Pod Save America - “Sean Spicer is good now.”

Episode Date: September 18, 2017

The GOP makes one last run at repealing Obamacare, Democrats look for a message that works, and Trump delivers his first United Nations speech. Then HuffPost editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen joins Jon, Jon, and Tommy to talk about the state of American democracy and the media, and DeRay Mckesson discusses the protest against police violence in St. Louis.

We are still in Hillary Clinton's basement. If someone could send some food and water. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On the pod today, in studio, we'll talk to the editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, Lydia Paulgreen. And later, we'll call the host of Crooked Media's Pod Save the People, DeRay McKesson. Love it.

How was Love It or Leave It on Friday? Good? It was a great episode. Should people download it or not? People should download it. We had Guy Branum. We had Aaron Ryan, who was hilarious. We had Julissa Arce.

We had Cyrus Habib. Oh, Crooked Media friends. Lieutenant Governor of Washington. He's really funny. He's really funny. I like Cyrus a lot. He's a friend of mine. And I was excited for people to hear what he's like.

Cool. Tell me who's on Pod Save the World this week. I'm doing an episode on some pretty horrible things going on in Myanmar. There is, in fact, what's been called an ethnic cleansing or potentially a genocide of a group of people called the Rohingya, who are a Muslim minority group. It is one of those issues that is, the more you read about it, the more brutally hard it is to comprehend that this is actually happening. But I do think it's important not to look away from this stuff

and to see if we can bring attention to it and maybe get the international community to do something. So tune in. Glad you're bringing some attention to that. Okay, so before we get into real stuff, a lot of people on Twitter have been asking for a quick love it rant on Sean Spicer at the Emmy last night. Well, I almost didn't make it in today because I'm still laughing so hard because it's so funny.

Sean Spicer. Remember when he lied? It's hilarious. Colbert is so well equipped to have Sean Spicer on and rake him over the coals for being a guy who has no morals and for being a huge liar. Just to have him come out and joke about lying at the podium from day one, I don't think it's funny. I don't think he should get that glossed over in his resume going forward.

Yeah, what's weird about it to me is that Colbert was on Kimmel last week, and Kimmel brought up Spicer because Kimmel had Spicer on, and Colbert was very tough on him and said he doesn't seem to want redemption. He doesn't seem to want to apologize. So I figured that Colbert would not do that. But it's just weird. There's going to be no penalty

now. We have some agency in this whole penalty question. So let's keep at it. Oh, by the way, I book Sean. But no, but it's like, honestly know uh an anti-trump emmys where spicer comes on stage i don't doesn't really care i don't think it's funny what bothered me more was the deluge of selfies kind of coming over the twitter all night of like here's sean spicer at the governor's ball and here here he is here, and here he is there. What a good time he's having.

Getting all these, you know, I didn't look at one of those. Enough about this. One more thing about that, because everyone's like, Spicer lied about crowd size, and that's why it's bad. Spicer lied about crowd size, and that was the joke. That wasn't, let's remember, that's not the biggest lie. Like, the worst,

the more damaging lie is, he defended Trump's lie about three million people voting illegal in this country he defended trump saying that barack obama committed a felony by wiretapping him like we just we forget these things and now we're just like you know well yeah yeah and he also like he's got small lies he thought donald trump was a disgusting person until he was in charge then he went and worked for him he's the worst he the reporters in D.C. before he worked for Trump how awful Trump was. Every reporter knows that. Every reporter's told the stories about it.

And then he went to work for him anyway. Sean Spicer doesn't get to be in on the fucking joke. He's gross. That's it. He is the joke. All right. Okay. So now, Graham Cassidy.

Republicans in the Senate are making one last-ditch effort to make health insurance unaffordable for tens of millions of Americans. They have until September 30th to pass a bill through the reconciliation process, which means they only need 50 votes. After that date, they need 60. The bill is Graham-Cassidy. I am wearing my Repeal and Go Fuck Yourself t-shirt today to show how— Your resolve. My resolve and how dangerous this is.

It's leadership. We talked a little bit about what the bill would do on Thursday, but just to review, eliminates the individual mandate, which would immediately drive up premiums, send the individual insurance market into a death spiral. It would allow states to eliminate essential benefits like chemo coverage, maternity coverage, prescription drugs, eliminate protections for pre-existing conditions.

And then basically, it eliminates the Affordable Care Act subsidies and the Medicaid expansion, gives that money to states, minus $400 billion over the next 10 years, and then eliminates all funding in 2026. Yeah. So it's- That's the deal. So it's radical. Radical.

It's radical. It is a full repeal effort. It is a full repeal effort. It is a full repeal. It's certainly not a compromise. We're protected a little bit by the fact that this is their kind of fallback third final attempt at something because we were dealing with ultimately a repeal effort that was rooted in the structure of Obamacare this entire time. Right. effort that was rooted in the structure of Obamacare this entire time, right? All the different versions we saw, but for skinny repeal, which was, you know, that crazy last-ditch effort just to get to the House bill, if you remember, three months ago, or two months ago, the last

time we were dealing with this. But this is a fundamentally different thing. And had they actually done this through any kind of regular process could have been something that they could have really rallied people behind in a more significant way because basically it takes Obamacare and it turns it into less generous block grants and basically puts it on the states to figure out what they do with health care. The many problems with this are, one, the way they deal with the Medicaid expansion is fucking nuts. So basically, 30 states expanded Medicaid and 20 states didn't.

Those were a lot of rural states and conservative states that refused to do it, even though the money was basically free, which punished a lot of their voters. Well, what happens in this bill? Well, it takes all the money that went to Medicaid expansion to states that expanded and states that didn't and just divides it up evenly as if no expansion had ever taken place, which is just a giant wealth transfer from states like California and New York and even Kentucky, states that did the right thing, and transfers them to all the states where their governors and legislatures didn't care enough about their poor and minority population to do anything about it to get them health care. It would be devastating.

That is awful. Right now, we're short of 50 votes, right? But I think the thing that makes a lot of people nervous is that this is a bill sponsored by Lindsey Graham in part. McCain is sort of waffling on it. Dean Heller is already on board. But what I don't get is McCain's whole argument against the last round was that it didn't go through regular order. There were no amendments or no committee process. There was nothing done the way it's supposed to be done in the Senate. I don't get how he could make that big bold stand and then jump on board. So if you listen to him on on Sunday, he was on Face the Nation and John Dickerson asked him about this.

And he said on Face the Nation, we should have a bill go through regular order. There should be a bipartisan process. And I think the bipartisan effort being undertaken by Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray should come to the floor for a vote. He just said that yesterday on Sunday. Now, in other statements, he said he likes Graham Cassidy. And he said ultimately he'll do what his governor tells him to do, Governor Ducey of Arizona. We should note that, after what Lovett was just saying, under this plan, Arizona loses about a billion dollars. Arizona is one of the states that gets hurt.

