Pod Save America - Political Violence Shocks Washington

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

As more details emerge about the gunman who tried to rush the White House Correspondents Dinner, one thing is clear: it must be Democrats' fault. Jon, Lovett, and Tommy discuss the reaction to the violence in Washington and on social media, whether Trump will be able to use it to get his ballroom project un-stuck, and the latest with the stalemate with Iran. Then, Lovett talks with Katie Porter, one of the leading Democrats in the race for governor of California.

Pod Save America is brought to you by SimpleSafe. Between the news cycle and the chaos of everyday life, your brain already is too many tabs open. Having a system that lets you check the arm status from your phone means you're not lying awake at 2 a.m. wondering if that thumped downstairs was the cat or something worse. SimplySafe is more than just a camera. It's a comprehensive ecosystem of sensors, cameras for inside and out in 24-7 professional monitoring. In the event of a break-in, flood, or fire, Simplysaf's agents are ready to take action. With SimplySafe, you can easily customize a system that's right for your home at Simplysafe.com. and ships to your door in a few days. With app-guided setup and no drilling required, you can install an arm your system in under an hour.

No need to wait around for a technician appointment. There are no long-term contracts or hidden cancellation fees that simply safe earns your business by keeping you safe, not by trapping you in a contract. Get 24-7 monitoring for a fraction of what the traditional brands charge. Look, we've all lived in places without security systems, and we know that that noise downstairs is a little scarier. That thump outside is a little more freaky, the floodlight going on.

You don't like that. It really gives you some peace of mind to know that you have a SimplySafe system, that you can check it from your phone, that you have cameras inside it out, there's sensors, there's 24-7 monitoring. That's why we highly recommend it. We've partnered with SimplySafe to offer an exclusive discount to our listeners. Right now, you can get 50% off your new system by visiting Simplysafe.com slash crooked. That's half off at Simplysafe.com. There's no safe like SimpliSave. Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm John Favro. I'm John Lovett. Tommy Hithor. On today's show, we're going to talk about the awful. shooting at the White House Correspondents dinner and the predictably idiotic discourse that's ensued. Republicans blaming Democrats, Trump trying to get Jimmy Kimmel fired, conspiracies about the whole thing being a setup. We'll also check in on the stalemate in Iran. Why talks have fallen apart and what the options are from here. Then Love it talks to Katie Porter, who stopped by the studio, former

member of Congress and one of the leading Democrats in the race for governor of California. Before we get to the news, two big announcements. Love it. Love it or leave it. It's going to two days a week. There's too much news. We have to cover too quickly, so we're going to get more episodes out more quickly, and we're going to be shooting it in a studio with a live studio audience for the first time. We have a bunch of amazing guests lined up, including

Melissa Etheridge, Ron Funches, Beck Bennett, Kyle Mooney, Ginger Midge, and more. We're doing a show as part of the Netflix as a joke festival, too. If you're in LA, come see our new studio at cricket.com slash events. Awesome. And also, as you may have heard on the Friday show or on Love or Leave it, CricketCon is

is coming back. We've got three days of events right after the midterms, November 5th through the 7th in Washington, D.C. There's going to be live shows, tons of panels, new ways to connect with other political sickos like us. Head to Kirkacconn.com and sign up for updates, including ticket release dates, lineup announcements, and a lot more. All right. So as you all know by now, on Saturday night, a gunman charged the entrance to the White House Correspondents Center and shot an officer before being subdued and taken into custody. He's now been charged with attempting to assassinate the president. Trump and other senior officials were rushed out of the dinner by the Secret Service,

while other attendees hit under the tables. The rest of the dinner was canceled, and then the president held a briefing at the White House right after, where he talked about unity and was somewhat complimentary toward the media. By the time he sat down for an interview with Nora O'Donnell of 60 Minutes the next day, however, that changed. I was looking forward to making a speech. And it would have been a lot different. I said, I can't make that speech.

I was going to do a pretty rip-roar and spell. I won't go into the total details, but no, I was going to hit people really hard with humor. So much the press. It's the press plus the Democrats, because they're almost one and the same. It's like the craziest thing. I do think that the hate speech of the Democrats,

much more so, is very dangerous. I really think it's very dangerous to the country. The reason you have people like that is you have people doing no kings. I'm not a king. What I am, if I was a king, I wouldn't be dealing with you. He also wrote this.

I'm no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes. What's your reaction to that? Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you're horrible people. I'm not a rapist. I didn't rape anybody. Oh, you think he was referring to you? Excuse me. I'm not a pedophile.

You read that crap from some sick person. Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones. that were involved with, let's say Epstein or other things. I'm not any of those things. Mr. President, these are the gunman's words. Excuse me. You shouldn't be reading that on 60 minutes. You're a disgrace.

But go ahead. Let's finish the interview. Okay. Some fun. Friends on the other side of the plate. First off, anyone, general reactions to what happened and how Trump is talking about it? I mean, for the billionth time, political violence is bad.

It is bad. And not the way to solve problems in this country. And it's a crass political matter. It does seem like it's always backfiring. It does seem like the most likely outcome from this incident is Donald Trump gets a little rally around the flag effect. And I think he would probably agree that that's probably what's going to happen because you don't scramble to pull together a 60 minutes interview last minute unless you think it's beneficial for you to talk about this stuff. So thank God no one was killed. Thank God that, you know, our political debates are afraid, but they're holding.

That won't always be the case. It sucks that Donald Trump is now blaming Democrats for this. It's suck that they're once again, you know, making this about political rhetoric or jokes or criticism. And we're not talking about, you know, the combination of mental health problems and guns or access to guns. It feels like that would be a more worthwhile conversation if we want to curtail violence in this country.

But here we are. Now we're in this stupid defensive crouch for a while because of this bad faith attack about political rhetoric always gains currency and becomes the conversation. Yeah. Yeah, but I was in the air flying back to LA and the Wi-Fi was down. And so by the time I landed, this was already about building the ballroom. And it was already about like funding DHS. It moved beyond just condemning political violence and having that be a unifying thing.

To be honest, like I really like Nora O'Donnell. And I understand why she read that. And I obviously don't think Trump's response is correct. But I do think when you're reading the text from someone who tried to kill the president to the president, you are sharing something that you are only sharing because someone attempted to do terrible political violence. And there's a delicate balance to me between understanding the motivations of people that would do this and trying to understand what the underlying conditions are in our politics, in our society, in our rhetoric that might be contributing to it without elevating the

specific motivations of any one person unless it was directly incited by someone in our political system because the reality is what unites mass shooters, people trying to do political violence. Sometimes they have ordinary beliefs. Sometimes they have unhinged crazy beliefs. But what unites them is this desire to take control, go out in a blaze of glory. It is a contagious idea online. That is what we are grappling with. And the less we make it about the specific political fights we were already having, I think, the better. Yeah. One thing that has changed, I think, in assassination attempts and even violence like this that we've seen is it since the advent of the internet and especially social media like you have seen a lot more of these people be

radicalized online and you know someone ended up finding the shooter's Twitter account and then he moved over to blue sky so they found his blue sky account and it is just a bunch of crazy shit and in the difference between you know that shooter and anyone else is like Tommy said he's probably had a he had a mental break and there's easy access to guns but yeah political violence is always wrong and you the idea that you are somehow a hero or you can solve any fucking problem with violence is crazy and and it's counterproductive and it never works and it only makes more problems and anyone who thinks that political violence is somehow okay or justified if you know the person that you're committing it against is more powerful or more evil or whatever.

It's just wrong and it's stupid. I was thinking about when it happened to the people. I think this is one of those situations where the people outside of the Hilton, Washington Hilton, probably knew that everything was okay more quickly than a lot of the people inside the Hilton. Part of that's because, and we've been there before, there's fucking no service in that ballroom. The Wi-Fi is always bad. And I think if, you know, I think if you were the president or one of the people who was rushed out, you probably knew that the shooter had been taken down was okay. But if you were one of the like 2,500 attendees there and you were under the table, that had to be pretty fucking scary before, like for a little while at least before you knew that the shooter was subdued.

And so that was like one of my first, my first thoughts. Plus by the time the chicken came out, it had to be just absolutely just bone, just room temperature. Starving. Yeah. Just cold chicken. That's true. I do. I think what Trump said to Nora O'Donnell response was weird.

But if someone tried to shoot me and then their words are read to me that I was a pedophile rapist and a traitor, I'd be pretty pissed off too. It is like, it's an interesting journalistic question of when you read a manifesto like that and why and to his face like that if it's antagonistic on perfect. I'm not trying to like nitpick her, but yeah, I'd be pissed too. Again, because it gets sort of put through the lens of politics. And it is a different thing than a mass shooting. There's all these different motivations. But I do think the more we see people that are being radicalized online, they have access to guns. They may have a mental break.

