Pod Save America - "The energy is in progressive politics."

Episode Date: May 30, 2017

Trump jeopardizes the NATO alliance on his “historically successful” foreign trip, Kushner conducts secret diplomacy with a Russian banker, and the Democrats hone their message after Montana. Then, Senator Elizabeth Warren joins Jon, Jon, and Tommy in studio to discuss the fights Democrats should wage on behalf of working Americans.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On the pod today, we have the senior senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren. I think it's so smart that she's coming on the show. She will be in this studio in just a little bit. And Jon got her some treats. Tommy asked what her favorite Dunkin' Donuts order was on Twitter.

She responded immediately. The Boston Globe wrote a story. The Boston Globe, being the good hometown newspaper that they are, they have a Boston guy, they have Elizabeth Warren, they have a Dunkin' Donuts mention. They put it in a story. You don't need anything else. I want you guys to know that there's a box of Dunkin' Donuts in the studio and I went to

take one and John said, those donuts aren't for eating, they're for clicking. We do things for the social media here. Okay, so before Senator Warren arrives, everyone, Pod Save the People was on hiatus last week. DeRay is back this week. DeRay and Brittany and Sam are going to go deep into the past week's news, including the economics of mass incarceration, emoluments, education budgets, and the troubling work to preserve some of these Confederate monuments. DeRay also speaks with Vanita Gupta, former head of the Civil Rights Division at DOJ. It's a great episode. It is out today. So go download it. Okay, let's talk about the, in the words of the White House, unprecedentedly...

That's a new word. Let's talk about, in the words of the White House, the historically successful foreign trip. Did you try to say unprecedentedly successful? I did, and I couldn't do it, so I moved on. Okay. The historically successful foreign trip that Trump just came back from. So, halfway through this trip last week, when he was finished with the Middle Eastern portion,

some people in the press were calling it a success. Of course, Chris Silliza of CNN said it was worthy of praise. Politico was praising the staff for putting it together. NBC said he was on message. What do we think now? Now that we're looking back on this trip? Premature? message um what do we think now what now that we're looking back on this trip premature i i i don't want to be the guy that spends the next four years complaining about how obama was treated

versus how trump was treated but like we were we spent years being attacked for abandoning allies like obama removed a bust of winston churchill from the oval office and we spent four years hearing about how the special relationship was destroyed. He walks to, oh, he goes to Europe. He arm wrestles with Macron. He like assaults the Montenegro whatever he is and shoves him out of the way. And at the end of the

trip, Angela Merkel is so upset. She gives a speech saying Europe must really take our fate into our own hands. I mean, that is the story of the entire trip, is that our stalwart allies, the people who are a part of NATO, who have been with us for decades, keeping the globe peaceful, are worried that the United States is walking away from those bedrock alliances.

And it's like, this is why we can't judge trips on optics and whether Jared's frequent flyer miles where a PIN code was entered properly. These are big- big ticket security items. And he doesn't act like he's the leader of the free world. He acts like he's their loan officer complaining about paying NATO dues as if that's the end goal of the alliance and not global security. Yeah, also, to say that Trump was on message, he didn't talk to the press. He was on message by literally standing there and wearing a suit like is that what being on message is on message by like not having the international data plan

on his phone so he couldn't tweet that was that was on message and by the way a lot of people have made this point but like if on message means consistency then he was not on message because he went to the saudi arabia and he told him he wouldn't lecture them and then he went to europe and he lectured them all over didn't like didn't want to lecture the dictators did want to lecture the democratic allies in Europe no I mean it's interesting because there's the smaller stuff the smaller gaps that Obama still would have gotten shit for if he'd gone on a foreign like and we didn't talk about like the orb who the fuck cares about the orb right he did say like we just got back from the Middle East while he was in Israel which which made Israel's ambassador slap himself in the head.

Ron Turmer. Ron Turmer. Right-wing Republican, by the way. He did treat his note at Israel's Holocaust Memorial Museum like it was a yearbook message. See you next summer, Yad Vashem. Despicable. Amazing being here. All of this stuff is small.

It's gas. Still, it would have been a whole. here right like all of this stuff is small it's gas still it would have been a whole but what you just mentioned tommy what he did at nato what he did with our european allies is by any standard of any foreign any u.s president of either party's foreign trip of the last however many years hugely problematic right the existence of nato is essentially revolves around a provision of it called article 5 which says if one member of NATO is attacked, we'll come to their collective defense. He refused to publicly reaffirm his commitment to Article 5, which freaked out everybody that has to deal with increasingly, you know, what's the word I'm looking for? Bellicose.

Bellicose Russia. Belligerent. Thank you. Belligerent is the word I was looking for. Aggressive. And additionally, he wouldn't recommit to the Paris Climate Accord at the G7, which was a huge break

with the rest of the G7. So where's the progress? What's the success? Well, it was interesting. You said the one person who was... No, I'm sorry. It was interesting

that the one country that was celebrating the foreign trip and Trump's foreign trip was Russia. And Russian TV said that Trump turned NATO into a house of cards.

So the the the fact that on background or behind the scenes, Trump advisers like, no, no, no. He'll reaffirm Article five. First of all, that misses the point. It misses the point because this is one of those places where posture is the most important thing. Right. This isn't we you know, we are signatories to NATO, right? We are supposed to uphold NATO. The president's not saying it out loud is a very big deal in and of itself, even if his advisors behind the scenes are like, he's an idiot, don't worry about it, don't worry about it.

Like, Vladimir Putin is looking for these signals. And the craziest part about this is Donald Trump is in Europe. He's being asked to push back against Russia at a time when his administration is looking for these signals. And the craziest part about this is Donald Trump is in Europe. He's being asked to push back against Russia at a time when his administration is being accused in the press day after day of being too sympathetic, of having colluded, of having these very strange meetings over and over again that they lied about on their security clearance forms. His son-in-law is being threatened right now by these stories to expose a kind of crazy relationship that suggests that they're beholden to Russia. And he still wouldn't criticize him. He still wouldn't criticize Russia. It's right in front of our faces.

Yeah. And your point about posture is really important because there's no principle that is going to enforce NATO if we choose not to come to the collective defense. It's all about your commitment. It's all about your willingness to be there in the toughest time imaginable. And his signal does say to Vladimir Putin that what you did in Crimea is fine. Go after Ukraine. Take all of Ukraine. Take a look at some of those.

Belarus. Yeah. Yeah. Look at some of those small Eastern European countries whose capitals you learned in high school. What do we think about Macron there? So he has this sort of white-knuckled handshake with Donald Trump, and he comments on it later and basically says it wasn't an accident. He says, quote, Donald Trump, the president of Turkey or the president of Russia, are of a mindset of power relations which doesn't bother me. I don't believe in diplomacy of the public invective, but in bilateral dialogues.