So you wouldn't imagine that Ducey would do it unless, of course, they pay him off. But there's a lot of focus on McCain here. But here's the deal. Cassidy's running around saying they have 49 votes. That's one short of 50. So that's very scary. Rand Paul seems like a hard no. You never want to count on Rand Paul because he's upset from the right.

But he's now, over the last couple of days, tweeted nine times about this proposal, including one where he says it's bad because it keeps Obamacare and redistributes money from Democratic states to Republican states, which is an argument that people on the left are making. And it is a correct argument. Correct. But it's like if Rand Paul was going to flip, you wouldn't imagine that he'd just keep tweeting every day about how horrible this is. But, of course, we all remember Rand Paul was a hard no last time around, and then McConnell promised him a vote on clean repeal. So that's why he voted for skinny repeal. Yeah, I mean, we have seen Republican senators say things that should make it impossible for them to flip. And then they flip. I mean, that's what Dean Heller did. Rand Paul's done that in the past.

Ted Cruz. All these guys make these grand statements to try to help themselves in the negotiation. And then I almost said negotiation. I know. I think he also left out Dean's honorific. Oh, dirty Dean Heller. He's a dirty politician. He's a dirty politician, Dean Heller.

But basically, we need – Collins and Murkowski have been very quiet. It's hard to imagine that they'd say yes, but if we have Collins and Murkowski and Paul, it doesn't matter what McCain does, that's enough. We need three no's. And Alaska is also one of the states that loses a bunch of money over the next 10 years, and nothing has really changed for the two of them since when they stood against the last proposal, which was on substance, not on process like McCain. So you would hope that Collins and Murkowski are in there. We need one more.

Paul's a possibility. But that's basically, this is all to say, it's scary again and everyone's got to get to the phones. I know that's annoying to hear, but it's true. It is. We have to do it. We hate ourselves for saying it. It's a constant struggle, people. So what's going to happen here?

McConnell will not call this for a vote unless he's got 50. He has pressed the CBO to give a score for this thing, even though the CBO was busy working on extending children's health insurance programs. The CBO, man. There's some guy deep within the CBO who is exhausted. He's got an ashtray with tons of cigarettes. Every month he gets a call from McConnell and he's like, you need to do six months of analysis

in two fucking days. Here's what's truly scary about it. They think that the CBO only is required to come up with a score about how much it costs and they may not have time to figure out what the coverage loss is for this bill. So they might give a CBO score that's just about how much it costs without any coverage numbers,

which is truly fucked up if you are voting for a bill. Especially McCain talking about regular order. You're going to vote for a bill where you don't know the impact? He just can't. Once again, it's the same fucking – like the bill is bad. It's a bad bill. It's yet another bad replacement bill. Once again, it's like they don't care enough about their conservative principles to even put something together that achieves some kind of an end.

You want to turn it into a block grant. You want the states to be in charge. You come up with this crazy jury-rigged dumb fucking way to do it that could never become law. Fine. The bill is bad. But once again, reforming a sixth of the economy, tens of millions of people's lives. And they're like, we think we can get it done. The last week of September, we got two days.

We got two days. Well, it shows that they're trying to – Ride or die. They're trying to sneak it through because they know that if they had a public debate about it they would lose which again this is a reminder you know trump's bad we all everything's about trump this is not about trump this is a bunch of you know republicans who've even called out trump like lindsey graham and they are doing this very bad thing so when you go vote it's not all about Trump. It's about these fucking Republicans in Congress. One story as a proof point for how serious this effort was, I think it was the political

story, said that Trump was asking about the bill at Bedminster, which I just think is like the lowest. He's like, what's happening? There might be some kind of other health care thing. He's seized with this challenge to the point where he's just first inquiring about it while playing golf. So anyway, IndivisibleGuide.com. You can go there and find ways you can help.

Most of it's going to be phone calls, but there are going to be some events as well. Also follow Ben Wickler from MoveOn.org on Twitter. He's got a couple long threads on everything you can do and steps you can take. So everybody make a few phone calls. And then here's the thing. Once we get to September 30th, if this doesn't pass, then we can finally celebrate in a way we couldn't even celebrate in the summer. Until McConnell changes. Until they change the rules and do it anyway.

Look, killing this thing, it's harder than killing the clown from fucking it. And it's going to keep crawling out of that well until we take back the house. I will not be watching the remake of that movie. It ruined my life as a child. Nor will I watch Mother, which sounds really fucking awful. I love it. It's exciting. I'm going to go see Mother. Emily wants to see it, too. Emily and I have already been texting. Don't even worry about it.

Alright, let's talk about what the fuck's going on with Donald Trump. Over the weekend, our bipartisan, independent dealmaker president had quite a Sunday morning tweet storm, which culminated in him retweeting a gif of Trump's golf ball hitting Hillary Clinton, which was originally tweeted by someone who's tweeted racist and anti-Semitic garbage. What a surprise.

Of course. Of course it is. I just, I wanted to bring this up because it's like no one's talking about it today. We're all sort of moved past it. I mean, that is a crazy thing to do. It is like fantasizing about political violence by the President of the United States against his former female political opponent. What? He's a moron.

It's just like the kind of thing that makes the dumbest person laugh. Like, ha ha, a couple. But it's the kind of thing that makes the dumbest person laugh if it's like shared on Facebook by your crazy uncle. Yeah, it's a kind of thing that makes the dumbest person laugh if it's like shared on Facebook by your crazy uncle. Yeah, it's a crazy uncle thing. There's just no thought that this is the president of the United States and that there's all kinds of other implications. Yeah, I mean, what else is there to say? I know, there's nothing else to say. It's not a new low.

Like, he's joked about her being fucking killed during the election. He does this all the time. You know, this is who he is. Like, it's not – not yeah he tweeted about her getting hit in the back with a golf ball and falling down because he thinks that's hilarious because he's a dumb mean-spirited fucking dotty old racist what do you want that's what he is he thinks it's funny he does it we've never even seen him fucking laugh he's never laughed he's never laughed the one thing maybe he chuckled to himself yeah he laughs when he like mocks people and then he laughs about

it when sessions cries this brings up a political piece from last week that we didn't have time to cover, but it's relevant. It's called Teflon Don Confounds Democrats. It basically digs into a series of private focus groups and internal polls conducted by Democratic strategists and campaigns. Polls of swing voters, independents. So there's good news, bad news in this poll. Sorry, the bad news. Bad news is Trump is still viewed as an outsider shaking up the system. They think he's bringing about change.