They do see a lot of crazy shit on their phones and on their screens. The more we think of this as kind of one big contagion that we're dealing with, and there's a lot of ways to deal with it. One of them is mental health. One of them is addressing, like, where and how people are radicalizing. Another one of them is the guns. But one lesson we've learned, whether it's in mass shootings or in suicide being contagious, it is that you have to be really careful how you share and talk about the motivations and the methods. that these people use, and that is delicate, right?

Because it is of journalistic value and that getting his responses of journalistic value. It's not an easy call. But I think if you take it outside of this, I think you start to see it more as part of a broader pattern. Yeah. I wonder if he had, if the shooter had named Trump in the manifesto if she would have asked that same question because then she would have gotten the name. I don't know. But who else could he?

Of course. Her being like, oh, you think that was you? Of course he's. Oh, that part, yeah, for sure. But it was funny because she did ask a question before. before that that was like, why do you think people are trying to hurt? This is the third time. I'm glad you're okay, but like, why do you think people are trying to hurt you?

You probably could have just asked that, I guess, and not done the, but anyway. There's been a lot of reporting already about the security protocols at the event and how they seem to have been lower than at other comparable events. What did you guys make of those stories and the security in general, how it went both this time and in general, the security of those events? In general, I think the Secret Service is far more of a mess in the disaster than its public image would suggest, and that's been the case for a long time. But I think in this instance, like the Secret Service Protection is about protecting the President and other designated protectees. And from that perspective, I would argue that the system worked, basically.

I mean, they will review their protocols. They will maybe decide to create like a bigger perimeter, put the metal detectors further out in the future. But Trump was never really in danger. Some criticisms that are worth considering are like, this guy has certainly found and exploited a flaw in their planning by staying at the hotel. Maybe Secret Service needs to think harder about like the totality of senior officials in a room and then adjust. But like the dude sprinted at a security checkpoint, got off one shot, maybe got what, a couple dozen feet within it and then was taken out. And he never got close to Trump. And he never really got close to more official.

So you can always have more security. The uncomfortable reality, I think, is that someone who's willing to die is always going to be able to do some really bad stuff. If this guy had done what he did 30 minutes earlier, I probably would have been a lot worse. But, like, you know, ultimately, I think the process worked the way it was supposed to largely. Yeah, so people know what it's like there. It's where they got him. He was running towards probably the escalators that would have gone down one flight. and then you would have had the doors into the ballroom.

Because the dinner had started, once it started, those doors to the ballroom were closed and they were guarded. So even if the shooter had gotten past that security checkpoint and hadn't been shot there, would have gone downstairs, would have faced another several Secret Service agents, would have had to get through the doors at that point. There would have been others at service. Trump's up on a raise stage. They can pull them backstage. But in general, I do think the Hilton is a bad location for this.

And I think part of it is because the guests in the hotel should never have been able to get close to the ballroom if you're not part of the event or the pre-dinner receptions, right? Like a lot of other people could have been hurt aside from the president who was, I think, well protected. And it's like you said to me about all the senior officials in one place, like, what if someone had brought explosives? Right? Like this, I mean, I don't really go into all the different things that could have gone wrong. But if you were a guest at the hotel, even if you weren't that guy with those weapons, if you had like worse weapons or something, but you were still a guest. you could have probably done a lot more damage. I don't agree with that.

Like, there's a lot that suddenly because this one crazy person ran at the door, there should be things to learn, but like maybe they have to do something different with guests, change the protocols in a certain way. But then all of a sudden, this location is no longer possible for a dinner that's been happening there for decades. Well, Service said that. Service was saying to people in the record that like,

or on background at least, that, you know, we now have a convention center in D.C. that is much easier to protect there. They can still hold the same number of people. They've never liked the Hilton. They said it's always an uphill challenge. You're always working against stuff. The president was also shot outside that building.

Right. And they've still been doing the dinner there. I'm sure that maybe there's better places to do it. But the point I'm making is only in the, we have been taking our fucking shoes off at the airport because of one crazy guy for 10 years. We can't have liquids in our suitcase because of one crazy guy. In the wake of things like this, there's this always effort.

Like, there must be, like, I hope they fix their protocols and learn things from this. The answer to some security breach by one random person can't constantly be that the perimeter gets bigger. The security gets more. Our government becomes more militarized. Fewer of our officials can be together. I know you're not saying that. But I do think that is the reaction.

The second something like this happens, there's an effort to like, there's got to be something we can do to make the whole system safer. And maybe there is, maybe there's not. But we live in a democracy. And if somebody is going to try something like this, they can be stopped. This person was stopped. The system hopefully worked. But like, I think what's been revealed over the last year or two is that Secret Service is pretty bad at its job. Like Butler, there was a guy in a raised position with a rifle with a scope aimed at the president and shot him in, like, it's insane.

Yeah. There wasn't like more changes in turnover. And I think it's the totality of the events that lead me to question Secret Service, even if I think this incident was like not really an issue. There's a, there's a lot of space between like, we must live in a militarized society and there's, you know, what are we? going to keep adding more, you know, protection and people, it's like then just maybe expand the perimeter a little bit, get a better place, make sure that secret service isn't fucking up more. You know, like there's little things you can do to improve it. For sure.

Agreed. Right. You can't solve it, but you can improve a little stuff. Fair. Fair enough. Hodge of America is brought to you by Zbiotics pre-alcohol. You know how we feel about Z biotics at this point. I think I need to stock up again.

I feel like there's a lot of events coming up. There's a code at the end of this copy. Yeah. And because I can't, I can't skip Zbiotics anymore because I did a couple nights ago and it was, it's just tough. You just feel worth it. Just feel terrible. Yep.

Zbiotics, pre-alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's a buildup of this byproduct, not dehydration that's to blame for rough days after drinking. Pre-alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. just remember to make pre-alcohol your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. From the start of baseball season and music festival circuits, April is a sprint of outdoor celebrations.

We're running. Don't let a rough next day keep you on the sidelines. Drink pre-alcohol to stay ahead of the game and make the most of every sunny Saturday. Go to zbiotics.com slash cricket to learn more and get 15% off your first order when you use Crooked at checkout. Zbiotics is back with 100% money-back guarantee, so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they will refund your money. no questions asked. Remember to head to Zbiotics.com slash crooked and use the code crooked at checkout for 15% off. Positive America is brought to you by the Obama Foundation. America, it's time to bring change home.

The Obama Presidential Center is opening this summer and tickets go on sale starting May 6th. In his farewell address, President Obama asked Americans to believe, not in his ability to create change, but in their own. Wow. Now the Obama Presidential Center is opening as a global Center for Change on the south side of Chicago. It's an entire campus designed to empower people of all ages to turn inspiration into impact. From immersive experiences and stunning gardens to an athletic center and public library, it's a place for everyone to reconnect with hope and discover their potential to create change. How excited are you to reconnect with hope? Honestly, pretty fucking excited at this point. It's been gone for a while. I'm very excited to visit

Obama Presidential Center. A lot of us are going to go this summer to check it out. We love the Obama Foundation. want to just live in some nostalgia for a minute. Remember that politics doesn't have to be like it is right now. Be among the first to visit this new American landmark when it opens this June. Tickets are available beginning May 6th. Visit obama.org to plan your visit. The Obama Presidential Center, bring change home. Let's go through some of the reactions to the shooting, starting with what I think might be the strangest. Just hours after it happened, Trump, the acting attorney general, and dozens of pro-Trump influencers essentially made the argument that,

The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a rich guy with a ballroom. The government is now asking the court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by preservationists to block the president's $400 million ballroom because they say it's essential to, quote, ensure the safety and security of the president for decades to come and prevent future assassination attempts on the president at the Washington Hilton. Who would like to point out some of the issues with this line of reasoning? I just like, this is so dumb that I kind of can't believe that this is how they're harnessing. an assassination attempt for political gain. Like, I know,

it was hard to believe. Why, why did the mindless mega influencers jump up? Like, is the argument that the president will never leave the White House again? Right. Just do events at this one ballroom.

What about, is every event in the future going to be de facto government hosted or government sponsored? What about when it goes to the states to do campaign events and rallies and fundraisers? It's like, it's ridiculous.

Just foreign trips. There's overseas speeches. Like, even on like the narrow point of like the, the Hilton. and the White House Correspondents Association, they would absolutely refuse to host a press association speech at the White House on government property.

So it was not even solving that. So Donald Trump gets to control the invites. It's not his fucking event. And then now, so it's like basically every, yeah, I was taking it from the other point, which is that like, yeah, so now every time the president does an event in D.C., the president's like, no, I just don't leave my house. You have to come to me because I have this, this.

Also, the White House has been breached plenty of times, either by intruders who jump over the fence or by the Salahis in 2009. Also, we live in a free society. Even when the Secret Service is talking about the Hilton Ballroom, like there's always the safest place the president could be is to never leave the White House again. But you do and you figure out, you do the best you can, you try to secure places, you figure out compromises

so that the president can go where he or she needs to go, host campaign events, do OTRs where they stop at random places because they don't think anybody knows. There's all kinds of, steps and layers of security that are about the balance between the president being in a fortress and us being in a democracy. No, the answer to the Hilton ballroom being kind of stocked by one fucking asshole is not that the president only hosts from this point on game night only at his house. Ridiculous. Bunker it up. Build your fucking ballroom if you want, man. Just do it legally.

