a family's economy. But it pains me to say it. There is this sort of relatively short memory on a lot of this stuff as far as voters are concerned. And so if gas prices do come back down by November and inflation numbers improve, a little bit, I think there's a good chance that if Trump off ramps here over the next four weeks, what we thought would be 40, 60 vote swing in the House of Representatives might

be much smaller. Now, I still think Democrats take the House regardless, but it might be like a 15-seat swing or something like that, which would not be the overwhelming blue wave that is possible. Yeah, look, I think if gas prices are not at $4 a gallon, Trump will have avoided the worst-case scenario for him and his party, I do think there is some lasting damage here from the war that will affect him in November 1. He has any chance that the economy was going to get significantly better than it was. Pre-war was ruined by the war, right? Inflation is back up. There is a long bottleneck on some of these prices. We're already going to suffer in food prices from the fertilizer cost because he did this during planting season. So farmers were already making

choices. They were already paying more for fertilizer and then making choices about how many acres to plant based on that. And so he's, it's not going to be as good as it could have been if he hadn't gone to war. So that takes that off the table. And it's like, if we're being like totally like brass tax about this, his approval rating has only dropped four points basically since the start of the war. Now, the difference between 38 and 42 probably matters a lot in some of these seats. But he, I do think that this is a one of those high profile things that affects people in two

ways and how they think about Trump. one is the idea that he's out of control, and that's a problem for Republicans because generally what people want is some balance in these elections. It's sort of a thermostatic public opinion piece here. And the other thing is this is now the second thing he has done that's like he has like stood up, waved his arm around, jumped as high as you can say, I'm going to raise your prices. And that, that hurts. So I think, you know, the amount of the impact from this war, you know, depends a lot on the price of gas. They very much agree with that. But I think he has done damage to himself and made that.

things harder for the Republicans. I think that's true. And I wouldn't understate the importance of those four points because the lower you go, the less there is left in the sense of there's some core. I don't know if it's 22 or 28 percent or I don't know exactly what it is. But it's the shoot people on Fifth Avenue and they don't care kind of crowd. So when you're at 42, losing four, I think is actually quite significant. Yes, it is.

We're getting to the end of the, um, Convincible electorate, if that makes sense. Yeah, that's right. I think, I don't know what his floor is, but it's certainly below, we've now know it's below 42. And you just, you want him to be as low as you as possible. Because also if he's mired in 38, it does just, there's like such a narrative of despair within the party that it has to affect turnout. Pottsave America is brought to you by fast growing trees. Did you know, fast growing trees is America's largest and most trusted online nursery with thousands of trees and plants and over two million happy customers. They have all the plants.

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Terms and conditions apply. Pod Save America is brought to you by Common Power. If you're listening to this podcast, you know the stakes of midterm elections. If you still need convincing, just scroll through this administration's latest blunders. I would just point you to any news article about the war in Iran. It's a good reason to worry about what these morons are up to. To save America and democracy, common power needs your support. Common Power is the organizing force for training and deploying volunteers to doork for Democrats in over 20 battleground states

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Look, we don't have to tell you guys for the thousandth time how important these midterms elections are. It will really matter if a lot of us get out there and knock on doors and talk to people and talk to our friends and talk to our neighbors and just make the case for why they have to vote,

why we need a check on Donald Trump and why we need it right now. Support the organizing force of volunteers fighting to shift the balance of power at commonpower.org slash crooked. That's commonpower.org slash crooked. All right, let's pivot real quick here to the affordability tour

that Trump has been on. He was in Vegas on Thursday night to do a roundtable to tout his no tax on tips policy. This is the tax credit they've pinned their hopes on to try to salvage the midterm elections. Here's what Trump had to say

to a group of Las Vegas workers. Let's take a listen. For the remainder of 2026, you're going to see a big surge. The numbers are really tremendous, and that's why I'm out here. If they were bad, I wouldn't be here today. I'd be sitting home watching television, I think. Don't forget, we're having some fake inflation because of the fuel, the energy prices. Earlier this week at the White House, I met a wonderful woman named Sharon Simmons,

a grandmother driving DoorDash to help support her husband's cancer treatment. She's got serious cancer. He's going to be okay, I think. Sharon delivered McDonald's to the Oval Office. It was a little bit of a, you know, I mean, to be honest, it was a little tacky. Indians of American small businesses, including restaurants, strike cleaners, corner stores. What is a corner store? I've never heard that term.

I've never heard it describe that a corner store. Who the hell wrote that, please? What do you think? Is this a winning economic message? No, I mean, there's so, this is so chock full of things to talk about. You know, I mean, I, to go back, there was this incredible moment with the DoorDash grandma. Yeah, I want to hear you talk about this. I'm sure you don't want men and women's sports rights.