He's getting some credit on the economy. Folks are unimpressed by the fact that he lies. They're not so much into the Russia investigation. They don't think Charlottesville is as big of a problem as we think. And there's some bad news in the Democratic policies that people have been proposing. Free college didn't poll so well. Fifteen dollar minimum wage didn't poll great. Medicare for all tests better.

But there's some skepticism. What do we think about this? You know, it's just a good it's a good level set. Yeah, I think a dose of skepticism is is needed. Like, I think that's important. You know, the piece makes this point that's like, if Democrats think they're on a walk because of Trump to like taking back the House and making these big games, and they should think otherwise. But the truth is, I don't think a lot of Democrats think that I don't think we're all I don't think we're all feeling super great and how easy it's going to be to win the House. I think everybody recognizes that it's really hard. And at the same

time, it is one of those politico pieces that you can just feel a conclusion searching for evidence as it goes along to kind of tell a story about how donald trump is it's you know teflon don isn't usually that isn't really what you would call somebody who has a 35 approval rating right it's sort of that's somebody to whom everything has stuck that's a cast iron pot with a lot of stuff grilled to it like you made a grilled cheese and didn't flip it early enough that was was my take, too. I think that was Bill Burton's quote. And the final quote of the piece was Bill Burton being like, the guy's at 38%.

It's not going well. He said everything's working. Taking back the House is not going to be won or lost just based on Donald Trump's approval rating. That is the mood music that will allow us to fundraise, to recruit great candidates, and to put together a message to counter Trump and tie all these other Republicans to it. So it's a piece of a puzzle. I feel pretty good about Donald Trump being at 38, 40%. That's not good. And he has not done anything to get himself out of this hole, including the short-term

debt ceiling debate. But it is a reminder that politics, it's all about choices. And we need to put forward an alternative to Donald Trump that people like more than him or like more than the Republican that's running on his party. So we have a lot of work to do. Yeah, I do think that we have to also decide what is the message that we go out with, not just on our side, but what we want to say about Donald Trump. And we always say this here, but there's like, he gives us 50 targets a day and you call him a liar, you call him this. So some of the good news was the voters did seem exhausted about the chaos surrounding Trump. And there was a lot of interest in electing

a Congress that can act as a check on him. And then the other message that seemed to really work with a lot of these people in the focus groups and polls were Trump is out to make his rich friends richer at your expense. This is about stripping regulations, the corporate tax breaks, the health care, like him trying to repeal Obamacare was effective too. And on fights for people like me, Democrats have now pulled ahead of Trump. They were even with him in February. By a lot too. By a lot. Yeah, I think because Trump scrambles so many of the rules and he does give us so many different directions to go, we kind of forget some of the basics.

And even though he's going to do so many different and disparate crazy things over the next year, we do need to start getting behind a sentence. Like, I don't know if, you know, Donald rich friends richer, fine, whatever it is. But it's like, you know, Donald Trump is out for himself and making his rich friends richer. That's why he's trying to distract you by hitting a golf ball at Hillary Clinton because he's doing all this other stuff, whatever it is but it's like you know donald trump is out for himself and making his rich friends richer that's why he's trying to distract you by hitting a golf ball at hitler clinton because he's doing all this other stuff whatever it is we need to get to some place where the first part of the sentence is the same um and that's been really hard and that didn't happen in 2016 at all core criticism that is repeated every day it's funny i heard someone uh bernie sanders was interviewed the other day and someone interviewed him about what do you think about donald trump so

far everything he's done? He's like, not only is he someone that wants to give tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, like first thing out of his mouth. And then he went to talk about Charlottesville and racism and everything else. But it's just that there is a message discipline that's going to be required in the campaign going forward. And I think this piece is good for that. Especially as the Mueller stuff continues to leak out every day. And winning the House is going to be really hard. Donald Trump being unique doesn't make the race to win the House unique. It's not, it may look like a Bush thing, you know, we may be able to pick up a bunch

of seats, but it's not going to be easy. And we're going to have to fight for every seat. That's all. I want to talk about what's going on this week. On Tuesday, Donald Trump will deliver his first speech to the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York, which brings together leaders of the 193 member nations for a week of meetings and speeches. Major topics be Iran, Syria, terrorism, and maybe the most pressing, North Korea. Tommy, you went to all of these when Obama was president. They're called UNGA. It's called UNGA for short. That's the acronym. UN General Assembly. Yeah. What can we expect there? What usually happens there?

I mean, it's a place for the member nations to convene for a week. There's a lot of speeches. There's meetings to discuss global security challenges. The focus changes every year, but it's been the Middle East, Syria, Iran, some of the hot button issues. I think this year, the focus is going to be on figuring out Donald Trump. They want to know what America first really means. We're coming off previous summits that were defined by Trump refusing to reaffirm the most important part of NATO, shoving the prime minister of Montenegro for no good reason, driving around by himself in a golf cart while all the other leaders hang out. He's also described the UN as, quote, a club for people to get together, talk and have

a good time that's sort of useless. So I do think like North Korea is going to be front, talk and have a good time. That's sort of useless. So I do think like North Korea is going to be front and center and trying to figure out the next steps as they continue to flaunt the international community. This will be made harder by the fact that Chinese leader Xi Jinping is not going to be there. So it's hard to see where real progress come from. Trump has been making a lot of noise about pulling out of the Iran deal. A whole bunch of people are going to lobby him not to do that, including Francois Noland, leader of France. They also are really going to be focused on Venezuela, Myanmar, like why did you pull out of the Paris Climate Accords? I think U.S. journalists are also going to be very focused on Rex Tillerson because he has been

about as irrelevant a secretary of state as we've ever had. And people are also going to focus on Nikki Haley because she sort of stepped into the breach and some of the leadership void that he has created. So, you know, we'll see what happens. You know, Trump's there for like three or four days. It is like the worst kind of diplomatic speed dating you could ever imagine. You have major speeches you have to like know what to say in the bylaw with cutter and the lunch with the japanese pm and the south korean pm about north korea's nuclear program okay quick question not up for it yeah he's not gonna do that so then what happens i mean i don't know that there's like the expectations game has gotten run down so low but i do think i've noticed that they're like what is he gonna get up there and scream at everyone in his speech and say that he hates the world?

I was like, no, he's probably going to give a normal fucking speech. Right. Let's not. I mean, it's just it's hard because summits like this where all the leaders are together, usually you do a whole ton of work leading up to it to try to get to some deliverable, some big accomplishment, something to announce. And when you have a state department that is essentially not staffed, it's very hard to have the team in place to do that and to like get to the place where we have accomplishments. So we could say, you know what, Venezuela is a disaster and we're going to ratchet up political pressure on them until they stop doing X, Y, or Z. Or like there's a ethnic cleansing happening in Burma. We are focused on it. This is the money that's going towards helping refugees

who are fleeing to Bangladesh. I just like, I have no confidence that any of that is prepped. It really feels like they're so reactive. Like they don't, like you never, like what is Rex Tillerson's agenda? Like, I mean, they've pulled out of Paris. They're dealing with North Korea.

