Pod Save America - “Republicans cancel a Cheney.” (PLUS - Elizabeth Warren!)

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

Republican cancel culture comes for the Cheneys, Mark Zuckerberg’s private Supreme Court upholds Facebook’s decision to suspend Donald Trump, and new Census figures show that an increasingly diverse electorate may not help Democrats as much as the party has hoped. Then, Senator Elizabeth Warren talks to Jon Favreau about her new book, Persist, and whether she has a plan to deal with Joe Manchin.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsavetheworld. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, Republican cancel culture comes for the Cheneys. Mark Zuckerberg's private Supreme Court upholds Facebook's decision to suspend Donald Trump for now. And new census figures show that an increasingly diverse electorate may not help Democrats as much as the party has hoped. Then, Senator Elizabeth Warren is here to talk about her new book, Persist, and whether she has a plan to deal with Joe Manchin.

But first, check out the latest episode of Hysteria, where comedian, activist, and stepmom Lindy West joins to talk all things motherhood with the crew. Check it out and subscribe to Hysteria wherever you listen to your podcasts. All right, let's get to the news. Liz Cheney, the third ranking Republican in the House with one of the most conservative voting records in Congress, is on the cusp of losing her leadership post for the mortal sin of admitting that Donald Trump lost the election, tried to steal it,

incited a violent insurrection when he failed, and probably shouldn't run again, nor should anyone who tried to help him overturn the results. In response, the twice-impeached one-term loser called her, quote, a warmongering fool who has no business in Republican Party leadership. And House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who makes Paul Ryan look like he has a steel spine, has reportedly decided to do Trump's bidding and orchestrate a vote to strip Cheney of her title as conference chair. The news broke shortly after McCarthy was caught on a post Fox and Friends hot mic saying this. I think she's got real problems. I've had it with her. I've lost confidence. I've had it with her. I've lost confidence.

I've had it with her. I've lost confidence. Dan, here's what the man who Donald Trump nicknamed Mike Kevin was saying about the former president just four months ago. The president bears responsibility for Wednesday's attack on Congress by mob rioters. A few days after that, Mike Kevin and 145 other House Republicans voted to keep Liz Cheney as conference chair. Now it seems like they have the votes to get rid of her, a process that could start next week. What changed? The political wins, ultimately. I mean, Kevin McCarthy is not a leader by any stretch of imagination. He is not smart. He is not brave. He is not a policy expert.

His one political skill that has put him at the top of this pile of festering idiocy that is the Republican Party is he has a great sense of where the political winds are going and the ability to get there about one nanosecond before everyone else. So after he was almost murdered by a mob of Trump supporters, he thought the party was going to break with Trumpism. So he gave that speech, he defended Cheney, and things have moved dramatically since then. And he went right with them. And this was probably inevitable, but it is, I think, a pretty important and notable moment in the long march of the Republican Party off the cliff. One senior Republican told The Washington Post that the final straw was when Liz Cheney fist bumped Joe Biden on his way into the his his joint session address. into his joint session address.

And apparently, this is so widespread in the conference now that there was reporting that a Republican who voted to impeach Donald Trump still thinks Liz Cheney should go. It's like they think that she is embarrassing the whole party because she refuses to say that the election was stolen? That seems to be, that's where the Republican Party is now. I mean, it is. I mean, we've known this for a long time, although many in the media, particularly the reporters who cover Capitol Hill, willfully try to avoid this fact. But

conservatism is not an ideology, it's an identity. And the barrier of entry to be a conservative is your willingness to adopt racially motivated conspiracy theories for the purpose of maintaining minority rule in this country. And the fact that Liz Cheney was unwilling to do that thing means she cannot, not only can she not be in Republican leadership, she can't really be in the Republican Party. She probably would lose a primary. She had it. She will probably not run again after this. And she will be cast out to go do whatever former Republicans who don't like Donald Trump do. Let's say that Kevin McCarthy, instead of the spineless moron that he is, was a profile in courage and decided to try to do everything he could to protect Liz Cheney from being ousted as the conference chair.

Do you think he could have gotten away with it? No, he couldn't. I mean, this is where the party is going. It is, there has not been a speaker in the Republican Party in decades who was actually in charge. The inmates were in the asylum. And that is how it has been. So the case was the case with Boehner, the case with Ryan, the case with Denny Hastert and so forth. And so, you know, he is only as strong as a majority of his members are in backing him.

And they all back Trump. That is where the energy in the party is. And that's where the leadership is going to be. Leadership is just it's like it's a complete misnomer. It's an oxymoron because their job is not to lead. Their job is to follow. I saw some CNN reporting this morning that Kevin McCarthy is also very worried about potentially having to testify in a potential commission that looks into the 1-6 attacks, because if he had to testify during that commission, he would have to reveal what Trump told him on the phone call, which was maybe you all should have tried harder to help me steal the election, essentially. And maybe someone would have played the clip that we just played where he criticized Trump a couple of days after the attack. He doesn't want to. He wants to pretend that never happened.

So he's also worried about himself here, which is also why one of the other sins of Liz Cheney is apparently pushing for this commission to investigate the January 6th attacks. And she wants the commission to be made up of independent of an independent group that's not members of Congress so that politics doesn't completely get in the way. And she also wants them to look only at the 1-6 attack and not at the protests following George Floyd's murder, which is apparently what her colleagues in the House want the commission to look at, as well as the 1-6 attack. I mean, everything is so stupid because it really like this is, I guess, how you would think about the Republican Party, which is if Liz Cheney had fist bumped Joe Biden in the mouth, she'd be running for speaker right now. But because she just fist bumped him in some in some affectionate way, she's going to leave the party like that's the difference.

So what do you think it says about the House Republicans that they're so quick to get rid of someone who voted with Donald Trump 93% of the time and has a lifetime score of 80% from the American conservative union. It's, it's that Republicans stand for nothing. They just know there is no policy agenda. There is no ideology. There is just your willingness to embrace Trumpism. I don't even think it matters so much about Donald Trump, the person, and we talk about that. Basically, that's sort of the theme I think runs through the topics of today. But the problem here is the inexorable path towards further embracing Trumpism. Whether Donald Trump is around or not, it is about this sort of conspiracy theory, mongering disinformation, authoritarianism

that is the core of how Republicans think they can hold on to party. And you either embrace it, or if you embrace it, you can be in the party. And if you don't, you're out. And that is where we are. It's not about tax cuts. It's not about spending. It's not about entitlements, not anything else. And I think the thing here is for everyone has to recognize it for what it is. You know, it is like watching, is for everyone has to recognize it for what it is. It is like watching – it's like this two different worlds between reading the coverage of what's happening with Liz Cheney and the fact that she is being kicked out, as you said, for not pushing a conspiracy theory. The thing she wants to tell the truth about is not that the merits of Joe Biden's plans or that

maybe the Affordable Care Act works or that the Iran deal wasn't a bad deal. What she wants to tell the truth about is the fact that Republicans lied about the election. Donald Trump pushed that lie. A mob of his supporters went to Capitol Hill to murder Republicans and Democratic members of Congress. He wants to tell the truth about that. And in doing so, that is a mortal sin in the party. And if you were one of those reporters who threat that that represents, then you shouldn't be covering politics, shouldn't be talking about politics, shouldn't be involved in politics, because you're missing the forest for the trees. We know this. We talk about this on this podcast all the time. But this should be one of those moments where the daughter of a two-term vice

president who was essentially the avatar of neoconservatism gets tossed out of the party. of neoconservatism gets tossed out of the party. Mitt Romney, the 2012 nominee of the party, also a member of sort of Republican royalty, gets booed off the stage at a convention in Utah, not Massachusetts, Utah. That is a sign of something deeply sick in the party that is a threat to democracy, not just to Democrats or anyone else. It has to be covered as such, discussed as such. Well, I also think the party is not organized around ideology anymore, right? Like reporters in the media are still in the general mindset that you describe someone who is more extreme as more right wing and conservative and someone who is more moderate as less extreme because they hold a set of policy views. Policy views, policy principles,

