Pod Save America - “The world’s assignment editor.”

Episode Date: May 28, 2019

The President sides with a murderous tyrant over advisors and allies, the Attorney General targets Trump’s political enemies, and the Democratic candidates fight for media attention in a crowded field. Then ACLU attorney Chase Strangio talks to Jon L. about the Trump administration’s most recent attempt to roll back civil rights for transgender Americans. Also – Pod Save America is going on tour! Get your tickets now: crooked.com/events.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. Later in the pod, you'll hear Lovett's interview with ACLU attorney Chase Strangio about the Trump administration's most recent attempt to roll back civil rights protections for transgender people. But first, we're going to talk about the president siding with the murderous tyrant over his own advisors and our allies, his decision to use the powers of the presidency to go after his political enemies, and all the latest 2020 news. A light show

light show good times in america right now love it yeah speaking of good times how was love to leave it we had a great conversation with norbeza flint megan gailey joel kim booster it's one of my favorite shows actually you know we talked about the abortion bans have been passing but we had one of the most interesting conversations that i think we've had on love to leave it in a long time so i really recommend the episode plus it was funny not that part that part was very serious but the parts after it were funny and actually even some jokes in that part so check it out i hate to say it's unusual of it to for you to have your laptop here in the studio and i see that it's open to your mentions well because i i had it open for my conversation with with chase oh i had questions look at I had it open for my conversation with Chase.

Oh. I had questions. Oh, look at you. I had questions for my interview. God, you're always so prepared. Also, check out the latest episode of Hysteria where Aaron Ryan and the crew recorded a very powerful and personal episode about the human stakes

of the newest assault on reproductive rights. Definitely check it out. It's a very, very powerful episode. John, you can also see here that here is my notes for what I was going to tell you about Love It or Leave It. A really great episode. It says so right there.

It says so right there. See, I take notes. Got to prep. You need notes on that? I wanted to remind myself. All right. Also, please go subscribe to our brand new Crooked Media podcast, This Land, which is already climbing the charts and drops on Monday, June 3rd. It is a riveting story about a pair of murders and a Supreme Court case that will decide the fate of half the land in Oklahoma.

Hosted by Rebecca Nagel, a Cherokee journalist and activist. This is going to be fantastic. Sweeping the charts. Please go subscribe. Subscribe now. Subscribe while you're listening to this podcast. What are you waiting for? Beep boop bop.

Flying off the shelves. That's the most important thing you can do. And finally, today is the day you can watch Running with Beto on HBO. Documentary about Beto O'Rourke's 2018 Senate campaign, as well as all the activists and volunteers who were part of it. It's fantastic. What else can we say about it were part of it. It's fantastic. What else can we say about it? That's it. It's about a moment.

About a moment in time. People reacting to the Trump presidency, how we're going to take it back, our democracy. Yeah, so go check it out. Check it out on HBO. We're very proud of it. All right, let's get to the news. During his trip to Asia over the weekend,

Donald Trump said that he sees things differently than those who believe that North Korea recently conducted missile tests that violated a United Nations resolution. Those people include Japan's prime minister and Trump's own national security advisor, John Bolton. The president tweeted the following, quote, North Korea fired off some small weapons which disturbed some of my people and others, but not me. Some of my people and others, but not me. Some of my people and others, but not me. I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me. And I also smiled when he called Swamp Man Joe Biden a low IQ individual and worse. Perhaps that's sending me a signal?

For Christ's sakes. Tommy, before we get to the Biden stuff, how concerning are those test missiles and what is North Korea up to here? Well, so, I mean, I don't know what Trump is seeing. I assume a radar sees every missile the same way. And these are ballistic missiles, according to his national security advisor. And shooting off a ballistic missile is a violation of a bunch of U.N. Security Council resolutions. a ballistic missile is a violation of a bunch of UN Security Council resolutions. So it is against international law. It is pretty scary if you live in Japan or South Korea or anywhere where you could be struck by one of these missiles. His team is trying to play it down in this ongoing effort to resuscitate a completely dead set of negotiations with North Korea that's been a

complete failure. But I don't think you can really smooth over that stuff with happy talk and pretending you didn't see what is right before your eyes, which is a UN Security Council resolution violation and a missile test. So it's just, it's ludicrous. At this point, what actions or behavior have we gotten North Korea to change since the beginning of these so-called negotiations? There were some swaps of remains of service members killed in the Korean War. I mean, you know, there was the saga, the tragedy of Otto Warmbier, whose body was returned to the United States. But I mean, basically, Kim has been enriching uranium and making more nuclear weapons for about a year and a half and advancing his missile program.