They're trying to seem as though they're competent. It seems as though everything about what Nikki Haley does, what Rex Tillerson does, is about doing this first level thing of just demonstrating that we have a competent and working, functioning diplomatic effort in place, which is the threshold entry for actually doing something in those jobs. Rex Tillerson has spent nine months reviewing the staffing levels at the State Department for some reorg that he wants to put forward. Meanwhile, he has no assistant secretaries of state. There's no management reorg where you're going to say, you know what, we don't need someone in charge of Europe or the Middle East.

There's some things he's done that actually kind of make sense. He's gotten rid of some of these special envoys that deal with challenges that kind of aren't really a big deal anymore. You know, so, that's fine. Like, the State Department could be shrunk down a bit and made more efficient, but it's just I don't think there's a single cabinet member that is more of a disappointment than Rex Tillerson.

Like, even Rick Perry found religion and was like, oh yeah, the Energy Department, like, we should have that. Oh, I will take guarding our nation's nukes seriously. Yeah, right. I'm going i'm gonna show up to work so i'm a little scared about north korea oh you're the one i was reading uh i was reading axios last night they had some reporting on this that the trump administration is down to basically two paths one continue to put more pressure on china economic um pressure particularly and then two like preparing for a preemptive ground war. I mean, what's going to happen here?

Seems great. Hell if I know. I mean, it does seem, I mean, hopefully what they're doing is posturing and trying to fix Steve Bannon coming out and telling some progressive journalists that he's right. That we're in checkmate. We're in checkmate, that we're screwed. That there is no military solution. They want to get the Chinese to ratchet down on imports of fuel. David Sanger in the New York Times did a big piece today on how there's this very specific deadly rocket fuel that China's allowing the North Koreans to purchase that's fueling their missile program.

So there's a lot of things you can do on the pressure track in terms of sanctions, but it requires support from places like Russia and China, members of the U.N. Security Council. It actually also requires them to actually enforce things that are going on in their own country, like Chinese companies selling fuel. Yeah. And I saw McMaster talking about this over the weekend. And it is true that as part of this negotiation, it seems like they need to convey that they have a reasonable military option, that that's part of their messaging and part of what they're doing with their press office at Axios is to try to convey that they actually believe they have a military option to give them a stronger negotiating hand. Because McMaster was like, there are people saying we don't have a military option. That's not true. Maybe pushing back against Ben and kind of giving away the game in that interview he gave that we forgot about because it was two weeks ago.

I mean, it's a different situation, but it is analogous to what we did with Iran, which was say we will blow the shit out of your military facilities and your nuclear program unless you take these steps we're demanding you do. And in the interim, we increase sanctions. In the interim, we increased sanctions. Speaking of Iran, it is very frightening that Trump has previewed the fact that he might pull out of the Iran deal as early as October. That has in place a diplomatic process to oversee, to monitor their nuclear program. It's not perfect. We need access to military sites that we're not getting. Enforcement could be improved. But it's just

when you look at North Korea and you see this program just spiraling out of control versus Iran, where it feels managed by the international community to a great extent, I cannot fathom why they would do that. Also, this is a choice between, like you just said, enforcement could be improved, or if you pull out of the deal, no enforcement. And the Europeans will just roll on without us. That's so, like you pull out of this deal, Iran's going to go, of course they're going to go pursue nuclear weapons again, and they're going to have an easier time doing it than they are right now. It's just like, think of the things we're not even talking about, like, right now. The only story I read about, you know, Middle East peace, he's going to meet with Netanyahu.

He just tweeted about it. Yeah, I mean, it's just, there's no real process in place to push them forward. Not that there's an easy solution on the table or even a hard solution on the table, but there's just no work getting done there. There's ethnic cleansing happening in Myanmar. There's all these issues and areas. There's all these global development and food security goals that are really important to places where people are struggling that don't even seem to be on the agenda. Yeah, I mean, I was asking about North Korea because over the weekend he tweeted, he called Kim Jong-un Rocket Man. And then all the stories were about he's got a nickname for Kim Jong-un,

it's Rocket Man. And I'm sitting there just like, oh, this is a funny little topic. And then last night I read the Axios reporting about the actual military options that they're considering. I'm like, this seems to be the bigger deal right here. Not so much the Rocket Man nickname. This is the stuff you want to pay attention to. Why are we calling Kim Jong-un Rocket Man?

Is that an insult, first of all? That was a fine movie from the 90s or early 2000s. And then we're calling terrorists losers now. He's really stuck with that one. He thinks that one's a good messaging point. He thinks that one's a good messaging point. I'm not totally against that one. The Rocket Man thing is silly.

He's also ruined two Elton John songs now. Rocket Man, Tiny Dancer, he plays that at his rallies. When we went to NASA at the White House and Buzz Aldrin almost punched me in the face, before that he handed me his business card and it says, Buzz Aldrin, Rocket Hero. That's awesome. Which is cool. But even just Trump tweets that he's rocket man what what's so funny quick story about me and buzz aldrin yeah you know and if love it

or leave it gets uh very good friend very good card uh close personal friend buzz aldrin and i were uh at the palm the uh and then charlie rose came up and then i took a selfie with spicer spicer buzz aldrin and i getting a quick lobster cob at the Ivy. But no, but that even just people reacting to it is exhausting. Like he calls him Rocket Man. Like it's not funny. It's not appropriate. It's strange.

It's not even worth your outrage. Like Trump thinks he's going to solve this with a nickname. Who knows why Trump does what he does? I just mean to say it, but it's just frustrating. even worth your outrage like oh trump thinks he's going to solve this with a nickname no who knows why trump does what he does i just mean to say about it's just frustrating he's just it's a very hard problem it's not his fault it does seem like tillerson to a lesser extent hr mcmaster mattis nicky haley are are seized with the challenge they get it they're focused on it the rest of the world is wondering what the hell donald trump's going to do and if he's going to make things worse rather than better. And that's not a great place to be.

I always want to check in with you from time to time on this because I try to think to myself, is this something that's a uniquely Trump administration strategy? Or what would we be doing if it was the Obama administration right now, knowing that it is a really hard challenge no matter who's president? That's always the tough thing reading this stuff about North Korea. Yeah, I mean, we would be pushing for more sanctions, for more enforcement. We'd probably be doing a lot more to reassure the South Koreans.