ideology as traditionally understood does not drive the Republican Party anymore. It drives some of the older establishment that is still in Congress. It perhaps drives some of Mitch McConnell's decisions. Maybe not. It definitely drives some of Mitt Romney's views. Mitt Romney has not become some moderate, you know, over the last couple of years just because he's opposed Donald Trump. And we can see this in a lot of the policy debates that are unfolding in Congress. Mitt Romney is still extremely conservative. There are most issues we disagree with Mitt Romney on, but that's not what's organizing the Republican Party anymore. What's organizing the Republican Party is simply power at this point. What do they all

talk about all day? Like, they're not talking about the legislation they're introducing. They're shit posting online. Like they're trying to own liberals. They're talking about cancel culture. Like these are all the things that drive Republicans, things that legislation doesn't necessarily solve. Right. The legislation that they care about the most is legislation making sure that Democrats have a harder time voting. Right. I mean, it's not about like they don't they don't have passion for cutting taxes anymore. They don't even have passion for cutting Medicare like Paul Ryan used to anymore. They have no passion for any of these policy issues. Their passion is to put Democrats in their place and to hold on to power however they possibly can. That's it. That's it. I mean, the most we you know,

we always sort of say like the economy is the most important policy issues. I mean, the most, you know, we always sort of say, like, the economy is the most important policy issue. It's the thing voters care about. The problem for Republicans is the party is irreconcilably divided on economic issues. Large portions of their base oppose cuts to Medicare. Large portions of their base oppose cuts to Social Security. Large portions of the base support a $15 minimum wage. And so if you talk about the economy, if you talk about the party was organized around this idea of supply-side economics, smaller government,

reigning in entitlement, sort of Reaganomics, that has not been popular forever with anyone, especially the Republican base, and therefore they cannot talk about their policy agenda. But they also can't abandon their policy agenda because they continue to depend on corporations' wealthy interests to fund the party. So there is this, the voters and the donors are at loggerheads. So what do you do? You talk about everything other than a policy agenda. And when you do that, your organizing principle becomes your willingness to adhere to insane cultural positions like conspiracy theories and the big lie. And I think this has tremendous consequences as well going forward, right? Like a lot of the coverage has focused on sort of relitigating what happened after the last election, talking about

the insurrection, talking about Donald Trump's attempt to steal the election. But this has a lot of implications for the future, because if Republicans take the House in 2022, which is very possible, we've talked about this a lot here, that they have a structural advantage going into the next midterm, no matter how well Democrats and Joe Biden are doing, no matter how popular the president is, they have a structural advantage going to the House. If they win the House, then what they are doing is you have a House Republican conference now trying to purge people who are telling the truth about Donald Trump's attempt to steal the last election and will gladly try to attempt to steal the next one. So what happens when we have another

close presidential election in 2024 and we have a Republican. And suddenly it's not just a few members here and there who are voting to not certify the election and trying to overturn it, but you actually have a majority of the party that is controlling the House of Representatives now saying, okay, if the election was close enough, we're going to say, we're going to refuse to certify this election. And now you have chaos. That is the danger of what's happening with to certify this election. And now you have chaos. That is the danger of what's happening with Liz Cheney here. And it's much bigger than like any kind of personality clash between McCarthy and Cheney and Trump in the last election.

It is about how the House looks as we head into the midterms and then ultimately the 2024 election. I think it's very dangerous. And I think it's sort of an undercover point as people are talking about this. Ultimately, I'm not a fan of Liz Cheney, or any Cheney, frankly. It's not a Cheney I like. Wow, weird. Wow. And so before everyone comes around, yeah, before a certain segment of the internet comes around and says, Democrats embrace Cheney's. No, I don't give a shit about Liz Cheney. And I actually don't even really care that much whether she's in Congress or not, or in leadership. Because the problem isn't that we were going from

one dissenting voice to zero dissenting voices. It's that there are no, basically, there was only one dissenting voice. That's the bigger problem. She had no influence or change to it. But her removal should be noted as sort of a mile marker on the path to where you say we're headed. And another warning sign to people who are desperately trying to normalize this very abnormal party and who are understating the dangers to democracy that come because of it. Things are not going to be that much worse than they were before if you replace Cheney

with Stefanik. But it's a reminder of just how bad they are, I think. It's the difference between running against Republicans with abhorrent policy views who are willing to accept the results of an election they lose or running against Republicans with abhorrent policy views who are not willing to accept the results of an election they lose. That's the that's the difference. And like, you know, like you said, you don't have to love liz cheney i'd rather we have to run be running against republicans with abhorrent policy views that will accept the results of an election otherwise this whole thing fucking falls apart it's not that hard to understand republican leaders from trump on down want to replace

cheney with new york congresswoman elise stefanik uh she's not nearly as conservative as cheney in fact she's more of a moderate who only voted with Trump 78% of the time. But of course, like we just said, the only three votes of hers that really count are the two votes against impeachment and the one vote in favor of overturning the election. Stefanik checks all three of those boxes. And she also happens to be one of the absolute most shameless politicians in a party where that attribute is the price of admission uh i'm a big fan dan how about you yeah i mean really a emerging star in the republican party she is the biggest fucking phony i mean i like elise stefanik first of all i know people

who knew her at harvard She was friends with, friendly with Pete Buttigieg at Harvard. She's part of that class. She was a, she was a moderate. She had like co-authored an op-ed with Gene Shaheen once, right? She's just a moderate person. Like, what does it say about the Republican party that a moderate Harvard grad decided that her best career move was to try to help Donald Trump steal an election. I mean, it says everything about the Republican Party. Think about, just as always, to understand what a politician is going to do, you got to look at their incentive structure. Barack Obama won her district in 2012. Donald Trump won it by double digits in 16 and 20. Then you add on top of that, that she had this sort of moderate persona. She had no real juice

in the Republican Party. She got a lot of profiles from Politico and others. But in terms of actual power and influence, basically none. And then it's not just that she voted against Trump's impeachment. It's that she put on a performance defending Trump at the impeachment hearings that caught the attention of Trump and Trump world. And then she raised a gazillion dollars right afterwards. And she became sort of a star of the MAGA movement and sort of doubled and tripled that on that because she was chasing the attention, the clicks, the donations. And that's where all of the incentive goes. And it's not a, if you're thinking this in pure nihilistic, terrible cynicism, it's not a crazy choice because now she's about to be the number

three person in power. No. And if she had gone the other way, she would be probably already announced her retirement from Congress because she was about to be primaried by some other guest on Steve Bannon's show and would be sort of courting a meager MSNBC contributor contract. Like that's, those were her choices. No, I mean, look, there's a number of MAGA stars that have completely drank the Kool-Aid and believe all this stuff, right? They just, they 100% on the Trump train.

And then there's people like, and people say that Matt Gaetz is in this category, too, along with Stefanik. People who knew them way back when know that they absolutely understand that all of this shit is bullshit. They absolutely understand that all of the Trump stuff is bullshit and that they are purely in this to advance their careers. That's Gaetz. That's Stefanik. That's a whole especially some of these younger Republicans who people knew back in the day as much more moderate figures. And like you talked about McCarthy and the political winds, they see where the political winds are blowing. And it is, you either fully embrace Trumpism and fully embrace sort of the authoritarian direction of the Republican Party, Or like you said, you either get beat by a Democrat, you're kicked out as conference chair, or no one cares about you.

So the only path in the Republican Party to success, the only incentives are to be as crazy as fucking possible now, and to sort of embrace this new authoritarianism in the party, or at least the authoritarianism that's taken over it over the Trump years. And that's it. That's it. So she's so she was on as we're recording this. She was just on Steve Bannon show. Steve Bannon. Last we heard from Steve Bannon, he was calling for Anthony Fauci to be beheaded. That was last we heard from Steve Bannon. Elise Stefanik is on his show this morning. She was out there saying that one in every four votes in Fulton County were fraudulent in Georgia. One in every four votes. Fulton County were fraudulent in Georgia. One in every four votes. That's what she's saying. She knows better than this.