And she goes, I don't really have an opinion on that. I'm just here for no tax on tips. So, like, that was very interesting because it was someone telling the president, this culture war stuff, I'm worried about what's happening in my budget. That's what I care about. The most tragic part of all of it, though, is that there is no, there is no tax on tips in the bill. What this is a deduction. And it requires five minutes of discussion, but this is something that it'll benefit the average

tipped worker at the most a couple hundred bucks a year, which I'm not dismissing as nothing. But when you're thinking about child tax credits of a couple thousand bucks and different things, there's lots of other things that can be done for working class people. You get to deduct up to $25,000 in tips from your federal income. the vast majority of tipped workers are paying very little, if any, federal income tax. So there's actually not that much left to deduct. Same thing with no tax on social security. Trump raised the deduction a little bit for seniors, but these are like not at all the policies

that are being presented with these one-liners. And people are doing their taxes now. We just passed the tax deadline of April 15th and seeing that their tax liability really hasn't changed actually that much because of these bills. Now, will they remember that in November when they vote? I don't know, but it doesn't strike me as a winning message, at least the way that he's presenting it. Yeah, you know, you hear the White House talk or you hear the Republican strategy talk. They're like, we need to get back on the economy message.

You get back on the economy. You know, talk about the economy. That is the key. And I'm sure that talking about the economy is better than talking about the ballroom, right? Or better talking about the war. But Trump's a very bad economic messenger. Like, that is something that has, he is a good economic messenger when he's a good economic messenger when he's charging the economy is good. And he is a good economic messenger when he's out of power and the

economy is bad. But when he's in power and the economy is bad, he's terrible because he can't admit fault. He can't do the Bill Clinton feel your pain thing. He can't say, you know, he just can't give the honest answer. Like, I inherited a mess. We've made some progress. People are still hurting. We need to do more and hear the things we're going to do. Like, that's the message that works. It's the version of the message Obama had to do in his first term after the 2008 financial crisis. But Trump cannot, he just cannot do it. And he's like, he's got to call it fake inflation.

He was interviewed by a bunch of reporters headed to the helicopter at the White House on the way to that event. And they asked him on high gas prices. And he denied that gas prices were high and that attacked ABC News for saying the gas prices brought. He just can't do it. Like, it's just, it's not a, he's just like what people want to hear, he can't say. And what he generally says is either sort of nonsense or it's the kind of thing that

pokes people in the eye. Like in the gas prices question from yesterday, he brought up the stock market. Like I remember in sitting at focus groups in 2009, 2010, and you know, these are people, swing voters, soft Obama voters, people hurting in that economy, as so many people were. But if you brought up the, if anyone brought up the fact that the stock market was up, they would flip the table over an anger because that to them signify that all these other people were getting rich or they were doing fine and the average person weren't. So, like, he, I mean, he is sort of a bad economic messenger, and that's a gigantic shift from his first term.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think Trump realizes the degree to which stock market holdings are highly, highly concentrated at the top. And a lot of people do have 401Ks in retirement accounts that are tagged to the market. But in terms of holdings, it's a relatively small amount of money compared to the very wealthy. It's interesting to see that a message that they correctly, the Trump people correctly identified during the Biden president. that's simply repeating that everything's awesome doesn't convince people if they don't feel that it's awesome. Now, I'm using the word feel because it may be pretty good by most economic metrics, but perception really is reality with the economy and how it feels when you're looking at how much

money is left at the end of the month, what's coming in, what's going out, and what are my expenses. The MAGA people stumbled upon the reality that you can't convince people the economy is good if they don't feel it, and they're kind of doing the exact same thing now because they don't seem to have any other ideas. Yeah, it's, it is doing exactly what Biden did. Like, it's tight. It's touting macroeconomic numbers to convince people that they're, what they were seeing personally in their lives, their bank accounts, it does not matter or is not that

important. You know, it was like the Biden people are always citing the how low the unemployment rate which, which is great. Like, that is better than a high unemployment rate. But it just doesn't, just doesn't change the fact that people are just paying so much more money for the things they need in their daily life. groceries, gas, housing, and people are getting hammered right now with utility bills. Just absolutely hammered, particularly in this past winter as like these cold spells all across

the United States, heating bills through the roof. And there's no actual attempt to try to solve the problem or even just seem like you're trying to solve the problem. Like in general in politics, you either got to solve the problem. You've got to get caught trying to solve the problem and Trump's doing neither. It also sometimes is important to talk about what is being measured. And the example I often give is, you know, if you put Bill Gates in a room with nine other people and you talk about the mean net worth of that room, you would go, this is the wealthiest group of people I've ever seen. But the mean would be the wrong metric in that scenario. You could have nine broke people and then Bill Gates and it averages out in that way to something that looks pretty good. We know that you can mess with all of these indicators and create a perception that is different. I'll just give you one example that always comes back. When the unemployment rate was low under Democrats, including Barack Obama, the right was obsessed with talking about the labor participation rate. And they insisted that the labor participation rate is really low and therefore the economy is not

actually good because too many people are out of the economy. Now, it was true that the labor participation rate had been declining, but it's been declining for a long time as the population ages and more people retire. You could spin that on its head and go, hey, listen, the fact that people can afford to retire is good. And that's going to lower the labor participation rate. The point I'm making is no matter what's going on with one metric, you can pull some other metric out and go, this is the one that really represents what's happening to the average person. And as we learned under Biden, as we're seeing right now, those macro indicators, as you said, don't really tell the story of what

is happening in terms of the median American. What did you make at the DoorDash Grandma event? Was it a good press event, a good message? I can kind of go both ways on us. I'm curious your take. On the net, I mean, I think on the one hand, I thought back to the Trump McDonald's thing. Yeah, same. That's exactly. And so, like, I think Trump does well when it's just pictures or video where you don't

hear anyone talking, right? So when you saw Trump wearing the headset and the apron at McDonald's, it's like, okay, that imagery is actually kind of useful to Donald Trump. Trump opening the door to the Oval Office and greeting this grandmother. and taking the bags of McDonald's, I think there is a significant part of the American population that sees that and goes, okay, that's an image I can identify with. But then the messaging around it, I think, was terrible. And the event was pretty widely ridiculed.