We'd probably be thinking long and hard about increasing our missile defense systems in the region, which I think they're also doing. But it doesn't look that different. It doesn't look that different, except for the fact that the North Korean strategy is that tried to divide the alliance right to provide the japanese and the south koreans from us and trump is into that and and he's he's leaning into it without really realizing he's also trying to divide the alliance look finally though it'll it'll be okay because stephen miller is at that computer figuring out the perfect words for donald to say. Yeah, I mean, can you guys imagine? C plus Santa Monica fascist. I guess the funny thing is,

he does give this big speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. It will be very weird and jarring, I think, even now, for us to watch that and to see him in that role. I won't be watching. But he will be reading from a teleprompter. It will probably go fine. The thing that I really worry about is like, what's he going to say in the meeting with the King of Jordan

or the PA of the House of the Authority or the leaders of Egypt or in his working lunch with African leaders? You know, it's like these are, you know, he doesn't know a thing about what's going to be discussed. I would say a full 75% about what Donald Trump will know on foreign policy on Friday, he does not currently know yeah he will learn it in these meetings they were talking he will be fascinating he's going to say something like you know many people didn't know that there are more than five countries

in africa people more and more people are finding that out so this is a basically this is an international relations course for donald trump oh yeah it's it's crash course and they're doing a long version i mean monday tuesday wed Thursday. Like, by the end of the Obama administration, we're right out of there. The great courses. Unga. He gets to chill out in New York for a couple days. Right. That's exactly right.

He hates Washington. He's doing most of it from Bedminster. I've got to say, I'm with him on that one. Oh, that's fun. Okay. When we come back, we'll be talking to the editor-in-chief of HuffPo, Lydia Paul-Green. We are very fortunate to have in studio the editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, Lydia Paul-Green. We're HuffPost now.

HuffPost. I said it earlier in the program correctly. It's okay. Can we do it again? Yeah, let's do it again.ost. I said it earlier in the program correctly. It's okay. We can do it again. Yeah, let's do it again. No, I think it should stay in, guys. It's a learning moment. I think so, too.

Stick with people. I'm a big believer in transparency and showing your work, so there we go. That's perfect. Before you were the editor-in-chief of HuffPost, you were also a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, Focus on Africa. The UN General Assembly is this week. How do you sense the world is viewing Donald Trump nine months into this adventure we're all on? Have people started to figure him out? Or is he still this big question mark that is creating anxiety? Well, I think both, right? I mean, they've started to figure him out, and that is provoking even more anxiety. You know, it's been really interesting. I mean, I spent most of my career covering, you know, developing nations that were sort of transitioning to democracy, but often in a deeply complicated way.

in a deeply complicated way. They were not necessarily, you know, ideally representative or, you know, perfect in their expression of democracy. And, you know, when I was in places like Zimbabwe, or Congo, or Nigeria, or India, you know, the US, for many democracy advocates, was seen as a kind of beacon. And, you know, when I talk to my friends in those places now, they see things very differently. I had a conversation, this is like such a Tom Friedman thing to say, but, you know, we've been going around the country on our Listen to America tour that HuffPost is doing, visiting 25 cities. And I was in St. Louis for the kickoff, and I had this conversation with a Lyft driver going back to my hotel, who's originally from Uganda. And he's lived in the St. Louis area for 13 years. He's a nurse and, you know, drives Lyft on the weekends. And he said,

we had a pretty in-depth conversation about the situation in Uganda. They've had a strongman president, you know, for the past 30 years. And he said, you know, I used to call Uganda to check up on people there. And now people are calling to check up on me. Great. And that, to me, like really encapsulates how a lot of people, you know, from the world that I used to spend most of my time covering feel about what's unfolding in the United States right now. It's a mix of horror, you know, but also, you know, it feels very familiar, you know, having a leader who's using fear, antipathy. I mean, in Uganda, for example, it wasn't Muslims, but it was actually gays who were used as a kind of a way to whip up antipathy to the opponents of the president. So, you know, I think it's really useful to look and see how the rest of the world is digesting and seeing, you know, the Trump presidency. And you're seeing, you know,

don't forget that Trump is part of a wave, you know, I covered India, and, you know, Trump is of a piece with figures like Narendra Modi. So, you know, I think the global lens is really important in thinking about what's unfolding in America right now. So you were covering countries transitioning into democracy and then covering one transitioning out. So you became editor-in-chief of one of the largest left-leaning media organizations right as Trump is elected president. We're now eight months in. What's been the biggest challenge of journalism in the Trump era? And what surprised you?

Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. I mean, I think, you know, HuffPost has traditionally been described as a left leaning news organization. And I suppose there are some ways in which it's true. I'd like to think of us as progressive. But I think like, this is a moment where the traditional polls of left and right feel so scrambled. And, you know, you've got these two giant forces, you know, globalization on the one hand and technological change on the other, converging to really to really re-architect how power works in the world. And so I think of us, the best way to describe our identity is, you know, we're for people who earn a paycheck and live on that paycheck. And that's actually not an ideological point of view. What does that mean in practice? Well, it means that we're pretty critical of everyone.

It's powerful. I was going to say that it's more populism than ideology now. Yeah, I mean, and I think like populism is, is has become a dirty word in our, in our current political climate, because it's been used in so many negative ways. And the history of populism in the United States is not a happy one. But it's hard to ignore the fact that there are, you know, huge parts of the country, and frankly, the world that feel alienated from the most powerful institutions that govern our lives, whether it's, you know, politics, whether it's media, you know, technology, there's just so many things that feel, I think, fundamentally alien. And I think, you know,

one of the things we're trying to accomplish with this listening tour is to sort of get beyond the divisive tactics that have divided people and help people, particularly working people, see the things that they share and that they have in common. And, you know, once you get past, you know, the kind of Fox News framing around political correctness and, you know, transgender bathrooms and things like that, and get people having a real conversation, I think they often find that they share much more than divides them. I think they often find that they share much more than divides them. I just want to follow up. So taking on both sides, right, or sort of viewing not being easy on the liberal side, right, and that would be a difference than what, say, a more liberal publication would do.

Where do you think more liberal-leaning places are falling down on the job in holding Democrats and progressives accountable? It's a great question. I mean, I think, you know, we're, you know, Democrats love nothing more than a circular firing squad. So, you know, there's a lot of kind of internecine battles going on right now. It feels like we're going to replay the 2016 primary, you know, probably well into our grandchildren's, you know, lives. But, you know, I think that, you know, the relationship of the Democratic Party in particular to big institutions, financial institutions, to the technology industry, I actually think that you're seeing an emerging set of voices that are asking really, really hard questions around these issues. So we're definitely not alone in that. I've been super encouraged to see a huge emphasis on the questions around technological monopolies. I think that the battle over identity politics is pretty uninteresting to me, but it's good that it's a conversation that we're having. So I'm not going to criticize any sort of left-leaning publication for doing this or not doing that.