I think when you sort of look back at people like Elise Stefanik, you look at someone named like Adam Putnam. So Adam Putnam, for those who don't know, was this Republican congressman, conservative by the Cheney definition of conservative, who was elected at a very young age, worked his way up in the Republican Party to leadership, left, ran for statewide office in Florida, became secretary of agriculture, agriculture commissioner, whatever it's called, with the goal of running for governor when Rick Scott was done. He had the support of all the establishment. He had his whole career, his whole life to run for governor of Florida. He was a Trump skeptic establishment Republican, conservative, Heritage Foundation conservative. Ron DeSantis runs one ad where he basically sucks up to Donald Trump, does this ad where he teaches his kid how to say MAGA and all this other stuff. Trump endorses DeSantis,

Adam Putnam's career is over. So you're at least defined like you're a young person trying to make a career in the Republic Party. You look at that and you say, I got one choice and one choice only, and that is to embrace Trumpism, or I'm going to end up doing something else. And that is where we are. And this is, it's sort of a, it's about more than her. It's about where the party is going, where all the incentives push it. Yeah. So one thing that is slowing Trump down is the fact that he's been banned from most social media platforms. On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg's private Supreme Court, because that's that's part of our dystopia now, ruled that while Facebook is justified in suspending Donald Trump's account in the wake of the January 6th riot, the company has six months to set clearer standards for this type of action and decide whether to set a specific timeline for Trump's suspension or to just shut down his account permanently. The oversight board, which Mark literally calls his Supreme Court, we're not just making a joke here, is a Facebook funded 20 person global committee of experts in areas ranging from free speech to human rights

and journalism. Facebook isn't legally bound to their decisions, though they say they are bound by the rules that they have all made up. But the oversight board did write that in this case, quote, if a head of state or high government official has repeatedly posted messages that pose a risk of harm under international human rights norms, Facebook should suspend the account for a period sufficient to protect against imminent harm. So Mark Supreme Court threw it back in Mark's lap. What did you think of the decision? Were you surprised? I was amused because Facebook went through this, as you point out, this incredibly elaborate, intricate process to basically slough off responsibility to someone else so that you can, because Mark Zuckerberg's goal, I think is to anger no one, but in reality is just to anger

everyone. So he's like, I'll make some, let someone else make the decision. This board that was created and organized and funded and all of this elaborate rules, like it was the fucking constitutional convention. And then they were just like, nope. And they threw the hot potato back in his lap and now he's got to make the decision again. So that was, I guess, enjoyable. But it's, but it was a punt, right? Everyone punted. Zuckerberg punted to this fake court he created. They punted back and we're going to be right back here in some number of months waiting for a decision to come. What do you think about this oversight board on a scale of how bullshit it is? On the scale of whether it's completely bullshit, but that's not really the point.

If your company is big enough to create a global Supreme Court akin to the United Nations, your company is way too big to be held account and should be broken up. Our country now has two Supreme Courts. We've got the Roberts Court in D.C. And then we've got the Zuckerberg Court in Menlo Park. Yeah. I mean, it is like it is. It should be Exhibit A in the antitrust case against Facebook.

Yeah. Like, look, I so, you know, what Facebook will say is so they have this trust. So it's funded through this trust. There's no financial commingling after they've set up the board. There's no communication between the board and Facebook allowed while they're making a decision. All of the members are, you know, sort of independent. Of course, they are selected by Facebook. But, you know, the Oversight Board so far hasn't ruled on a lot of cases, but in most of the cases where they've ruled, with the exception of yesterday's with Trump, they have sort of overturned the decision Facebook has made, which also says, you know, they're somewhat independent from the board. So I have no reason

to believe that the board itself is not acting in good faith in the decisions that they made. But your point is the more important one right which is like the the very existence of the oversight board as opposed to regulations that come from the government that is elected by the people is that that tells you everything you need to know right there look if the whether it comes from the court the court which is ridiculous as it did yesterday or from Zuckerberg's office, as it will in a few months, the fact that the decision is of such great consequence that it is watched by millions of people around the world, that it is seen as this massive pivot point in American politics is a sign that the company is too influential. right? That is the problem.

If any single corporate decision is such a big deal, it's a sign the corporation has gained too much power and we should do something about that. And that is a thing much bigger than whether Donald Trump is on the platform or not. How much do you think a permanent ban would matter if Trump decides to run again from two different standpoints, one from fundraising and the other from the standpoint of getting his message out? Well, let's start with his message, which is it doesn't matter whether he's on the platform or not.

Would it be a little more helpful to be able to pick his own content? Sure. But do you know what the 10 top performing link posts on Facebook were in the United States yesterday? Look, it's always a very tight contest between Dan Bongino and Ben Shapiro. Yes. So yesterday, posts number one, two, and three were from Ben Shapiro. The top 10 also included two posts from Dan Bongino, two posts from Fox News, one from Sean Hannity. And congratulations to Rachel Maddow for coming in number 10 and breaking up. Wow, good for Maddow. and people who broke the rule should be held accountable. And there shouldn't be exceptions for world leaders.

In fact, the people who should be most held account is not some random dentist down the street. It's the person whose posts are viewed by millions of people that can lead to, oh, I don't know, an assault on the United States Capitol. And so it should be upheld. But I think we're sort of missing the point here, which is whether Trump has a page or not, Trumpism is run amok on Facebook. It is just constantly pumping dangerous disinformation

into the ecosystem about vaccines, about the election. All of that is happening on Facebook, whether Trump is on there or not. And so that, I think, is the bigger challenge here that doesn't really matter whether Trump is on there. The other thing I'd say is, think of the conversation we just had. Donald Trump is basically absent from our lives in many ways, right? He's not pouring gasoline on a raging media fire. He's not tweeting at people. He has lost his job as nation's assignment editor.

Yet the Republicans are about to dump Liz Cheney at Donald Trump's behest. He is more influential in politics now than he was before. Trumpism as a movement is stronger now than it was before in Trump's ban from social media. So that should tell us that what is happening is something much bigger than one man and whether that person can post at their own behest. It is something much bigger than one man and whether that person can post at their own behest. It is something much bigger than that. Well, it also tells you something very important about the silos that we're in, specifically the information silo in which the Republican Party and Republican voters find themselves. Like the whether or not Donald Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024 depends on two things, Donald Trump himself and Republican

voters, right? Republican voters get a say here. And where do Republican voters get all their news and information from? From Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino and Fox News and all the bullshit that's on Facebook and all the bullshit that's on YouTube, right? And so there is almost a closed information environment in which they operate, which is also, by the way, look, it is fantastic that Donald Trump is not the nation's assignment anymore. I love that he's not on Twitter. I love that we don't have to think about him all the time. But again, I keep saying this, it's a false sense of security here that he has somehow gone because we are not experiencing Trumpism on a day-to-day basis when we come in contact with the media. But the entire Republican Party and Republican voters,

which are the ones who get the say in whether Donald Trump becomes the nominee, they're seeing it every single day, which is also why it's so silly every time a reporter tweets a statement of Trump or RT something, you get people on Twitter like, don't amplify him, don't amplify him. It doesn't fucking matter. Right? Like Republican voters are mainlining the stuff every day and they're the ones who get to decide whether he's the nominee again. And so, you know, Trump has a propaganda network in Fox and a propaganda funnel in Facebook to get his message out. And that's all he needs. And neither of those things are going away. So to the second part of your question, if Trump runs for president, I am 100% confident that Facebook will put him back on the platform.

