Pod Save America - “The MAGA industrial complex.”

Episode Date: August 7, 2017

Mueller impanels a grand jury to investigate Trump, more Republicans start to challenge the President, and Democrats continue to debate their own way forward. Then Lovett interviews Joshua Green about his new Steve Bannon book, and Pod Save the People’s DeRay Mckesson joins to talk about the opioid crisis.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's show, Lovett will interview Bloomberg Businessweek's Joshua Green, author of the new book, Devil's Bargain, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. You know what? It's already happened. It's happened. It was a great conversation. I actually went on a little too long. Raising the bar.

I went on a little too long. Well, this one's actually happened. I opened that book and I was like, I'm going to read a book about Bannon. But it's a great book and it was a fascinating conversation. Cool. Tom was like so bored during that whole thing. I'm just waiting for the day one of it. I was like, you know, it is a shitty conversation. Skip it. He did the same thing on Thursday when he, before he interviewed Senator Cortez Masto. He's like, it's going to be a great interview. I will say, look, it was a fine conversation. That was definitely overhyped.

You can always improve. And a little later, we'll be talking to the host of Crooked Media's Pod Save the People, DeRay McKesson. But first, it's August. So, slow news until there's horrendous news, which is usually what happens every August. You're about to hear the name of a mountain you didn't know about before.

Something's going to go wrong. What is this mountain joke you've been making all morning? It's just that every August, there's the BP thing, or there's a hurricane, or something unexpected. The world is going to come test Donald Trump, and I, for one, think he's up for it. Okay, let's begin with what I think is the most consequential political development of last week. The Wall Street Journal report that special counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury to investigate whether the president of the United States and or his associates broke the law in connection with Russia's interference in the 2016 election. Robert Mueller is not fucking around. No.

Robert Mueller is going to use his dragons. But, first of all, I thought you were doing that in a tone where you were going to say something funny, but you didn't. You said something quite serious, and you meant it. I was straight news John there. Yeah, well, look, grand juries, they're a serious business, but I don't know if you know, but Newt Gingrich already doesn't trust him. That's a reason.

Well, let's just talk about the context here, which is like, I think a lot of legal observers have assumed this was going to happen all along. It doesn't necessarily mean there's a crime. Grand juries are used all the time to investigate things, but it provides an important mechanism to bring in a whole bunch of witnesses, interview them in a format where lying is a very big problem for them. We get to check the record of all the things Trump has tweeted and said in interviews publicly. And it also makes me feel like people like Paul Manafort and General Flynn are very, very nervous. The things we've read make it sound like at a bare minimum, they have failed to register under FARA, which is a law that says

you have to register with the government if you're going to be a representing foreign agent. So yeah, not good for Team Trump. Yeah, it basically confirms that Mueller is not just running a counterintelligence investigation, which this whole thing began with. It is now a criminal investigation. And there was also there had already been a grand jury impaneled for Michael Flynn. There's one in Virginia. But the fact that there's now a second grand jury in D.C. means that this is very likely far beyond the scope of anything that just is Flynn-related. There's a two-for-one sale. There's a two-for-one sale on grand juries.

And as Mueller's boss, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said on Fox News Sunday, it means that the special counsel can use the grand jury to investigate any crimes that he might discover within the scope of his probe. So this means that, again, remember, the whole Clinton investigation back in the 90s began with Ken Starr looking into Whitewater, an Arkansas real estate deal. And it ended with Clinton perjuring himself over an affair. So these things tend to go far afield of what begins with. So basically any crimes that Donald Trump or his associates may have committed could be uncovered with this grand jury.

Yeah, and look, we don't know what's going to come out of all this, but my sense of it has always been that Michael Flynn is just an ancillary moron. So I put this into the Flynn camp of he was aggrieved, he wanted cash, he skirted the rules because he either was too stupid or too arrogant to follow them. But separate and apart from that are all these other things from Manafort to Don Jr. and all this stuff that's coming up.

So, you know, it's exciting days. I will say, I'm not defending Flynn in any way, I do think people in Washington have played fast and loose with the Farrah Law for a very long time. Many of them don't write an op-ed in their own name supporting their client on election day when they're working for the next president of the United States. Very loose. But Flynn is especially stupid. A friend of the pod, Adam Schiff, argues that moving into the grand jury phase is very significant. He said over the weekend that, you know, it shows that there is some there there and that this thing is not slowing down. It's ramping up, presumably because there's

a sense of some wrongdoing. So who knows? Well, we're not predicting because we don't do that anymore. But so what can a grand jury do? As you said, can subpoena just about any record emails. It can get testimony from just about everyone. can probably get trump's tax returns that's that's going to come up now um they may be able to compel trump himself to testify that's how clinton was compelled to testify don jr's buddy list on aol yeah well already they've so we already know they've subpoenaed um records relating to the meeting with trump jr manafort kushner and the like 50 or so russians they had in the room at the time. The entire Bolshoi Ballet was there.

They had enough to fill one of those nesting dolls. Yeah, it was like they opened up another Russian, another Russian, and then the littlest one was Putin. The meeting was at the Duma, which is their parliament. People aren't talking about that. So, does this make it more or less likely, do you think, that Trump fires Mueller, that this has happened? Trump has not yet commented on the grand jury story, though this morning, we're at the point now where Trump's tweets, by the way, like, I was getting ready for the pod this morning and I was like, oh my god, there were like nine Trump tweets. He's screaming about Dick Blumenthal and yelling about Vietnam. And I was just like, oh, this crazy old man. Let's just put him aside for a second.

It's a little bit like, you know, Trump's tweets are like drugs for the media, but now they need a stronger, they need something stronger. It's not getting them high as they used to. So it's interesting is Trump's lawyers are taking a new, and there was some write up about this, but Trump's lawyers are being a bit more conciliatory. First of all, he's hired a lawyer named Ty Cobb. I don't know how that's possible. But basically, they're saying things like, we're cooperating fully.

We cannot wait to see what happens. We're so excited to be working with Robert Mueller. We love him. Bob Mueller, great suits, heroic guy. Can't wait to talk to him. And then also, but it was great. There's a little internecine lawyer stuff because Succolow, the worst one, clearly was... Jay the worst one.

Jay the worst one. This is definitely a new strategy to be a bit more conciliatory with the special counsel, but he clearly is being bothered that people are suggesting that the new lawyer is fixing things. He's like, everything's the same. Everything's just as great as it's always been. Interesting aside on this is two senators, Tom Tillis and Chris Coons, have proposed legislation that would give a judge the ability to review any decision by the president to fire Mueller. So who knows if that will go anywhere, but there's movement in a bipartisan way in Congress. Yeah, I do. I think that that's a good sign in terms of like whether Trump will fire Mueller or whether he'll be able to fire Mueller.

Now that we've entered a grand jury phase and we have a grand jury impaneled and they're looking into crimes, the more that comes out about this, the harder it is for Trump to, let's say, successfully fire Mueller. Right, right. Because we're not predicting whether he will or not because who the fuck knows what he'll do. Yeah. But to successfully fire Mueller with all this happening now at the grand jury I think will be tricky because we are, like you said, Tom Tillis, Lindsey Graham is drafting separate legislation with some senators as well so there's a whole bunch of legislation now and for once like senate camaraderie and decorum is keeping sessions safe you know it's but like yeah it's they're standing up for the institution because they like sessions so his ability like you have he can't fire sessions because they've, all these

Republican senators have made it clear that they won't let him refill the job. The Senate's not going into recess. So, you know. You know, Chris Hayes made a good point a while back, which is a lot of people expected that the Russia investigation would ultimately bring down the rest of Trump's agenda. But the reverse could be true, which is the failure of healthcare reform could finally start making Republicans in the Senate House realize, like, this guy, we basically only have him here because he's a pen that can sign all of our

conservative free market legislation, and if he can't even do that, then what's good is he to us? Right, they're tolerating the head because they can put a pen in the tiny hand. They're just like, stuff that head full of fast food and get it signing things, and it's not working. This is a good segue into our next topic, which is

are some Republican politicians finally starting to look for the exits? Over the weekend, Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns of the New York Times reported that a shadow campaign for a potential 2020 primary challenge to Trump has begun begun and includes potential candidates like Ben Sasse, John Kasich, and Vice President Mike Pence.