But I do think that anybody who cares about these issues needs to be putting real pressure on the political leadership and also the sort of big institutions like unions, you know, as much as they remain a force to really be kind of like foot soldiers in this battle. And putting that pressure on and continuing to advocate for these issues is extremely important. I guess, yeah, I just it seems like to me that those are critiques and access points from the left as well. Right. That's like a desire for a stronger union force that are to take on big technology companies that are monopolistic. I guess I just to me, like I see MSNBC at a moment where there's incredible liberal activism kind of going out and trying to find conservatives to kind of level the playing field. And I guess I wonder why this would be a moment to come at these issues. Oh, I totally agree. And I think like, you know, to me, the thing that's dismaying is that the conservatives that you see, you know, rising up in places like

MSNBC, and like the, you know, you know, opinion pages of the New York Times actually represent like exactly the same worldview as the liberals, you know. They may have differences on policy issues and things like that. But, you know, they represent, you know, upper middle class, elite consensus, establishment, you know, I mean, you know, Brett Stevens is an incredibly stylish writer, and I think, you know, an interesting thinker. But, you know, there's not that much difference in terms of the broader kind of polls that we're seeing in our world right now between him and Tom Friedman, or him and Nick Kristof, you know, they essentially come out of the same milieu, and they go to the same cocktail parties, they have had the same lived experience. And so, to me, it's less of a critique about ideology. And to me,

it feels like weirdly more like a sort of cover your ass than a genuine attempt to grapple with ideological diversity. Yeah. I mean, and Hugh Hewitt is an intellectually dishonest individual who came to support Trump when it became economically and socially acceptable or viable for him to do so. And lo and behold, he's rewarded with a show on MSNBC. Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. You know, I mean, I think we're seeing people, it's very comfortable for establishment institutions to embrace never Trump conservatives.

That's like a gimme. It's so easy. Shout out to Miller. No, I mean, exactly. It's like, it's, you know, so nobody gets any points for ideological diversity in my book from embracing a, you know, GOP never Trumper. It's like yawn. I was thinking about this last night and you were tweeting about it as well with Spicer on the Emmys,

which is like so supposedly liberal Hollywood. Harvard now is like embracing these former Trump figures like Spicer and Corey Lewandowski. But not Chelsea Manning, God forbid. Well, it's like in my mind, I'm like, this is ironically one of the points that Trump's campaign was making, which is there's this clubby elitism. And it really doesn't matter which whether you're a Democrat or Republican, because all these people end up together. No, of course. Because it's the money and fame that sort of drives it. No, that's exactly right. And I think like, you know, it's been kind of a rough time for Harvard. No, of course they do. Because it's the money and fame that sort of drives it. No, that's exactly right.

And I think like, you know, it's been kind of a rough time for Harvard. I didn't go to Harvard. I don't know if any of you guys did. Boo hoo. When's the vigil? I mean, look, it's not like I went to a state school. I actually went to a small liberal arts college in Maryland

that had a lot of conservatives at it. You know, I think that this ability of establishment institutions I actually went to a small liberal arts college in Maryland that had a lot of conservatives at it. You know, I think that this ability of establishment institutions to re-assimilate noxious figures is a very old story. You know, I mean, it's like Kissinger. Yeah, exactly. I mean, Henry Kissinger, you know, is, you know, remains hailed by a statement, including by people like Hillary Clinton. So, you know, I think this has been a factor in our public life and really says something like deeply troubling about Washington, that there's essentially nothing, there's nothing you can do that makes you a persona non grata.

Yeah, well, I found myself thinking that it's even worse, which is, it's about the enemies you're allowed to have, you know, because had Sean Spicer stood up there and defended things like a Muslim ban, but had Trump done something anti-gay in a way that led Spicer to forgive it at the podium, he'd be much less forgiven by people at the Emmys. I think that's absolutely right. I mean, and that goes to like the kind of hierarchy of, of otherness, you know, and look, you know, you look at things like the transgender ban. And look, I don't remember if Sean Spicer specifically stood up and defended the transgender ban. But like, you know, we've seen this like change sweeping through Hollywood, but it remains, you know, it remains, it remains somewhat on the fringe. And, you know, I think, I think that, that the question of like who it's okay to bash

and who it's not remains like a really important one. Yeah. So you're leading a media company at a time of massive change in media. We are too. We are as well. So I was actually just going to get some advice. So wait, I'm here to ask. So Ben smith advice put your office in a soundproof uh studio on la siena you'll never hear a motorcycle go by ben smith at buzzfeed wrote a piece about facebook and how it's time for big technology companies to sort of have their time in the barrel and they're starting to get attacked you're hearing about antitrust media companies have long viewed facebook as a frenemy. They give you extraordinary reach, but they cut into revenues. What do you think the future is for

these massive technology companies like Facebook, like Twitter, that are so important to the way the news is disseminated to consume now? I think they're in trouble. I mean, I think that you're seeing on the left and in certain parts of the right a consensus around the overwhelming power that these platforms have. You know, the New York Times story about what happened at the New America Foundation with the Open Markets Institute, I think, was a real wake up call. And, you know, it remains unclear if that's actually what Google wanted or if it was, you know, the overzealous reaction of the people that run New America. But, you know, it's clear to me that news organizations, you know, really let themselves be dealt a bad hand. And I think about the way in which, you know, for example, Taylor Swift has managed her relationship with Spotify. You know, I take it away, I give it back.

And, you know, I remember right before her album came out, there was a massive advertisement that Spotify paid for. It was kind of a takeover on the New York Times homepage. And it was clear that she had extracted, like, extraordinary concessions from Spotify and said, you as a platform, you need to have this album. Now, can news do that,

I think is a really interesting question. And the fact is, we trained our readers to expect our content to be free. But that in a way is not nearly as bad as the second sin, which was training platforms to expect that we would just give them our content and let them build their businesses on the back of it. I mean, this is particularly poignant for HuffPost, right? Because, you know, one of the most powerful critiques of HuffPost was that we destroyed the journalism industry by having unpaid bloggers and, you know, by aggregating people's stories and things like that.

you know, by aggregating people's stories and things like that. I mean, we are all unpaid workers, you know, toiling in the minds of the in the data minds of Facebook, right? I mean, we really are, you know, I mean, and a lot of nice houses in San Francisco been built on the on your labor. Yeah, exactly. And so I think like, you know, now running like a small scrappy, I mean, not that small, but you know, like a scrappy newsroom that's like really devoted to creating. It's sort of ironic that, you know, there was a time that people pointed to us and thought of us as the, you know, the enemy race, which I don't think we've had a good enough or serious enough discussion in this country about how to counter propaganda. Or even a full accounting of what happened. Or a full accounting of what happened. But I kept looking at these studies after the 2016 election that shows the media coverage,

you know, mainstream media coverage was overwhelmingly negative for both candidates. And there was remarkably little about policy for both candidates among the mainstream media coverage was overwhelmingly negative for both candidates. And there was remarkably little about policy for both candidates among the mainstream media coverage. But Trump benefits from these right-wing media outlets, Breitbart, Fox, everything, that were actually talking a lot about his policy positions. And so his policy broke through in a favorable way on the right. Hillary never had anything like that in the left. Not just broke through in a favorable way on the right, but they broke through without any interference, right? Right. I mean, without any scrutiny.