Yeah, of course. And what matters more than whether he can post his statements on Facebook or post videos of his speeches, what matters is whether he has access to the ad platform. So one of two things is going to happen. They're either going to give him access to the ad platform or they're going to get rid of political ads. And so he will not, Facebook will not disadvantage him. When you look at all the various things that Facebook did to help Trump, refusing to fact check ads, basically giving him dispensation after dispensation, they're always doing things in favor of Republicans. And part of that, I think, is this very demented sense of both sides-ism that I think plagues Mark Zuckerberg. But it's also because Facebook user base is the most Republican of any social media platform. right? Pew did a study a few months ago,

which looked at how much Republicans and Democrats use social media. Democrats overwhelmingly use social media more than Republicans, but Instagram users are 19% more Democratic. Twitter, 15% more Democratic. Facebook is only 3% more Democratic. So Mark Zuckerberg is not going to do something to upset what he sees as 50% of his user base. And the people who keep deleting Facebook and walking away are Democrats. It's Republicans who keep signing up or staying on the platform. So I think we know where this is ending if he runs for president. Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out what standard they would have to keep him off, right? They would have to say, see what they would have to say is anyone who continues to spread

lies about the last election or question the results of the last election can't be on Facebook. Right. But if they do that, they have to kick a whole bunch of people off Facebook. as he doesn't incite violence, use language that incites violence, he can stay on, which, of course, is easier for him to abide by, even as he's out there today still talking about how the last election was stolen from him and the Supreme Court should have overturned it and Mike Pence should have overturned it. All the language that, in fact, is what incited the violent insurrection in the first place. So because they can't figure out what the exact standard is, you know for sure, maybe not, we don't know for sure, but you can guess that they might throw their hands up and say, OK, if he's running for president, he could end up being the president of the United States.

We have to let him back on. Yeah, I mean, we just talked about Steve Bannon's interview with Elise Stefanik, which is on Facebook because after calling for the beheading of Anthony Fauci, he's still on Facebook. They didn't ban him for it. So there is no standard here. The decision will be reverse engineered in a way that allows them to appease half their user base. That's what's going to happen. So since Trump was banned from just about every social media platform,

his team has been hinting that the former president will launch his own communications platform. And boy, have they delivered. On Monday, Donald Trump launched a blog. As many people online have noted, this blog is basically a scene directly out of the office. Here's a clip. I remember I blogged the whole thing. www.creedthoughts.gov.www backslash creedthoughts.

Check it out. www.backslashcreedthoughts. Check it out. Last year, Creed asked me how to set up a blog. Wanting to protect the world from being exposed to Creed's brain, I opened up a Word document on his computer and put an address at the top. I've read some of it. Even for the Internet, it's pretty shocking.

even for the internet. It's pretty shocking. Now, in fairness, Trump's blog is connected to the internet, but basically all it does is encourages supporters to copy paste his blog messages to Twitter. Is this solution just too genius for us to really understand? What do you think? Yeah, I think that's right. We were making a huge mistake by laughing at this 2005 blog that he has launched. The person I want to laugh at is the Fox News reporter who was pitched this story, wrote it up with Trump launches new communications platform. When I saw that breaking news alert, I was like, huh, because there've been all these reports that Trump was going to buy Parler or launch his own Parler competitor or have put it – actually tried to build an actual social media platform. Which we've been very skeptical of because it involves intelligence and work, two things that Trump is diametrically opposed to.

So when I clicked on it and saw that it was an old, outdated website that looks like it came from the internet archive. It was quite amusing, I guess. Unbelievable. Yeah. And apparently they hinted that yet, that there's still more to come with this communications platform thing. So I'm still waiting. They're known for telling the truth. So I'm sure Jason Miller told us, and he's never lied to anyone before. So I'm sure that's true. We talked last week about the effect of the new census numbers on redistricting. The data also gives us a clearer picture of who voted in the last election. Nate Cohn has a New York Times piece this week that argues the census data reveals two important points about our current political landscape.

the census data reveals two important points about our current political landscape. First, voters of color make up an increasing percentage of the United States electorate. That is thanks mainly to the growing share of Latinos, Asian-Americans, and other non-black multiracial voters. That is why the electorate is diversifying because of those groups. why the electorate is diversifying because of those groups. Second, this increasing racial diversity isn't doing quite as much to help Democrats as liberals hope or to hurt Republicans as much as conservatives fear. And that's because diverse population growth is happening in redder states like Texas and Florida, where Democrats don't win non-white voters by the same margins they do everywhere else. For example, Texas and Florida would have actually gone to Biden if Latinos in those states voted like Latinos in New York or Illinois. What do we mean by that? So Latino voters in Texas and Florida,

much like white voters in Texas and Florida, are more conservative than Latinos in New York or Illinois. Just like white voters are more conservative than white voters in New York and Illinois. Now, did Joe Biden still win the Latino vote in Texas and Florida? Yes, but not nearly as much as he did in Illinois and New York. Now, of course, like white voters in Texas and Florida still voted for Donald Trump by huge margins. Right. That was like the big reason that he won. Latinos and non-white voters in general in some of these redder states, these redder swing states, happen to be more conservative, which is why the diversifying electorate is not helping Democrats like they thought. like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which haven't grown more diverse over time, is because Trump actually lost ground among white voters between 2016 and 2020. So the interesting thing there is if Biden had just won Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, which he did win because

of a more diversifying electorate, or at least that's what really helped him in those states, that still wouldn't have been enough to win the presidency because of the Electoral College. You still would have needed Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin in that scenario. And the reason that Biden won that is because he made up some ground with white voters. Do you think, Dan, that Nate's read of the data is correct here? And if so, what are the implications? I mean, it is certainly correct in the prism in which he's discussing it. I think you can't have this conversation without acknowledging what Nate Cohen is really saying is that within the constraints of our anti-democratic political system that disproportionately awards power to white voters who disproportionately support Republicans, Republicans are doing

better than they thought. If we lived in a political system that was national popular vote with universal ballot access, without gerrymandering, without the geographic biases of the Senate, then this diversification would be overwhelmingly helping Democrats. This is why what he's really saying is the gap between the popular vote, strength of Democrats, and electoral strength of Republicans is growing. And you can look at that in the micro way of who that helps in the election, and that definitely makes things easier for Republicans than Democrats. But you're missing, in that case, the much bigger point, which is our democracy is being further strained as additional, as it's becoming

easier and easier for a shrinking, mostly white conservative minority to elect people in a country defined by a growing, progressive, diversifying majority. And that's the bigger issue here that I think you just have to acknowledge when you have this conversation is that we are accepting a premise of elections with voter suppression, with gerrymandering, and with an electoral college, which obviously is very hard, if not impossible to change, but is deeply problematic. Yeah, because, for example, Democratic gains among non-white voters have been concentrated in the major cities of big and non-competitive states. So where a diversifying electorate has helped Democrats,

it's, you know, makes Los Angeles or San Francisco or Chicago more liberal, more bluer. And that doesn't really help you in the electoral college. And because what's happening is, I mean, the other thing it tells you is where you live and whether you have a college degree can maybe tell us just as much about how you voted than your racial background, which is something that has started happening over the last several decades. And so that it's not

just, we're not just polarized by race anymore. We're polarized by geography and education. And so some of those things can interact here. What do Democrats do? What are the implications for Democratic strategy? Well, one other point, let's just start on the analysis, which sort of bedevils this discussion and so much discussion about the role that Latino voters play in 2020 and elections more broadly is it is a very diverse community. It differs by geography. It differs by background. And so having this like, what do you do about Latino voters? It's just the wrong way to have the conversation, right? And people who do a lot of politics in Florida, we certainly worked on this when we worked for our president's committee. When you think about Florida, you think there's Cuban voters here, there are Puerto Rican voters in Orlando, and you think about the diversity within

the Latino community. But when we talk about politics nationally, we do not do that. And so the best way to have this conversation is to do it with a much finer point and think about it that way, as opposed to just trying to treat the community as a model. So I think that's a mistake. Yeah. And look, and we have talked to Chuck Rogo about this on the pod and Carlos Odio and, you know, Latino strategists, Latino pollsters, and they will say the same thing. And I think for a lot of people, you know, saying that the Latino community is very diverse, they'll say, OK, well, that's why, you know, Trump did much better with the Cuban vote in Florida. But it goes far beyond the Cuban vote. Like there are just dozens of different communities with different political beliefs and backgrounds within the Latino community. And so just like, by the way, there is in among white voters, too, right?