I just want to say that this show is really fun. We're talking about a lot of fun topics, and I'm so glad we won on health care, because now we get to do this. What topic? What? This wasn't on the outline, by the way, but this morning, apparently, Orrin Hatch said that we are moving on to tax reform and he's sick of the administration still talking about health care because they shot their wad on health care. Shot their wad. Salty language from Orrin Hatch. From a U-ton. That is unfortunate.

Let's talk about the New York Times piece. I mean, I don't know. It makes total sense to me that Sass and some of these other folks who are pretty overtly anti-Trump would begin planning for 2020. The Mike Pence stuff, it read to me like he's a very savvy politician. He's going to Iowa and he's meeting with donors after that event. He's having the Koch brothers over to his house. It's a place to like fit big donors. He's making smart political meetings. He's sort of like,

you know, bulked up his staff with some good political operatives, not like legislative guys. So yeah, is Mike Pence thinking to himself, he would love Donald Trump's job? Absolutely. It seemed to me like there was evidence of him making an overt play for it right now. Not quite yet. It seems like a guy who's looking at a president who may not make it through his term, keeping his options open. Yeah, I thought the same thing. I combed through the piece a couple times. I'm like, all right, where's the actual evidence for the Pence stuff?

The closest is that an aide to the vice president told people, told a prominent Indiana Republican, that Pence was preparing to run in case there was an opening in 2020 and was reaching out for potential help. So that does seem like, look, I mean, the fact is, though, that Pence is at least thinking that Trump might not be able to run in 2020 or might not be a candidate in 2020. That would be, that's something big. And it's important to remember, Mike Pence is a scrupulous moron.

You know, he's a bad person who would shiv Donald Trump in a heartbeat. He's Donald Trump's vice president. By definition, he's a bad man. So he'll do what it takes. But I think what Tommy said was right. He's being very savvy. Very savvy. But also, just to look at it,

if we took off all cynicism away from this conversation, the things he's doing, going to Iowa, doing smart politics, talking to big donors, keeping people happy and in the tent, could help with a reelect as well. That's right. So, who knows?

But savvy operator. Well, Mike, in one way that he was savvy, by the way, unscrupulous, one way that he was savvy is he immediately realized that Donald Trump was going to read this story and fully panicked. Oh, yeah. Did you see the statement that Pence put out being like, just, it might as well have said, I'm working for the greatest man in the history of the world. Fuck all you people.

Mr. President, this statement is for you. Love you, bro. Yeah. Yeah. And Jonathan Martin was tweeting about this, too. He said that they were warned, the New York Times was warned by the Pence people that they would be pushing back ferociously on this story if he printed it. This is one of those stories, though.

This is going to grind Trump's gears for months. on this story if he if he printed it this is one of those stories though this is going to grind trump's gears for months in three weeks he's going to do an interview with like mike.com or someplace where you wouldn't expect it to be like by the way pens is an asshole you're just going to say something that's right i do think a lot of trump's tweets this morning were about how great the base is all of these problems i've had have only brought the base together and the space. Yeah, it's so easy. It's again, like, it's so funny. It's very much like George H.W. Bush, like message, I care.

You're not supposed to talk about the base. You're the president. You don't call them the base. They're people. They're American citizens. They're not the base. The base. But putting pens aside, you have SAS and then you have just sort of a general kind of group of Republicans that are the anti-Trump people like Flake kind of being more vocal.

But Dave Weigel has been beating this drum, and it's, I think, a very fair criticism, which is, okay, you're vocal. Where's the action? Jeff Flake was railing against Donald Trump being a birther, but then voted to confirm a judicial nominee by Trump who is a birther. So and Ben Sasse is the same way. You know, I think Ben Sasse is like if Ben Sasse lived up to the standard that Ben Sasse set, I think we'd be seeing a very different version of him. Yeah. One other point on just this question of will Trump have a primary opponent?

I mean, I would love to see that happen. And I would love to see like a real conversation on the right in the Republican Party about his record and things he's done, like who he is as a man. But I have no faith that that primary opponent will be covered in a fair way. Like the MAGA media establishment

is not going to walk away from Trump. They're all in on him because he gets the money in ratings and they do, you know, propped up all these new outlets. He's literally inventing news outlets that are hosted by his kids. The MAGA industrial complex. So this is my question. Phrase coined.

This is my question about this is how do you run against Trump if you're in the Republican primary? Like maybe perhaps you don't run against him like a Ben Sasse would or a John Kasich would and say he's not living up to conservative principles, conservative free market principles. Because what a lot of these Republicans, the establishment Republicans have not realized yet is conservative free market principles are not popular in this country. They're not. Like Trump's base doesn't believe in them and the Democrats don't believe in them. So that's two problems, right? There's two big groups of people that don't believe in them.

So the question is, do you run against Trump if you're a Republican from the other side saying that he has not lived up to his economic nationalism, his populism, like he hasn't delivered on all these promises he made to the base of the party? That's what I'm wondering. Yeah. You've talked about this before, just sort of where you can come at Trump. I mean, where's the wall? If there's no wall, you can say, where's the wall? Someone on the right of Trump says,

he told the Mexican president in a transcript that the wall was the least important part of their conversation, but it was politically a big deal to him. He's not real. You know what Trump says? No, he didn't. You're a're a wall also the sky is purple well the thing too is that that that part of what makes it challenging to try to challenge trump on either side of him i don't even know what the sides are anymore is he did successfully change the conversation in the

republican party he personally attacked the dogmas that every other person on that stage adhered to. And so they are his debating points. Like, he's the one who came in and said the Republicans are wrong on trade and the Republicans are wrong on immigration and we need to build a wall. Like, he made that the axis of debate inside the Republican Party. So it's going to be so hard for anyone to claim that they deserve it. I don't know. Yeah, there's not a lot.

I mean, there's like the Tom Cottons out there, right, that you could sort of see running to his right. But he's not, you know, he's not very impressive. You just can't. You have to just picture them side by side. None of these people you want to cheer for, by the way. Oh, no. Let's be clear on that point. Look, yeah.

I mean, this is no heroes on that debate stage. It's going to be tough to pick a side. But you have to picture these people standing side by side with donald trump and the one thing he was so good at doing is just exposing wimpy little politicians for what they were and uh tom cotton is exposable now so this is all about 2020 but let's talk about sort of why this matters before 2020 um we've already talked about how his congressional agenda, his legislative agenda is suffering a bit because Republicans in the Senate and the House now

are not sticking with Trump on everything. They're kind of going their own way. He's also got some problems within his own White House. Just to state the obvious. Not just with all of his staff shake-ups, but there's continuing leaks we recorded right before

the transcripts of the foreign leader calls were out. Tommy, what did you think about this? Because I know you and Lovett have had a little conversation about whether this was I heard an impassioned case on Lovett or Leave It this weekend, which is a great show Thank you. You should check it out Oh yeah, we didn't promote Lovett or Leave It

Do it right now move on subscribe download it subscribe i heard you make a case for why these leaks are good and we should support in any case because we have a terrible president we need to have more information on it like i just can't help but approach this as someone who worked on the nsc and like knows how i mean so when the president calls a foreign leader a transcript is often made or a memorandum of the conversation is made up by the note takers who are in the room. Those things can be not a big deal. Like you can be calling and, hey, I hope we get your vote on X thing at the U.N. Or it could be incredibly sensitive.

Hey, Prime Minister Netanyahu, please don't bomb Iran. It would really bum me out if you bombed Iran this weekend. Let's not do that. So it's going to spin the gamut. I think both sides need to have some sense that they can have a private conversation. And so, you know, that's true internally. That's true for team Trump, but also anyone he would talk to. So it does worry me that these things are leaking out. It feels like things are breaking in terms of our ability to protect conversations or just sensitive information that I don't know that we can fix.