That's all we're saying. Lindsay Graham's putting forward a bill to fund it with taxpayer dollars. Then no. Unbelievable. Right. Like if you want to build it. him at the grinder party but it ran out of alcohol but it's another problem but here's the thing

that no one is like the ballroom problem is that he decided to bulldoze the east wing without going through any kind of process if you want to build

your ballroom do it legally like go through the bribs grow through the proper channels you know David Fahrenheit Holt

the Times just had a piece today or a couple days ago that the they gave a Trump administration basically is building

this thing with a secret no-bid contract after inflating its value by three times and the government is paying also, not just fucking private donors. So like there's a lot of problems that's not just like,

oh, no one will let him build anything. It's like, you just don't want you to build it illegally. Yeah, I don't want him to build it at all. But yeah, no, legally would be best. Right, legally would be best. If he has the power to do and it's legal, then he can do it and we can all complain about it.

Right, right, but the ballroom doesn't become less illegal because this horrible thing happened at the Hilton. Exactly, exactly. Right. Republicans are also using the show. shooting to blame Democrats for not funding DHS, which oversees the Secret Service, whose employees won't be able to get paid after this week because they've been getting paid through Trump's executive order that only has so much money attached to it. Only issue there is that Democrats and

Republicans in the Senate did already unanimously pass a bill to fund DHS a few weeks ago. It's the House that hasn't done anything with it because they're mad about ICE funding. You guys think that attack will fly? They're all doing this today. They're blaming Senate Republicans. Senate Republicans and Senate Democrats have a bill they sent it over. And by the way, we're in the midst of what's supposed to be a process by which they pass that specific bill because they have another vehicle for the ICE funding. I think they just don't trust each other enough or they don't they can't seem to get their shit together. The repunded right now. People can be paid right now. And by the way, on a path to, as much as we tried to stop it, Republicans in the House and Senate with 50 votes in the Senate funding

ice anyway. So there's no real excuse for this other than House Republicans can't get their shit together. Again, in moments of scariness and tragedy, you got to pick your one cynical way you're trying to exploit the thing. You can't start with the ballroom and then go to Jimmy Kimmel and now you swerve back to DHS funding. I would have started at DHS funding and just hit that and try to get a vote on it and got some funding whether it's on the merits or not. But no, the entire conversation is about political rhetoric, not DHS funding. But they have, but this is the problem. They do have the votes. They're the reason.

The only, like, there's no other, the only path to funding DHS is through a vote in the House. That is the next thing. There's nothing on the table in the Senate. That's it. It's absurd. It doesn't make any sense. I get blaming Jimmy Kimmel.

Yeah, that's what we should have started. Let's talk about that. That guy's enough. Once it became clear from the Shooter's manifesto and social media presence that he was motivated by opposition to Trump, the focus of the right-wing reaction moved from the ballroom to the rhetoric on the left. ballroom actually, it's kind of died down now, right? We've moved past the ballroom now. Now we're big into the rhetoric on the left. The ballroom blitz is over. Yeah, just to give you a flavor of how

understated the criticism has been, Senator Rick Scott of Florida said, quote, Democrats want President Trump and Republicans murdered all across this country. Just normal. The latest round of this discourse reached its inevitable climax on Monday morning when Melania Trump tweeted out a condemnation of, quote, hateful and violent rhetoric from Jimmy Kimmel, apparently a reference to a joke made last Thursday night, days before the dinner, where Kimmel delivered a mock address to an imagined correspondence dinner. Here's what the joke, which no one had been talking about until after the dinner, sounded like in context. I do have to ask, though, why do you hate windmill so much? Is it because they can still get turned on by being blown?

Marco knows what I'm talking about. He's been there. But I do want to praise the poetist. Look how far you've come. 30 years ago, you're just some rich guy on Jeffrey Epstein's private jet out of Teterboro, but you worked hard, you stayed friends, you shared some wonderful secrets, and because of that, you're able to fly on that plane seven more times.

Dreams really do come through. Our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow. You know, Melania's birthday is on Sunday. That's right. She's planning to see. celebrate at home the same way she always does looking out a window and whispering what have i done

so shortly after milania posted uh her husband jumped in referring to the sketch as a quote call to violence that was pretty clear uh that's quote beyond the pale and demanding that kimmel be fired uh you guys think the trump's latest attempt to fire kimmel for a joke is going to work so the joke is that milani doesn't like her husband and that he's quite old i was good yeah andrew eager at the bulwark he was like, so the trophy wife who won't be crushed when her rich old husband kicks the bucket trope is older than dirt. And I was like, yeah, that's sort of what it was. But I also think there's another line in there that is what really bothered her because there's a joke in there about Epstein introducing Melania. There's a lot Epstein in there. To Trump. And it's like, man,

you're taking another run at canceling Jimmy Kimmel. Like, dude, open the fucking straight or more moose. You know what I mean? Like, what are you doing here? Cancel hominae. Yeah. So Kimmel, just for more context, Kimball did the fake speech because there's no comedian this year because Trump is scared of comedy or jokes about himself. So they'd owes the mentalist to do whatever he was doing. Big whiff. Yeah, he didn't call his shot on this one. Well, he doesn't predict the future. He can read your mind in real time. That's not really on him. Yeah. He's not, he's not a future secret. He could have been like, hmm, there's a guest in rim. Right, that's true. I guess he could have read that guy's mind. But just like, again, this is, it's all just so bad faith. It's like self-evidently bad faith. A few weeks ago, Trump tweeted that he was glad that Bob Mueller. was dead because, quote, he can no longer hurt innocent people. That feels tonally off. And Trump has made a similar joke to what Kimmel just said there. Last December, he did an event for members of Congress.

Steve Scalese was there. Trump talked about going to visit Steve Scalese in the hospital after Scalise was shot. He said, Steve, I want you to know your wife was crying her eyes out, which means she really loves you. And then he goes, I know many wives that wouldn't be crying. Literally the same joke. Same borsh belt, like Hardy Har Har Har Har, you got him. You got him. secretly hates the husband. And so, like, okay, you're really offended by this. But again, like, if I'm Kimmel, I'm a little worried because your fate is determined by some executive that maybe he's working on a merger and Disney or some shit and, like, decides at some point that you're,

you're not worth it. You know who gets to complain about that joke is anyone who was complaining about it after he made it before the dinner. Like if you, no one, no one raised any objections afterwards. And remember, Donald Trump was still, there was still two attempted assassination. when he made the joke. So it's not like anyone drew a connection because probably because the two assassination attempts were like 600 days before he made the joke.

But like no one said anything when he made it. And someone just, you know, someone found the clip after the thing picked up and were like, all right, a thing to be angry about. Let's do it. Let's go. Yeah, there's a real, in the wake of these things. There's this like nobody, the internet, we were such like kind of naval gazing

and kind of like, we have such like an immaturity about us that like we're not allowed to have any kind of uncomfortable feeling like this is just bad or I or that like it's it's more pleasant to be mad than to be scared or to be to be upset whatever it is and so people just go casting about for like the thing to kind of make them feel the normal feeling they feel in politics which is just antipathy towards their political opponents I just like you know we went through this of course when Charlie Kirk was assassinated and they all did the like we have to take the temperature down and the left's violent rhetoric stuff like that

And let's say at that point you wanted to give them because, okay, maybe they've all, maybe they want to bring the rhetoric down to, right? And maybe this is a good faith. Just bear with me. Maybe this is like a good faith objection here. And they're going to really try. After that, president called for members of Congress to be tried for treason, put to death, amplified calls for their execution, literally said they should be hung. This was over the video of the illegal orders video. George Washington would have hung them. Celebrates the deaths of Rob Reiner and Bob Mueller. Stephen Miller told ICE agents they have full immunity to do whatever they want. Two of them, a couple of them killed two Americans. Then the administration, multiple people in the administration smeared them knowingly false charge that they were domestic terrorists. And then Donald Trump said, threatened to annihilate an entire civilization.

And also, even at Charlie Kirk's own funeral, Erica Kirk like forgave his enemy. the shooter and Trump was like, I don't. I hate my opponents. I hate my enemies. It's just, and it's like, you know what? There's no effort to take their tone rhetoric down. And it's just just rhetoric either. Like he pardons violent criminals. He posts snuff videos of blowing up boats of fishermen.