Like there is plenty of diversity in beliefs and ideology with white voters. We talk about the difference between, you know, white voters with a college degree, white voters with a non-college degree. There's a giant gap there in terms of politics. And you are starting to see more of that same gap among both the Latino community, the Asian American community. And it's creeping a little bit into the Black community, though not as much as other non-white voters. I think in terms of democratic strategy, I think step one for all of us is to recognize the very dark storm clouds on the horizon. It's very easy to, you throw out maybe the theme of this whole podcast, it's very easy to be happy Trump's still off Facebook, just sort of laugh at the absurdity of Kevin McCarthy dumping Liz Cheney and sort of be happy our enemies are fighting

each other. But despite Biden's massive popular vote margin, he barely won against a deeply unpopular candidate who lit himself on fire for the last six weeks of the campaign. He got COVID, and he did everything everything wrong and still almost won. And had the Republicans had the House, as you say, it's possible when the House. Look, if you're sitting here right now without passing H.R. 1, without pushing back on partisan gerrymandering, it's probable the Republicans win the House. We have to recognize that and be prepared because there was the Senate. We think this is a great Senate map.

Is it? Not really. I mean, it is better than we've had in previous years, but we have to defend Arizona and Georgia. We barely won those seats before, and it is much harder to vote in those states in 2022 than it was in 2020. We have to win. Our other opportunities are good in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, but those are states that Biden barely won. And Senate Democrats underperformed Biden in many cases

all across the country. We have a chance to beat Marco Rubio in Florida, but it just got a lot harder to vote in Florida as of today, as if it wasn't obvious enough. Ron DeSantis signed this bill live on Fox and Friends. That is what is at play here. And so we have to do, I think, sort of three things here, none of which are easy. And I'm not saying the Biden White House, the DNC, the DSCC, others are not fully aware of this. They definitely are. We have to pass H.R. 1. I don't have a great plan for that, but we to pass it um two we have to let's uh let's move on to the scenario where we don't pass hr1 well well i think it's a binary choice on the

vote save america site what happens if we don't pass hr1 we're fucked yeah yeah so let's operate an environment uh let's just say we're fucked we have we have to have because i- I say that because I want people to understand that if Joe Manchin does stand in the way, it is not, and we can't get it done, it is not like now everyone take their toys and go home. We just have to fucking fight that much harder. And that very well may be a scenario that we face and we just have to be prepared for that scenario.

And what I think that means is we, and it is to the credit of Joe Biden, is he has found a policy agenda and a message that is broadly appealing. Trump voters, large portions of them, shockingly large portions given the polarization in American society, support what Joe Biden is doing. He has also found a message that divides the Republican Party aggressively, which, and you saw the gusto with which he discussed it at a media veil yesterday, I think, about taxing the corporations and picking a giant fight over taxes. All of that sort of comes down to what we need to do is develop a set of wedge issues

that divide the Republican Party base from the Republicans. And that is very possible because they are so divided on economic issues. And this is what I would sort of – it's easy to be like, well, how do – you know, like, well, we're not going to convince the people in the MAGA diner and the Fox News viewers. Forget that. Here's what I want to do. I want to have the Democrats have a narrative about the Republicans that is such that it tries to move us not from – to move all these people into the Democratic camp. get Republican turnout among, particularly in rural and exurban areas, from these white, non-college voters down to Romney levels instead of Trump levels. If we get them down to Romney levels and we hold onto our gains with suburban voters and others, then we will keep the House and we will take the Senate. But that is the first step to getting people to join our party and support us is to explain to them why they shouldn't support the party they're currently supporting. That is the message we need.

That is where all of the intellectual energy in the party needs to go, is figuring out what sort of economic message that is evocative enough, visceral enough, and delivered with enough discipline and repetition can begin to have that achievement. I want to convince Republican voters that the Republican Party is not for them. Then we can convince them to become Democrats. But let's start with step one. I also think the lesson here is it is dangerous and wrong for Democrats to assume that non-white voters are going to vote Democrat based on their race. We just can't do that. Like there has been this sort of debate where, you know, some Democratic strategists will say, OK, we've got to appeal to some people who voted for Trump. And then other strategists and activists will say, no, we can't do that because it's just a bunch of, you know, non-college educated white racists who vote for Donald Trump.

And what we need to do is to boost turnout on our side and register more voters. Well, of course, we need to boost turnout and register more voters. That's incredibly important to any strategy. We don't do that. We lose also. And behind that is this idea that if we have the more diverse party and we have a diversifying electorate, that new Latinos who are in the electorate, new Asian-Americans, new non-white voters, if we just sign them up and they vote, they'll automatically vote Democrat. And that's just not the case. You still have to make a case to these voters.

You still have to persuade them to vote Democrat. And the fact is, as we've seen from this data and from the last election, as you go further south, as you go into these Republican states, you get more conservative attitudes from some non-white voters. Now, are Democrats still winning the Latino vote? Yeah, they're still winning 60, 65 percent of the Latino vote probably they did in 2020. That's great. Latinos in general are still voting Democrat. That's fantastic. But like take, you know, Biden wins Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, right? And he wins those states partly because of a diversifying electorate.

Well, we just said those states aren't enough to hit 270. So you got to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or Michigan. Now, let's say you look at those three states and say, you know what? Those states aren't enough to hit 270. So you got to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or Michigan. Now, let's say you look at those three states and say, you know what? Those states aren't diversifying. It's too hard. There's too many non-college white voters here, the Republicans. We just can't persuade them. They're just too Trumpy. Let's give up. So what's the next state you have to win to get to 270? Then you got to win Texas. What happened in Texas in 2020? What happened in Texas in 2020 is that Joe Biden improved his performance over Hillary's among white voters, specifically college educated white voters in the suburbs. But he did worse than Hillary among a lot of Latino voters in Texas,

because Latino voters in Texas don't think like Latino voters in Illinois and New York because it's a diverse community. And so you've got to go as a Democrat and make the case to those border communities that voted for Donald Trump by huge margins. And you have to treat them just as you would every other voter. And this is what we mean when we say that voters, you shouldn't divide voters into turnout targets and persuasion targets. Every voter is a persuasion target. And, you know, every Democratic strategist, pollster, pollsters that work in Latino communities, that work with other communities of color, strategists that work with Democrats in red states and blue states,

they will all tell you the same thing. And so much of this debate is just like unproductive when what we should be trying to do is figure out, OK, we have to even in order to win now, we have to win over voters, white and nonwhite voters who have more conservative attitudes. We're not going to win over Trump fans. We're not going to win over the people at the rallies. But people who have more conservative attitudes than we do, we are going to have to win over in order to hold power in a counter-majoritarian system that we find ourselves. That is just the reality of the situation. And so we have to figure out what those voters think. We have to figure out what messages persuade those voters. And we have to go and make our case to them. Cool. Right. Am I missing anything? Well, yes. A lot of you're

missing it. But my one addendum to your very persuasive argument would be we also need to, as a part of that process, we have to be more sensitive, attuned to disinformation campaigns that happen in Spanish language. There is a lot of, that is not everything by any chance of imagination. The broader trends you point are exactly right. But the Trump campaign, months, even maybe even a year before Democrats got involved, were pushing disinformation about socialism and Democrats in Florida. You saw similar things happening in Arizona,

in the Rio Grande Valley, in Texas. We have to get ahead of that and fight hard against it. Absolutely. All right. When we come back, my interview with Elizabeth Warren. I'm now joined by the senior senator from my home state of Massachusetts, a longtime friend of the pod and author of the new book Persist, Elizabeth Warren. Senator, welcome back. Thank you. It's good to be back, John. It's good to have you. You write a lot about your presidential campaign in this book,

which I was particularly interested in because I voted for you. Oh, thank you. Yeah. And I voted for you in the California primary when it looked like you weren't going to win because I just believed you'd make the best president. A lot of voters in 2020 were focused on electability, which for you boil down to two incredibly frustrating questions. Can a progressive win and can a woman win? Have you thought about, because I've thought a lot about this, how future presidential candidates can either change or overcome that dynamic? Yes. And let's talk about how and let's ground it in where we are right at this moment. You have to stop to remember the 2020 primary was really run in 2019.