But I don't know. I'm a little precious about this. I think that's fine. Look, I hear that. I don't care. And I don't care because this is going to be you're right. It's absolutely right that that what's happening is people inside of the administration are going to are breaking these tools for secrecy, like important things like just the basic function of the phone call mechanism that the president has is being broken right now. Those things can leak. Anything can be leaked. It's a huge problem, but it's a problem we can fix. And Donald Trump is damaging all kinds of norms and institutions. It's not a surprise that in turn there's an internal response to that that is also breaking some things that we like and would rather have

for the next president that we were glad were in place for Barack Obama. It's going to take time to repair the damage from Donald Trump. But I just this is one of those things where these things are going to leak and expose what Donald Trump is doing, how unprepared he is for the job. OK, it's a price we're gonna have to pay. I just I'm in favor of it. Maybe. I don't know. Again, I'm not I'm not blaming the journalists. Like I'm not saying these new news outlets shouldn't be publishing things. But, you know, as part of the Duterte conversation, that transcript leaked, I think they were talking about where nuclear subs were positioned. I mean, there's a lot of second, third order things that get out there that are just disconcerting to me or information that won't be conveyed to us

through that channel that otherwise would have. And meanwhile, over at the State Department, Rex Tillerson has literally no one working in the building to talk to these folks. So, Tommy, what's the universe of people who have these transcripts and could leak them? It depends on the it depends on the call. These didn't seem like the most sensitive calls or sort of introductory calls. Like I used to get transcripts of lots of foreign leader calls in my little sit room cubbyhole box. I get a lot of Biden's calls. Those were a blast to read. Let

me tell you, he's the best. But, you know, if Obama was calling the president of Afghanistan to talk about reconciliation, which is the attempt at a peace process there, that probably would have been one of the most closely held pieces of paper in the government, or maybe a transcript wouldn't have been made. So there's a lot of different ways this stuff goes down. Like, it's not that hard to photocopy something. It's not that hard to hit forward on your email because sometimes they come to your high side email, your classified email, and you can push it out to someone

and it goes and goes and goes and off we go. But there's also like a war in the NSC that's deeply dangerous. And I don't know that these leaks are part of that war, but the war against McMaster and the war of all these creepy aides that are writing insane memos and getting fired. I mean, there's just weird shit going on that just feels unstabilizing.

Yeah, it's hard not to pull for McMaster and Kelly and trying to like purge some of these crazies. Even if it like, who knows, even if it, you know, structures the White House in a more orderly fashion. I just think for like the safety and security of the world, like some of these people in the NSC, the, you know, need to get out of there. It's hard because I do want the NSC, the kind of national security apparatus that exists before Trump and that will exist after Trump to function. It has to function. It's really important. You know, this is the anniversary of I guess it's the 16 year anniversary of the memo that Bush got that said bin Laden determined to strike in the US.

We have absolutely no idea what very secret warnings and information is currently passing through those channels to the president. That process still needs to work. And it's terrifying to think that Donald Trump helms it because, you know, it's you know that he doesn't have the capacity to properly process this kind of information. So it's this balancing act of I want that aspect to function. But at the same time, if Donald Trump doesn't have secrecy on his phone calls, I think that's OK, because I want to know what Donald Trump is saying to these people, because I don't trust him and I don't believe he's up to it. And just a sidebar to your point, I mean, Maggie Haberman reported on that long form podcast. You talked about the Trump is still using his old cell phone, which is probably being collected on by at least a half a dozen intelligences. So, OK, but palace intrigue in fighting, that's not new.

And it's also not new national security like Powell versus Cheney. Right. There's a whole history of this stuff. When you read about McMaster trying to purge the NSC of people that are writing memos that talks about a domestic international threats to Trump that include globalist bankers, the deep state Islamists that compares it to a Maoist insurgency. Who are these people and what are they doing? And then the head of the Intel directorate, Ezra Cohen Watkins, was just like, go. That guy's job is to like manage covert action programs in the most sensitive intelligence collection we're doing period in the world. Why is this guy running an enemies list or, you know, getting together with Devin Nunez to do this weird off the books briefing, right? This stuff is worrisome. It is not just Keystone Cop. It is they're living in a

dark place. It doesn't really exist in reality. No, it is. It is malfeasance mixed with, as we said many times, the incompetence of the broader administration. Right. And that incompetence, that incompetence is creating a vacuum for a lot of bad people to go in and do a lot of bad things. Yeah. I mean, just the kind of people who would not have access to any levers of power, certainly not a Democrat, but not even a Republican like a Jeb Bush or even a Marco Rubio. These are people that have no business being in the administration. And that's why you see McMaster and Kelly

trying to get these kinds of people out. And they're finding common cause with right-wing media outlets that are the people that peddled Pizzagate and claimed that Hillary Clinton had Parkinson's disease. And there was no price for that. And yet these guys are like openly anti-Semitic. They're putting out cartoons that have like the Rothschilds holding a doll of Soros, which

holding up McMaster, right? Doesn't get more blatant than that. You mean the media, some of these media? Like, you know, I'm not going to say their names because I don't want to ever talk about them, but like crazy right wing bloggers are getting leaks from the bowels of the nsc in the administration yeah to go after mcmaster and trump apparently doesn't like mcmaster because he briefs in an orderly way and doesn't like fuck around when they're talking about afghanistan so trump gets mad that afghanistan isn't going well and threatens to send him there in lieu of more troops

which i don't think they should do but i, I mean, the whole thing, it just... Well, the weirdest thing happened in an NSC meeting is McMaster was speaking and Trump picked up a remote and tried to change him. Anyway, nobody's talking about it. Well, no, this is the fundamental problem, right? Like, you could talk about the problem of leaks, you can talk about

the problem of, you know, staff shake-ups and, you know, staff shakeups and, you know, palace intrigue and all this kind of stuff. But the fundamental problem is that we have a president who is too incompetent for the job and is also, and no one can trust, right? Like those foreign call, those foreign transcripts, foreign leader transcripts revealed that Trump lied about a lot of things. Like they, they revealed him to be a liar. And also like, he's not like, like he doesn't like that his national security advisor gives orderly briefings. Like, that's not how the President of the United States is supposed to fucking act.

And also, by the way, one thing to note from those leaks is Turnbull, Pena, Nieto, both came off well. They did not say anything they wouldn't comfortably say in a press conference. And so, once again, there's a leak or there's an interview and the only person that looks terrible is our president. Yeah. It's just, these are hard jobs and you're never going to bat a thousand and you're going to make a lot of mistakes, but like it's been like seven months. These guys don't have their sea legs. They're still fighting with each other constantly. And North Korea is just ramping up launching missiles in the sky like they're bottle rockets every other day. And, you know, the U.N. Security Council passed sanctions and

that's good and that's a real win for Trump. And for us. And for the world. But I don't know. It just like bad process always leads to bad outcomes. A good process can hopefully get you good outcomes, but they are not guaranteed because these are hard problems. Yeah. So let's talk about how to get Trump out of office. Oh, good. Speaking of terrible processes and scary outcomes, the Democratic Party. Because one of the things I noticed is, you you know so his approval rating is in the tank it's probably the lowest it's ever been um you're starting to see some slippage from even the republican base their favorability rating of

donald trump but um gallup did a uh survey of his approval rating with trump's approval rating on a state-by-state basis in congressional district by congressional district, right? And the troubling thing is a lot of the slippage in his approval rating is in Democratic states

or even when it's the Republicans who have stopped approving him of Trump are Republicans living in Democratic areas, right? And so his approval rating in a lot of these Republican areas is still hovering around or a lot of these swing districts that we're going to try to flip in 2018,

forget about 2020, it's still at like 46, 47%. And so the question is, how did Democrats capitalize on all of this to start winning so we can hold them accountable? Because that's the only way we're going to do this. Remember that? Remember winning things? So let's talk about the Democrats and how we're doing on the project of getting our shit together. Last week, Ryan Cooper of The Week wrote a piece titled, Why Leftists Don't Trust Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Deval Patrick, who he called, quote, a handful of minority Democrats being groomed by the centrist establishment to run for office. He then laid out the reasons that the populist leftists trust these three.

Harris, her past as a prosecutor, failure to charge Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin for his misconduct at One West Bank, Patrick for his employment at Bain Capital, Booker for his comments defending Bain Capital in the 2012 campaign and his support for charter schools. So he lays out this piece. David Atkins of Washington Monthly

then writes a piece in response that said, while these may be legitimate complaints about these three, in targeting black candidates like Booker Harris and Patrick Cooper gives further fuel to those who claim that Sanders-aligned economic progressives have racist motivations, or at least that they are tone deaf and poor allies on matters of identity and social justice. He goes on to say that the establishment, on the other hand, must stop treating class war activists as second class citizens in the party. Love it.

You tweeted the story. You tweeted the Atkins story. You said everyone should read it. What are your thoughts on this? And talk about some of the responses that you got to your tweet. No, I'm not talking about the responses. No, I think that there's two big conversations going on. One that's really important and good and one that's less helpful.