It even got Trump to say when he talked about it on Thursday that it was tacky, I think, was the word that he used at the end of the day. So I don't think in the net it was a beneficial event. Yeah, I had the exact same thought was every Democrat ridiculed the McDonald's event. And like, it seemed cheesy. And what we did not calculate in, or a lot of the Democrats talking about it didn't calculate in 2024 was that it's the kind of thing that goes viral. And it got so much attention.

And it got viral because people who love Trump were posting it. It got viral because people who wanted clicks were posting it. And it went viral because Democrats were making fun of it. But everyone saw it. And this was poorly executed. Like, I think Trump should not have taken a bunch of questions from the press. And he could have just, there was a way to do this probably close to right. And it got a ton of attention.

Everyone was talking about it. Every, you know, everyone mentions that it was tax on no tax on tips was the reason for it. And so like to me, there was a little bit of a lesson of like we do have like for Democrats is sometimes you got it. Like you have to lean into the things that are going to get attention. And this did get attention. Trump did not execute it well because as you mentioned, he spoke. And that is often a downside for him. But like, it's easy to like completely like, like, look.

at the cable coverage of it or even the Twitter coverage of it and say this was this was a total loss for him. And then if you go like with the McDonald's thing, if you go on TikTok or Instagram, you see it's everywhere. Like one of the things you can do that can break out of the bubble, the political media bubble and get to those people. And this at least had the potential to do it. Trump just kind of stepped on it. Yep. I think that that's right. But I think on balance, the maybe my feeling in two months will be different. But looking back at the McDonald's thing, it seems that that was pretty clearly a win for Trump. Yes, I agree. I agree. Whereas this one is seeming at best like a wash.

Yeah, I think it was a, had the potential for a win that Trump kind of fumbled the football here. Yeah. Positive America is brought to you by the Working Forest Initiative. The Working Forest Initiative is a cross-industry coalition promoting the role of working forest in driving economic growth and climate resilience. The backbone of the WFI's sustainability efforts is a diverse team of working forest professionals. From timberland owners to hiring managers and accountants, GIS analysts mapping the future of our canopy and biologists protecting wildlife,

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That's NutraFol.com, N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L-com, promo code, crooked. All right, I'm going to spend some time talking to you about what we're seeing inside the right-wing media ecosystem Last week in an extended rant on true social, Trump called out Tucker Carlson, Mecca Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones by name. He did that again here on Friday morning. He called

them the opposite of MAGA. Although those four are the only ones criticizing Trump, there have been many more have been critical, including a bunch of really important Trump supporters from 2024. Let's take a listen. Here's a leader who's mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the god of gods, and exalting himself above them. Could this be the antichrist. Most people that voted for Trump or wanted Trump to be in office, one of the things that was attractive was this, no more wars. Sure, of course. And now we're in one of the craziest ones. What kind of delusional reality are we living in where he's parading around the grandma that's working Doordash so she can afford to pay her husband's cancer bills? And he's like, see, we're not doing

tips. One of the features of most of Trump's decade on the public stage here, on the political stage, has been essentially no criticism from his media allies at all. That has changed in the last couple months here. It's started with the Epstein Files. It's gone in overdrive because of the Iran war. How significant do you think this is? Does it really matter to voters? Could it change the political damage? Or is this just sort of like porn for Democrats? I think it does matter, but maybe in a different sense than some might think. Like, I don't think that the comments, for example, from Andrew Schultz and Rogan are going to turn Trump voters into midterm Democratic voters. Right.

Because I think that that's just a difficult uphill battle. And you have to remember that a lot of the people that were activated by the Manosphere and by Trump himself were previous nonvoters. They were, they got involved in politics because of Donald Trump and the Manosphere movement around him. So it's not, oh, you know, I sometimes voted one way, sometimes the other. I went Trump. Now I don't like this.

I'll go back to Democrats. I think a lot of these folks, if they're not liking what, what they're seeing, they're going to stay home. Now, that still presents an opportunity, I think, for Democrats to do some damage in November, but that kind of remains to be seen. The part I find very interesting about a lot of these clips is that there's no accounting for the role that they played in getting Trump elected. And so there's been a lot of the one of these, I think it was, I don't know if it was

Schultz or which one, but maybe even Rogan used the word betrayed when it came to the war stuff, where he said he was going to be anti-war. then he does this stuff. I've said to my audience, if you have interactions with people who fell for it and now they're reconsidering, let's welcome them back. Let's not make fun of them. This is not how you get people out of cults. You say, it's great that you're thinking for yourself. It's great that you're rethinking previous mistakes you made. But I also want to mention this was predictable. And the way that we know it was predictable is that our entire ecosystem of podcasts and shows was predicting that exactly this would happen. So it was a

this completely nobody could have seen it kind of thing. And so I think that the approach has to be awesome that Rogan and Schultz and whoever are kind of changing their tone right now. But they're not absolved of the fact that this was totally predictable and expected. And they pulled in arguably millions of people into the sort of Trump world, softer Trump supporters maybe than the hardcore MAGA base. And you want to make sure that you don't allow that to happen again to you next time around. there will be whoever is after Trump. And the same sort of mechanism is going to be at play again.