And what's happened since early 2020? A pandemic, a racial reckoning, an armed insurrection. We now have a new president and we have passed the biggest rescue package in the history of the nation. Very much like in 2008, the lesson was when things were all shaken up, when things are breaking apart, there's the opportunity for change. People are no longer in the, well, this is how it's always been. Now they're willing to try the,

what else do we need to try to do here? I think that all that's happened in the last year has changed the world for all of us. But I think it's also changed where progressives are in this world. Think about it this way. Joe Biden in the general election ran on a very progressive agenda.

He ran on an aggressive role for government. Did that surprise you? No, it didn't because it met the moment. That was what America wanted and needed. It was a different moment from the moments that preceded it. So Joe Biden was talking about Build Back Better, which giant infrastructure. He was talking about Build Back Better, which is giant infrastructure. He was talking about child care and a caregiving economy, universal child care, very progressive. He was talking about taxing multimillionaires, billionaires, and giant corporations. So he had a lot of the basic building blocks of a progressive agenda right there when he was

talking to the American people. He then gets elected and goes full on in that first rescue package, which by the way, included $40 billion for childcare, included money to go straight into our public schools. He had already put in place suspending student loan debt payments, which is a $5 billion a month click. So he was already in it. And so I think of this, and this is what I talk about in Persist. I try to make the case about how personal policy is. What we get right or wrong in Washington touches your life.

Child care, you got a new baby, right? Touches your life personally, affects your opportunities. And then make the case for here are the core building block pieces we need going forward. And then my final twist on it, because this matters personally, I hope you'll be in the fight too. Joe Biden has gotten away with having a more progressive agenda and pushing for a more progressive agenda because he was perceived as a moderate white guy? You know, maybe. But I also think that the progressive policies are just damn popular. Could we stop apologizing for this? I mean, hello.

Very popular. The things that progressives want to do, the rest of America wants to do. So talk about the wealth tax, right? You know my view on the wealth tax. Here's this idea I have to put a tax in place on fortunes above $50 million. Your 50 million in the first dollar, you gotta pitch in two cents,

two cents for every dollar over that. You get to be a billionaire and you gotta pitch in a little bit more. That is popular, popular, not just among Democrats, but among Republicans and independents. So my view on this is that part of the problem has been we just haven't put that stuff out there to have people vote on it. Get it out there.

Put it out in front of people and people like it. What do you think about, you see all these ballot initiatives with progressive policies on them passing in some pretty red states, right? Minimum wage in Florida is passed by far over 50%. And yet we lost the governorship in 2018, lose Florida in 2020. Medicaid expansion is getting passed in some very deep red states. And yet the Democratic candidates who run there don't win. What do you think the gap is between the candidates that sometimes Democrats put up and the policies, which you say, especially some of these progressive economic policies, which are super popular? Well, partly, and I don't want to identify anybody specifically.

Can we do this generically? We can do generic, yeah. We need Democrats who are willing to run on a strong progressive agenda, who are willing to be full-throated. Katie Porter runs in Orange County in a district that literally had never elected a Republican from the time that district had been formed. Katie didn't run as a mush mouth, well, the one hand and on the other and I'll try to pick up some votes from over here and some votes from over there. No! Katie got out there,

I told her, give them a reason to vote for you. Tell them what you'll do if they'll elect you. And by golly, that is exactly what Katie has done. And she not only beat an incumbent Republican in what by any ordinary measure would be a very red district. Now, again, the demographics were changing some in the district. But it's not only that. It's when she ran for reelection, having shown them what she'd do, having shown them the fight she'd get in, she turned around and won by a larger margin. And look at Arizona, where increasing taxes to pay for education passed, right? Look at Colorado, purple state by most measures, where paid family leave, you know, it's just get it out there and tell people,

I will fight for this. I think that's what people are looking for. Look, that's why I persist. It's to get out and fight for these things. It's funny that that brings something else up because I remember, you know, when Katie Porter was running for the first time and she did run on this very progressive platform, I heard she was also getting a lot of advice from consultants. Like you've got to really run as a suburban mom with your, you know, your soccer mom in your van. And it was this tension. And you sort of talk about this, the impossible woman trap in the book and how women have to run.

You talk about running in Hillary's shadow. What advice would you give to the next woman who might feel like she's running in your shadow and comes to you for advice? You have to make policy personal. So I talk about in this book when I got fired for being pregnant and lost the job I had aimed my life toward, and that was to be a special education teacher. And so I'm out on my fanny,

and I get this crazy idea to go to law school. Nobody in my family's graduated from college, and now I'm gonna go to law school. And you know me, naturally, I start planning, so I have my whole list. I check out where I can go and what the tuition will cost, find a state university, Rutgers, that I can afford. I'm really down to things like how much mileage I get on the car so I can work out a

budget. That's the kind of planner I am. On that list, child care, because I got a little one who's not yet two years old, and you can't take a not yet two-year-old to class with you. and you can't take a not yet two year old to class with you. I start looking for childcare. And I think of this as one of the periods from hell in my life. Every childcare place that I looked at, they were eight towns over. They cost a bazillion dollars.

If I could afford it and it was nearby, it had a waiting list that was two years long. It was just one thing after another after another. And I tell the story very personally about how I was down to literally the last five days. If I don't get childcare, I'm not going to go back to school. I'm just, that's it. Right.

It's over. And I made it through. I found a woman who was just opening a center. I tell the funny story that she only takes dependably potty trained children. I've got five days to dependably potty train a not yet two-year-old. That's not tough. But I tell this story to give an honest account of how hard it can be, but also to try to inspire more women to run, to get them in,

inspire more women to run, to get them in, because the fight for childcare is won as a nation. If we really believe in equal opportunity, if we really believe in branching out and everybody gets a chance to finish their education, everybody gets a chance at a job, everybody gets a chance to take that promotion, then by golly, that's gotta include mamas. And I get it. And some daddies, some daddies are worrying about this as well. But here's the thing, childcare nearly knocked me

off the track, as I talk about in the book, twice by the time I was 30 years old. Maybe I'd have gotten back on someday, maybe not. It nearly knocked my daughter off the track a generation later, and if we don't make change, it will knock my granddaughter off the track if she decides to have babies. So I think of this as we were saying earlier, the door is open to crack, we can make change. There's all this going on in Washington.

Now is the time to push and make this change. We need to make the change on childcare. We need to make a change around student loans. We need to make a change around student loans. We need to make a change around wealth tax. We need to make it personal so that we can make those connections for people, get more people elected, because we say these are the changes we will make.

And they're not abstract. These are changes that will touch your life. So two big ways to make change right now. President has executive authority and they're not abstract. These are changes that will touch your life. So two big ways to make change right now. President has executive authority and then there's Congress. Start with the president. You've been pushing Biden to cancel $50,000 in student debt. Do you believe he'll do it? I'm sure hoping so. I'm pushing. Chuck Schumer is pushing. You know, Chuck has been a terrific ally yeah he is a true believer uh uh ayanna presley is pushing and and the nice thing about this everybody's pushing it's the reminder canceling student loan debt is good obviously individually but good for our country

obviously, individually, but good for our country. It is a racial equity issue as well. You understand the backstory on why we have so much wealth inequality in this country, and much of it because of Jim Crow laws, laws that prevented African-Americans from buying homes and building up wealth in that way but that gets us to the point where we are today where african americans borrow more money to go to college borrow more money while they're in college and have a harder time paying it off when they get

out of college i'll give you just one stat on this i can do a zillion but i'll give you just one stat on this. I can do a zillion, but I'll give you one. And I'm glad you're sitting down because this is one that just, it should just knock us over. 20 years out after you've borrowed student loan debt, the typical white former student who borrowed money has 5% of the loan left to go. The end is in sight. You can see it out there. 20 years out, the typical black student still owes 95% of the original debt amount.