The one that's really important is, why are Democrats in the wilderness? Where have we gone wrong? What can we learn from Bernie? What can we learn from Hillary? What can we learn from Macron? What can we learn from Corbyn? What are the lessons of where liberalism, progressivism is winning, or where it's losing? And what can we draw from that? Where should we be shifting to the left? Where is it more about messaging? I mean, these are big fundamental questions about why Democrats aren't appealing to huge swaths of the country. And it goes beyond this notion, you know, so there's that conversation, very important. Then there's a less helpful conversation, which is basically boils it down to, oh, you want to go after the white working class to the exclusion of the female minority base of the Democratic Party,

that there's a lot of accusations that go both sides that really assume a lot of bad faith. I think there's a lot of partisans within the Democratic Party that have been vindictive, that there's a ton of sexism and just viciousness inside of this debate. And I think that the point that David Atkins is making in the piece is, here are the axes of the debate that are really helpful. You know, where should we be on health care? Why are people on the left of the party skeptical of those who have worked with the financial sector, like obeying capital? Why is that an important thing to recognize and address? But to me, it's about recognizing that we're sort of allies in a very big fight and that unity on the left is one of the most important things we can do to combat Trump. What do you think, Tom?

Yeah, I mean, the poll you started by talking about is disconcerting. And I think it speaks to the closed information loops that existed during the election. It speaks to the power of the MAGA media. during the election. It speaks to the power of the MAGA media. If you don't have friends that you hear from, if you don't hear about like what's going on in Washington most days because you're too busy and you don't have friends to talk to you about it and you don't have Facebook friends who post things like you're never going to hear about a lot of this stuff. And we all need to remember that as we obsess about it. Trump has certainly helped us paper over a lot of our differences. I think the health care fight was a great point of unity that allowed us to truly unite in support of a priority and a goal. You know,

I don't know the answer. Like, I don't get being this critical this early of Booker and Kamala Harris and Deval Patrick. I think those are great public servants. I'm proud that they're members of the party. Times I've interacted with them personally. I've been incredibly impressed by how smart they are. They're good at their jobs. They, they fight hard for things I care about and believe in. So, you know, I was a little struck by the amount of viciousness, uh, and some parts of the internet against them. Like I personally hadn't actually seen a lot of it until I was going back and forth with a reporter and talking about it. So we have a lot of soul searching to do. I know I'm just restating the problem, which is what Democrats do,

but I want to approach this with a lot of humility because I don't know that I spend enough time listening to people from both sides of the spectrum here who are upset about these things. And I think part of what we want this show to be is a place to air those things as openly as possible. And the one thing I do worry about is if those conversations get shut down. Yeah, I do. And I think that's a good point.

One of the big problems with these conversations is that they're happening on Twitter, which I think is an incredibly useful tool that I am addicted to. But it's very hard to be subtle and nuanced in 140 characters. And I know what you're saying. I'm sometimes afraid to say things, even on this podcast, as we start talking about the Democratic Party, because I start editing in my head and imagining after this podcast, the tweets that we're going to get, either from the left or from some Hillary supporters or from some Bernie supporters that we didn't acknowledge their positions and the challenges that they faced in the 2016 primary.

And it actually stops me from saying some stuff because I'm like, we're just going to get in trouble. And I don't think we can be in that position if we're going to try to unite this party eventually and go win in 2018 and 2020. I think we're going to have to have some super uncomfortable, awkward conversations where we make mistakes in some of the things we say and we, like, learn from people that we didn't, you know. Yeah. And not assume and not look for reasons to believe somebody shouldn't be listened to.

Right. Like looking for excuses to not hear somebody. The. Yeah. But this starts. But yeah, I think but but this starts one of the things we can do is to focus less on individual personalities until it's time for an election and focus more on like what we stand for as a party and to talk about the issues like the Democratic Party is a party that must stand for economic justice, for racial justice, for social justice, right? Like, we must fight racism in all its forms, we must fight sexism in all its forms, and we have to fight poverty and inequality, right? Like, we have to do all these things, and we have to be able to stand for all these things, and we can't start ordering which of those issues is more important than the others, because when we do that, then we

start breaking into different camps. Like, it's all important. And also, looking at Kamala Harris' record, totally reasonable. You have concerns about it, totally reasonable. Raise them. You have concerns with Deval Patrick, you have concerns with Cory Booker, great. Don't treat them as deal breakers. Treat them as reasons to question somebody. Find out what they're for. All three of those candidates owe answers and explanations on anything.

Like, if you're wondering, like, okay, Deval Patrick, you know, explain why you went to work for Bain Capital. Tell us. Kamala Harris, explain your record as a prosecutor. Go ahead. Cory Booker, if you're wondering, like, okay, Deval Patrick, you know, explain why you went to work for Bain Capital. Tell us. Kamala Harris, explain your record as a prosecutor. Go ahead. Cory Booker, if you believe in charter schools, tell us why and let's debate it. Yeah.

Like, of course they owe us explanations, but, like, I don't think you just cross them off a list because they're passed without letting them at least talk about this stuff. And then also just, you know, you look at the policy debates and there's some big policy debates, but you talk about health care, right? And whether single payer should be a litmus test for Democrats moving forward. I understand arguing for that as a position, but, you know, like we had Chris Murphy on and he said he's for a public option. And like Democrats choose the absolute worst names for things like, are you for single payer or a public option? Like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, but you look at you boil that debate down and it comes down to are you for access to Medicare for all or are you for Medicare for all? Right. That's the big debate. It's an important debate. But like, remember that we are on the same side and that we are not

adversaries. And by the way, also, this debate is never resolved. You never win this argument. The argument between the center left and the left is like the heart of the Democratic Party. And I think the most important thing is that everyone feels included and part of that conversation in developing what the party stands for, that people on the left, the Bernie wing of the party, do not feel in the next run of elections that they're being sidelined or the deck is stacked against them. And at the same time, the people on the center left aren't made to feel like they're Republicans, that they're the same as Trump, just because they have a different point of view on some key policy issues like that to me, like arguments in good face, not seeing each other as adversaries.

That is the most important thing as we go into these next elections. Yeah. I mean, you said this before, but we need to be patient with our allies and we need to be able to learn from our allies. And we need to be able to, to like hear the voices and learn from the voices of people across the spectrum and people from all different backgrounds right like we're you know like the three of us are three white dudes what do you know that so there's a lot of perspectives that we don't have right that we need to that we need to learn from so we try to bring all these people on and learn from it too yeah um it's not gonna be the three of us having the conversation it's important for no one to believe that they have all the people on and learn from it too. It's not going to be the three of us having the conversation. It's important for no one to believe that

they have all the answers on this kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, race and gender are a very important part of these conversations. And I think that that initial article understandably bothered some people because it singled out three African-American Democrats. And that seemed surprising that

it would be written that way. I think we should just be honest about that. And I think we should also be honest that for people who have felt frustrated by the party and the lack of progress and the lack of support and help in their community, being told to be patient and we'll work these things out is probably pretty goddamn annoying after decades and decades and decades of that. And so, you know, I don't know how to fix it. I think one thing we're trying to do here is have a forum to create, have as many honest conversations that we can, not just on this show, but all the other shows we're trying to develop, which are happening, not as fast as we want, but they're all happening.

At the end of the day, this is also about figuring out a way to win elections. And you have to be able to figure out a way to win an election despite whatever institutional challenges you may face. faced quite a few institutional challenges, right? He was a black man named Barack Hussein Obama from the South Side of Chicago who was facing a lot of institutional racism. He could not fix that institutional racism. He could only figure out a way to overcome it. The other thing he faced was Hillary Clinton's campaign, which had the support of the entire Democratic establishment,

including the Democratic National Committee and a bunch of superdelegates, right? And he had to figure out a way to overcome that as well. So when you look back at 2016, right, like the Bernie people say, well, the whole establishment was against us and Hillary Clinton ran the machine. They were against us too in 2008. And we just had to figure out a way to around it. And Barack Obama did. Turned out it was a mile wide, an inch deep.

Hillary Clinton faced a monumental amount of institutional sexism. Absolutely. But the next woman who runs for president is going to have to figure out a way around that. Because we're not going to stop running women candidates. We're going to run more. And what they're going to have to do is figure out a way to win despite the sexism. And candidates on the left are going to have to figure out a way to win despite establishment support for the other candidate. And by the way, despite an entrenched donor class

that you have every reason to be suspicious of. You know, absolutely. And like, so, yeah, there's no easy answers here. But the most important thing, I think this is a point that David Atkins makes in that Washington Post piece, is if this devolves along the same fault lines as the 2016 primary, we are in real, real trouble. And it's dangerous and unhelpful, and I can see it happening. a vigorous primary with a whole bunch of opponents is a net good thing. Even if the ultimate candidate has some lasting wounds from that primary process.