Why do you think Trump would side with Kim over all of our allies and his own national security team? Is he just that horny for a deal or what's going on here? I mean, he ignores intelligence when he doesn't like it. It's a pattern. And I think that he knows that if he dangles an attack on Biden out there in the tweet, even if he spells his name wrong, which is weird, we should just note that our president can't spell the last vice president's name. That's troubling. And incredibly, the least problematic part of the tweet. Yeah. So he can dangle out that little cable catnip and he can play assignment editor for a bunch of journalists who then have to focus on this stupid attack on Biden and distract from the fact that the policy is.

Yeah, he's done. He's this is an area he knows is fruitful in terms of getting people to talk about what he said about his opponents. He knows that he doesn't really care. He does. He he instinctively knows that it's wrong to choose to side with a tyrant over an American politician. But then he knows it also gets him tons of attention. So he's done it before. It's not the first time he said, you know who I like, this tyrant. It makes our Democrats look like shit. Yeah. I'm thinking back to an Obama, like if Obama had gone to Japan and there had been a North Korean missile launch and the prime minister offered one view of what that meant. And Obama offered another. It would be seen as a massive rupture in a decades old relationship. Right.

It would be seen as like this incredible moment in the history of our two countries. And Trump just kind of lies through it and insults through it. And, you know, I don't know why he thinks it's great to highlight North Korean propaganda. Remember, they called him a mentally deranged U.S. dotard. Yeah, dotard, dotard. Not long ago. So, you know, it's really weird. And also, the follow-up, too.

Like, we know this wasn't some errant tweet because then Sarah Huckabee Sanders goes on Meet the Press. And she says, well, you know, I think that Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un agree in their assessment of Vice President Biden. Like how concerning should that be that the president states is siding with a murderous tyrant over a possible political opponent and a former vice president of the United States? I mean, it's a lot less concerning the fact that the negotiations with North Korea that are designed to deal with their nuclear weapons program have completely failed. I think that's the point, that they can dangle this stupid shit out there and Chuck Todd has to ask two or three minutes about it. And we liberals get our backs up and we're like, how dare you side with Kim Jong-un over Joe Biden? And, you know, his people don't care. They love when he attacks us.

They love when he attacks Democratic politicians on foreign soil. Like all the norms are gone and broken. And I think we've all long past moved on from, you know, any sort of concern that he would hold up those norms. So I don't know. I'm just like fed up with the bullshit. Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm I agree. It's almost it's sort of this is not new. Right. It's sort of this is not new. Right. We shouldn't be so surprised. Like this is how Trump speaks about his opponents. I do think the bigger issue is the fact that in his, you know, permanent 1980s negotiation is no obvious good negotiation yeah but enough of that fairness like there is a better way to run a set of negotiations of course of course totally failed like we're way too soft on him on this front i'm not being soft i'm just saying that like there's no it's like what he could he could say create he could say incredibly critical things about kim jong-un he can continue to say the most farcical and evil things about kim jong-un by

comparing him to joe biden we're still in the same bad place we are with these negotiations. But we're in a worse place when you are able to split the president of the United States from his national security advisor, split the US and Japan and South Korea, right? Like that is how he's weakened our position in these negotiations, in my opinion. And that is like the fundamental policy failure that's not getting surfaced because he's calling names. It is so intense to go on Twitter and just be like surfaced because he's calling names. It is so intense to go on Twitter and just be like, John Bolton's an idiot. Yeah. I mean, North Korea on Monday called Bolton a warmonger and a defective human product. So,

you know, there's a lot of name calling. And also a broken clock, right? I was about to say, wait, let's hear these people out. How should Democrats handle these sorts of attacks, Tommy? And what kind of case should the presidential candidates be making against Trump on foreign policy in a broader sense? Like, is there any is there any way to sort of connect these dots of what happened with his comments on North Korea and Biden over the weekend to sort of other instances? Yeah, I mean, I think that he hasn't delivered on any of his promises. You know, he said he would get us out of wars in Afghanistan and he actually sent more troops. His team ran this play in Venezuela to install Juan Guaido as the president and it's completely failed.