95% of the original debt amount. It will be there until, for many of them, they die. And when you're loaded with student loan debt, we just know, the numbers now show, you don't start families, you don't buy cars, you don't buy homes, and the big one, you don't start small businesses. So we want that entrepreneurship. We want our country to be productive. One way to do it, cancel student loan debt. Joe Biden could do it with the stroke of a pen. So I'm pushing, Chuck's pushing, and we're asking people all over the country, help us push, help us get this done.

What else should President Biden do with his executive authority that he hasn't yet done? Declare climate change an emergency, a national emergency. And that would free up federal resources. Yeah, it unlocks things he can start pushing for on his own. Manufacture drugs. The federal government has the power on so many of these drugs to just step in and put out contracts to manufacture them. You know, the same way we put out contracts to build battleships,

put out contracts to manufacture drugs like insulin, EpiPens, HIV, AIDS drugs. Do that and it'll do two things. It will bring the cost way, way, way, way, way, way down for those drugs. Plus, it's like hold up a giant sign to the drug companies on every other drug you get that far out of line we are prepared to enter in the national interest and make these drugs available to families could do that one uh talk about congress president proposed american jobs plan in the american families plan both include a ton of great progressive policies. Highly unlikely that everything ends up in the final bill or bills, depending. What, in your view, are the two or three most important policies that you'll be fighting for the hardest? Like, what will you go to the mat for? It sounds like child care is

one of those policies. Right. Child care. And let me put a pitch in, because you know as well as anyone, devil's always in the details. When I say childcare, I mean universal childcare. I mean it's there for all of our babies. And look, as your income goes up, there's a copay. So I want to make sure that any parent who wants to put a child into child care will have access to do it. If your income's higher, you'll have to pay up to 7% of your total income, but it's available to you. I also want to put in a pitch, if it's not too deep in the woods. One of the things back and forth around child care, child care has always been done in this country to the extent there's been federal support, which has been way, way, way, way, way

too small, along the lines of a work requirement. So you've got to fill out this paperwork even to find out if you can get your kid into one of these centers. And my view on this is that's just backwards. We should not be doing that. We don't ask parents when they send their kid to third grade, are you working? Or are you just trying to finish your education? Or are you just trying to start a business? Well, can you bring us some documentation? No. We say we're going to make this available to all third graders because we think it's a really good thing for kids to have this chance to go to third grade. I feel the same way about when they're three years old and when they're two years old. You know, you probably are looking into this now, you know, since you've got Charlie. You probably are looking into this now since you've got Charlie, but parents who can afford it, even if they have a stay-at-home parent, often are putting their children in, they may call them playgroups or baby time or whatever they call it. It starts early.

It starts early. It starts earlier than I ever imagined. Exactly. But you know call it starts early it starts earlier than I ever imagined exactly but you know why it starts early it's because we've come to understand brains better than we used to development better than we used to getting for example 18 month olds and two-year-olds into a place where there are other toys and lots of color and noise it helps build vocabulary it helps children get socialized it helps children learn to control themselves these are good things indeed we call it child care and dang i get it. After the pandemic, you know, that parents are like, please get someone to give us some care. But it's education. And we need to invest in our littlest Americans.

We need to make that investment in them and and make it high quality, affordable. And I'll add one more pitch. We do this. It's not only good for the babies and good for the mamas and daddies, it's good for the childcare providers. The economics, think for just a minute about the economics of running childcare centers. Half of America lives in a childcare care desert meaning there are one or zero child care facilities available waiting lists on average stretch out what feels like forever

why doesn't the supply ramp up on its own where are all my perfect markets friends and the answer markets friends and the answer parents can't afford it so so the economics of providing high quality childcare is you can't afford most families to to pay what it would really cost and work so we don't ask parents to pay the full cost of third grade we should not ask them to pay the full cost of pre-K or two-year-olds. So I want to get this money in and then raise the wages of every child care worker and preschool teacher in America. You know, notice what you called that infrastructure bill. You remember the title of it when you started?

Yeah, the jobs plan. Jobs plan. It's not the infrastructure plan. This has been driving me nuts, Senator. Exactly. But here's what really gets to me about it. Most of the time when they're talking about jobs, they're talking about construction jobs. And I'm all for it. I'm all for it. Let's do lots. Plenty of other important jobs, though. And I'm all for it. I'm all for it.

Plenty of other important jobs, though. But there are other important jobs. We invest in childcare. We are also investing in women's jobs because women are the principal childcare providers, principally women of color. And right now, what most women are making in childcare, they'd be better off to go be a cashier at McDonald's. And in fact, that's why there's a lot of high turnover in the field. Let's make this

a real profession that pays. And we could do that by making an investment as a nation. And again, you want to look at ways to lift up families, to help create more economic security for the working poor? Here's a way to do it. So, you know, it's about $4 trillion worth of spending between two of these plans. You know, the Republicans, they got their deficit complaints and then they got their tax complaints, which don't even match with each other. But I was wondering yesterday as the talk about inflation started picking up with Treasury Secretary Yellen's comments, our good pal Larry Summers is concerned about inflation too. What's the argument when inevitably Republicans start opposing this plan with a new excuse, which is, you know, inflationary concerns, prices are going up everywhere. What do you say

to that? No, they're not. So can we just start there? And we have, I mean, they have yelled wolf slash inflation. How many times now? I think they were yelling that 40 years ago, right? This has been their standard response. And it just hadn't happened. And if it does start to happen, Janet Yellen has got a lot of tools to deal with it. We are well prepared. We have an arsenal to deal with it. So, A, let's take a deep breath on that. B, over and over, when the Republicans want to cut taxes, they don't worry about debt. They don't worry about the deficit.

They don't worry about inflation nothing matters except cutting taxes which they tell us will pay for itself which it never does and that's what the data now show so i'm a little tired of hearing the republicans run two of the same old tired arguments shame on them and shame on us if we listen to them. But I want to make a third point, and that is we do need revenue. And I'm just, I mean this generally. It's not that you have to tie it to one thing because they only want to talk about taxes when we're starting to put things forward. I just want to say in general, we need to do more revenue. Wealth tax. Wealth tax, oh, and here's my fave. Wealth tax combined with a real corporate profits tax, that is a tax on book income, not sure after you ran every scam through the tax code,

on what you're reporting to your shareholders and to the public and basing your CEO pay on, a 7% tax for corporations that report more than $100 million in profits, and third leg on the stool, nearly double the IRS budget with the instructions that that money goes into enforcing tax laws for millionaires, billionaires, and giant corporations. And it does seem like the Biden administration wants to do that last thing. That's right. In fact, we're getting pieces of all of this. You know my job, push for more. Right. We do those three things, just those three things not this all the other kind of pieces which

i may very well support but but the point is those three things alone will raise us about six trillion dollars over ten that's enough money for the infrastructure enough money for the caregiving and there's still a couple of trillion left over so um can we talk about what the hell we're going to do with joe mansion and the filibuster do you do you have a plan for that okay so let us let us start with a little history i ran for president on getting rid of the filibuster i remember i remember um we spent we spent a whole primary on positive america talking about it we got a whole bunch of candidates we got a whole primary on Positive America talking about it. We got a whole bunch of candidates following your lead, finally saying no filibuster.