First of all, the fact that the president of France is lumping in the U.S. president with Erdogan and Putin is very unsettling. And in other states, he doesn't believe in diplomacy by public abuse as well. So, it's

interesting. Donald Trump... And then Macron stood up at a press conference with Putin and called out RT and Sputnik as propaganda outlets right next to Putin. So talk about criticizing Putin. And Macron recorded a video message to American scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs saying, if the United States is not going to care about climate change. Come to France. We care about it, too. The kind of message the U.S. used to send to say we're a beacon of the we're a beacon of the future. We're a beacon of the of smart policies and economic opportunity. The thing that the thing that's so galling, right, is Trump introduces this childish used car salesman notion of masculinity to the world stage. You push people out of the way, you give them a tight handshake, you pull

them in, you pat them on the shoulder because, again, Donald Trump picked this shit up from 80 self-help books he saw on the shelf. And the thing that, you know, it's the kind of thing where when someone steals your parking space and they're going nuts,

the only way you can get it back from them is you have to go a little crazy too. And so Donald Trump introduces Jack Donaghy. That's a loaded, loaded observation right there don't drive with john you either have to you either have to concede or you have to lower yourself to their level to care enough about a parking space to fight over it and so donald trump introduces this not nonsense masculinity into fucking handshakes and macron's like all right that's the game you

want to play i will squeeze your hand until it hurts and I won't let go of it. And what sucks is like we're on his side. Yeah. Well, it also sucks that it worked. Right. I mean, this is what we're talking about right now and not not any any bit of substance from these meetings. Well, let's move on to Paris because, Lovett, I know you're gonna have thoughts on this. So Axios reported in the middle of the trip that Trump has privately told multiple people, including EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, that he plans to leave the Paris Agreement sometime this week.

Of course, he tweeted during the trip, or someone tweeted for him, because, of course, again, the international data plan was off for him, that he was going to announce this week whether or not he leaves Paris. So he still wants to make it a bit of a reality TV show type game. But it seems like all signs are pointing towards him leaving Paris, which is quite a surprise because we were told that Javanka and globalist Gary and the New York Cucks were going to prevent this from happening with their very important influence on all the CEOs on the council and Gary and Jared and Javanka.

They were in the White House. They were participating in this mess because they were going to have a good outcome. They're going to influence a good outcome. So shocking this didn't work. We don't know yet. We could all be wrong. I could be eating these words by the end of the week. Well, we don't know. A week ago, it looked more promising. Now, Trump seems to have spun the other way, or at least somebody inside the administration is floating into axios. You know, who knows what you can take at face value, right? These people are liars and people take what they say at face value.

It's been my position for this whole time, this whole notion that globalists Gary and Ivanka and Jared were moderating influences. Everything came down to Paris. Everything. And that includes, by the way, the Economic Council and Elon Musk and others who said they're staying in because they want to see if they can make a difference. If he pulls out of Paris, it means that it is hopeless because there has been unanimity on the part of Democrats, on the part of a lot of business leaders that have been trying to influence this administration. If you can't get him to— Republicans, too. Lindsey Graham. Well, but notably, they were saying that McConnell and about 20 Senate Republicans sent a letter last week to him telling him to pull out of Paris. Yeah, I mean, I didn't say every Republican, but there are smart Republicans who are saying you should stay in it.

But I think the more fundamental point is all these stories about staff shakeups, Mike Dobke as communications director getting canned today, apparently, because Trump couldn't get over the fact that he said there was no Trump doctrine on foreign policy and that leaked. Apparently, that's what Dylan Byers has reported. Like, I think staff can influence Trump insofar as you can be the last person to tell him information that, like, pinballs him one way or the other. But I don't think he's an individual that's, like, really susceptible to logic or reason or to good policy discussions. He's a guy who's going to do what he's going to do. He's set in his ways.

And you're either a part of this monstrosity or you're not. Well, what's interesting, too, is it's not just all this staff has been trying to moderate his stance and they've failed. In the Kushner story that we'll talk about soon that Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman wrote over the weekend, there was a paragraph in there that said, Mr. Kushner appears to be modifying his center stances instead of urging the president to keep the U.S. in the Paris climate accord. As he sought two months ago, he has come to believe the standards in the agreement need to be changed. So it's not just that they are failing to moderate Trump. That is, he is changing their views. Well, so we don't again like this is all who knows what's going on behind the scenes.

They are they are a group of people desperately negotiating even amongst themselves to try to influence a dotty old racist who's in decline and unable to concentrate. I mean, like we're in a serious crisis. And one of the parts of this crisis is that Donald Trump is not persuadable. He doesn't have the mental acuity to focus on these questions long enough to come to a logical conclusion. So I am I again, like it's a it's a binary here. If they stay in Paris and they say as part of staying in Paris, we are going to continue to negotiate this. We're going to make adjustments. We're going to push for changes. If that was a way to get this thing over the finish line, I am fine with that.

It's 100%. If they could keep them in, they did a good job. If not, we'll never listen to them again. That's it. I'm done. We have clarity on that. Thank you, Tommy. Thank you.

But I just hate this conversation about like, Jared, is he good? Is he bad? We just sort of skip over the fact that his policy depth is 120 days old, give or take. Right. This is a 36-year-old dilettante who bought his way into school, who lucked his way into a real estate fortune and a good marriage so far, and has to deal with the horrible stepdad that he works for, not stepdad, father-in-law, who's now his boss. I mean, he's not a real advisor. He's not someone who brings any kind of gravitas or knowledge or experience to the job.

He's a kid. It's nepotism. And you know that that's what, you know, Steve Bannon gets in there and goes like, listen, I know Jared has your best interest at heart, but are you going to listen to this guy? And he's right. The penny loafer princeling. So Glenn and Maggie's story the penny loafer princeling so glenn and maggie's story about about jared um of course stems from the news that broke on friday night that in during the transition uh jared had unreported meetings with ambassador kislyak the russian ambassador and the head of a russian bank who i know and love to leave it whose name we couldn't pronounce.

I still can't pronounce it. It's so long. No, no, the bank's name is quite long, but the guy's middle name is incomprehensible. I gave up on both of them. It sounds like Seb Gorka, though. It sounds like Seb Gorka, but it's not. So anyway, Jared had these meetings.

He left them off his SF86, oops, by accident, then reported them later. There was some reporting of this meeting earlier, but now we know he was reportedly trying to set up a secret channel of communication directly to the Kremlin using Russian diplomatic facilities. The first excuse from allies of Jared that wound up in the New York Times after the Washington Post reported the story was that this was all about Syria, that they wanted a direct channel to Flynn, from Flynn to Russian generals, so they could fix the problems in Syria.

Tommy, does that make sense? It doesn't make any sense. I mean, like, General Flynn could pick up the phone and call someone discreetly, and that's a back channel. You don't have to go to a Russian diplomatic facility and do this KGN run around the intelligence community and the State Department and everybody else. Like, the back channel has become this inflated thing. Like, when Tom Donilon would fly to China to have meetings with their senior leadership,

that was a useful back channel because it could be private, have a confidential conversation. He comes back, reports directly from the president. You don't need to do all this cloak and dagger bullshit. Well, the thing people keep—part of the reason this is conflating two things is it's only a back channel from america it looks like a regular channel from the russian point of view it's not like he's going directly to putin's house he's going to a russian facility to use their regular ordinary communication system so it's a back channel to keep things from america it's not it's not on the russian side it's just it's a back channel to keep things from America. It's not on the Russian side. It's just the normal thing.