Because I think Hillary, Bernie, O'Malley was probably not a big enough field. We could have seen a more vigorous debate that just felt larger and more real. So we should fight it out. But yeah, you're right. I mean, you fight differently with your family. You fight differently with your friends than you do against the other team. Unity should not come at the cost of papering over our differences, right? We're not looking for unity for unity's sake.

Unity should come after a vigorous debate, but it should be the end point. Yeah. And by the way, this will be a new conversation because we all learned a lot from 2016. We learned what we had to accept and what we didn't. We better have. We're in the process. One last thing about this, too, is John and I were talking this in the drive. We also shouldn't lose faith.

Politics, it doesn't have to be an exhausting slog. It doesn't have to be. Being for Barack Obama, campaigning for him, it was inspiring and it was fun. You believed in him and you cared about it and you fought really hard. And, you know, listen, not a fan of Donald Trump. We're not on the fence about Donald Trump. But being for Donald Trump is pretty fun. You go to a rally, you cheer.

He tells you everything. All your worst instincts are valid. You know, you have a good time. Being for Donald Trump is fun for people. Being for Democrats needs to be fun. It can't just be a brutal, exhausting competition. It can't be. It's a little, now, it's a little rose-colored glasses because being for, you're right, being for Barack Obama fundamentally was inspiring, was fun.

That primary between Obama and Clinton was fucking brutal. It was. That's true. And the things we said about each other and the other side was truly, it got dirty. New Hampshire, until we finally won the nomination, is like blacked out in my mind. All I can think about is gaining like 40 pounds and looking like a white walker and just wanting to end it all every single day. Now imagine being on the losing side. What a pleasure. That's what makes me feel better, is what I think about that.

We used to say that we knew how Hillary Clinton would do in a primary before it happened, because she always did just well enough to have a justification for staying in, but not well enough to change any dynamic in the race. So we just knew it would go on until the bitter, bitter end. Anyway, it's going to be a great time. When we come back, we will have John Lovett's conversation with Bloomberg Businessweek's Joshua Green. Joining us on the pod today, Joshua Green.

He is the author of Devil's Bargain, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. He's also a national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek. Welcome to the podcast. Great to be here. So, first of all, the book, it's a great read. So, I'll be honest, I was reluctant to crack this thing open to, like, sort of spend my time coming to understand Steve Bannon better. But it's so well written.

It is a page turner. And it really is, you know, the thing you say at the outset is you can't understand Trump without understanding where Steve Bannon came from. And you really feel that as you read the book. So one question I wanted to start out with, what do people not understand about Steve Bannon, Trump's advisor? I think they don't understand whether he's for real or not. You know, he cultivates this kind

of mythosis, the Voldemort of politics, and he kind of gets off on that stuff. But it's not really true. And what was so interesting to me about Bannon, I met him back in 2011. He called me up out of the blue after some article I'd written. And he's a very optimistic, smart, funny, profane, clever guy who just has a different way of looking at the world. And so the morning after the election, I had pre-written like a chump. Business Week, my magazine closes on, what is it? I had pre-written a Hillary wins story, like 3,000 words, all reported, ready to go. And I ripped it up at like 10 PM. And the next morning after I turned it in, my mom called and was like, what happened? She's a big, she went to Wellesley, big Hillary voter. And I didn't really know. But looking back, you know,

I sort of felt like I could put the threads together of Bannon and Trump. And I didn't see it coming. But looking back, I could see how it happened. And that was the idea of the story, the narrative that I wanted to tell in the book. He has this reputation. He is this guy pulling the strings. He's the source of Trump's nationalism, white nationalism, racial resentment, exploitation. Is that all there is to it? I mean, look, you know, this book has a lot of intellectualism around Steve Bannon. He's read a lot about traditional Catholicism. He's an autodidact, all this philosophy. But then Trump goes on the stump and he's like, transgender people shouldn't be in the military and we ought to knock the crap out of these animals on the streets. I think that what Bannon has and what he recognized is that conservative politics, as it's represented by Republican leaders in Washington, had long ago become disengaged from the interests and needs of the base. But I think what Bannon recognized because of the circles he traveled in was especially the power of illegal immigration as a motivating issue for conservative voters. And I think, honestly, for some blue collar

Democrats... Put your phone on silent, John. I mean, come on, this is a professional operation. Don't read it out loud. I won't read it out loud. It's a Trump advisor. Very exciting. But I think that was his main kind of contribution. The idea that he's somebody who, you know, he's such a freak and he comes out of such a weird background that he wasn't captive to kind of the mental strictures that I think of as afflicting in the book, the conservative underworld, like not the respectable conservative places like Fox and National Review, but Breitbart and Fringy Talk Radio. And Bannon himself, you know, people forget this, but I think it's important. He used to host this Breitbart call-in radio show. I used to do it for like three hours a day, people who became Trump voters, but those kinds of people would just call all day long. Bannon was talking to these people. And so I think he understood and internalized

their anxieties and how to manipulate them. And that was really a key to kind of storming the GOP nomination in the presidency. Yeah. The word storming there is pregnant with meaning, say. So you say exploit this idea. Is he a sincere advocate for these policies? Right. You know, look, you look at this phone call that just gets leaked. You have Donald Trump saying to the president of Mexico, this is the least important thing, but it's the most important thing politically. You have Bannon that seems to have been on this quest to find a vessel, as you say in the book. First Palin, Bachman, looking for someone to carry this torch. He finds his Donald Trump and they're off to the races.

But is it a means to an end? Does he actually believe in this kind of anti-immigrant politics? I didn't. When I first met him, I thought he was just a grifter. I mean, his way of speaking is like, you know, high energy salesman, coked up Wall Street 80s investment banker. And I thought he was one of these scam-pack guys. And these are the guys that sort of exist in and around the fringes of Washington trying to make a fast buck out of whatever the latest political trend is. And he

was a big Tea Party palin guy then. So all that stuff seemed to line up. But it became clear pretty quickly that he really does believe this stuff. He's a pretty rich guy. He doesn't need to make a fast buck off anybody. And I think he is sincere to a frightening degree in everything that he talks and says Bannon has a lot of vices, but he doesn't lie. He doesn't really spin in the way that normal political people do. He kind of wears his underwear on the outside. I mean, he'll tell you exactly what he believes, no matter how appalling or upsetting it might be to mainstream discourse. Is he a racist? I don't honestly think he is, at least not in the kind of storm front, you know, Klan hood wearing sense.

But it doesn't have to be that sense. No, it doesn't have to. And that's where it gets in a tricky area. I think that he is more motivated by religion than he is by race. And one of the threads in the book is tracing the Islamophobia all the way back to his experience in the Navy. He was over in the Persian Gulf during the failed mission to rescue Iran hostages. And even before that, to this weird right-wing Catholic military high school he went to in Richmond, Virginia. I talked to some of his classmates who were like, look, we were taught from freshman year that Western civilization is under assault by Islam and the Moors and Ferdinand and Isabel in the 1500s saved Christendom in the Western world. It's the moops. It's the moops. And Bannon, to a frightening degree, I think internalized that and believes it.

And so the way that manifests itself is a hostility, I think, to Muslims or to Muslim immigrants and refugees. So I'd call that bigotry. Okay. Well, then if that falls under your definition, then it does. I've asked you the question. And I think also toward immigrants from Central America, Mexico, that kind of thing. What I've never seen or heard from Bannon, and he's been explicit on many other hot button issues, is any kind of anti-black or anti-semitic comment he gets kind of charged with all these things some of them i've seen and i quote some horribly misogynistic

uh things he says about hillary clinton but but others i haven't bull dyke is the term that you use in the book can i swear you can say whatever you want we get an e-mail it was fucking bull just just any called paul you know called Paul Ryan an elliptic mother. I guess he's not racist. That part was one place where I thought, let's hear Matt. Let's hear Matt. He may have a point here. But it's tough.