So I think that it's going to have an effect and it's having an effect. But I want to do everything I can to make sure that we say, this was not an unpredictable out of nowhere thing. We were saying these guys were wrong all along. And it turns out they were. Yeah. And many of them, I think Andrew Schultz has talked a little bit about where he erred in this process. But for the most part, everyone else is, you know, they are just on to the next one. There's a few things. I find interesting about this. One is these folks, particularly the political ones like Megan Kelly and Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones. I'm sure they are conservative in their political views. I don't doubt that. And I believe that they probably genuinely liked Trump at some

point, even if they don't like him right now. But they are also people who are responsive to an audience. And what has really driven the growth in right wing media from 2016 until now has been just a simple fact that you either pro-Trump or you died, right? All the conservative entities that were not pro-Trump but tried to remain conservative went away, right? Weekly standard, et cetera. So you either had to become very pro-Trump or you had to become like a member of the resistance, right? You had to be an anti-Trump organization.

And if these people were seeing giant drops in viewership or subscribers or advertisers, is whatever else, they would not, I suspect that you would hear a different tone. And you're not seeing that. So I do think that there is something that has changed in the economic incentive structure of right wing media, which I think is problematic for Trump. Second thing here is, and it's worth separating the, like, the Megan Kelly's and Tucker Carlson's from the Joe Rogans and the Andrew Schulzis or the Theo Vons or any of the other Manusphere, the Nelke Boys, any of those other people.

Because I think the main audience of the people actually like tune in to Megan and Kelly Tucker Carlson are political people, right? It's like the version, it's the right-wing version people who watch our shows. And then the people who turn into these other things are apolitical people who became interested in politics because the host content creator influencer that they trusted talked to them about politics and kind of push them on this. And for Republicans, losing the apolitical people does hurt with turnout, like as you point out. Like that it, like, I do not think those people are coming out for congressional Democrats for the most part. Maybe the right Democratic presidential candidate can get them in 2028.

But I just don't see them just being like, you know, Joe Rogan told me to vote for Donald Trump. I voted for him. Donald Trump kind of screwed me over. Maybe Joe Rogan screwed me over too. And so now I'm going to vote for Lauren Bowbird or something. Yeah. Or I'm going to vote or I'm going to vote for John Ossoff or Janet Mills or, you know, pick your Democrat. They're like that seems unlikely to me.

But a Trump voter who does not turn out is a net loss of one for the Republicans. And so that is bad. And if they do not, if just standard typical midterm voters turn out in this election, that's very bad for Republicans because we dominate that space now. The thing is also, I don't, increasingly Trump doesn't really have that much to offer a lot of these people anymore when at one point he did because he can't run again. Okay. These people, these people being the hosts, the contact creators. Yes, yes. Sorry, the Megan Kelly's and these sorts of folks where the incentive to stick with him for future goodies of whatever kind there might be, rides on Air Force One or Trump rallies for the next campaign or whatever.

I think he's just got a lot less appetizing things to offer a lot of these people at this point. And so they're making the calculus. Their audience is increasingly disaffected. We see it in the approval ratings. And they're kind of trying something different. You know, this whole thing has started a big sort of debate about what MAGA means. And Trump's pollster Jim McLaughlin talked to Politico on Friday, and he said this. The base doesn't consider Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, or Candace Owen's a conservative anymore. My guess is most of their cliques are from

progressives. Now, I don't buy that, but what do you think? Well, no, I don't buy that either. Not at all. I don't buy that at all. I think that there's another aspect to this, which is, is Trumpism even conservative by any traditional? I mean, the discussion of what's conservative at this point, I don't think, I don't think there's much conservatism left anywhere in that movement. But no, the idea that it's left-wingers that are watching this stuff as kind of rage bait or for entertainment, I don't think that that's the case at all. In fact, most of my, a lot of my audience even says, hey, a lot of this stuff isn't even

really worth reacting to because these people are increasingly on the margins of what we consider to be kind of like the valid political discussion and, and, and, you know, you know, and we don't even care to hear from them that much, so I don't buy that. I think the interesting thing here is so there is a question of like who is actually conservative. And you were right by any definition, traditional definition of the term conservative, Trump is not conservative. He is spending money, big, we're, the U.S. government is taking over companies.

We are taking stake in companies. Not like not a raking conservative by any stretch of the imagination. Then there's a question like, what is MAGA, right? Is MAGA a actual ideology of, you know, that is, you know, that is, you know, you know, know, and this sort of presumes this idea that prior to 2016, there was this, you know, group of Republicans or, you know, this large group in America who were anti-immigrant, nativist, populist on economics, anti-system, who were just waiting for someone to lead their movement and Trump showed up. Or is MAGA just another word for Trump fan? And I think it's,

I don't know whether it started as the former, but it's definitely the latter now. Like, yes, They are not, Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly are not MAGA because they're not pro-Trump. But that doesn't mean that they like, I think that's an important distinction for people to understand. Like, especially when you look at the polling because the thing you hear all the time is, yeah, all these MAGA, quote-unquote MAGA influencers are turned against Trump. But 92% of MAGA voters support the Iran war. Well, it's like, no, 92% of Trump fans support Trump's war. No shit, right? Yeah.