Specifically from American intelligence, from the State Department, from the Defense Department. And one thing that's worth pointing out about the intelligence community and DOD and state is there are a lot of people who we would feel like had sort of a Cold War mindset, even during the Obama years. There's people who are deeply distrustful of Russia. Sounds like they, you know, had a point, and then maybe we're right all along. But like, those are the people who maybe you're making an end run around. And that is incredibly valuable to Putin and the Kremlin, because they don't want to deal with all those people and their skepticism and their cynicism. If they can cut a deal with Trump, that's like, you know, some relief on sanctions for fill in the blank, it doesn't have to be the quid pro

quo doesn't have to have happened. It could happen in the future. They could be setting up a way to get something in the future. And that is just as dangerous, if not worse. So you mentioned the fact that the word back channel has sort of been conflated in this whole debate. I see a lot of people on the right now and on Fox and other places saying, you know, Obama had a back channel with Iran and everyone said it was brilliant and smart and a way to do diplomacy. So people know what's the difference between having a back channel and what Jared did. Well, it starts with the fact that Barack Obama was president of the United States when we conducted secret negotiations with Iran. That's a big... And Jared is just Jared during a

transition. That's a big caveat. I mean, I'm interviewing on Pod Save the World a guy named Bill Burns today, who's the deputy secretary of state, who, along with Jake Sullivan, was part of the team that led the secret talks between the United States and Iran that led to the Iran deal. That's an example of really useful private diplomacy. And that's something that's happened for decades. decades. It's like trusted confidant of one president, trusted confidant of another president, and they can work things out and not go through the formal bureaucracy or have a secretary of state come over with a press corps and have a big to-do that's formal and has talking points and cut through the bullshit. What they did is, in the way Lovett described, unbelievably cagey, that you would think you would go to literally Russian soil. Their diplomatic facility in the United States is Russian soil. Use their, what I assume

they think is secret encrypted communications gear to communicate back. Ironically, in this case, it seems like we've penetrated those systems since it's all in the newspaper now. I'm not saying this from any knowledge, but you kind of got screwed twice here, Jared. But I mean, what he's talking about is just, it's unprecedented and it's so naive to think that that's what was needed in this instance. Yeah. I mean, like a bank channel, by definition, is, you know, we have interests as a country. You have interests as a country. There's a lot of complicated discussions that make it hard for us to get something done. Let's meet in a room. Let's have a conversation. Let's get rid of all the trapments and just see if we can hammer this out. That's not what this is. Yeah. There's nothing to do with that. Well, it was also interesting that

okay, if this was really about Flynn and it was about Syria and diplomacy, then why did Jared also meet with a Russian banker with ties to Putin and the Russian spy agency? Who's never done diplomacy before. Who's never done diplomacy. And this is where the conspiracy is

just, it's all sitting out in front of us. There's nothing subtle, nothing secret here. Real estate kid who needs a lot of money meets with a Putin-backed banker. A lot of this seems like some blatant self-dealing, like some Putin crony who was plucked out of the spy services and established at a bank. I mean, it's all a little too convenient and weird. Well, apparently, and CNN reported this morning that during 2016, U.S. Intel heard Russian officials discussing leverage of a financial nature over Trump. What a shock.

The thing we've all suspected all along. But it is, isn't it crazy that, like, all this stuff that we think is the sort of the ultimate conspiracy, and like this, it couldn't be that. I know. That's like Luis Mench territory, right? But like, it's seeming that like like a lot of this stuff is coming. I don't know. Is it true?

You don't want to. It's so awful. You don't want to believe that. You have to sort of like look at what's happened and you have to say like, what is an explanation for this that doesn't involve leverage over Donald Trump? And I don't need it to be a dossier about peeing in a fucking bed. It doesn't have to be that. It could be something else. It could be something we've not. That would be honestly, that would be better. It would honestly better for it to be a sexual piccadillo

than for it to be financial leverage over many members of the administration. Because at this point, we're looking at, you know, Donald Trump has no scruples. He has no values, not approaching this from a sense of dignity or shame. He doesn't experience those emotions. And yet here he is refusing to this day to say a bad word about Russia, giving Russia an open door to do all kinds of things in Europe. And and again, like this is what Putin wants. Putin wants this outsized influence on the world stage. The Russian economy is smaller than Italy's. It's smaller than South Korea's.

It's smaller than India's. It's smaller than Brazil's. It is an incredibly crucial and important country. It borders like borders like every hotspot around the world. Eight time zones. It does. It does deserve an outsized bit of influence compared to its GDP. It does deserve an outsized bit of influence compared to its GDP.

But Donald Trump talking about some crazy deal he's going to make in the future as a justification for his light hand with Vladimir Putin doesn't make any sense. None of it makes sense without leverage. None of it. This is the laziest sort of policy proposal in foreign policies is like, well, I'll create a better personal relationship with this ex-leader, and then we can align on interest. And I think with respect to Russia, they are a petro-state that's dealing with a cratering economy, declining oil prices. And what Putin does is uses fear of another and views the world in zero-sum terms. So if he can cut down the United States or create chaos or make us look diminished in any way, that's a win for him. Can't build Russia up, got to tear the United States down. There you go.

There you go. This is Pod Save America. Stick around. There's more great show coming your way. Should Jared have his security clearance revoked? Some Democrats are calling for this. Cory Booker on Sunday said no, we should at least go through a process first what do we think about this i have no idea what we should be doing because this is so unprecedented a senior advisor to the president who has access

to the most secure information that our country collects washington post reported today that he gets his own intelligence briefing jared does before before Trump gets his. He lied on his – what's certainly clear is he lied on his FS-86, right? He lied. He did later amend the SF-86 to report those meetings, but originally he did not include them, yes. The piece in the Post about how Trump gets his PDB was interesting. The chilling part to me was imagining Jared sitting on that couch as like – because that's – it's one thing to get an intelligence assessment. It's one thing to have top secret clearance or access to, you know, code word level compartments or special access programs like to sit in on that PDB every day and get the most up to date intelligence picture constantly. You need someone that you trust completely.

And I don't think he's given us any reason to trust him completely in the same way General Flynn has not should they strip his clearance? Yes of course absolutely he's a little dilettante he shouldn't be in the goddamn PDD in the first place 36 year old real estate punk suspend it and then take a fucking look at it

I'm not saying you can't get it back if all this turns out to have been innocent which is hilarious. But what are we doing here? Let's also remember that over the weekend, since the story broke on Friday, the White House has not refuted the story. No comment from the White House or from Jared's lawyers are saying that it's false, which is a first for them, actually. Did you see that Fox News ran a story without a name? Yeah.

One source, no name. Catherine Herridge is too embarrassed to slap her name on it because she's been their stenographer for a long time. It was written by the website itself. It's the emergent consciousness of Fox News Nation. You know what, too? Like, all the stuff with Hannity last week, a bunch of people are tweeting, like, you know, Fox News has some great journalists who work there, but Hannity, blah, blah, blah. You know what? At this point, we can count the real journalists who work at Fox News on one hand.

And people like Shep Smith, I guess Chris Wallace, maybe a few others, you guys are the cover for an evil organization. And if you don't leave, you're a fucking part of it. It's just so clear that you're part of something evil. But back on the security clearance question, like, it's not something I thought a lot about until I saw that Booker thing. But it's just a question of risk. If there's any chance that he could have been misleading, any chance he could be

blackmailed, if there's any chance that we suspect he could be coughing up secrets, I don't think he's a spy. I don't think he's a double H. I think he's in over his head. But I don't get why the goalposts have moved so far in terms of allowing these things to just continue that we were not doing the basic things to protect our country. And it's not as if we haven't been through this before. Every Russia has spent decades trying to develop people to help influence and gather information on the United States of America.