Fucking blew up a school in Iran has not even apologized or anything about that. I mean, it's just like the president and his party and the administration have done and continue to do awful, evil, monstrous things. And that has led to like countless death and suffering. And we get to say that. We also get to say that they should be removed from power through purely peaceful and legal means. Like you can say both those things. We have the right to say the first thing. We have an obligation to say the second thing. Both those things can live together. Yeah. Fundamentally, political violence is wrong. And it's wrong because it doesn't just silence the

person that they're trying to kill. It silences the entire society. It silences democracy. It is an authoritarian act. Even when people claim they're doing it for whatever their justifications, maybe it's an authoritarian act. And by the same token, The motivations of one shooter cannot be a way to silence the people who may share those views because it's not their fault that some random asshole on the internet decided to take a shot at the president. It's especially galling to have them claiming that the left is responsible for all of this rhetoric.

When they, I remember when... This time around, I was like, I can't even take it seriously for a second because you people are so fucking phony after the Charlie Kirk thing. After everything you did since then, like, it's so phony. I remember when Donald Trump was first running in 2016. I remember seeing this speech live. And he said, Hillary wants to essentially abolish the Second Amendment. And if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks.

Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know. And because this was new and we were young and naive, I remember being so fucking gutted to see this person say that and to see how many people apologized for it, said it wasn't what he meant, made all kinds of excuses for him. You can draw a straight line from that all the way to the insurrection. And I feel like we have been consistent. Political violence is abhorrent and wrong. It is wrong on the right.

It is wrong on the left. It is stupid when people think it is justified. It is embarrassing and wrong when people apologize for it or try to justify it or become anthropologists for it. And it is wrong when the president of the United States, especially, is someone who has encouraged political violence for years. And the fact that there are a lot of Republicans who would like to point the finger fucking Chris Murphy or whoever else for telling the truth about Donald Trump,

I can't look in their own house is part of why we got here. I was just like just one person on the right I would take seriously if they said, you know what, like there's some pretty bad rhetoric coming out of Donald Trump's mouth in this administration and Donald Trump has been pretty bad on some of this. And also there's some incendiary rhetoric on the left as well. And I think we, you know, even if one person said that, I would maybe take them seriously, but none of them even try. None of them we even address the fact that Donald Trump says any of that shit.

So whatever. Mike Johnson sort of just gave up the game today. I don't know if you saw that quote in his interview today on Fox when he was talking about this. And then he said, I hope voters remember this in the fall. You've got to keep the grownups in charge. And that's the Republicans. I don't want to have. I don't want to put the shit.

Hey, we're doing this because we think maybe this can help us win the midterms. So I just want you to know. I definitely hope the assassin loses his congressional race. Yeah, me too. Potta of America is brought to you by ORA Frames, looking to upgrade. your Mother's Day gift beyond the usual flowers, look no further than aura frames. I got my parents in ORA Frame

for Christmas. They absolutely love it. It is so easy with the app to just upload pictures that goes right onto their aura frame and you can keep changing them whenever you want and when grandparents have grandkids, they love that more than anything. They got free unlimited storage,

add as many photos and videos as you want. Preload photos before it ships. Keep adding from anywhere, anytime. You can personalize your gift and add a message before it arrives. The gift box is included. Every frame comes packaged in a premium gift box with no price tag. And of course, download the free ORA app or text photos straight to your frame.

The mom in your life can stay up to date with all the best moments you capture. Make Mother's Day special with ORA Frames. Name the number one digital frame by wirecutter. You can save on the GIF's mom's love by visitingoraFrames.com. For a limited time, listeners can get $25 off their best-selling Carver Matframe with Code Crooked. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com. Promo code Crooked, support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply.

This podcast is brought to you by USA for UNHCR. With conflict spreading and global uncertainty rising, the world is at a critical moment for fleeing families. Refugee numbers have hit a record high, yet the lifeline they rely on is disappearing. Over $1 billion in funding cuts are forcing UNHCR to make the impossible choice of who receives help. Sick children are being denied,

water, and the elderly are losing access to life-saving medical care. Families are being pushed into overcrowded camps where cholera is rampant, while survivors of sexual violence are left without critical support services. Your donation to the UN Refugee Agency can rush emergency aid to those in need. Once a donation is made, relief can reach refugees within 72 hours of an emergency. The UN Refugee Agency is operated in over 130 countries worldwide and over 70 years of experience protecting refugees. This UN Refugee Giving Day joint a life-saving movement.

Every gift is matched doubling your impact for families. Donate at UNrefugees.org slash pod save to help save lives. Your donation will be matched. Help the millions of displaced people around the world this giving day. Donate at UNrefugees.org slash pod save. One reaction that was notable, if unfortunately not surprising, was the absolute explosion of conspiracy theories about, quote, what really happened. Our DC correspondent, a crooked Matt Berg, got a hold of data showing that there were

450,000 Twitter posts containing the words conspiracy hoax staged or false flag in the 24 hours after the shooting, which is almost as many as right after Butler. Is this just the new normal? And why do you guys think so many people want to entertain the notion that this may have somehow been staged? I think it's the old normal too. I mean, there's something in America's DNA that just makes us distrustful of government and concentrated power and prone to believe in conspiracy theories. I think it is a feature, not a bug of America. American life. The founders of our country believed in conspiracy theories about like British plots to do things. There was Masonic temples. The Catholic conspiracy theories were around forever.

And also like, on top of the other. The U.S. government has given people ample reason to question official narratives from the JFK assassination to the lies about Vietnam, to Quintel Pro to the Iraq war. And then more recently you have QAnon, which is obviously bullshit and crazy and has a thousand offshoots that are insane. But the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, I think, made people feel like, huh, maybe they weren't so wrong. And so you take that American DNA, you sprinkle on some social media algorithms and some news outlets that make money off this stuff and are like seeding it all. And it just feels inevitable. And so I think on a human level, a conspiracy theory makes you feel like you have a unified theory to explain why bad things happen that isn't the world is chaotic and out of our control. And that's just the way it is.

And like it just makes you feel like, oh, that's the one thing. Okay, like now I have some sort of control over this when you really don't. Yeah. And I was thinking it's like instead of trying to frame it as either I should believe conspiracy theories or I should. shouldn't or I should trust the government. I shouldn't. Just take like each one as it is. It's like, I'm just trying to think about staging this fake assassination attempt. Like, how does it work? What is the, and also like, what is the benefit here? Like, he gets a, he gets a five point bump in the polls that goes away in a few weeks. If that, yeah. Or, and the

judge in the, in the ballroom case feels bad and then dismisses the lawsuit. And that's, that's worth risking his own life and the lives of the people around him. I just, I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze. No. On this one on the station. the attempt. Also, I'm not sure quite how you do it. The guys from California, he's been posting things about opposition to Trump for like a couple

years now. I was going to say, that's a long, it's a long game. It's a long game. Yeah, man. I think everything Tommy said is right, but as with everything else, like people are more isolated. They are like, when you start seeing one conspiracy theory, you start to see others

and it just feeds that worldview. view and there's not enough natural kind of checks against it, whether as people seeing the news on their television just happen upon it and people having tighter social circles, people having more friends. So I just think there is this conspiratorial kind of the internet is conspiratorial. Social media is fundamentally conspiratorial. It's why it rewards the right more than it does. The left, it feeds a kind of anger and an animosity and a loneliness and a paranoia and a sense

that everything is happening to you and that you have no place in it. Sarah Longwell and I were talking about this on the Sunday pod we did with like people are now in focus groups saying, well, I'm a big conspiracy person. It's not like a thing you're ashamed of or like, you know, kind of like walking on eggshells around. It's like, oh, people like, I love conspiracy. It's like part of their identity now. Then I guess I would just say for folks who believe that on this one, think about it this way. And a couple other people have made this point. So it's not new. But Donald Trump, would he have rather the night gone how it did or would he rather have gotten to give his speech where he had the press captive for a full hour and,

was going to just tear into them so that everyone could hear and make all those jokes. He was really excited to do what he was about to do. This outcome was probably more beneficial. Well, he wants to, he's so excited about it he wants to reschedule it for 30 days so we can go give this speech.

Yow them again. Yeah, I just, I think, I don't know if this is the best outcome. Before we move on, we should address the other incident of attempted political violence in D.C. on Saturday night at an after party hosted by substack independent journalist Michael Tracy and Jim Acosta got into some kind of a shouting match

about Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown, whose reporting broke open the Epstein scandal. Speaking of conspiracies, not Julie Brown, but the Epstein scandal. Afterward, Tracy tweeted, quote, Jim Acosta threatened to fight me tonight at the substack party, to which Acosta replied, that's because you are trash. Tracy then posted maybe one of the greatest tweets of all time, quote, still have no idea whatever went on with Trump tonight. Just know Jim at Acosta

threw a fucking hissy fit. Pussy. Jim, meet me in front of the Hampton Inn. Then he posted a picture of the Hampton Inn. With the address of the Hampton Inn. No, first the address, including the area code and the country. Then he followed up with a photo

of the facade. And then the caption was Jim, I'm literally waiting for you right now. You piece of shit. So then Julie Julie K. Brown posted that Jim Acosta was a total gentleman. Yes. So it does sound like, I mean, Michael Tracy sounds like he's a piece of shit. So Julie Brown, she said the Michael Tracy, she's like tweeted criticism of him before.