I think there's a few characteristics at this point to MAGA. I mean, one of it is. It relies on what I call faux populist rhetoric. You might just call it populist rhetoric because it's not policy, it's rhetoric. But I call it faux populist rhetoric is number one. It is reactionary at its core. And it's quite authoritarian as well. So if you think about libertarian Republicans like Rand Paul and authoritarian Republicans

like Trump, they land in very different places on policy. So I think that when we actually look at policy for within MAGA, it's. It's extraordinarily authoritarian. It's authoritarian when it comes to its regulation of businesses. When we don't like the decisions Twitter's making about what can be published, we say the government now tells Twitter that they have to publish certain things like during the pandemic, for example, or whatever the case may be. So I think that those are kind of the building, the most important building blocks right now,

but it's an authoritarian movement far more than republicanism was for, really for the last 20, the 20 years prior to Trump. Yep. Let's widen the aperture here a bit, because I want to talk a little bit about your career. You've been making political content longer than I have, longer than most people doing it online. You've been hosting your show in some capacity, which I originally started as a radio program, I believe, since at least 2005. Talk a little bit about how you ended up in this space and how the media ecosystem has changed in that time period. I really started just out of boredom. A community radio station when I was in college started up. And at that point, you just had to sign up and you got a show. It was like a very low barrier to entry. So it was easy to get a show.

But very quickly, you know, I came up when podcasts were growing and then YouTube for news and politics content got going. And so I got involved in that. The biggest difference now from when I started was when I started, the pie was getting bigger so fast that as there were. new entrance creating content, it had no importance whatsoever on your audience because the pie was growing so quickly as people transitioned from cable and broadcast radio to podcasts and online video. That's changed now because a lot of that transition has slowed down.

There's sort of like a critical mass that was reached and then growth slows down. So a lot of the people who have trans who did transition over to digital. media have done so already. And there's sort of like a smaller opportunity for the pie to grow. And so many people are now doing this. So I think I benefited a lot from timing in the sense that I got in early enough to build an audience. And I was recently talking to some Canadian journalists who were just getting going in this. And I said, it would be very difficult to start right now because there are so many more people doing this than there were. I think that that's great in terms of democratization. And also it does put a little bit more of the onus and responsibility

on the audience when it comes to media literacy and determining what exactly am I getting here is this trustworthy. Do I understand the difference between news and opinion, et cetera? But it's a very different feel now. And then the other thing is it's starting to get very corporate, even in the online independent media space for two reasons. One, legacy and corporate media all have a presence in podcast and YouTube. CNN has podcasts and CNN has a massive YouTube channel. So I think that's one difference. And then the other is private equity and investment firms are getting involved in a lot of what was previously completely independent media. So all of that is really changing the feel of the space. Do you think that's the, do you take it as a negative that is becoming

more corporate? I think that there are negative and positive aspects to it. I think the negative can be, sometimes when money comes in, it kind of flattens things. So a lot of stuff starts looking kind of the same. And I, on my show this week, I talked about how some non-political YouTube channels have been sort of bought up by private equity. And that hasn't necessarily been disclosed by the creators. And so a lot of the same changes start being instituted across channels. And so things kind of start to look more similar. I don't think that that's good because I think Part of what makes the space interesting is that everybody has their own presentation style, the studios look different, the approach looks different.

Losing that, I think, is bad. I do think that there is this reality that the right in the independent space has been so well funded for years that they've grown to dominate some aspects of it. And that money was much later coming in to the left. And so I don't want to unilaterally disarm either. And so I recognize that sometimes you do have to fight fire with fire. And some of that money coming in may be necessary from a political perspective to fight the right. There is finally money coming in to progressive content creators that has been many, many, many, many years after it's been coming into the right and still at a much, much lower volume.

I've spent, honestly, much of the last 10 years going to meetings with donors to try to convince them that to take some of that money, they were spending on TV ads that were largely being shown to people over the age of 65 and put it into any form of content creation that could be influencers, independent media, podcasts, et cetera. But it's still, even after all of that, you know, really took after the 2024 election for there to be like a real, or at least a little bit in the run up to 24 and then after that more interest in it. What do you think the hesitancy has been among the the Democratic Party establishment, the funding base to actually get behind independent journalism, aggressive content creation. I think that the donors on the left have been very attached to

institutions as a concept. And so when you go to them and you go, hey, forget about a big institution. Here's the 10 biggest progressive shows. They don't have anything to do with each other, but together, here's the audience they command. What about dumping in a bunch of ad money, for example, which the right does where they go, hey, listen, we're not involved in your production. We're just going to do ad spend. So we're going to put your content in front of people on Facebook and on YouTube. We're just going to dump money in that way. You could do that on the left and you could say, hey, I don't have to create any content.