No filter, yeah. Without any like, you know. And so I think like, you know, I think that a lot of the anger that you're seeing from President Clinton, from Hillary Clinton, against the media is really kind of like speaking to this in that, you know, you had these big institutions that saw it as their job to do their job as they've always done their job. And meanwhile, kind of off to the side, there was this other media that was much more savvy and plugged into how people are actually getting information that was telling a really different story. And look, you know, I mean, one of the one of the basic things, I mean, there's there's absolutely like, you know, progressive, you know, I wouldn't quite call it fake news, but there's

progressive, you know, kind of manipulative media, I know, because my mother bombards me with it every single day on Facebook. But, you know, there also doesn't seem to be the receptiveness to that among, you know, on the left. I think that there is a more questioning, less likely to sort of accept this kind of simplistic framing that we were seeing on the right. And so, you know, so I think that you're seeing efforts on the left to try and replicate the bright parts and others. I don't think they'll succeed. I don't think we want to. I mean, it's always bothered me because when people bring up Fox and Breitbart, they'll say, oh, and then on the left you have MSNBC and HuffPost.

They're just not like that. There's no comparison. We would be in much better shape if there was a Rachel Maddow of the right. If that's who people were tuning into on Fox News, it'd be great. the Rachel Maddow of the right. If that's who people were tuning into on Fox News, it'd be great. I don't think we want to replicate that.

But so what do we do on the left? I mean, you guys must struggle with that, right? We do all the time. And I think like, you know, I mean, it's not to say that, I mean, if you read Breitbart on any given day, which I do read every single day, they are absolutely writing about divisions within the right,

you know, so it's not like a, you know, a kind of amen corner for the GOP. And so I think like our kind of fratricidal coverage of the left is not dissimilar. Certainly now with Bannon back, you're seeing that. But I think that there has been this like really skillful, you know, kind of transmission of memes on the right that just would never work on the left. I agree. And, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot as we learn more and more about Russian propaganda efforts, because it's not that they were more technologically effective or better funded than, say, Hillary Clinton's team or the DNC's team. There had to have been something about the content that people were more willing to believe. And I think it's because they're willing to lie. They're willing to say Hillary Clinton murdered people and here's the list.

And like when that shit gets in your head, it's hard to get it out. And I don't think that's something we ever want to replicate on the left, at least I hope not. But on the right, it's like we saw this about Obama from day one, the birther garbage was exactly that. Right. I mean, I think it really has to do with like your relationship to truth and fact, right? I mean, if you have any sense of right and decency and care about, you know, the actual world in which we live. I mean, that's why I think, you know, people who are shocked that, you know, Trump and Schumer, that, you know, Chuck and Nancy and Donald Trump are, you know, making deals. I mean, you know, at the end of the day, I think that for the Democrats, saving DACA is like not a joke.

You know, they're not going to sell out, you know, 800,000 people who came to America as children for the sake of not giving Donald Trump a win. I mean, agree or disagree with the Democrats, like, you know, that was not the case with the Republicans under Obama, right? I mean, they were willing to do almost anything to prevent him from getting almost anything. And what we're seeing right now is a Democratic Party that's behaving like adults. And I think that's just the reality that we need to live with, that at the end of the day, people like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are going to make deals with Trump because it's just too important. Yeah. So last question, and then we'll let you go. Because you've covered so many countries transitioning into democracy, how do you think that our institutions are holding up so far under the Trump presidency? Or how concerned are you that he's doing lasting damage?

are holding up actually pretty well. I think, you know, for all the criticism of the media, like, you know, there's so much great journalism out there right now. And, you know, people are not intimidated. And I think that that's really powerful. I worry a lot about the courts. I think that, you know, something that people are probably not paying enough attention to is just how much power the president has to shape the courts. And given our current, you know, our current setup in the Senate, this is going to have profound and lasting impact. If the Republicans achieved only one thing, denying a Supreme Court justice to President Obama and handing a seat to Neil Gorsuch is a generational win that will not soon be undone. You know, and so, you know, I think that's one area where we have to be like really, really be watching closely. You know, I'm an optimist by nature. And I think that, you know,

particularly traveling around the country on this bus tour, I'm going to Birmingham from here. You know, I just have to believe that, you know, the sort of the real stuff of the country, which is people in their communities, like making changes in their lives and in their political institutions and their civic institutions, that that's the thing that's going to keep us from going off the rails. I mean, look, there are countries that have perfect elections under the auspices of the United Nations. Like, for example, I covered one of the first elections in Congo after the Civil War. And that was a beautiful election. Everyone, you know, cast their ballots peacefully. The ballots were counted correctly. That country has no institutions, you know. And so it's just been a mess ever since.

In Nigeria, they can't hold an election to save their lives. You know, there's like open ballot stuffing and, you know, all kinds of shenanigans that go on. But its judiciary almost always gets it right and its institutions, you know, sort of hold the country in place. And that's why, despite everyone thinking Nigeria is a mess, it's actually held together all these years. And so when I think about the United States, I think about us as being, you know, there are parts of the mechanics and the furniture of our democracy that are vulnerable, but there are sort of deep institutional reasons why I think we have reasons to be optimistic. We also need Trump's lawyer to keep going to steak lunches and just talking loudly about their strategies. Getting to Ken Vogel.

Getting a pop over and talking about a safe with secret documents. Keep it up, man. Read about it in the New York Times. Yeah. Lydia Paul Green, thank you so much

for joining us and please come back again soon. It's a pleasure. Thanks, guys. Good luck on the bus tour. Yeah. Thank you.

Have fun. It's awesome. On the pod today, we have the host of Pod Save the People, DeRay McKesson. DeRay, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. How are you guys doing? Pretty good.