She said he was paid, she asked or wondered aloud on Twitter if he was paid to harass and Samir Epstein's survivors. So I think he asked her about that. But Tracy has also attacked her reporting and accuser fabricating quotes. So a lot of like the underlying dispute is about the reliability. of claims made by some of the victims, especially Virginia Jufray. So I don't, God knows what they were talking about. But Julie Brown says that Tracy was harassing her.

Jim Acosta steps in to try to get him to calm down. And that led to what I think are some of the funniest tweets in the history of Twitter. Like, me, in Ohio style, I'm waiting for you outside the Hampton Inn. It's so funny to me. Yeah. Also, like, on that night. Everything else is so serious going on, like, just a constant stream. Relentless.

know what's going on with Trump tonight, but you are trash, you pussy meet me in front of the ham today. And then later, Olivia Giuliano, who's like a 23-year-old woman political activist, she's still like, hey, since you like picking on women so much, why don't you pick on me next time? And Michael Tracy responded to her, okay, let's do it. You want to meet up somewhere tonight? Like he was trying to fight her. So now this guy is threatening to beat up this Genzi woman. Then he later said, who are you sending in your stead at Olivia Juliana, I would have loved to give you the nice beat down you requested. No holds barred. Do you think he's still at the Hampton in right now just waiting for anyone to show up who might

have a substack or any kind of he's just waiting for an influencer to walk by. You know, I will say, I used to be sort of, oh, how do people get radicalized and do crazy things? I don't know. Yeah, we got to follow the figure out what, how do we get Tracy, how to get Tracy how to get Tracy off the Hampton Inn pipeline. But yeah, like I remember when we like we were working on dinner back of the day. It was like, it's a little bit weird, like all the press is there? It feels a little too chummy. Like, you know, it feels like, is politics just a show? And now all these years later, it's like, you know what? It had its problems, but like, there was something good about people being able to be in one space. But then I think, you know,

what we were really missing that like 1960s, 70s, 80s, coked out people who don't have an internet. So the only time they finally get to fight each other is in person. And there's like, like, Gorvadol's getting slugged in the face, Dormin Moller's there, making a little quip like that come on let's get back to that but again it does sound like the in-person portion of this fight seemed much more boring than what we got online so even even that

like it seems like there was a little altercation in person these dorks don't want to fight anybody right because it's like but this this no one would be talking about this without the beautiful Hampton in posting yeah I also think it's worth saying the fact that yes like what a confrontation it seems like based on what everyone was saying that that Tracy like wouldn't

let Julie K. Brown walk away from him. So he's basically like kind of like yelling at a, at a woman at a party about the Epstein files. Yeah, wild. Also, you guys don't want to fight anybody. Like best case, you win the fight and then you go to jail. Worst case, you lose the fight and then you're like severely injured. None of you like to stop it.

It's not pretending you're fighting anybody. Fighting is not cool. You're adults. Movies make punches seem like movies and punches, I think give people a bad impression of punches. Yes. What will happen is you'll throw one punch, then you'll grapple, and then you'll be exhausted and you'll fall on the floor. And the cops will arrest you. Yeah. Have fun. All right. Well, there are other things happening in the world, believe it or not, as Trump's interviewers over the weekend tried to remind the president. Here's answer to Fox News's Jackie Heinrich in a phone interview about why he called off Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner's trip to Pakistan for a new round of Iran talks and where things stand right now. We're not doing this anymore. We have all the cards. If they want to talk, they can come to us or they can call us.

You know, there is a telephone. We have nice secure lines. We've wiped out, largely wiped out the opposition. If we ever had to keep going, would wipe them out very quickly. The rest of it, the remainder. And I hope we don't have to do that, but it may be possible that we do. They have no cohesion. Their leadership is very, very strange. Sometimes you don't have any idea of that you dealing with. So in a separate interview with Fox, Marco Rubio echoed that last point saying, quote, unfortunately, the hardliners with an apocalyptic vision of the future have the ultimate power in that country, seeming to indicate that the new Ayatollah and his loyalists are stopping the more moderate block from offering any concessions on Iran's nuclear program. The state of play right now, American officials say, is that Iran is offering to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for an end to our blockade of their ports and punting the issue of Iran's nuclear dust. others known as the more than 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium to a later date. German Chancellor, Frederick Mertz, said on Monday that Iran is, quote, humiliating the United States with how its approach to the negotiations. Tough to disagree. Tommy, where does this leave us?

Friedrich Mertz. Yeah, this makes me triggered on a lot of levels. Back in the day, we would talk about how there were politics in Iran and diversity of opinion and moderates and hardliners and Republicans would be like, you're so naive. They all chant death to America. They all hate you. It's like Rubio's whining about the hardliners, killing off hopes of a nuclear deal with the moderates. Like, yeah, buddy. Well, maybe because Trump pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018. And then you started bombing them with the Israelis and you bombed them during talks. And then you killed the Supreme Leader and you killed Ali Larjani, who was one of the negotiators. And now the IRGC, the military is grabbing more power, just like literally everyone predicted. So now it sounds like we're left trying to negotiate a deal that is just about a straight of Formuz,

which is now closed but was open before the war started. And all the nuclear issues are unresolved. The 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium is just sitting there. The Iranian military has lots of ballistic missiles. They're repairing the launchers that they used to fire them. And the U.S. is like kind of relatively protected from the economic fallout. Like our gas has gone up, but not a lot. But, you know, factories are shutting down in Asia.

Lutonza canceled 20,000 flights because of fuel shortages this summer. yet countries rationing energy. And if this keeps going, there's going to be recessions in Asia, Europe, the Gulf. You could see higher food prices down the road in Africa, if not shortages. So, like, yes, this is humiliating for the U.S., as Mertz says. Not just, though, because J.D. Vance is sitting on a tarmac in Islamabad, but because Trump has started a war and he has no ability to end it or losing it. I noticed in reading some of the pieces about this that the U.S. or the,

the Trump administration officials and Trump himself have not yet rejected this plan from Iran on like opening the Strait of Hormuz for and ending the blockade and then kicking the nuclear negotiations down the road. And I was starting to wonder like I could see an outcome knowing Trump where he they make that deal. He opens the, opens the straight and then says, and we got our eyes on the nuclear dust anyway. And we're going to, we're going to get that later. They try anything with that dust. They don't even know what's going to happen. And we got all the cards and we're going to negotiate real strongly later and you know what we've destroyed the regime regime change we've destroyed all their missiles not true uh we've done all this stuff and we're gonna and now they made a big

deal they because the blockade hurt them so much they couldn't deal anymore and now we control the strait and the straits open and we won it's a lesson from Donald Trump for german chancellor Friedrich Mertz which is no one can humiliate you without your consent it is uh yeah I think he's gonna try to walk away from this thing yeah that's like I could see that happening Although I guess it also part of the deal was that Iran was like if the Strait of Hormuz opens in this deal, they're still going to charge the tolls. Open for that means you go on the route, we tell you to go, and you pay us a fee. So it's actually worse than it was before. Everything will be worse than it was before.

They will have more revenue to rebuild all their nuclear infrastructure and all their military infrastructure. And by the way, like there's some reports today that Iran retains two-thirds of its air force, the bulk of its missile launchers. Like, you know, it's just a mess. Even that was bullshit. All right. When we come back, Love It talks to California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter. Pod Save America is brought to you by Hymns. ED is way more common than most guys think. Millions of guys deal with it at some point, and that's exactly why Hymns offers a straightforward way to handle it. Hymns connects you with licensed health care providers online, giving you simple access to legitimate ED treatment options from home.

No awkward appointments, no pharmacy lines. Just complete a simple online intake, and a provider will review your information to determine if treatment is right for you. if prescribed your treatment ships directly to your door in discrete packaging. That includes sildenophil, also known as generic for Viagra, available through Hymns at up to 95% less than the brand-named version. And if that option isn't right for you, there are additional treatment options available, so you can find what works best for your body. It's straightforward, transparent, and designed to make getting care feel easy. To get simple online access to personalize affordable care for ED weight loss and more,

visit, Hymns.com.com slash crooked. That's Hymns.com slash crooked for your free online visit. Hymns.com slash crooked. Prescription required. See website for details and important safety information. Saldanafil is the generic version of Viagra. Viagra is a registered trademark of Viatris specialty LLC. Hymns is not affiliated with or endorsed by Viatris. She's a former member of Congress from Orange County and a candidate for governor, the real single mom of Orange County. Katie Porter, welcome back to the show.

Great to be back. So I want you to know something. I'm an undecided voter. So this is an interview, but I'm also a constituent. First of all, what have you learned on the campaign trail that has surprised you so far? I would say how just kind of demoralized people are about politics, the biggest opponent in this race, and there's been a lot of speculation about who's going to win and who's winning and who's not winning. Actually, the biggest opponent in this race has been apathy.