And even if Jared Kushner doesn't realize it, he could have been completely compromised. He doesn't have to know that he's doing it. That was the John Brennan line. It was like a lot of, most people who are on the path towards treasonous behavior don't know until it's too late. That was quite a line. That was a cool shit, John. Also, let's remember that Paul Ryan called for Hillary Clinton not to have a security clearance after James Comey said he would not be prosecuting her for any kind of crime.

I mean, the boundless hypocrisy. I can't. I thought I would just dangle Paul Ryan over the conversation just to see if Lovett can jump over the desk. You know, it's become so routine to see these people fail to do their jobs. Well, it's become such it's become so routine to see these people fail to do their jobs like this is not there. It was not inevitable that Paul Ryan would capitulate his role this much. It just it was not automatic that we'd be in a situation where these endless stories about the compromised White House and these these idiots and these nefarious doings that would have absolutely no consequences on the Hill. There's just no rule that said they had to do it this way. And look, we pick on Paul Ryan all the time, as we should.

But Bob Corker, right? Head of the Foreign Intelligence Committee in the Senate. One of the supposedly, I'm not going to call him moderate, but let's call him a mainstream. Adult. A mainstream conservative Republican. Hopefully an adult, yeah. First of all, he puts out this statement after the foreign

trip saying, smashing success. I called President Trump and told him what a great wonderful job he did putting this whole thing together. Bob Corker went to the Capitol steps and released doves. He was so happy. And then, on the Jared thing, he said, look, he seems like a great guy. Let's just hear him

out. I'm sure there's a great explanation for this. And Lindsey Graham's first thing, I don't know if I buy this, right? John McCain said he was troubled by it. Oh, yes. John McCain is endlessly troubled. And of course, usually what happens with Lindsey Graham is he says the wrong thing, then McCain says the right thing

even though McCain doesn't do anything, and then Lindsey Graham sort of catches up with John McCain's position a week later, so I guess we'll wait for Lindsey Graham on that. It's like a fucking mock trial team. Can I read you guys a quote from Bob Corker? Sure. Those around the world who are looking to the United States for support against intimidation, oppression, or outright massacres have learned a tough lesson in the past few years.

This U.S. president, despite his bold pronouncements and moral posturing, cannot be counted on. The president's empty promises and unreliability are at their most acute in Eastern Europe. That was an op-ed about Barack Obama. That was not about, that was not about Donald Trump. And like, he's a Republican, but he's also one of the people who is sort of seen by the elites in Washington as an adult, who's someone who's a policy wonk, who will do the right thing. He's been bipartisan in a number of ways. And when these people start putting out fawning statements about a foreign trip, that was obviously not positive. It was obviously a failure, I think, to anyone who actually looked closely or listened to what Angela Merkel said. For him to do this fawning bullshit

like he's Hope Hicks releasing their North Korea propaganda statements is really troubling. And it's like an institution falling down on its face. And I just, you know, you see various versions of the capitulation. You see, obviously, there's the Marco Rubios, I think, who have convinced themselves that they don't say anything publicly, but they're working on the Intelligence Committee behind the scenes. You have Bob Corker, who I do believe is a smart and sophisticated foreign policy person who has sort of a sense of the world and what he hopes to achieve. who has sort of a sense of the world and what he hopes to achieve. And yet he too now believes that somehow it's in the interest of either himself or his policy goals to kind of do this kind of fawning around Donald Trump, maybe to garner influence. I don't know, but man.

We should also mention that Bob Corker is up for re-election in 2018. And if you listed the Senate Republicans who are vulnerable, it would of course be Dean Heller, then Jeff Flake, and then Corker and Cruz would be the next two. They're not vulnerable, but those are the next two on the list. But these are people taking different tacks to what it means to be up for re-election. I don't understand why being up for re-election, even in Tennessee, would lend to this kind of fawning praise. It doesn't actually flow from where his popularity is at. I'm sure Trump's popularity in Tennessee is like through the roof, you know? I mean, some of them are going to make

calculations that the best way to win reelection is to make sure you do not lose one fucking base voter, you know? And that, that might be Corker's calculation there, or maybe he's just lost it. I don't know. Um, speaking of elections, uh, let's talk about Montana really quickly. Um, so, uh, the, uh, guy who body slammed the reporter won the election, Gianforte. He's going to the House. Wonderful addition. Rob Quist lost.

Matt Taibbi wrote a piece in Rolling Stone that I thought was interesting called The Democrats Need a New Message. And basically the conceit of the piece is why do Democrats keep losing to spectacularly awful candidates like Gianforte and Trump? Now, look, I sort of thought that Matt's diagnosis of the problem was a little off, just because I don't think Montana necessarily fits with this thesis. I think one of the reasons we lost in Montana is Republican candidates have won in Montana

that congressional seat by like 20 points. Just in 2016, it was a 20-point victory. Trump had a 20-point victory. Trump has a super high approval rating in Montana. So it's very hard. And, you know, Quist cut it down to like a six, seven-point race. Great. But he does say some things that I think are interesting to think about.

He talks about the deplorables comment from Hillary Clinton back in 2016. And he said the deplorables comment is an example of how the Democratic Party has, quote, surrendered to a negativistic vision of a hopefully divided, hopelessly divided country. And he said Republicans are worse, but just because, quote, Republicans win using deeply cynical and divisive strategies doesn't mean it's the right or smart thing to do. the right or smart thing to do. And basically says that Democrats can't just go into elections trying to attack, attack, attack, and tear down a Republican opponent and tell everyone how fucking awful that Republican is, that we need to start pushing through a positive message. What do you guys think of that? Yeah, I think, sorry. No, I was talking to Matt McKenna, who was a Bill Clinton staffer for a long time, friend of the pod.

He's also from Montana. He's worked for Montana politicians. He did some work on this race. You know, he would argue that their message was health care and public lands and that that would have been the message for any candidate. He would also point out that they had a budget and then they raised like $6 million in the last month when voting started. So I do think there's it's drawing a broad brush from this race to any number of others is probably dangerous. There is appropriate caution here. Like, you know, you also mentioned the Nina Turner comment about no one in Ohio cares about Russia.

We know we don't want to go down the rabbit hole too far. Like politics is about helping people. It's about health care to economics. But I also don't want to overcorrect the wrong way. We're not TV executives trying to water down our message and talk about the thing that will appeal to the most people. Some stuff just matters. And I think-

Whether it matters to people right now or not, it matters. Figuring out if the President of the United States lied to the country matters. Figuring out if there's collusion between his team and a foreign country matters. And the fact that they're blocking that effort to figure it out matters. And guess what else didn't matter to the American people until it was repeated to them a million times? The Benghazi attacks, right? That is an issue. Obama bowing.

Like, there's right-wing apparatuses that create issues out of nothing. I don't think we should do that. I do think we need to have a positive message. We have to talk about the things that really matter. But, like, I don't want to take our eye off the ball of some of the things we talked about earlier in the show because those matter to me, and I think they should matter to everybody. Yeah, it's really tough because, like, on one hand, I see the post-story Friday night about Jared, and I'm like, oh, fuck, these people are going down.

This is a big deal. We've got to talk about this. But there's a part of me that's like, damn it. On Monday, I'd rather be talking about what's happening with the health care bill in the Senate and how we can stop it from becoming law and talk about some other economic issue that actually matters to people. I would love to be talking about all these issues, about some other economic issue that actually matters to people. I would love to be talking about all these issues, and I don't want to just get people caught up in hoping that Russia is an easy way out for us, right?