He did this big set of negotiations on North Korea the people who actually help us achieve the things we're trying to do so i do think we should be making a case on foreign policy um it's just it's not as it's a little more complicated than just pointing out that he's a climate denier or like that he's a horrible human being. No, look, I do think that last point, he in in foreign policy, he puts his personal relationships for political and financial gain ahead of the country's national security over and over again. Right. He sides with Kim Jong Un when he attacks, you know, a former vice president of the United States. He sides with Vladimir Putin over the intel community when every piece of intelligence says that Putin sabotaged our election and may do so again. He sides with the Saudis when they murdered a Washington Post journalist and has now decided to go around Congress and sell weapons directly to them. So like time and time again, he keeps siding with these murderous dictators

because why? You know, like envies them, I guess envies them. And he sort of he wants the deal. He wants the personal relationship. And it's at the expense of our national security over and over again. And I feel like some Democratic democratic candidate hopefully most democratic candidates can go out there and sort of connect all these dots together because i actually i haven't heard anyone really do that it's um there's a uh there's a podcast called dr death in which a a insane narcissistic surgeon is just going into people's backs like attaching screws to the wrong place making huge mistakes and then sealing up and going i'm the best surgeon in the world like basically that is sort of the donald trump approach to negotiations like he he gets in there he's like

i'm the fucking best i'm gonna walk in there i'm gonna fucking charm the charm the fucking missiles off of this kim jong-un i'm gonna get those missiles and then he's not gonna get him he's like ah i mean i'll take another bite at this but remember i can crush it this perception of trump uh as opposing wars in the middle east was very beneficial to him remember maureen dowd's column donald the dove hillary the hawk that was a big seminal thing i was like you know people thought that hillary was going to get us into wars trump would get us out the opposite has happened you need to make that case it's really is we're constantly paying for the mistakes of 2016. Obviously, the country and maybe the planet will pay for them for the rest of humanity's existence. But there was a period of time where Trump was a pro-gay dove. Yeah. And here we are, as he is laying waste to rules protecting trans people and pursuing escalation in the Middle East and in in and in south america and it's like well it's also it's just yeah it's just a betrayal of the country too it's a betrayal of his own

country what he's doing with putin and mbs and kim jong-un he is betraying his country he hates democrats more than he wants to be tough on actual murderous tyrants all around the world. That's how much he hates his perceived political enemies and opposition in this country. I also think that's actually, it's actually even giving him too much credit to suggest that he hates. It's actually, I think it's even more cynical than that, right? It's, he sees value in taking this position. Personal value. Personal value in taking these positions.

It's all about himself. And I think the question we should be asking is actually less like can you believe that donald trump said this can you believe that once again he chose to side with the dictator over fucking joe biden it's more how sad the state of the republican party that an american president can say something like this about their opponents and there's just no outrage nothing there's either but just statements here and there yeah just sort of republican congressman you know have some but not the kind of and in part because they know that due to fox news and the sort of the way in which their own base has been anesthetized that there's just no cost for trump to say something like this and that there's only cost to really

saying the truth about donald trump when he does attack an American like this. Yeah. It's all about himself. It's all short-term game. All right. So the president is now doing more than just tweeting about the people on his enemies list. Yeah. On Thursday, Trump issued a directive granting Attorney General William Barr the power to unilaterally declassify any government secrets held by our intelligence agencies and law enforcement so he can investigate whether Robert Mueller's investigation was really just a deep state coup started by the Obama administration.