Until a couple of weeks ago, people would stop me and say, like, you're running for governor, you're great, but like, I like Gavin. And I would be like, hey, guess what? like I'm not running against Gavin and Gavin's term limited. Even now, I think people feel like they look toward politics, what they often see is what's coming out of Washington, and that is upsetting. And so then they don't want to think about politics at all. But from the standpoint of a Californian, this is a huge decision for our state. And so one of the things I think that surprised me is having someone who's been in a swing district year after, you know, every two years, swing district. Like voters statewide are not as tuned in.

to we need to make decisions. It's okay to vet and choose among candidates. And so I've been a little surprised in Orange County. Everyone was like, I don't know. I'm not sure. Like, you are the Republicans. Persuade me. And at statewide, it feels a little bit more like, tell me what to do. And I think, like, we need to flex our political muscles and look at candidates and listen to them and think about what the moment calls for and make choices. And I think Californians are a little. little bit out of practice of that. Yeah, it feels like there's two big reasons. One is Trump sucks up all the oxygen. And the other is the problems that are California based are actually not brought about by Republicans. It's a Democratic state with a Democratic legislator. We've got a Democratic governor.

Our cities are run by Democrats. So let's let's talk about each part of it. Let's start with Trump. Governor Newsom told Mark Leibovich that he would encourage his successor to meet with Trump, and build a relationship because it starts out interpersonal, and that Trump might really want that relationship to stick it to Newsome. What do you think about that? Would you head to D.C.? Take one of those smiling pictures like Mom D.N.A. and Karen Bess? Well, I would definitely head to D.C.

And one of the things I would head there for is not just Trump, but to meet with a congressional delegation. Because I saw this when I was in Congress, our state government, whether that's the governor or the legislature in California, and needs a much tighter partnership with our congressional delegation. because our biggest problems here, like housing, are not the biggest priorities of our congressional delegation. That's a mismatch. So definitely go to D.C. in terms of Trump, like, I think you always start out. I knocked on a lot of doors in Huntington Beach, and I would approach Trump the same way

I approached a Huntington Beach voter. Hi, I'm Katie Porter and see where it goes from there. Because if you can have a productive relationship, I'm not real confident it's going to last, given what Trump's doing. But I took Governor Newsom's advice here to be, get a positive thing going for as long as you possibly can. And maybe we can make some progress on things like aid for fire victims that we have been waiting too long on. That said, it's pretty likely that Trump is going to hurt Californians and you are going to have to be ready to punch back. So there's been a few different approaches by different Democratic governors. You have Newsom, I think, has been the most publicly pugnacious. You have Pritzker that has, I think, done similarly,

but also I think had a lawsuit and kind of focusing a bit more on the courts. You've had others that like Gretchen Whitmer that have at least publicly tried to be more conciliatory. Is there a model that you think looks the best, that works the best? I don't think you can have an answer to that because you have a president whose main characteristic is wild unpredictability. So I think most of us get up every day and be like, what are we getting today? So I think you can't know for sure. But I will say my time in Congress, I think I really showed all of the ability to have all of those different responses. So there were Republican members of the delegation like Doug Lamalfa who passed away not long ago that I did two bills with Doug and passed them through the House.

There were other Republicans, Daryl Issa, like I just can't get along with that guy and I don't want to. Don't feel bad about that. Just can't find that opening space. So I think you have to kind of be willing to adapt to what Trump is throwing at you because it's, I think it's going to, we see him changing on the minute. So let's talk about some of your proposals. You pitched getting rid of income taxes for California is making up to $100,000. Now, for reasons that people outside of California may not know, we have a proposition system. Property taxes are limited in a way.

The governor can't change. And what that's meant is, because we have progressive taxes here, year to year, there's huge swings in how much revenue the state has, boom and bust, boom and bust. Wouldn't narrowing the tax base make that problem much worse? The opposite, actually, I think. So first, let's talk about progressive taxes. We have progressive income taxes in California. But we actually, because of Prop 13, have absolutely not progressive property tax. In fact, if you buy something and then it appreciates wildly, you get. the same benefit as somebody who buys something and it stays flat. So we're not progressive there, but more importantly, what I'm really interested in is the fact that we do not have a progressive corporate tax. If you're a corporation in California and you make a dollar and hard-earned profit, you pay 8.84% on that dollar. If you're a corporation and you make $500 million in profit, you pay $8.84. So we could actually adjust that just slightly and actually provide some

tax relief for those really corporations that are struggling. Some are big, some are small, but they're struggling. And in the most profitable years, we could say to corporations, you had a banger of a year. You're going to pay just a little bit more because that's what we say to Californians. You got a big bonus. You got more income. You're going to pay a little bit more. So that's the first thing. The second thing is almost all of the volatility in our revenue system comes from the tippy, tippy top. It comes from capital gains, not from variation. the income. But the reliable part is the income part. There's going to be, we, you will have, the taxes will be applying more at the top. So we get over $100 million in income tax every year.

The people paying under $100,000 generate about $8 billion of that. So it's, it's not a huge, huge fraction. And I think we can safely say we are going to have corporations that make a profit every year. I mean, I've pretty much never seen all corporations lose money. And so I think that's about it. But the bigger reason to do it. But the bigger reason to do it, it is, look, everybody's talking about affordability, to which I say welcome. This has really been my life's work. Families in bankruptcy, people, victims of predatory lending, families facing foreclosure, pharmaceutical prices, all of the work I've done my whole career. But a lot of what I see candidates doing, not just in this race, but across the country, is describing the problem to voters.

Voters know they are already having trouble making ends meet. So affordability might be like a new talking point for some politicians, but it's been in people's lives for a long time. And the second thing is pointing the finger at everybody else for affordability. It's the fault of pharma. It's the fault of fossil fuel. It's the fault of, now look, if you've seen me with or without a whiteboard, you know I'm all about holding those people to account. But government also can take a big step to give people more money. And so if we think it takes $100,000 to support a family in California, If we think that's what it takes, then government can give people more of their money and be part of solving that affordability crisis. Right, but aren't, aren't we just downstream of the problem?

Like, California had an income tax when we were always an expensive state, but when the state was more affordable. As of right now, if we keep on this trajectory, housing's getting more expensive, schools getting more expensive. I know you have policies for all of that. But the reason California is unaffordable is not because we have a broad tax base in which everybody pays into the system. It's because California has a whole bunch of money. of other problems, some caused by the state that are long, that, that hit long before you get to the tax code. Aren't we, aren't we like kind of just sort of, well, shit, California is way too expensive. Nobody likes taxes. Let's get rid of taxes. I don't think that's right. I think we're,

and I think we're actually agreeing here, which is that it's not one or the other. The biggest problem Californians have is the cost of housing. That is the biggest slice of virtually everyone's budget. That's why housing has been my number one issue, not only in this race for more than a year, but in the Senate race. I'm focusing on child care cost. Why? Because if housing isn't your biggest expense, it's probably because you've got little kids and you've got child care. I'm focusing on college tuition.

That's a really big piece. So you can't nibble around the edges of affordability. But look, we are also facing population loss. We are not retaining our own working age people. Our state is kind of demographically aging pretty rapid. If you look at the 10 cities in the United States that are most aging most rapidly, like six or seven of them are in California. And there are big cities. So we do need to say to people who are coming out of college or coming out of apprenticeship programs who are like five years, 10 years on the job, stay here.

Stay here because we're going to let you. And they're often earlier in their earnings. They're often those below 100,000 people. They've got a lot of student loan debt. They've got a lot of child care expense. They're the ones who are suffering on housing, right? So it's not on either or. I think it's in all of the above, but I do think it's really important for government to own directly some of what we put on families.

If you're making $50,000 a year in California and you're a mom, a single mom with a kid, let me go back to my JP Morgan Chase Jamie Diamond example from the whiteboard from years ago. You need every penny. And so the state should do that, should help you have what it takes to live. And so it's not to take away from all those other problems. It's just to say, like, we need all the above. And we need to really get out California's reputation as a place that supports the next generation of workers, the next generation of Californians come here for a better future. If you got every proposal you have put forward through, would the California state government be collecting more revenue or less revenue?

So on the three, two free years at college, which is one of my proposals. So we have two four years at community college under Gavin Newsom. Big shout out to him on that. I think it's someone who's a parent of a 17-year-old with a lot of B-minuses, transformative, okay, to know that I have that option for my kid. So I would do tuition-free years at a CSU, a UC, or a Cal Poly. And then no taxes on families earning less than $100,000. Those two I can make up and have left over with a little touch-up from 8.84 to maybe 9.5 or 10

on the most profitable years on our corporations. The child care is a little different. The child care is going to be something that is bigger. It's longer term. It's probably going to come through a mix of tax revenue. It could be a small payroll tax. It could be partly through corporation taxes. But let me be clear.

Free child care is not something I'm doing for kids. It's not something I'm even doing for parents or grandparents who are tired of being the free child care. Child care grows our economy. And that's what California needs. Yeah, well, that's the reason I asked that is, look, I love California and you can tax the fuck out of me. I'm happy to pay it. I'm not leaving. You and Tom Steyer?