That, like, we can just wait and hope, and then suddenly this whole administration will go down on its own malfeasance, you know? But yet, like you said, Tommy, like, some things that might not matter to the public still might matter right now for us to focus on. I don't know. It's a very tough... Yeah. So I think that there's two things here. There's larger questions about democratic vision,

and then there's smaller questions about tactics in any individual election. So the point he makes about we shouldn't be as cynical as Republicans, I actually don't think that's been our problem. I think our problem is that we've been pretty naive in that we thought we could appeal you know, we could appeal to people's better instincts. We could talk about love, Trump's hate. We could talk about how vulgar and crass and racist Donald Trump is. And it turns out that that wasn't enough. It's not enough in any election. It wasn't enough for Hillary Clinton to become president. That doesn't mean that those issues aren't really, really important. But I feel like part of what we're missing, and I think the thing that that Taibbi is getting at here is we need a larger vision that we can come back to over and over again.

There may be weeks we spend talking about Russia, and that's important, and maybe weeks we talk about whether or not the president is corrupted and is under the thumb of a foreign government. I think that matters. I think we need to talk about that. But when we're finished saying that, what are we going to do? finish saying that, what are we going to do? And I think the bottom line, we just do not have a coherent, compelling story about what we're going to do that's more than just stopping

them. Well, I think the smartest thing he says in the piece is, the largest group of potential swing voters out there doesn't need to be talked out of voting Republican. It needs to be talked out of not voting at all. Right. Right. And that's the sort of people that we're after here, right? It's people who, not Republicans, who are not going to get anyway. I mean, like, if you saw Gianforte fucking body slam a reporter and all the other horrible things that he did in that race, endorse Trumpcare and all this, and you say, like, no, no, no, I still want that guy.

I don't know that we're going to reach you, but we at least have to try to reach some of the people who decided, like, eh, they both seem like awful candidates. I don't like the Democratic Party. I don't like the Republican Party. I think politics isn't for me. I'm staying home. And that's a big group of people. We had this giant primary right between Bernie and between Hillary. It was a debate over fundamental questions about what the Democratic Party stands for. But even in that debate, a lot of it wasn't around a positive vision for what the country should look like. You know, Bernie has a critique around Wall Street and power and influence about getting money out of politics, about raising the minimum wage. Hillary Clinton had a kind of kind of adopted a lot of that tone, but kind of a more practical version. But even that is about stopping bad things. It's not

it's as if we're still we're sort of trapped in a kind of language that never says, here's what the future looks like if we got everything we wanted. Yeah, that is my great concerns. I think Democrats betting on a strategy where we're simply rooting for Donald Trump to fail is, I don't think, going to be successful for us. Because if you're an individual that spent 10, 20, 30 years feeling like politics has always let you down, Trump catastrophically letting you down leads you to completely check out, to walk away from the whole thing, to not necessarily be susceptible to believing our message the next time around, that we're actually going to put forward policies that really help you. Because Trump, Warren talks about this in her book, and I'm excited to ask her about

it. Like Trump's populism is fake populism. It's anger and grievance in the guise of populism and the guise of helping people. And like the bullshit is getting stripped away and, you know, the coal jobs are not coming back. They're finally admitting all these things. Sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. No, the one thing I'll say is that we have, even in our big policy debates that Democrats are currently having, I think that the big next step for us to take is we need to stop debating whose critique is right. And we need to start talking purely about what we're going to do.

Yeah. One thing I remember that Obama always used to say in the campaign, and this was after eight years of George Bush, is he sort of started speech by saying, OK, the one thing we know is that George W. Bush is never going to be president again. And the question we have to ask ourselves is what's next? And then you just go. Right. And then you just go. Right. And like we are going to have to get to a point where in 2020 or even in 2018, a lot of these candidates say, we all know that we hate Donald Trump and he's an awful president. And then he's done some horrible things. The question is, what are we going to do next? Right. It's almost like at some point Donald Trump stops being the enemy and starts being the weapon we use to defeat bad ideas. OK, we will talk more about this and a whole bunch of other issues when we come back with Senator Elizabeth Warren. This is Pod Save America. Stick around.

There's this great stuff coming. Lots of great stuff. On the pod today, in studio, we are very lucky to have the senior senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren. Oh, I'm tickled to be here. Thanks for coming. Oh, are you kidding? You offer donuts? I'm here.

Yeah, we got some Dunkin' just for the occasion. Like you guys are putting me in the zone here, right? We're not even supposed to have food and coffee in here. You probably don't need them in front of you for the length of the interview. I can sniff them the whole time. I can have like a sugar high. If you don't like a question and you want to avoid answering it, you can just take the length of the interview. I can sniff them the whole time. Do you feel like I need to take one? I can have like a sugar high. If you don't like a question and you want to avoid answering it, you can just take a bite of the donut.

Exactly. You are posing with my donuts here. They're not even a sponsor. We're hoping that they'll be a sponsor. That's the idea. We can talk them into doing this. I just want them to open some more franchises out in LA. That's all I want. Make that clear.

Every summer of my life, huge iced painting houses yelling about the Red Sox. That's what we did. What an all-American story, Tommy. I know. Okay. Stick into it. So you recently said in an interview that Hillary Clinton in 2016 didn't win a lot of working middle class voters because Democrats didn't make the case. And you said that it wasn't just her, it was all of us. We all failed in a

way. So if you were campaigning with a candidate today or in 2018, what would you say differently? What case would you make that was a better case than what we did in 2016? You know, it's a good way to put it. I think the thing I do now, like, can we do this just as go forward? It doesn't have to be what we should have done. Yeah, because I think that's the real question. And for me, it's like, what are the biggest differences between us and them? Not what are the things we all agree on? It really is. So what are the big differences? And man, the Republicans have made that so clear with health care. Holy guacamole.

Are you kidding me? Not a great bill. Yeah. Well, not only not a great bill. I mean, it's like it's it's like Republicans distilled in this. It's like the central essence. So they say, hey, here's what we're going to do here. Here's how we're going to fix health care. Knock 24 million people off their health care coverage

in order to create tax breaks for a handful of millionaires and billionaires. Drive up costs for middle class families, for working families, for people over 50, so that we can give tax breaks to a handful of millionaires and billionaires. Oh, and just in case, because that wasn't enough to make it through the House the first time, I know, let's make it so that you can charge people who have pre-existing conditions a lot more, knock them off insurance, people with mental health issues, people with substance abuse, so that we can give tax breaks to a handful of millionaires and billionaires. Well, to me now, man, that's, there it is. Let's run on that one. Let's run on that

one, because that one tells you what Republicans care about. And that is, it's the second half of every one of those sentences, so that we can give tax breaks to a handful of millionaires and billionaires. And let's talk about what Democrats stand for. And that is how we get health care coverage for all of America, how we get better outcomes at lower costs. That's our job. And that's the difference between the two parties right now. Well, and what do we say about that? Because, you know, there's gonna be some people out there say, yes, I hate that bill. I don't like Trump care. I think it's garbage. But under Obamacare, my premiums are still rising too fast. I still couldn't afford it. My deductibles were too high. right, just announced they got to charge the maximum amount because they think that Trump and the Republicans are going to cut the legs out from underneath them and change parts of Obamacare that won't let them

cover their costs. But I don't think we want to go weeds. I think you just go high and say, you're right, we want to do more. But here are our values. Here are our goals. We want 100% coverage for everyone. And we want it at the lowest possible cost. There's a lot of ways to wring costs out of this system. And we are on board to do that. In fact, we got a bill right now, just one piece of it that we want to do as Democrats. I want to be able to import drugs from Canada. You know, there are places in Canada where, and in the United States on certain drugs, where we're paying 10 times as much for the same drug. If we can import drugs from Canada, same kind of safe drugs from Canada,

man, you bring down costs for families, you bring down costs for insurance companies. That's a way that we continue to get better outcomes at lower cost. Bernie Sanders has put this bill together. We've got a whole group of Senate Dems on it. You know, there are things we can do to make it better, but you've got to have that that's your value. When you start with, how am I going to create tax cuts? How am I going to knock people off health insurance? You don't end up in a good place. You end up a place that is truly a punch in the gut to working families.