Here the 10, the 15, the 20 biggest shows. They're proven already. They have an audience. Let's just leverage that with ad dollars, for example. And I've pitched that to some people. And they don't really seem to get it. They're just, they still think that doing the four-minute hit on cable news is better for an elected official than long-form conversations.

And all of this stuff is changing. So I may be more critical than where we are right now in 2026. But I think it's just like there's this deference to the big conglomerate. Yeah, my experience has been a couple of things similar. One, the first problem is most of the people who are writing these checks don't consume YouTube, TikTok. It's just, it's like it is a foreign world to them. They do not understand it. So you're asking them to give money to something they don't know what is. What they do know is television ads. And they've been writing checks for television ads for however long they've had money. And they

see those television ads because they watch 60 minutes or the football game or whatever else. And they see them. Someone will email them the link to the ad that they essentially paid for. And then the second problem is, and this is really started in my era. the Obama era is that we became, as a party, we became incredibly data-driven, which is good. I'm not against that. But we really decided we could figure out the exact ROI on every dollar spent. And so it's like if you are running a television ad, you can at least say it's this many ratings points.

It's going to, this is what the audience is. This is how many people your dollars are going to reach. It is just a lot, like, these are not to the extent you have metrics. If you were investing in like your ad idea, it's exactly. that you have metrics. They're not metrics that are particularly familiar to the people who are paying for television ads. And then if you're just saying, invest in content creators themselves, right? Let's give some of them a stipend. Let's, you know, let's, you know, have some sort of funding that helps people get started or lets them level up. Like that is no, that's a venture bet. It's not a

specific, it's not a stock. You know, you're not buying an equity, right? So people have talked to really struggle with that because they became used to this idea that there's this very specific formula that your dollars, you're going to reach this many voters, we need this many voters to win. And now you're asking them to invest in something they don't fully understand and with in a way in which without the certainty of impact that they've had before because you're not exactly investing. And this is, I guess, the third reason is tied to it is short termism. Every Democratic donor wants to win the next election.

And I understand that. Every one of them has been existential for a long time now. So it's like, we absolutely have to win the house. How do we win the house? Let's how do my doctor's have to win the house? What we're saying is we have to build something that is going to sustain a progressive pro-democracy movement for the future, for 26, for 28, for 30, for 32. And that we just have always been, like we don't have the version or haven't had the version

of the Koch brothers who were investing for the long term for decades. That's right. I think that that long-term thinking is what's missing. And I've had a couple conversations with people who, they weren't really looking to invest in anything in particular, but they were trying to understand the space a little more, which I appreciated. And I said, here's, they said, how would I know whether my dollars are working and how quickly? And I said, here's the way you kind of have to think about it. Imagine that you identify the 20 largest progressive shows and we figure out, hey, cumulatively, this is a billion and a half views per month

and 100 million subscribers. I'm just making up numbers. It's probably probably would be like 30 million subscribers and 1.5 billion views a month. Imagine if over the next two years, by index, by Investing in the ad programs using ad spend to boost these shows that triples to four and a half billion views a month and 90 million subscribers as candidates come forward in future elections as there are movements to support whether it's prop 50 or whatever Isn't it mathematically obvious that three Xing the audience and viewership of these largest 20 shows is going to create a much more powerful apparatus and they kind of get that? And I tell them, you won't know how much of it is because of your money. You will not be able to know that. That's the exact problem here, yes. And they don't like that.

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One purchase, one donated with over 150 million donations and counting. Head over to Bombas.com slash crooked and use code Crooked for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash crooked, code crooked at checkout. You've learned over the course of your career here. You've learned a lot about the media environment. You've written a book about it. You've written a second book about it that's coming out. out this fall, about the power of algorithm.

You talk a little bit about what your book and what it's about? So the concept is pay attention, which of course has a double meaning. We're paying attention to stuff. We're also paying for attention. And it's really, it's not political in the partisan sense like my first book was. And it's really just to look at how these platforms developed and how they actually do come from earlier forms of media, even though it might not be completely obvious how that is, how algorithms today are dictating how people can exist in the same country but have completely

different beliefs about not what should be but but even what is and what is taking place right now AI is a part of it and how that's going to affect the space that we occupy probably significantly and it already is in fact in some ways and probably will even more with some ideas of how to have a more balanced and healthy approach especially to news consumption but to media consumption of all kinds. And I've learned a crazy amount even in researching the book. But I think that really right now, for anyone who either is on these digital platforms, has to make decisions at some point about kids being on these platforms, which is not a decision I have to make right now. It's probably, I don't know, seven, eight years away or something like that. I think we really

have to understand how we got to where we are and why I see certain things when I look at Facebook or TikTok and you might see something different. And the effect that this has socioculturally and on the economy. So it's kind of broad in that sense, but it's specifically focused on digital platforms and why they look the way they look today. Your book is not political, but the most powerful players in American politics and world politics right now are the algorithms themselves. Yes. They are determined, they have played such a gigantic role in polarization, news consumption, what breaks through. And like it is, this may not be a part of your book, but it is just worth noting that the

most, the algorithms that matter most are all owned by, or most of them, all but one of them are owned by pro-Trump billionaires, right? Mark Zuckerberg and meta control Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp. And then you have Elon Musk controlling Twitter. we now have a pro-Trump billionaire and a of TikTok of TikTok US. Like how like what level is concerned does that give you beyond just the dangers of these algorithms to begin with? It's a huge level of concern, but one of the things I do talk about in the book is that it might seem as though the causality goes one way, which is, hey, pro-Trump billionaires control the algorithms, therefore the algorithms

promote a lot of this right-wing stuff. I actually think it's the opposite way, which is that the rights sort of argumentation is built for what performs best in these algorithms in the sense of divisive content performs better. Simple ideas with a clear scapegoat or someone to blame perform better. You can go through this list of five or six things and you kind of realize you don't have to build it in a way that it helps the right. There's something more structural in there. And George Lakoff has written a lot about this when it comes to political messaging. You know, you think about the concept of tax relief. It's my money.