And now we are in what I call the Joe Manchin cul-de-sac, which is every debate on every policy issue that doesn't fit in reconciliation comes back to, oh, but Joe Manchin and the filibuster. So now we can't do it. What do we do? So, look, I want to see it gone. And I'm going to keep staying out out there make every argument around it the question is how are we gonna get there how are we gonna get from here to there i think the pressure on our senators who are hesitant is good uh let me start by saying four years ago we've done close to where we are right now two years ago we can party we weren't close but by this last year we have moved a lot of folks in the Senate now I get it it's gonna take 50 of us to make this happen so So I don't, you know,

I sound like Pollyanna here. But don't sell short what you've been working on, John, and what all the people who have picked that up and who have raised it at town halls, who have tweeted about it, who have posted about it, so that reporters ask about it, so that news articles keep moving around. So we have got to keep the pressure up. Here's where I see us right now. This historic rescue package that we just finished, stop and think what that was like. It was, first of all, had a lot of progressive priorities like childcare in it. But other things were in it too. The fact that the President of the United States said, I want to be bipartisan and invited the Republicans in.

And they said, well, we're not going to do that. It's too much money. And he just rolled straight on ahead. That's an important, the world changes when that happens. He described bipartisan as Democrats and Republicans like it. And part three, he got us all. 50 out of 50 senators, we were there. So that has kind of earth-shaking consequences. Mitch McConnell and his, no, I'm not going to let you do anything. Well, they don't work so good

for you last time, Mitch. In fact, do you remember who was it? One of the Republican senators who was talking about after the rescue package passed, help is on the way, without mentioning that he had voted against it. Yeah, that's their favorite thing. That's right. Recognizing, though, that this is popular. Now we're moving, I think, that we're trying to keep things going simultaneously. But right now, it's infrastructure and caregiving, very popular. So we're going to put it to niche again. Are you really going to filibuster this? And if you do, do we think we

can get all 50 senators to either, now we may have to go harder, ram it through reconciliation, overrule a ruling of the parliamentarian on what can go into reconciliation. You get the point. That's kind of like the next rock we've got to roll uphill. But every time you do this, you get stronger and you send a lot of messages to the nation. I don't know a single person who got a check for $1,400 and said, well, yeah, I got a check for $1,400, but they passed it through reconciliation, so I don't really want it. People like it. We're going to do the same thing here, and now we're going to have to do the third one, and that is voting. I was going to say, yeah, the shit hits the fan with H.R.1, of course. And I mean, and that's not just about sort of the Democratic Party's agenda. That's democracy,

right? I've been thinking about this. We just, you mentioned this, we just survived an attempted coup and a violent insurrection. I can't help but feeling like we're all living in two different realities right now. And one reality, Joe Biden, is restoring competent governance and passing progressive legislation. And the other, most Republicans, from the leadership to the base, support the guy who tried to steal the last election and want him to run again, and he might run again. You are from a family of much more sensible Republicans.

How do we get back to a place where we can all have big disagreements about policy issues and not about democracy itself? Yeah. You know, that's a hard question, John. But I think part of it is the more we do this in the specific and the less we do this in the abstract, it gets a lot easier. Talk to me about roads. Talk to me about roads. Talk to me about childcare. Talk to me about the things that matter in my life right now. Vaccine distribution, you've made it available.

It does seem like, this is like the Biden administration's philosophy. I heard Chuck Schumer talk about this, too, that you've all sort of coalesced around the idea that if Democrats can deliver, if Democrats can tangibly improve people's lives and show America that we can govern competently, then all the crap we get from the right wing won't matter as much to voters at the end of the day. Is that the theory? I think that's the theory. I think that's actually a very good description of the theory. And look, it's scary what's happening over on the right wing. And it is, like you say, just a whole alternate reality, but for a narrower set of people so right now for me it's about and i think

for most of my colleagues what can we show you in concrete incontrovertible terms this is what a government can do for you this is is, we can get those vaccinations out. If you want them, you can keep yourself and your family safe. Boy, that goes a long way on the credibility spectrum. If you need some help financially, we've got a way to get some help to you. And that's why I go back to this notion that we were talking about earlier, because I talk about it a lot in the book. That's why I believe that this is a moment for change.

That over this last year, in this pandemic, we have decided we want a government that at least is on your side. We want a government that is willing to look at racial inequality and say, yeah, it's there and we can make some changes to make it better. We want a government that says, we want to make it easier for you to get to work. We want to make it easier for you to be able to buy a home. We just want to create more opportunity for you. We're not just trying to run this country for a handful of showboat billionaires. We're trying to run it for all of America. One of the huge challenges that we face is disinformation and propaganda. You spent a lot of time in your campaign taking aim at both

Fox News and Facebook. The Facebook oversight board just decided that they upheld Trump's suspension from Facebook, although it led to Trump's former chief of staff complaining and saying, well, some members of Congress are now looking at breaking up the company, which you, of course, proposed during the primary. Are you going to have some Republican allies in this fight now for breaking up Facebook? I may. I may. So look, I'm glad not to have to get up every morning and open my phone to see what the latest is from Donald Trump. But think about what this means. Facebook has become bigger than government. They have something they call a Supreme Court. Wait a minute.

What elected officials confirm those guys? Where were the public hearings on who ended up on that Supreme Court and that they get to decide a question like who has access to talking in America or any other part? Look, I think Trump should be banned. But the issue is that these companies are way too big and way too powerful and that's true for Facebook for Amazon for Google let's do our list here and the reasons let me just do real quick it's both it's a set of economic reasons look look at a company like Amazon watch their business model they run two businesses simultaneously, basically. One is a platform, right? Where buyers and sellers who want to buy online

come together, great. The second is they compete with the sellers. So you run, you know, John's Premium Pet Food and are doing a great job, they're scraping information out of every single transaction. They let you take all the risk of the startup, test out the idea, do the proof of concept. And then when they see you're making real money, say, oh, I get it. We're going to do john's premium pet food only it's john

with an h move it up to the front move you back to page seven and scoop in the profits and crush this small business you can do one or the other you can be the umpire in the game or you can have a team in the game, but you don't get to do both at the same time. So there's a lot of economic reason for breaking up. Facebook, there should be competition among different alternatives, just like there are for phone carriers. You can keep your same phone number, but you can decide to move to different carriers and you can shop for price or maybe for privacy. So there's strong economic reasons for breaking them up.

But there are also strong political reasons. They've got too damn much political power. Do you see opportunities for progress in breaking them up or at least sort of limiting their power over the next four years? Sure. And the number one thing that gives me optimism here is we already have antitrust laws on the books. We, I hope, are going to have a Department of Justice that is willing to enforce those antitrust laws. Now, you know my view, personnel is policy. Let's get a really good assistant U.S. attorney for antitrust who really is willing to take on the giants. But it's there. This is something you don't have to

get this through Congress. Now, are there some things Congress could do to tighten up the laws and to overturn some bad court decisions? Sure. But for openers, let's just pick up the antitrust tools that are already there in law, and let's start using them. Last question before I let you go. A few weeks ago, a man you admire very much, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, said he will consider running for president. You've previously said you thought this was a great idea. Does he have your endorsement? Well, it feels too early to endorse.

But all I can say is, be still my beating heart. There you go. I heard you say on NPR that you're not looking to be president right now. Any chance you might change your mind in the future? Oh, Joe Biden is running for president. He's running for reelection. My job is to help him succeed as president.

I wrote persist to focus on what we need to do while we have this opportunity. Think next hundred days. That's when we can make the changes that would last for generations. Absolutely. Thank you for joining so much. Please give Bailey my belated birthday wishes. I saw the video of him posted with the full burrito in his mouth. Did he eat the whole thing?

Of course. And then slept for about three days. Oh, that's a good birthday. Thank you so much, Senator Warren. The book is Persist. Everyone go check it out. It's a fantastic book. Thanks for coming by PSA. Thank you. Thanks for having me, John. thanks to elizabeth warren for joining us today great talking to you and everyone have a great weekend and we will talk to you next week bye everyone pod save america is a crooked media production The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Flavia Casas. Our associate producers are Jazzy Marine and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer.

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