So one of the problems with us getting that message out is money in politics. And you talk a lot in your book and throughout your career about the danger of money and politics. And I think you essentially make a case that it's worse than we even know. And Jane Mayer wrote a great book called Dark Money that's this look at how corporate money funds, not just candidates, but these think tanks and rent-a-quote academic institutions. How do we start to solve that problem in the wake of Citizens United? Well, the first way you start is you flip on the flashlight, right? This stuff happens behind closed doors. This stuff happens and everyone's polite about it. Right now, somebody shows up to testify in front of Congress and everybody says, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? You

like them, you don't like them, you know, and you may engage on substance. And nobody asks the fundamental question, like, who paid for you to be here? Who paid for your research, so-called research? Has any of your research actually been – do academics believe you're a researcher, or is this just stuff you're churning out now? You know, I tell the story in the book. out now. You know, I tell the story in the book. I talk about asking a question about one of the experts who came in front of us, who was talking about a whole thing about whether or not your investment advisor ought to be able to recommend products that improve the economic well-being of the investment advisor,

or whether or not they ought to have to put the customer's interests first. And this guy purports, this expert, and he has these fabulous credentials from a fabulous think tank, and he purports to say that, oh, his research shows that if they're not allowed to take kickbacks, that this could cost the American people a bazillion dollars. And there was just this funny little bottom, you know, little half a footnote kind of thing on where that work had been done. And I start pulling this thread. And it turns out that one of the actors in the industry that stood to lose a lot of money had paid for this study and had pre-reviewed the study and had some kind of input into it. And then they had used the name of the think tank to just, you know, he had attached

himself to that and it all looked like it was-up research. And I use that just as an example in the book of the insidious ways that money floats through. But here's one of the points I actually make in the book, is that when I called him out on it, there were a lot of folks in Washington who thought I somehow was the one who was out of line, you know, that it was the, you know, like you're not supposed to talk about that, you know, in polite company, you're not supposed to talk about that sort of thing. And so that's why I say the place you start is, man, you gotta call it out. That's the first place, not the last place, but it's the starting point. So I read your book over the holiday. Actually, listen to it.

The book is This Fight Is Our Fight. I listened to it at 1.5 speed. How did I sound at 1.5? Great. Great. I think I talk at 1.5 anyway. Well, now you seem like you're talking quite slow, but I think that's on me. Because I got used to it. So I think that you tell this pretty conclusive story, right, about 30 years of deregulation, of tax policy being tilted towards the rich and to corporations, about influence of money in politics, of influence of lobbying and paid experts, et cetera, on the process by which we make laws. And that seems to be the center of your diagnosis of the problem. And one thing that I was actually surprised about is, it seems like a lot of

the diagnosis is if we fix these things, right, if we can get the money out of politics, and then we can put some more money into things like research and infrastructure, we can raise the minimum wage, we can tilt the regulations against the banks more as opposed to what they've been lately. tilt the regulations against the banks more as opposed to what they've been lately. And then we can have a strong middle class again. And what I found interesting about that is that you kind of hear there's a second debate and one that's about automation, globalization, the consolidation of big companies. And my question for you is, if we solve all your problems, let's say we get the kind of Congress we want and we push back against the banks and we raise the kind of Congress we want, and we push back

against the banks, and we raise the minimum wage, and we put stronger regulations and cops on the beat, don't we then have to turn to these larger structural forces? Totally, we have to turn to, but here's the point I'm trying to make. If you don't have a government on your side, those problems will kill us. I mean, they really will, both literally and figuratively. It's only if we have a government that works for us that you can make these other, you can harness these other forces and make them work in ways that work for working families. Look, we've had innovation and change in this country for a long, long time. What shifted, and here's the long arc of the story I tell, is that America was this boom-bust economy from the 1700s right forward, about every 20 years.

The economy would be okay, and then it would get stronger, and then it would get more strong, and then it would get bigger, and then it would all blow. That's my radio sound stuff. Can we hit it? Then I go ding, ding. People are worried that there was an explosion. Right. It was just me. Okay.

And then the economy would blow up. And the problem was when the economy blew up, it took down not just the speculators. It took down the farmers. And it took down the shopkeepers. And it took down employees. It took down a lot of people who never had a chance to build much of anything up. So a lot of the world believed that's just the natural order of things. It's like tide.

You know, tides. Not the detergent. The stuff. The waves that come in. Right. Tide pots. There we go. That they thought that was how the world had to be.

And in 1930, or 33, when Franklin Roosevelt comes in, he has this incredibly, this bold vision, and that is, we can do better. And he harnesses government to work for the people. And the first thing he does, the first tool is the tool of regulation. And he says, no more boom and bust with these dang banks. And they break up some of the biggest, they start enforcing antitrust laws, put Glass-Steagall in place to separate investment banking from, you know, your checking account, savings account banking. Put a cop on the beat on Wall Street. That's the SEC. And it levels the playing field.

And we don't have booms and busts. And the second thing he does is he says, and we can build opportunity for our people. So they do progressive taxation and they bring it back. And we invest in education and infrastructure and basic research. In 1935 to about 1980, basic research. And 1935 to about 1980, that's our basic vision. And we built something amazing in this country. We built opportunity. It's the strongest middle class on earth, but the point is it was opportunity. It was opportunity for a kid like me. My dad ended up as a janitor. My mom worked the minimum wage job, but I got a chance, a college that cost $50 a semester. It was an America of expanding opportunity. And let me just add on that, because it was not a perfect America.

Black-white wealth gap has been there since we first started measuring. But even there, 1965 to 1980, the black-white wealth gap shrinks by 30%. We are expanding opportunity for all of us. And then you hit 1980, Ronald Reagan, deregulation, right? Eventually, you get rid of Glass-Steagall. You tell the big banks they can do pretty much whatever they want to do. And we get rid of progressive taxation. It's tax cuts. I mean, it's somewhat progressive, but you do tax cuts for those at the top. Reduce the investments in education, in infrastructure, in basic research.

So, and what happens? It works. It works. That is, the 90% of America ends up left behind without opportunity, without growth. And so 1980 to 2017, GDP keeps going up, but the 90% of America gets none of the new income growth. So now I'll answer your question. I know that was a long runway, but think of me as, you know, a Boeing 707. It's going to take a long time.

We do details. We do depth here. Good. That's why to take a long time. We do details. We do depth here. Good. That's why we're better than the news. Thank you. All right. So back to your question.