It's better and it's relieving when I get to keep it. And on the left, we're not the opposite of that. We're not going around saying the higher the tax, the better. We're kind of saying, hey, we're in a society. If we want to have certain public services, we need to set a tax level. That's like a structural thing, which social media explodes. And then that's how you get the disinformation that's really simple. with a clear scapego.

You know, they're eating the cats and the dogs and all of this stuff. It's built for these digital platforms. And so I don't deny that the pro-Trump biases of the people in charge matter and are important. But I actually think it's slightly less important than it might seem because there's such an algorithmic bias to the sort of stuff that the right is putting out. That's an important point because like the Facebook algorithm became a vehicle for right-wing content when Mark Zuckerberg was still a Barack Obama supporter, right? It's like it's that Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, the folks at Bright Barton Daily Caller sort of figured out early on

how to hack the algorithm, like what are the things that worked? And I remember sitting in the White House in 2014 when this was real, when really Facebook really sort of blew up both as a major source of news for people, as the news feed became a certain way, and as right-wing messaging really sort of surfaced a lot. I remember sitting in focus groups after, do you remember the IRS scandal when there was these, which turned out to be a bunch of bullshit, but that all the, that there was his accusation that a bunch of, that Obama had some have gotten a bunch of people in a Cincinnati IRS office to scrutinized deep party groups. And I thought it was one of those things when it blew up in Washington. And I understood why it blew up. It's like the IRS involved in politics that has echoes of watergate. It's going to get attention. But prior to that, we would always in the White House have these situation where it's like there'd be this big thing that like, nominate Politico and CNN, then we would do focus groups and people in the around the country would have no idea what we were talking about, right?

Just not a clue. We did focus groups on the IRS thing and everyone knew. And then we did, then there was like a VA scandal, which is kind of thing that doesn't really blow up in the same way. We did focus groups again, everyone knew. And every time they were sort of reading back, they were framing it to us in right wing terms. And when the moderator asked people why, like where they got this information, the answer was

Facebook. And it's like that, and they had sort of, and the right had sort of figured out how to, like, you know, it was like those Breitbart headlines that were just like so offensive that they would generate so much outrage, which would generate so many comments, which would generate so much engagement. The right has been very good at that in a state ahead of the curve, which is, it's almost shocking how fast they got good at it, considering how bad they were at the internet in 2008, 2012. Is it your, do you think Democrats are, you know, we have a more complicated message. We have a more, a bigger tent. Things are, I think, harder for us in some ways. But we're obviously not maximizing our opportunities here. Why do you think Democrats struggle with the sort of messaging that would do better on the platforms?

I mean, I think part of it is just the messages are inherently a little more complicated. And I say that without even a value judgment, like they could be more complicated and better or not. I happen to think most of them are better. but that doesn't necessarily have to have to be the case. I think that being late to the game to some degree and skepticism about some of us as creators and being slower to adopt that and being more risk averse as well. I mean, none of these are new sort of insights, but if you put them all together,

it has really slowed Democrats down quite a bit. I mean, only after Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election in December, the Biden White House said, let's have a bunch of creators here to kind of talk to us about how to work with them and this sort of thing. And then the other thing is I can't speak to whether this is unique on the left because I'm not in touch with the staffers of any Republicans. But one thing that does happen often is the communication I have with staffers from Democratic elected officials sometimes is really weird in the sense that it completely seems to miss kind of like what I do. Like I will get text messages from staffers that go,

hey, our principal, whoever it is, just put out this letter about what should happen. And if you want a signal boost it. And it's like, no one in my audience cares about that. That would immediately raise red flags. Why is David reposting press releases from elected official? And so there's sort of like, we don't exactly totally know how to work with you yet. Doesn't apply to everybody. But that's something that happens a shockingly high amount of time. I went and I spoke at the request of the House, I went and spoke to the House caucus about sort of the new media environment and podcasting and how to think about content creators as part of your messaging.

I did the same thing for the Senate. You know, and it's like it's sort of as you would expect, and this is a broad generalization, but the younger members get it more than the older members do. And younger is doesn't necessarily, sometimes that means sometimes it just means how long you've been in the House, right? I always sort of argue that politicians, like, understanding the media environment freezes in amber the moment they get elected to office, right? It was just like that the last thing they ever knew was what they, how they consumed media as a normal human, and then that's it. You know, they're except, like Bernie Sanders' team, he's not the youngest, is very good at this stuff.