I mean, I don't think Bannon is motivated by a hatred for black people or anything like that. I think it's a little more complicated than that, although the end effect, maybe some of you consider it, but it's this idea that there is some fundamental Judeo-Christian American national identity that is threatened by the influx of immigrants. Right. Well, but then you end up with an ad in the run-up to the election in which he talks about some globalist conspiracy. And of course, who is the conspirators? They're three Jewish financial people. You look at what Donald Trump is and, you know, you talk about how Donald Trump became the sort of perfect vehicle for Bannon's politics. In a lot of ways, Donald Trump has been practicing a form of this politics for decades. He takes out that ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five. He has been talking about these lousy trade deals for as long as he's been in the public eye. And so you kind of have this sort of combination of a willingness to exploit white grievance and white resentment and this anti-Republican position on trade and immigration in Trump before Bannon ever gets there. Well, see, but I think it's totally different. I don't think Trump believes in any of that.

And not to be too, too whorish and plug in my book. No, do it. But there, okay, so if you go back to the 70s, Trump was, as you said, just absolutely explicit, pressing racial hot buttons. But one of the interesting sort of lines of research in the book, it's not just Bannon, I do Trump too. began the racist birther rants against Obama, made himself wildly popular with African-Americans and Hispanics who were huge fans of The Apprentice and were actually had, I went and found the Q ratings of Trump among all the demographic groups. Trump was more popular with minorities than he was with white people back then, which made him a darling of corporate America. And so he is willing to exploit racial grievances when that

is in his best interest. And he's willing to subordinate those impulses and embrace minorities when that is in it. So I think he flip-flops back and forth and doesn't have any fixed beliefs. But as soon as he decided he wanted to run against Obama, which was the motivating factor in the birther stuff, he was happy to chuck that overboard and go right back to doing what he done in the 70s and 80s. You have this quote that I wanted to read in the book that I thought was just really well said. Trump, who has an uncanny ability to read an audience, intuited in the spring of 2011 that the birther calumny could help forge a powerful connection with party activists. He also figured out that the norms forbidding such behavior were not

inviolable rules that carried a harsh penalty, but rather sentiments of a nobler bygone error, gossamer thin and needlessly adhered to by politicians who lacked his willingness to defy them. He could violate them with impunity and pay no price for it. In fact, he discovered Republican voters thrilled to his provocations and rewarded him. into Donald Trump. It's not that he's willing to do anything. It's that he recognized that not only is there not a cost, but he'd be actively rewarded. So I went and talked to some of the earlier Trump advisors, guys like Roger Stone, who'd known him for a long time, and went really deep on this point, which is that Stone submitted to me, and he says in the book that Trump wanted to run in 2012. He really, really wanted to run. And he saw that this birther stuff, it connected. And not only did it connect, but he rose to the top of the polls. I'd forgotten until I did the research for the book that Trump was actually leading the Republican presidential field in the spring of 2011.

I didn't know that. Yeah, isn't that nuts? And it was in the middle of the birther stuff. But the other thing he noticed, Stone pointed this out to me, you know who the brand new chairman of the Republican National Committee was one month into the job when Trump started his birther stuff? It was Reince Priebus. It was Reince Priebus. And the very first scandal that Priebus had to address as the new RNC chairman was Trump going off on this birther rant. And I found this interview is on C-SPAN that Jonathan Martin and Jeff Zeleny, two veteran political reporters, they were interviewing

Priebus on C-SPAN. And Zeleny's like, hey, man, you know, Trump went out and essentially called the black president, you know, Kenyan or Muslim, like, are you going to condemn this? And Priebus just hems and haws and just completely wimped out. And Stone told me that Trump at that moment recognized that the Republican establishment was just a bunch of weak jellyfish who would allow themselves to be walked all over. And that's exactly what happened. I do not want to take us on a Reince Priebus tangent. But that soft little wimp, that craven, despicable guy. I mean, at every turn, Trump has made a fool of him from the beginning. He made a fool of him when he was a birther. He made a fool of him with that pledge.

Remember the pledge to prevent Donald Trump from running as an independent? What a stroke of genius that was. Unbelievable. Okay, so let's go to where we're at right now. We've seen a series of legislative defeats or just a failure really to get anything big across the finish line. Meanwhile, this in the past two weeks, Donald Trump tweeted a transgender ban. He came out for a harsh anti-immigration law proposal by Tom Cotton. Jeff Sessions has put forward or there are reports that he's going to put forward a plan to try to put an end to affirmative action. Donald Trump went to the Boy Scout jamboree of all places and kind of stoked a kind of animus and then went in front of law enforcement in Suffolk County and said,

these are animals, you know, we got to knock the crap out of them. Well, that's his old phrase. Now, whatever. I can't even remember the exact quote, but he encouraged police brutality and then later said it's a joke. This feels like a return return to baseline a kind of the bannon politics again is that right yeah but it was always going to go there right i mean unless he turned out to be some miracle legislator he doesn't have the powers of concentration and the ability to subordinate his own ego before a bunch of senators so he was always going to fail on this and when he does he falls back on the kind of bannon-based politics. And that's why Bannon, I think, is such – A, has been able to survive, like, these series of purges and all the backstabbing. But B is even in an administration that is just calamitous and failing every which way, Bannon has managed to win on these issues that he cares about, like immigration.

I mean, it's uncanny to me how much the administration has been able to get done. And Miller explains, so I did a big interview with Stephen Miller, very much in the news for his immigration stuff this week. B minus Santa Monica fascists. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Your words, not mine. I know. Not that I'm throwing up a great objection. I'm just, I just need to make sure I brand him. Right, right, right. Trump is president. But the point he made was, you know, immigration is the one area where we actually don't have to pass laws. The laws are in the books. We have a lot of latitude in how we enforce them. And arrests are up.

I think deportations are up. But I know Sessions has sent more judges to the border. And Bannon is a big advocate of lowering legal immigration, which you just saw with the embrace of the cotton bill this week. So he is managing to get a lot of what he wants just by dint of his ability to survive all the knife fighting in the West Wing. So you've now spent these months in the mind of Bannon in the country to understand what led to this cataclysmic event, or at least what opened the door to it. What is the lesson? So let's say for Democrats who we're looking at this and say, you know, we don't want to play in this trial. We don't adopt any of this. We want to fight this.

We want to figure out, you know, we knew how to fight traditional Republicans. And at the presidential level, we were good at that. We're looking ahead to 2018 and 2020. What's the lesson for Democrats from Steve Bannon? You know, I'm going to get lots of angry tweets and lessons for that. But, you know, the lesson to me of Bannon is that he was a shrewder analyst of both Republican and Democratic politics between, say, 2013 and 2016 than anybody else. And all that, but that he really is a shrewd guy in a lot of ways. And what drew me to him originally was his critique of how conservatives had failed in the 1990s when they went after the Clintons. It was that, you know, they became so absorbed in their own tail and so trapped in their own bubble that they didn't recognize they weren't connecting with the rest of the world, which I agree with. And he'd tell the story of how he came up with the Clinton Cashbook and all that in the book to try and break through into the mainstream media and sour people against Clinton. But the lesson for Democrats, it seems to me, is, you know, I don't want to spoil the ending for anybody who hasn't read it, but Trump wins in the end. And the morning after the election, we had had this arrangement where he was going to call me win or lose for my pre-written Hillary wins cover story. And to his credit, he did. And he kind of said,

I mean, now do you understand like what happened? I'm like, honestly, I don't have any idea what just happened. What do you think just happened? He goes, you guys fell into the same trap. He considers me part of the left and mainstream media. You guys on the left and Hillary and all the Democrats fell into the same trap that Republicans did in the 90s. You believed all your spin and you believed that Trump was objectionable and you never allowed the possibility that people might be attracted to some of the things that Trump was saying. And I think he was right about that. And I think the big issues were, one, the economy and the idea that despite whatever the stock market was at, there were a

lot of people being left behind. It wasn't like Trump had policy papers to back this up, but he was clearly speaking to these voters. I think immigration was a big issue. I mean, Bannon was absolutely convinced that Hillary wanting to go even beyond where Obama was in terms of allowing undocumented immigrants to stay in the country, essentially weakening immigration laws even further, just enraged a group of voters that included people who had voted for Barack Obama and who in the past would have been Democratic voters. I think that it may be the case that Trump face plants so hard over the next, you know, 18 months that Democrats can maybe win back the House without really changing anything. But I think that, and I know Benedict Reese says, there is a structural problem underlying all this,

that Democrats need to fix something in the party to appeal beyond the Obama coalition and find a way to win back some of these blue-collar, elderly, rural voters who once voted Democratic but don't anymore. Yeah. I mean, that's a debate. That's a way to get, like, beat over the head with a tennis racket by Bernie voters. But I think he's right about that. I think that's the lesson that people ought to learn from Steve Bannon. He figured out how to connect and activate those voters that should rightfully have been Democratic. Well, just to push back, I mean, the argument that you'd hear from some on the left would be

that's a tough group of people to persuade. A lot of them are people we lost a long time ago, but there are tens of millions of people who we are naturally inclined to vote Democrat, but didn't turn out and millions of them could turn out. And that had been enough to swing it. One other piece of this, and you wave it off in the book, that's not a criticism, you're not talking about that, but Comey, sexism, challenges in the media and all the rest, but not for a series of kind of black swan events. This is a guy that got Trump almost there. And we're not having this conversation, right?