For me, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's hard, right? How do we compete internationally? What happens in a tech world where you need fewer and fewer of certain kinds of workers? And the answer for me for all of that is this is the importance of having a government on your side. I talk about this a little bit in the book, about trade, for example. I don't believe that we shouldn't trade. I don't believe that we all should eat squirrels know craft our own doorknobs what i believe the well-known protectionist position the oregon trail policy these people are ripping us off with these doorknobs exactly it's that you've got to build right from the beginning you You've got to build in that we're going to do it in a way that

doesn't work for the thinnest slice at the top, but that works for all of us. And sometimes that's going to be about progressive taxation. You know what I mean? There are different tools you can use. Same thing is true on tech. I did a whole long piece. In the book, I only do a very short version of it, but I did a whole long speech, I don't know, maybe six months ago, about the changing workforce and how we got to change the rules. Did you know that Uber drivers under current federal law can't get together and negotiate collectively with Uber because technically each one of them or allegedly is a 1099 separate yeah contractor independent contractor and that would be collusion well duh that's a government that's not working for us right so so I say that is yeah there's innovation of course there's innovation

we're gonna great you know someday someone's gonna make a bigger version of a Dunkin Don Donut, right? And we're all going to love it, and we're going to eat it communally, and all kinds of things that are going to be innovative here. But the rules are set by our government. The basic regulatory structure and the basic tax structure and where you pull it away, and you make the investments in opportunity. And if that's what we're working on, we'll figure out how to solve these problems. We will.

One thing you mentioned, you touch on it briefly in the book about United Airlines and American Airlines, that there's been this move towards consolidation, how 70% of our soybeans are grown by several giant conglomerates. There's been an argument of late that- Not several. By one. By one. Not several. By one. By one. By one. Yeah, one of them.

There's been an argument I've seen of late that Democrats are not making a big enough deal around trust busting, around consolidation, that that shouldn't be one piece of the puzzle that's actually central to the reason there's so much income inequality and a loss of middle class security. What do you think about that argument that that needs to be the thing we're talking about? Well, it certainly needs to be in the top things we are talking about. I am totally there on this one, actually. And I write about it in the book and tell the stories in the book that antitrust law is what gives small businesses a chance. It's what gives consumers a chance.

And here's the amazing thing. The data now show, it's what gives workers a chance. That as we get more and more consolidation in industry after industry after industry, the power of workers, the power of consumers, the power of small businesses to innovate, to create, to do something new, shrinks and shrinks and shrinks. And the humongous, right, just takes up all of the space and rolls over everybody else. It's why we passed antitrust laws more than 100 years ago. But how much they're enforced, very much there's been ebb and flow to that.

And it's been a lot of ebbing over the last 30 or so years. You've seen Democrats be willing to say, I'm against this merger, but I feel like there's a timidity. I don't see a lot of Democrats out there saying, we need to break up the cable companies, we need to break up the airlines, we need to break up the big agriculture businesses. Do you think that's the next step we need to start taking? Yeah, I do. I think we need to talk about that. And like, as you rightly say, in the book, I give a lot of examples of this. We've got to be more willing to say, wait a minute, what's happening in America? There are three drugstore chains now, three in all of America, and they have 99% of all drugstores in America. Think about that. And here's the deal. Two of them are about to merge. So we're going to go from three down to two. And the people who are supposed to be acting on behalf of the rest of us,

the regulators, the Department of Justice that's supposed to look at that, has just been incredibly soft on this, has been their merger approval policy. So we talk a lot on this podcast about the sort of lingering divide in the Democratic Party. 2016, you didn't endorse a candidate in the primary. You then endorsed and campaigned with Hillary Clinton. When you did that, you still got some flack on the left. Some supporters called you sellout, all that kind of stuff. I don't think there's any member of the Senate or the Democratic Party more aligned with Bernie's philosophy, views, style of politics. Are you worried at all about sort of purity tests and the party

going forward or this divide? Or how do you see that moving forward? So I see this as a moment of such energy. And let's face it, the energy is in progressive politics right now, and it's in progressive issues and progressive ideas. And here actually is a great example of that. You know, back before the election, before we even got into the primaries, there were five of us in the Democratic caucus who signed on to a bill to raise the minimum wage to 15. Now, okay, we didn't get it passed, you know, but the point is five out of 100, or if you want to just do it on the Democratic side, right, five out of whatever we had at that point, 50, 48. Yeah, it shrinks all the time. It's hard to keep track. I know. Come on. That's not funny. That's not funny. But now we just reintroduced that bill, and we're up in the 30s.

Think about that. Okay, 30s is not the majority, but, man, that's a pretty good climb in a period of time. And the way I see that is that's the energy. We've put those ideas out there. All of America heard Hillary and Bernie debating minimum wage. That's what we talked about on our side. The clown car on the other side, they were doing their, you know, tiny hands and sweaty stuff and all that. And we were debating things like minimum wage, right, and the best way to approach it. And now we've got 30 plus senators saying, hey,

that is now enough that I'll go home in my home state and say, yeah, that's what I'm going to be for. That's what I stand for. And that's how you make change. That's where the energy of our party is. I'm sorry, do you want to ask one follow-up on the minimum wage question? Sure. Because one thing that goes separate from wages is reliable work hours. You talked about it a little bit. Yes. I've seen a lot of people starting to talk about this problem. Is there an answer for how you get

the companies? It seems like it's this more subtle issue, right? Predictable work hours for people that are on sort of wage jobs. Right. So I'm glad you raised this. You know, one of the things I talk about in the book, because I try to draw the contrast between these two time periods when basically government was about building opportunity and working for working families. And then when government 1984, it became something that worked for those at the top. I mean, that those are the two shifts over time. But I talk about my mom, that my dad had had a heart attack, is out of work for a long period of time. We had been a paycheck to paycheck family. And boy, without the paycheck, man, it got rugged out there. And we lose the family station wagon, and we are about to lose

our home when my mom puts on her best dress and her high heels and her lipstick and she walks to the Sears and gets a minimum wage job. And that minimum wage job saved our home and saved our family. such a moment to realize that that story is about how hard my mom worked, but it was also about an America that had set the minimum wage at a place where a family of three could survive on a full time minimum wage job. So I talk about the importance of the difference between a seven and a quarter, you know, and being up if we were at 15. But also, when my mom went to work, she got 40 hours if Sears was busy, and she got 40 hours if Sears wasn't busy at all. Because that was the deal.

It was a 40-hour-a-week job, week after week after week. And Sears took the risk of the ebb and flow of business. And I also tell in the book, as you know, the story of Gina, who works at Walmart, and in many ways, much better equipped to deal with the world than my mother was. She has a college diploma. She had several years of experience. She manages a department or an area at Walmart, and yet fights every day. It's not just her paycheck, her hourly, it's getting the hours. And how her manager, in her view, uses hours as a way to punish and reward and keep

workers in line. And how this has become not just an economic issue in the sense of can you get enough hours to be able to make your house payment or your car payment or your apartment payment and put food on the table, but how do you go back to school and get – how do you go to community college and upgrade your skills? How do you deal with child care when you don't know one week to the next, whether you're working on Tuesdays and Thursdays or Mondays and Wednesdays? And this has been a real shift of risk from what used to be the company that was better able to absorb it and had more resources to absorb it off to the workers and just say, man, you're out at the end of the string. And the manager will pull when the manager and just say, man, you're out at the end of the string,

and the manager will pull when the manager feels like pulling, and you have to be there. So I have a bill that's pending, and I've got some co-sponsors on it, about scheduling that just, in a sense, it just asks ask for some of the most basic things that you can't fire somebody for asking for a different schedule. I mean, it just tells you where we are right now in America, that that's the kind of stuff you've got to look for. Or that you, when someone asks for a schedule so that they can go back to school and it would have no impact on your business, you've got to make it a priority to give it to them. It tells you how little workers have to bargain with in America right now and how much government has zoomed in on the side of the rich, on the side of the powerful, on the big tax breaks, on the big mergers.