Yeah, me and, yeah. Or apparently not, because he said, he said me not paying tax. Me paying more taxes is not the solution. So here's the, right, but here's the problem, right? Because the politics of this are good old fashioned. People don't like taxes and they don't like billionaires. But right now, California, we collect more per person than every state besides New York. We have the highest tax, top marginal rate of any state.

highest gas tax, it's $10 every time people fill up their tank. We have the worst roads in the country. Highest sales tax in the country. We're losing population to places like Texas. If you look at that, you say, you know what? This state doesn't have a revenue problem. And that may be kind of something that doesn't play well with certain parts of the Democratic base. But the reality is what we have is a deeper structural issue with how our government is run

and where the money is going. And that, to me, is what we need the next governor to focus on. And to be honest, watching that debate, the two Republicans who would be a fucking disaster, seem more excited about that and more energized about that than the Democrats. So let me tell you where I got, because I think, you know, I'm known as a straight shooter, so let me be really straight with everyone. Hit me. Do you know where I got the idea of knowing, no California state income taxes on people earning less than $100,000? Tell me. Where'd you get it? Steve Hilton.

Oh. So the reason I tell you that is, I mean, I think Steve's got crazy pants ideas coming out of his money. most of the time. But I'm looking for good ideas. And the fact that Steve said it, I thought about what that would have meant for me early in my career. I thought about the person who's working as a cashier at my Albertsons and what it would mean for them to not feel like they're paying into a state that right now they don't feel like they're getting what they need out of. So I also think that's part of it is like you're saying you have to be willing to look at spending. You have to make spending decisions, period. And we have been sort of when Gavin Newsom ran in 2018,

and really he gave me so much help on the campaign trail, he came to campaign for me, but look, it was a different moment. And he basically said, we'll have this, we'll have that, we'll have X, we'll have Y, we'll have Q. You can have a free pony. Like, everybody can have everything. That's not where we are right now. So I am absolutely willing to make tough decisions. One of the things I've said is, for example, on homelessness, we've got to put more money into prevention. Why? Because homelessness prevention programs take about $6,000 to prevent someone from losing a home. Permanent supportive housing after someone's been on the streets for six months, that's $850,000. So I'm absolutely

looking at where do we need to shift our spending to give taxpayers more bang for a buck. When I ran in Orange County, I don't think I've ever seen Orange County Republicans more mad at me than when I had lawn signs that said Katie Porter, taxpayer advocate. Because they're like, you can't be a taxpayer advocate. You're a Democrat. But we should all be taxpayer advocates. People should feel like they're getting, bang for their buck. And Democrats should own that and lean into that.

And it doesn't mean you're taking services away from people. It's the contrary. You're saying, is this spending actually doing what we want it to? And so if it's not, we've got to redirect it to somewhere it is. So let's talk about how we like our roads, California roads, they are the worst roads in the country. We also have the highest gas tax in the country. We spend 2.5 times per mile than the average state. What do you think explains that? What would you do to fix that? Like let's, I want to talk about the reform aspect of what we need the next government to do. So I did not support the gas tax in 2018.

And so as we hear everybody sort of say like, this is all Democrats fault. It's like, I didn't support that gas tax. And the reason I didn't support it back in 2018, that extra 12 cents, was it's deeply regressive. It hurts low-income people who have to make long commutes with older cars. You know, I got the 2010 Sienna. It's not getting good mileage. So I think we have to be careful about doubling down on that approach. This is a question of what do you do with your general fund?

What are your priorities? California roads also have improved in many parts of California. don't think that people in Los Angeles feel like they've improved. But I will tell you, my roads in Orange County are great. And we've seen lots of projects and lots of improvements. So there's also like, it's a big state. We've got a lot of places that are doing things that are different. And so I think one of the things I also bring to the race is like, I'm not running to be the governor of Los Angeles or the governor of the Bay Area.

Orange County is the sixth most populous county in the United States. San Diego County is the fifth most populous county in the United States, and these places get treated like political backwater. So to Californians in every part and pocket of the state, you've got to look everywhere. And when you have one city that's not getting it done on any given issue, sometimes it's the city. And you've got to think about how to have those conversations and figure out what's going wrong there. On education, again, another area where California is spending a ton per people. There's been improvement over the years. It's not a totally bad story, but we're clearly still not getting the value we should be in our system.

Part of that is we have, again, a very convoluted bureaucratic system. Governor Newsom in January put forward a set of reforms that have been on the table for literally decades. The Board of Education and the Department of Education are separate and go up to different places. This is a proposal that would have more authority and accountability flow up to the governor. Do you support that proposal? I definitely support figuring out sort of having one place where the buck stops. But why don't you want it to stop with you? Why don't I?

Yeah, let's have it stop with the governor. So I don't have any problem with it stopping from me. But I do think that the governor needs to decide if they're going to do this. And this may be a decision the next governor doesn't get to make, right? Because Newsom's made the proposal. We'll see if it gets through is the governor has to set more steady educational policy. This is one argument for it being with the governor. Yeah.

Because one of the things we see with educational policy being diffused through those different agencies you mentioned, plus the legislature, right, plus the governor is we change educational policy every two years. So what I've seen this as a public school parent. First, it's two years of phonics. Then it's never mind. It's common core math. Then it's never mind. It's remedial this. Then never mind. It's textbook reform. Then never mind. It's class size. One of the things I want to do as governor is decide what we're going to try for eight years. and then really decide at the outset, how do we measure this? And I think states that have made progress on education have done that. I think there's a lot to be said about looking at the state level at where do we lose people and we can never get them back. So if you're not reading fluently by age seven or eight, we never get you there. That's just about brain development. If you don't make that jump from algebra one to algebra two, you are not going to have any of those STEM engineering, even a lot of the building traits. careers are not going to be open to you. And that's a place where the state could really concentrate

its resources. We changed things up with the local control funding formula several years ago. What we haven't done is go back and see whether it's worked or not. So, but isn't this an easy one? Like, what is the reason to not just say, hell yeah, it's stupid how we do it. I don't want to have the, the, the, all the accountability diffused. Like, we have a bunch of laws in California that distribute responsibility haphazardly. It's true in our city. We have this ridiculous city and county. It's true in our, I want to I want a governor who's going to be like, I need this authority because I have a limited amount of time. Like these are great reforms I'd go further. Like I don't understand the hedge.

No, it's just a matter of saying to yourself, like you have to realize that when the governor takes all that, you are still dealing with every county board of education. That's not something you're eliminating. You are not dealing with the local school boards. They still have a lot of authority. So I just want to be very clear. You can and I think probably should consolidate it all at the state level with the governor. But let me be very clear what happens in local school boards, much less what happens in every classroom. That is also in the mix. So if the governor had a stronger authority, you have one entity to do that negotiation. I think that's probably a good reform. So there remains a chance right now that Democrats are going to be shut out of the general election

because of our jungle primary system. So we just had this debate. It was you and three of your opponents on the Democratic side and two Republicans. Should the other Democrats who didn't qualify for that debate drop out? Well, look, the ballot is set. We have 62 people on the ballot. 62. And I just want to remind everyone, that's not totally uncommon for California for governor's races. When Newsom ran in 18, there were dozens and dozens of people on the ballot then, too.

There's always the person whose name is like IP freely, right, who has to be on the ballot. Some good ideas. I think everybody is starting to consult. I think we see this typically happen right around the time ballots go out. I think it is important for groups that are hosting events, whether it's a forum, whether it's a debate. Don't platform people. If you're concerned about this problem, if you're concerned that we're going to end up

with too many Republicans, don't put the candidate with 1% on stage. Like, let's act like grownups about this. And so, but I also think that there's been a push to, and we saw this with Eric Swalwell. There was a huge push that everyone but Eric should drop out. Aren't we glad we didn't do that? Yeah, that would have been a real botch. So I do think, you know, when we ran in 18, we had Newsom, we had Villagoraosa. This is Villagroza Governor Part 2 run. We had Villegroza. We had John Chung. And we had a lesser polling candidate to Lane Easton. But those were good. We had three pretty high polling candidates, maybe a fourth one hanging out there. And that worked out just

fine. So do we want to have eight candidates all duking out on the Democratic side? I don't think so. Should we have three or four so people have some choice or two or three? Yes, I think we should. So let's talk about the other people in the race. Why would you be a better governor than Javier Bissera? Yeah. So I have shown a willingness to go toe to toe with corporate America and a willingness to shake up the status quo. Like, you just did this yourself, John. The status quo isn't so hot. You started this with a litany of things about California that are frustrating. Javier Bacero first entered office

when I was in like middle school or high school. And I'm, you know, I'm 52. Like, I've had Botox a couple of times and people keep telling me on social media, I need it again. I don't disagree. No, no. You need your face.