Yeah. But at the same time, this is somebody who got Donald Trump close enough to be president of the United States. I mean, is there are we overselling the value of this kind of politics that so many things had to go wrong so many he had to draw this perfect hand for donald trump to be elected or is the lesson the fact that donald trump was close enough no it's very much the latter i mean i mean it's not just donald trump look at the senate right democrats were supposed to win back the senate this cycle that's such favorable allotment in wisconsin what happened you know we don't we have not come to understand what happened look look up and down the ticket. Look at all the governorships.

I mean, what are Republicans have like 36 governorships? This isn't just I don't know. We just lost one yesterday. There you go. I'm not sure what the latest count. This isn't just a Donald Trump story. This is this is this is what Ben is talking about. There is a structural problem within the Democratic Party that they haven't figured out how to address.

And one of the one of the things that's kind of unnerved me the most is the fact that at least from where I sit, I don't really see this conversation taking place. I expected in the weeks after the election that there would be, you know, rending of garments and soul searching and big democratic fights like there were back in, you know, the mid 1980s on, you know, what is the path forward and how do we... And for the most part, and part of this is just that Trump hogs every media cycle with his craziness, but for the most part, I don't think a debate has happened. And it's not clear to me that the Democratic Party broadly is figuring out a way to attract not just an electoral college majority in a presidential race, but support in non-urban places that they're going to need to win back a House and Senate majority. That's why I don't think you can just look at the millions of minorities and millennials who could have turned out but didn't and say, well, if we just activate them, then we'll be okay.

You might be in a presidential race, but it takes a lot more. Well, they just don't live in a lot of these congressional districts. I feel like one lesson I take away from Bannon and, you know, the Democratic Party has to stand against any kind of exploitation of white resentment. And I don't believe that that's the answer in any way. No, no. And by the way, I'm not. And I don't think you're saying that at all. But and so when I say this, I'm not referring to the way in which Steve Bannon approached this. But the fact that this is somebody who looked at the entire establishment and said, you're wrong, that there is another path here. And the fact that it was attacking Republican dogmas and actually Democratic dogmas on trade and immigration, there's no rule that says that these voters

that we lost to Trump can't be gotten back with an agenda that looks nothing like Steve Bannon's. Exactly. And here is where I think Democrats can learn and take advantage of what Bannon has showed us. The Democratic Party is the one that has an economic agenda that does more for middle class, working class, lower middle class voters than the Republican Party does. And one ironic illustration of this is if you look at what Trump tried to do on health care, had he been successful in repealing the Medicaid expansion, which was passed with Democratic votes and a Democratic president, he would have hit his own voters harder, really, than a lot of people. A lot of those people were Trump voters. I think Trump

voters were overrepresented in the people who benefited from that law. And so what Democrats need to do is make a more robust, and here's where I agree with the Bernie folks, and more populist, economic populist message to try and reach some of these voters. So instead of appealing to white resentment, you can appeal to white but also other demographic, economic needs and concerns. That's what I sort of – I've said this before, but Donald Trump reminded a lot of white working class people that they were white. We can remind white working class and brown working class and black working class that they're working. But one other point, you know, it goes to the larger issues that in many ways Trump is a symptom of a larger disease. It goes to the larger issues that in many ways Trump is a symptom of a larger disease.

One reason the Medicaid expansion applied more to Trump voters is because Republican governors in southern states with heavily black populations that could have used Medicaid expansion didn't get it. So one thing I did want to – how much of what we're talking about here is not unique to Trump? How much of this exploitation of resentment is actually a deeper problem inside the Republican Party? You know who I talked to a lot about this? Oddly enough, before he went into the government, it was Jeff Sessions. He pointed out, so I'd had an interview with him. It's included in the book, but it was actually for a profile. I did a banner back in 2015.

So Sessions was still a senator at the time. Stephen Miller was the guy who arranged the interview. But the point he made was that... Just the worst people have been rewarded. Continue. That's my beat, man. But he made the point that, look, you know, these forces that emerged as Trumpism have been kind of roiling in our party for a long time. And he said, go back and look at George W. Bush's attempted immigration reform in 2007. It was bipartisan. It had McCain and Ted Kennedy. But it was stopped because the grassroots kind of revolted and stopped it. There's always been, until Trump came along,

I felt like there was always a lid on that kind of sentiment. It just wasn't allowed to pour into the mainstream of Washington politics in the way that it has since Trump. And when we talk about, you read the passage from the book about Trump essentially smashing the walls and norms. What he did was to allow all that sentiment to kind of come flooding in and he stoked it and he exacerbated it. And Bannon, who before he was Trump's guy, was a propagandist and a filmmaker, was very good about how to, you know, trigger those feelings and those anxieties and exploit them. So I think that that has unleashed something that's going to be hard to kind of put back in. But to me, that is Trump's great sin in our politics to have kind of opened that genie's bottle and let all this out.

Just one final point on this. It's Jeff Sessions who stopped bipartisan criminal justice reform. It's Tom Cotton who was part of that effort to stop criminal justice reform and who now is a proponent of the anti-immigration bill that Stephen Miller was yelling at Jim Acosta about in the briefing room. So a lot of this is a sentiment that's been there under the surface or part of the fringe that now occupies the White House. This is what I call, you know, so it's funny. Sessions is the guy who kind of gave me this concept of a conservative underworld. We talked in 2015. He was so animated about Breitbart News

at the time because Bannon was still the chairman of Breitbart News, but he was plotting the whole Clinton cash thing. And what he said was, he goes, look, you don't see this. He's talking to me because you live in Washington. But I read Breitbart every day. You know, me and Stephen Miller, we call, we give him stories. And I know it's having an influence because I, Jeff Sessions, do talk radio all over the country. And when I call in for my morning segments, the things they ask me about, I know they're reading Breitbart because those are stories on Breitbart News. And his point was that this stuff is disseminating beneath the radar of elite Washington journalists like me and whatever you are. And I think he was right about that. But now these people have been elevated from the fringe. I mean, Sessions was a gadfly and a nobody two years ago in the Senate,

but now he and Miller and Bannon, all these people on the fringe are in charge of the U.S. government and they're able through the powers of the presidency, to implement a lot of these policies. One last question. I want to get to what I believe is the single most important passage of the book. And I want to, before I read this passage, I just want to be clear, and I don't know if you can confirm it, I can say unequivocally I was not a source for this book. Can you confirm? You can confirm that because you didn't call me back when i emailed you to talk about this welcome to anyone who tries to get in touch with me man uh i will read the

quote it says obama's writing staff is about the correspondence center in 2011 even brought in a ringer the comedian and director judd apatow to help its most comedically gifted speechwriter john lovett compose a devastating takedown of trump I just want to once again say that I'm not the source for that. I assume many people are. I assume you're a double source. You're a serious journalist. Being the most comedically gifted Obama says, like a tallest midget. Oh, how dare you? How dare you? It is a murderer's row of comedy speechwriters over there. How dare you? But this is actually a pivotal moment in Trump's story. So you, I think, bear some responsibility for all that has come since. I refuse to accept that or even acknowledge it.

But, you know, so Trump is riding high on – let's fill in viewers who don't follow this stuff. And this – you know, I tell the whole story in the book. But this – Trump was riding high on the birther stuff. He was doing this national tour and he was leading the polls. And then he decides to come to the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2011 seth meyers is going to be the comedy trump loves the attention he sits in the middle of the room and he gets absolutely ambushed first by president obama in a speech that just absolutely like mugs trump and robs him of any shred of dignity and we toned it down and you guys toned it down oh Oh, I want to see.