Like, there are exceptions to it. The staffers, you know, it's like I met with the staffers, with a group of staffers. And what was interesting was a lot of them get it. Like they, you know, they're in their 20s, early 30s. They consume media the way you and I consume media. They listen to you. They listen to Ponce America. They do a lot.

They subscribe a lot of substacks. But it's just very hard for them to convince their bosses who all still live in the old media world, both the members of Congress or the chiefs of staff in some case, particularly in the Senate, of why these things matter. And so they're just, they're being told to bring an old world idea. to a new media world. We also, as a party, became obsessed with signal boosting at some point, like around 2012, where it's like, hey, retweet this thing I'm going to send you and let's drive engagement to it.

And that was before there were, I mean, you were doing it, but there weren't as many content creators who were actually media figures who you could go on their show or have a conversation with or working into the coverage that you would sort of treat as a media, as a member of the media, not a fellow Democrat with a large Twitter following, you know? And I think that, that is, they have struggled to adjust from that. Like the term signal boost drives me insane. Yeah, yeah. The other one that I don't like is, hey, I wanted to send you a couple of flags.

And I'm like, don't send me any flags. I don't need any flags right now. Just let me know if, you know, your boss wants to do an interview and then we can actually have a conversation. But to your point, there are increasingly more and more. I find it to be especially governors whose teams do really get it and are understanding that kind of like long form don't over. manage, certainly don't say, only talk about these three things. Just like if you can trust the

principle, let them do their thing. And it's going to be far more authentic. And when you think about that, it reminds me of when Trump sat down with the knelt boys. I mean, he told 150 lies during that thing. But it didn't matter because you got the sense that he was kind of hanging out, giving his genuine, authentic opinion about things, which is a deplorable opinion in so many different ways. But the feel of it is something voters just identify with in a much more direct way. Yeah, one of the pieces of advice I try to give politicians or their staff is like, fine, is like you have, the goal when you go on a show up is not to just say the words your pollster told you to say. You have seven minutes. No matter what happens, you have to get

all your message out in that seven minutes. Don't care what you. Don't answer the question. Deliver your answer. And it's like, that's not how the world works anymore for a couple One, people are very skeptical of politicians. So if you sound like a politician, you're fucked. It's over. So if you're doing talking points, you've lost. I don't care if you're doing it on CNN. You're doing it on your show.

You're doing on our show. Anywhere else, you sound like a politician, you've lost everyone. The second thing is that you, because people hate politicians and they're very skeptical of them, you're starting at a deficit. So you have to convince them you're human. So, like, what is the thing you authentically care about that's not politics? Right. Like what, you know, and like, you find a way to talk about that somewhere, right?

That could be sports. Like you hear Josh Shapiro was always talking about Philly sports. He cares a lot about Philly sports. You hear J.B. Pritzker cares. He is a Star Wars nerd. And he will talk about Star Wars until the, you know, to the Calus come home. And he did an interview where he came up Ponce America with Love it. And they talked about their favorite Star Wars.

They ranked the Star Wars movies. Like that, like you just seem like a normal human. And people are just like afraid to do that. And you can only do that in a long form conversation. That's right. And that's the other thing which I think you're sort of alluding to, which is the talking points can't fill a long term, along the form conversation. So you all of a sudden have a 53 minute hole to fill. Yeah. And you got to talk, you got to talk about things. Are there politicians out there who you think are doing it right, who understand this media environment and are sort of communicating the right way? And we'll stipulate AOC and Zoron right away, but are there others? Yeah. I think there's no, there's no. one person that does it all perfectly, but in the last year, definitely, I mean, I think

Gavin Newsom's team definitely seems to understand how to use a lot of these platforms. I think J.B. Pritzker is pretty good. I was with him a few weeks ago in Chicago and did an interview with him. And he was pretty freewheeling and was up for talking about whatever. And his team seemed to understand who everybody was. And I think that that was a great thing. Not in more of an interview format, but Adam Schiff is pretty good at putting out reaction videos to things that are happening in the Senate and sort of like explaining how these relate to what people are experiencing and they get a huge amount of traffic. So I think I think that that's that strong.

I think Wes Moore has been quite good. And his team seems to understand. There's really a lot that are getting better and better at it. Corey Booker's team also is pretty on the ball in terms of being proactive, but not in a way where they're asking you to cover press releases. They're actually giving you, hey, he's doing this thing. is what's interesting about it. We would love for you to talk about it or whatever kind of thing. So I think there's a growing list of people who get it. If you were giving it, like we're going to

have somewhere between 12 and 200 Democrats running for president in 2028. If you had a chance to sit down with them and give them some advice about how to be a more effective, more authentic communicator in that presidential election, what would you tell them? The primary thing would be get your staff out of the way. You've got to make sure. that you are not trying to have an authentic conversation with two weeks of forced in authentic communication between producers and staff in between, because that just really kills things.

I mean, I think that obviously know what you stand for, understand what is important to you, know who you're talking to. All of those things are important. But I think the most important thing is don't allow staff to get in the way of what can be really good conversations. David Packman, I think we'll leave it there.

Thank you so much for spending the time with us today. Hope to talk to you again soon. My pleasure. That's our show for today. Thank you to David Packman for joining the show. Love it, Tommy, and John. We'll be back in your feet on Tuesday. Bye, everyone.

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