That's your, that your face is your instrument. So I think, you know, we need someone. We're in a moment of California where more of the same is not going to cut it. We need to change. We need to recognize that we can't just

on ourselves on the back and say we're California. We're the biggest. We got to say to ourselves, what's holding us back from being better? And so I think that taking on the status quo, being willing to do things a little differently, not just going along to get along, I think that's an important quality right now. I also think I'm someone who has, it came into politics because of Donald Trump. So like Abigail Spenberger, like Mikey Sherrill, like Deb Holland, like this whole next batch of governors that we have and are electing, these are my classmates. These are my generational peers in terms of when we came into politics, and we have a different vision of how state should work together than I think we have traditionally seen. And so I think that's really

important. And then the other thing I would say is I'm rolling out real policies. So I am rolling out concrete things that people can count on. And so things like two years of college, nobody's confused about what two free years of college means. Housing, number one priority, been our biggest problem. I think that's different than what we've seen in terms of all get or done. I think people need a different level of specificity and they need to know that you have led with a different level of accountability. So when I was questioning the CDC director early, early in the COVID pandemic, and I asked him, will you make COVID testing free? I wasn't content when he said, yeah, I'll work on it. I said, will you today make COVID testing free? And he did and people got it. And I think that is the

willingness to kind of reimagine government accountability that I think this moment calls for. And so, and then same question on Steyer, but my, you know, a lot of the knock on Steyer, which I think is a very reasonable thing to knock him on is when in his, you know, he put his wealth into things like private prisons and detention centers. And I think that's gross. And he's to explain that. But I'm curious just as a governor, why do you think you would be a better governor, not based on what happened before, but going forward, why would you do a better job than Tom Steyer? Yeah, let me tell a story about being in a caucus meeting full of Democrats. And they were talking about gas prices. And they were like, you know, gas prices, they're high. This is true, by the way.

This is years ago, a couple years ago. Gas prices, they're high. And everybody, you know, got in line and wanted to talk about gas prices. And I raised my hand and I said, you know what? I want to talk about grocery prices because that is the number one thing that has been going up really rapidly. Like I am seeing boxes as a cereal for $10. I am seeing eggs. I am seeing bacon. I am seeing blueberries that are eight bucks. This people are like, wow, who knew? John, I knew because I pushed the shopping cart in my family as a single parent. I'm parenting three kids who are 13, 17, and 20. So basically three teenagers. God help me. I really think about what's it going to mean for them if we don't bring down the cost of housing. What is it going to mean for them if we don't bravely

tackle AI? With all respect to Tom, his kids are going to be set. They're trust fund kids. And it's a different context. So when we talk about like kitchen table economic issues, and you hear politicians say that we should talk more about kitchen table economic issues, that stuff happens every night at my kitchen table. And so I think that it's as much a question about, are you really awake and attuned to what it's like for California families in a way that I just don't think a billionaire can be? So you've been asked to explain for years old videos where you lost your temper too many times. And I don't want to do that. But I had this feeling when I was watching you in the debate. And what I thought was, where's that energy from Katie Porter telling someone to get the

fuck out of her shot? Like, you think Tom Steyer is buying this race, he put $120 million in just to get his name up there. You've been fighting this on the street. You think Javier Bessera did a terrible job at HHS. You think he's super vague, has no idea what he's doing, and won't be able to get anything done. That's what I think you think. But I think there's, like, a part of you that is like, I don't know.

I know. Where is that part of that? And I worry that like you've been hit with this attack and you, you should treat people well. And I believe you do. Or have you've apologized for this in the past. But like, like, sometimes I'm like, I don't want to direct it at your staff in the room. And I don't think this person deserves to be yelled at. But I would like to see that get out of my fucking shot energy on the campaign trail. And I wonder if you feel that tension as a as a woman, as a candidate. I mean, look, there is California's never elected a woman governor. Let's just put it out there. And the last time Democrats had a woman nominee, do you know? Little trivia, live trivia.

Do, do, do, do, do. I don't know. Ninety-four. Oh, wow. I was a sophomore in college. And a lot of voters weren't born at that point. It was Diane Dynne's granddaughter, I believe. It was Kathleen Brown.

It was Kathleen Brown and, you know, the sister of the governor, the daughter of the governor. So there is real people have a hard time believing something they haven't seen. I have a new appreciation in this race for what it means to go first. In a lot of my life, I wasn't necessarily a first. I wasn't the first woman even elected to represent my district in Orange County. I was the first Democrat in a long time, but I beat a woman to get there. In the Senate race, I was running with Barbara Lee, right? An iconic woman.

And so the dynamics were, I think the gender dynamic and the discussion was different. I also think people are really sad that we have Donald Trump as president and are trying to assign kind of why that might be and how to understand that. You're seeing that pop up in discussions of who the 28 nominee should be. But nobody should make any mistakes. Like, I'm tough as hell. And that hasn't changed. And I'm running my campaign and taking on policy issues that are tough. We just had a back and forth about taxes in which, you know, you're.

You ask tough questions and I explain to you why I think you're wrong. I'm running my campaign not taking corporate money. Believe you, me in a state like California where, quote, that can't be done, quote, I'm showing that it can be done and I'm willing to be tough and say that I don't think our next governor should be bought and paid for by Chevron or be funding their campaign with fossil fuel money. That was a crazy quote by Bissera, by the way, about having, do you need Chevron? Who needs Chevron? Do I need Chevron? Do you need Chevron? Javier Bacera should not need Chevron, just to be clear.

Like, we right now need gas for cars in California, but no politician needs to be bought and paid for. That's a choice that every one of us makes. And I've made a different choice. And I think that is one of the reasons Californians can trust me. Back to kind of the debate stage look. Like, every debate has its own Evan Flo. The more candidates you have on stage, the harder it is.

I think I was the only one who punched hard at Chad Bianco for telling California to get over racism. And I said without mincing any words, racism is not something you get over. Racism is something you fight and you, Mr. Bianco, are unfit to lead a state that's diverse as California. What you're saying to black and brown Californians, to immigrant Californians, is unacceptable. But this is also a moment where people want to know you're tough, but they also want to feel like they can trust you. And I think you're always having to balance that. And so you're going to see that. Our first TV ads, they have me, they're up on air, they have me with the, you know, the whiteboard warrior, I'm taking these people to task, you know, Diamond, Trump's appointees,

Ben Carson. And then you're going to see some ads that are more about, like, what we just talked about. Like, here I am, a mom. Don't want my kid to live on my couch. And frankly, like, staring that down with these three teenagers. Are they ever going to be able to live on their own? And so I think you always want to have a balance on that. But I don't, I don't think I've changed. I think it's just like when you're doing an oversight hearing, you're the, you're the there to do some oversight. That, that stings. In a debate, you're trying to show people different kinds of sides of you all in a one-hour format. And we've also got more debates to come. So make no mistake, like people who are not being truthful and not taking accountability for their own

mistakes, as you said, I've taken accountability for yelling at that staffer four years ago, five years ago. And that's appropriate. But that doesn't mean that Javier Biserra shouldn't have to take accountability for losing 80,000 unaccompanied children. He should. And I'll hold him to that account. Last question. You said you were watching heated rivalry. Ever on a plane?

It's a tough show to watch on a plane. None of my plane worse, worse than on a plane. I was sitting there. I was on episode two, and my two teenagers come home, 13 and 17. And Betsy walks in and she's 13, and she says, clock it. because she's apparently unbeknownst to me, watched, he did rivalry and loved it. Okay, so.

And Paul says to me, he's 17, why do you have to watch porn in the living room? Right? And then we had an interesting discussion about would you feel like this, if this was porn, if this were heterosexual sex, an interesting discussion. But like, I am enjoying it. I have one episode to go. And actually, I wanted to ask you something. Can I ask you one thing? You can.

Love this book. So I want to pitch something. I am not a paid influencer. This is awesome. Yeah. I am not a paid influencer. Woodworking. Woodworking.

Did you guys publish this book? Yes, we did. Okay. So I didn't know that until yesterday that you guys had a publishing house. Everybody who is interested in understanding what it's like to be a trans person and where different trans people can be in their journey and how people can help them and hurt them. Love this book Woodworking, not being paid by crooked media, but just telling everybody this is my library copy, highly recommend. Wow. Shout out to woodworking. And I have like 30 pages left, so don't blow it.

No spoilers. No spoilers. Well, Katie Porter, good luck on the campaign trail. Thanks for talking to me. Really great seeing you. Thank you. That's our show for today. Thanks to Katie Porter for coming on. I'll be gone for Friday's show. But Dan and our buddy Alex Wagner will be back with a new show on Friday. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to cricket.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast,

substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. Also, please consider leaving us a review that helps boost this episode and everything we do here at Cricket. Pod Save America is a Cricket Media production. Our producer is Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer.

Reid Churlin is our executive editor. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seiglin and Charlotte Landis. Matt DeGroote is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, Carol Pellevieve, David Tolls,

and Ryan Young. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.