I want to see. But you wrote it with Judd Apatow. And so I sell it. And there's this famous footage of Trump kind of sitting there reddening in the face as he's just humiliated and raked over the coals by Obama. And then Seth Meyers comes in and keeps it going. And, you know, at the time, everybody in politics thought, all right, that's it for Trump. He has ventured too far in his little pretend presidential race to stoke ratings for The Apprentice or whatever. And now he's been smacked down.

He's going to go away. And that's all what we understood to have happened for like five years until he actually ran. When in reality, you know, that filled him, I think, with burning resentment and redoubled his efforts to go out there. And he was going to try and run in 2012. Bannon actually helped him plot a proto campaign. In the end, he didn't do it. But, you know, three years later in 2015, he comes down the Trump Tower escalator and does it for real. And I think he was driven by resentment at the types of folks who go to White House correspondence dinner and write speeches for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, whatever. Look, he's been seeking the approval and demanding the respect of the elite his entire life. But the one thing he's never been willing to do is have the kind of integrity or sense of purpose or discipline to earn it. And, you know, to this day, that cycle continues with him dragging Maggie Haberman into the Oval Office to get the approval of the New York Times. Yeah, no. And on some level, he has to realize he'll never have the respect of the elite and

the approval and this and that because of the way he comports himself and conducts himself. But that is an ongoing psychodrama that I think he's never going to be free of. Yeah. But I also think it's ultimately part of his appeal that he is, for all the wealth and privilege he had his whole life, he wanted to be part of a club that wouldn't have him. How's that appealing? I know it's appealing to the kind of people who feel like life is unfair to them. I mean, I guess it's appealing from the standpoint that it gives you a psychological predisposition to have a chip on your shoulder. He has the grievance. And hostility and grievance against the establishment and all that.

Yeah, I guess I'd buy that. Look, we could talk about it. This is a fantastic book. I really sincerely, sincerely encourage everybody to pick it up and read it. I could talk to you all day about this. It's so interesting. There's so much good stuff in there. But John and Tommy will yell at me for having an hour and 25 minute episode. you know look i at the end i always need an editor to to yeah to shorten my

stuff so i'll just i'll just stop talking thank you thank you so much for having me the book is devil's bargain end of interview on the pod we have the host of cricket media's pod save the people deray mckessonRay, how's it going? Hey, it's good to talk to you guys. Haven't been on in a while, so it's good to be back. I know. We miss you. It's good to have you. So you interviewed New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio this week. What did you guys talk about? I did. So we had to fit it into this tight 25-minute block. we covered Rikers, closing Rikers.

Why is it taking so long? We covered pre-K. New York City just did a big expansion of pre-K. Interestingly, we covered turnstile jumpers, which his response was, it'll be interesting to see people's response to his response about turnstile jumpers. And then we covered the marijuana arrest. So New York City has arrested about 20,000 people for each of the first three years of his administration

for possessing marijuana and we talk about sort of the what behind that and what's the work to come. Is that an uptick in arrests from before he was mayor or is that sort of steady? No, it's like dramatically less people. So like way less people than Bloomberg arrested for marijuana because de Blasio sort of went to this summon system. So like it's not technically an arrest. It still is interaction with the police. But so many fewer people are being arrested. A lot of people are still getting summons. even though there are less people getting arrested,

the percentage of people of color being arrested is actually the same. So it's still like 85% of the people arrested are still people of color, even though it's much fewer people being arrested. And we talk about like, why is the disparity still there? That's great. That'd be an interesting interview. We interviewed de Blasio back in February when we were in Brooklyn for a live event. And a lot of people liked the interview. They had not heard from people outside New York and not heard from de Blasio a lot. And he's a

good interview. Yeah, it's interesting. And he ran on Brooklyn when I was policing. He ran on Universal Pre-K. A lot of the things that he ran on have come to fruition, even if people are really frustrated with him. I do think there's more work to be done with his administration on the criminal justice front. So it'll be interesting to see what a second term looks like if he wins. So one of the things I wanted to ask you about, one of the top stories on CNN.com right now is about the opioid crisis in Ohio, which is obviously one of the hardest hit states. Specifically, the piece is about how the crisis is transforming Ohio's criminal justice system. You've talked about this issue a lot on Pod Save the People.

What needs to happen on a national level to address this crisis? Is it more money? Is it a change in attitude, strategy? What's your take on this? Yes, I also interviewed Chris Hayes for tomorrow's podcast, and we talk about it too. Just a quick sort of primer is that remember that the war on drugs was a big crackdown on crack in communities of color during the 90s. And so many people were incarcerated, that there was not

this push to treat opioids as a public health crisis. And now there is a push to treat as a public health crisis. So to your answer to your question specifically, like we should treat this as a public health crisis. Both my parents were addicted to drugs. They didn't need to be incarcerated. They needed treatment and recovery. So like that's where we should shift our resources. It is interesting to see what's happening now, because while the rhetoric and Chris and I talk about this, while the rhetoric with regard to opioids is more public health crisis-y in this moment, especially because white people are overdosing in record numbers, The reaction to it at the policy level has actually still been really punitive or might be. So what's going underreported is, story broke, that there is a prescription drug monitoring program

that all 50 states are a part of. Did you know about this? No. I saw the headline, but I don't know about it. Yeah, Missouri was the last state to join. And essentially they're tracking people who use a set of prescription drugs. And what they say they're doing is to monitor whether you're doctor shopping or not, like whether you have the same prescription from a host of doctors and stuff like that. But there are a lot of people who think that this is actually infringing on HIPAA, people who, you know, because in some states you don't even need a warrant. The police don't need a warrant to get, like, your medical history with regard to prescriptions and things like that. You don't even need a warrant. The police don't need a warrant to get like your medical history with regard to prescriptions and things like that. So the response to the opioid crisis in this moment can actually lead to less protection of people's civil rights, which out how to deal with this issue as a public health

crisis as opposed to sort of criminal justice action? Like, what are some of the steps in that CNN story about Ohio that, you know, law enforcement's taking or law enforcement could take to address this more as a public health crisis than a criminal justice one? Yeah, so one of the biggest things is literally to offer treatment to people. So most people need, most people who are heavily addicted need treatment programs that are residency programs, like 30 day, 90 day programs. Day programs work for some people, don't work for everybody. Things like Narcotics Anonymous are hugely helpful for a lot of people as well. What is not helpful is sort of arresting people because they're just addicted. So, you know, it's hard for many people to detox

when they are in a prison and to get the mental health treatment they also need. There are also set up policies and practices that people put in place thinking that it's actually keeping communities safer, but it's not. So like drug-free school zones is a great example, right? It sounds good on the surface.

And what drug-free school zones did is that they criminalized, they like increased the penalties for drugs being sold within like a thousand feet of a school. In most urban places, like everything's within a thousand feet of a school. Right. So that actually just like is dramatically increasing the amount of people who have arrest records and things like that. So those are the things we know that doesn't work. But treatment and access to treatment are the single biggest things that can actually help people recover and i'm guessing there's probably not enough funding for treatment

programs right now as well not enough funding and people just don't you know i don't know how many times how many times have you heard people talk about like live-in treatment programs you know it just it doesn't break through and like the you don't see it in the media you don't see in the news where like people go away for 30 days get treatment and then are able to come back to their homes there's like this weird sort of public reliance in the in the media around like methadone clinics and things like that as being the best sort of treatment and we know that that's actually not the case that people need mental health treatment people need like in-person programs or day programs where or possible but

treatment is really the answer here that's good well everyone check out your interview then with chris hayes about that for more on this topic on the opioid crisis and your interview with bill de blasio positive the people comes out tomorrow right tuesday tuesday yep excellent all right well we'll all tune into that and thanks for stopping by cool good to be back talk to you later guys take. Thanks again to our guest for today, Joshua Green, from Bloomberg Businessweek, and DeRay McKesson for joining. It was a great interview with Joshua Green. I know you haven't heard it yet.

You know what else was great? What? Today's Hannah's birthday. Happy birthday, Hannah! If her normal consumption may have its hold, she'll hear this in two weeks. That'll be a nice treat for her. She'll think that the whole birthday celebration is over, and there'll be one last blast.

One last blast. Jon Favreau, 2017. Happy birthday, Anna. Do you have anything else to do? End of episode. No, I like doing the outro. I like to drag on. You like what we know.

Love It likes continuing the outro until it becomes awkward, and then it sort of just dribbles down. And then by the end, we're like tweeting hammock at Dan. End of episode.