Let Walmart be gigantic and then again and then again and let it roll over all the local businesses. And there's just been nobody to stand up for working people. And we've got to fight that back. Senator, I think we have to make this last question. Oh, fiddle. Come on. And then it's donuts. And then it's donuts. Your staff drags you out of here.

I don't know. We'll go for you. Yeah, they will. So Trump just finished this big foreign trip where he managed to piss off the entire world to the point where Angela Merkel, one of our most stalwart allies, says, like, we need to take fate into our own hands as a continent, we Europe. I see stories like this. It makes me very nervous. But sometimes the repercussions of these actions get lost in the admittedly very significant concerns about Russia and investigations and like how dumb is Jared Kushner exactly story of the day.

You're one of the best messengers the Democratic Party has on economic issues. So how do you, I want to hear how you might prosecute a case against Trump on foreign policy, or talk about what a democratic foreign policy message is about how we can make people safer than they are today. Yeah. So I think we start with leadership. And that means leadership of our country, but it also means America's leadership role in the world. And why it is so important to have a president that values working with our allies, because we live in a very, very dangerous world. And we need to be able to trade intelligence. We need to be able to share in the defense. We need to be able to act in concert. Look, how did we get the Iran nuclear deal through, for example?

deal through, for example? And the answer was because President Obama and his entire team worked hard to get a lot of nations together to say, we're going to put economic sanctions in place. We're really going to tighten down. That takes cooperation, and it takes treating other nations with respect and saying in a calm way, not a big fancy headlines way, but here's our goal. We don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons. That is deeply dangerous to the region, dangerous to our ally Israel, but dangerous to the entire world. dangerous to our ally Israel, but dangerous to the entire world. And by saying that quietly and calmly over and over, nation by nation, we ultimately put in place tough economic sanctions and watched the Iranian economy down, down, down. And that's what brought Iran to the table, to be able to sit down and negotiate. And now Iran has stepped off this path that it was on to develop a nuclear weapon. The measurement was down to months that people were talking about how long it would be before Iran would

have a nuclear weapon. And that is no longer the case. And we have inspections. Does it, you know, is Iran a great ally? No. You know, there's still a lot that Iran does that's terrible. And frankly, there are other sanctions in place for that and need to be. And there needs to be real accountability. But I just want to look at that one thing. Every part of what Iran is doing right now will be a whole lot worse if they had nuclear weapons. is doing right now will be a whole lot worse if they had nuclear weapons. And yet, it was the work together with allies and acquaintances, not even all the way to full allies, with other nations

that got us in a position that moved us on that international stage one click safer. And that's important. It's work that takes patience, and it takes real leadership. And the United States has shown we can play that role. We have played that role. But when Donald Trump seems to burn alliances for no gain other than something to do with his own ego, then he is destroying something of value to all of us. And it will be felt in our security and the security of the entire world. One more question. So a lot of us believe that the first version of Trumpcare died in the House because of all this grassroots opposition at these town halls. And then a second version passed. And it passed because a lot of these so-called moderate Republicans,

they caved despite all of that grassroots pressure. So now as we're looking at the Senate version of this and Republicans trying to write this in the Senate, what can we do to stop it, right? Because we sort of worry here, we tell everyone, show up at these town halls, do whatever you can. It's all about activism and organizing. And then, you know, victory just sort of sneaks away at the end and it passes in the House. So what do we tell people to do? Or what are you guys doing in the Senate to try to stop them from passing something? Okay, so this is the right question.

And it actually is the last chapter of my book where I talk about this fight is our fight. Because I truly do believe that. We have got to be in this fight. So let me do history slightly differently from the way you do it, because I look at this a little differently. Yeah, we're in the same place. We beat them back on the first round, and we beat them back because we were everywhere. And we, listen, we did that one at, man, we were in Boston. We did our march.

We had our protest. We nearly froze to death out there, but we were out there freezing for health care. Listen, it was 67 in L.A. There were hardships everywhere. Oh, man, you guys. You's, you know, we develop character in places like Massachusetts, right? So, yes, that's part one. But part two, when you point out there were Republicans who caved, I actually think it was less about the moderates caving, and it was more about the right wing saying it's now brutal enough that we can sign off, right?

moderates caving and it was more about the right wing saying it's now brutal enough that we can sign off right it was it was not ugly enough in version one so the 2.0 made it even worse but here's the deal you notice they passed that thing and then ran for the hills right they didn't wait for a cbo score they didn't want any public debate. They wanted no headlines. There's a message in that. And the message in that is, wow, there are a lot of people who don't like this. Now, granted, they still got their folks on the far right who are going to support them, and they were feeling pressure over there as well. But I don't read the way they handled this as saying they don't care about the pressure that we brought to bear. I think they care enormously. And they're just hoping to get under the radar screen and that something else will explode and no one will pay attention to them. And they've all got their eyeballs focused on what's going to happen to them in 2018. And I got to tell you, we got to

have our eyeballs focused on what happens to them in 2018. But right now in the Senate, I've got to tell you, we've got to have our eyeballs focused on what happens to them in 2018. But right now in the Senate, you better believe that it matters. Those phone calls, those emails, those tweets, those protests, that showing up at office hours, taking pictures, where is my senator? Just firsthand, I just want to say this. Senator. Just firsthand, I just want to say this. Some of my colleagues in the Senate have been completely freaked out by how much people in their home states have paid attention to this health care bill. And yeah, it's going to be a big fight, but that's our only chance. We got all the Democrats. We're sticking together.

We got 48 of us on our side. We got to peel off some Republicans who get really nervous. And the only way they're going to be really, really nervous is if there are people who are engaged all the way. You think we have a chance of getting like Heller and Flake and some of these guys that are up in 18? I think we got a chance. Absolutely, we got a chance. And, you know, it's an interesting thing. I'm not giving up on anybody on this one. I mean, in terms of bringing pressure to bear, among those who would be hurt, keep in mind, it's rural hospitals that would just get smacked.

And these senators, they're senator for the whole state and supposed to be there for their whole state. So I think there's a lot of pressure to bear. You know, cancer doesn't ask if you're a Republican or a Democrat. Strokes and heart attacks and babies born with holes in their hearts, having a parent in a nursing home and not being able to pay for it. It's not a party affiliation. This is about what it means to be a human being. And this is where I think America has changed, even over the last eight or nine years. Yeah, there's been a lot of fighting

about the Affordable Care Act. And yeah, there are things we need to do better in it. And I'm all for that. But the bottom line is healthcare is a basic human right. And I think here in America, we've come to see that. And I think this is a big part of what Democrats stand for today, is healthcare is a basic human right. We're all working for what are the best ways to get everybody covered and to do it at the lowest possible cost. And there's a lot we can do. There's a lot we should do. But the bottom line is that's where we're aiming. The Republicans, they think it's all still about tax breaks. Yeah. Yep. For the rich and the powerful. Well, we'll keep fighting um you bet we will

senator thank you so much for joining us your book is this fight is our fight everyone go grab it's a great book and uh we appreciate you coming by oh thank you and eat a donut while you read it take care all right Thank you.