Great. Who's on the show this week? We have Tennessee State Legislator Lee Harris talking about drug-free school zones. There's so much you don't know that I didn't know about drug-free school zones. And then we have Tom Dart, the sheriff of the Cook County Jail, the largest jail in America. What did you talk to him about? You know, actually, yes. No, today, on Monday, Monday of this week, which is today.

I know, man. I know the feeling. Today is Monday, right? Yeah, I thought this was on Tuesday. I know man I know the feeling today there's an order that goes into effect by the chief judge in Chicago that should fundamentally change money bail there so we talk about that and we talk about like what does it mean to

lead a jail and the biggest jail in the country you know people don't realize that the three largest mental health facilities in America are jails so we talk about that and what his role is and what's on the horizon. So that was interesting. And then the conversation about what's happening in Tennessee and drug-free schools, there's something that I thought was sort of an issue until we talked and I understood it so much better afterwards. DeRay, in the course of your activism, I think you probably become, unfortunately,

an expert on the St. Louis police force and all its challenges. What did you think about the verdict that came down recently and the protests that have reemerged over the last several days? You know, Twyla, we'll talk about this a little bit more on positive people, but, you know, the officer Jason Stockley yelled, I'm going to kill this mother effer, and shot Anthony Lamar Smith five times. And his lawyer just dismissed this statement as sort of like a small matter. And you see that he got acquitted and people in the street. And it's a reminder that we have not seen justice in so many places in this country, definitely not in St. Louis, where the police kill citizens at a rate unlike any other place in America.

People are still in the streets and they should be in the streets. What is sort of wild is last night the police chanted whose streets are streets as they arrested like 80 people. And it's that sort of like gang mentality from the police that leads people to protest. Like, when have you seen the police yell, whose street? Our street. They don't own this street. They're supposed to be public servants,

but we've seen that not be true time and time again. Literally taunting activists from Black Lives Matter, right, who were reprising a chant that they had heard previously. Yeah, a chant that we made popular, all of us made popular on the street in Ferguson in 2014. And there's a movie that just came out about the protests in Ferguson. So I'm sure they have seen that or heard of it, and they definitely know the chant, and they were trying to use it to show that they own the streets,

that it's theirs. It's like, that's not what democracy is. That's not what it should be. No, it's not. Dre, as an organizer, how do you shape the way these protests are covered? So it seems like it's a constant struggle between getting out information like what we were just talking about when you were saying, you know, the police chanting that and the police antagonizing protesters. And people who cover, you know, a couple protesters, you know, throwing something at a house or something.

So like, how do you, is that something that's on your mind when you're organizing these protests? Is it just, you know, it's beyond your control? So what are you going to do? Or what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, so, you know, that's also what's interesting about what's happening in St. Louis is that they're using social media as a way to sort of put out propaganda in a way that we've not seen in other cities do. And those police officers definitely didn't do that three years ago. I had 800 followers in 2014. I have 900,000 now. And I tried to be really thoughtful by using that platform

to help people feel and see and smell what was happening. And in the digital space, that's really important because most of the people that care are not physically with you. So the more that you can help people, like, understand how many people, what's the mood like, what does it feel like, like, in a consistent way, that goes a long way. What else do you think has changed with regards to police violence and resulting protests since, you know, you first went to Ferguson three years ago? Yeah, you know, people thought there was a crisis in Ferguson. They didn't think there was a crisis in America in 2014. And now that has completely changed.

People understand that there's a crisis all across the country. I think now, like with most issues, people are like, what can we do, right? They're looking for what the solutions are. And there are some places that have been more resistant than others. I think that what we've not seen change is the FOP, that the police unions have almost wholly been against any change at the national level for sure. And with this administration, we don't see the DOJ any longer pushing for reform or any substantive change to the system. Dre, one of the most outspoken protests against police violence and the treatment

of African Americans in the country was Colin Kaepernick and his refusal to stand during the national anthem. It has been interesting to me to watch the way his leadership has been covered over the course of the last several years. And I think anyone who read Rembrandt Brown's piece in Bleacher Report recently, you know, seen the way he's brought people along with him. I'm wondering what you think about Kaepernick's stand against police violence and where that effort is. Yeah, I was just with Colin the other day. We were together for a couple hours, and then Jack joined. Jack, that's your Twitter, who's great and a friend, and they were together for the rest of the morning. You know, Colin is very kind.

He's kinder than I think people sort of get the impression of when they see him on TV. He's really dedicated to these issues both here and globally. And the reality is that nothing that Colin is saying about race and justice is controversial, right? He's saying that the police should be killing people. And, like, that is true. He's saying that this country was founded on racism. That is true. Like, these aren't controversial things. You know, he still trains five days a week.

He's ready at any moment if he gets signed by a team. It's also wild to see the owners almost seemingly joined together to block him. And that, you know, isn't fair, isn't right. So hopefully we'll see an owner step up and not bow down to the peer pressure of the rest of the owners and do what's right. 32 owners who are old, wealthy, white men, I believe. Many Trump donors. Yeah, many Trump donors. Yeah.

Do you guys have any idea of who is a strong owner who isn't susceptible to peer pressure? Love it. Yeah, you know, Dory, as you know, I sort of am an encyclopedia of knowledge about the National Football League. I have no idea. To be honest, I don't either,

but he's obviously good enough to play on a lot of teams. I mean, the question early on was whether he was holding out for a starting job and didn't want to be a backup. Well, clearly that was not the case, and that there was other issues that kept teams from picking him up, so hopefully a team will show some courage

and bring on a very good player. DeRay, thanks for joining us. I know you got to run, but everyone download Pod Save the People. It'll be out tomorrow, and thanks for calling in. Awesome. Talk to you guys later. All right, man.

Take care. Bye. Okay, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks to Lydia Polgreen and DeRay for stopping by. I think we hit it all. We talked about Spicer, healthcare, ONGA. I would like to come back at some time to the fact that the entire Trump legal defense team despises one another

and are openly fighting. We didn't talk about that at all. Anti-Screaming, Anti-Cob. Anti-Cob. Versus Don McGahn. Absurd. Well, no, Don McGahn wasn't at the BLT lunch. No, you're right, right, right.

He just heard about it later. He just got a call about it. He wasn't able to enjoy their delicious popover. If I just would love to have had a camera on McGahn He's just heard about it later. He just got a call about it. He wasn't able to enjoy their delicious popover. I just would love to have had a camera on McGann, the White House counsel, when he gets a call from the New York Times and said, Hi, I just got lunch at BLT. And the two other lawyers were talking about the whole strategy. I heard you have documents locked up in a safe.

Imagine if Kathy Rumler had gotten that call. She would have slit his throat. Yes. Yes, that's true. Okay, everyone. Great episode. Great episode. See you later. End of podcast.