Tommy, how unusual and dangerous is a move like this? So the declassification memo is a big deal. Basically, the classification process and declassification process is governed by a series of executive orders. And he basically just sort of rewrote that on the fly and inserted the attorney general above that process. Normally, if you're the head of the CIA, you can classify, declassify things and grant people access to that information. He just slotted the AG up on top. And so normally, I wouldn't be reflexively opposed to an effort to increase transparency and declassify things, except for the fact that Bill Barr is running it. And he has already shown himself more than willing to cherry pick information

to paint some deep state fever dream of a conspiracy to take down the president. So they are clearly trying to bring Biden into this in every way possible. It seems very likely that they'll look for like the next iteration of the Peter Strzok text messages where somebody says, you know, Donald Trump's an idiot in some random email. And it was classified because someone at the agency sent it to someone at the FBI. And suddenly it's part of this conspiracy, you know, web we're weaving. But it's like I think that I want to just sort of calm down all the people that are like humans will die.

You know, you just hear that too much. The government cries wolf too much when we're talking about classified information. But there have been reports that the CIA at some source close to Putin, who helped us figure out that Putin personally greenlit the election interference. If that name gets out there, that guy's toast, right? So there are real stakes to this, this major change. And it's clearly politicized. Also, what does it mean for sort of intel officials and law enforcement officials who are out there, you know, trying to get this information? Yeah. I mean, look, if I'm another country, you're looking, I mean, you've been looking at us like we're insane for like years.

Right. But I mean, if you're a foreign intelligence service, you're like, wait, what? You've changed the process to make it easier to release this information? Like, why would we help you? Why would we as a liaison intelligence service provide you information? It's pretty transparently political and politicizing intelligence information. Yeah, it really does seem like Barr is becoming a more sophisticated version of Devin Nunes. Yes, sort of an internal, like imagine if, imagine if basically Devin Nunes is what would happen if sort of William Barr was walking near a construction site and a cinder block fell on his head. Like that's what Devin

Nunes has been for a very long time. So now we're back to kind of now, now we have a real sophisticate at the core of this as opposed to a bumbling Twitter sewer. So that is very alarming. But, you know, it reminds me of Benghazi, too, in that on any level it is cynical and sinister, right? Giving Barr this power to declassify things. It carries grave risk. It's clearly a partisan effort. All that is true.

But it's worth remembering that the core supposition of all of this is made up. It's made up. I was just going to say, like, what really drives me crazy about this is why we have to continually relitigate why the Russia investigation began. Let's do it one more time. OK, just very quickly. In July of 2016, find out that russia has stolen emails and starts disseminating emails from the democrats and what happens an australian diplomat says oh by the way i was with the trump foreign policy aide who told me that the russians told him they have a bunch of damaging emails on hillary clinton if you're the fbi and you don't open an investigation because of that. You have really, really fucked up. And not to mention what happens in this apparent coup attempt.

There are two simultaneous investigations going on, one of Hillary Clinton and one of Donald Trump. They keep the Donald Trump one a secret till after he's fucking president of the United States while going on television to tell us just how close to being a criminal Hillary Clinton was. So this great coup attempt by fucking Eric Holder and Samantha Powers really shot the bet. And also like spying on the Trump campaign, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let's talk about the spying. It was one fucking person named Carter Page who was known as a potential Russian asset before he ever joined the campaign and wasn't surveilled until after he left the campaign. And the application to conduct surveillance on Carter Page was not some deep state plot. It was approved by multiple judges.

Judges appointed by who, John? Republicans, over and over again. That was it. So if they were going to do surveillance on the Trump campaign, they really fucked up by only picking Carter Page. And wait, I hope that we could get to the bottom of the sexy text messages. Perhaps we should be able to read them. The text messages that are the core of this, that reveal of this deep state plot.

Is there any way we might be able to get our hands on these text messages? Oh, they're already released. They've already been released. There already was an investigation. There's a reasonable conversation to be had about the FISA courts, the Foreign surveillance act courts this is not that this is nonsense there's a lot of reasonable conversations to be had and this is Trump is also saying that he wants Barr to scrutinize the role the Australians and the British governments played in this process so he wants to go after he wants to go after allies for trying to help him prevent a Russian agent from uh penetrating his campaign.

Tommy, it's deeper than you think. It goes deeper. It goes to the Australians, to the British. Well, the ghost kangaroos, they just hop around. But then on top of that, I mean, we've never even really mined the fact that Rudy Giuliani was getting leaks from the FBI right before the campaign and was talking on TV about that information. So whatever.

I mean, you can think that this is Barr just appeasing Trump and his crazy tweets, but it does seem like this is a broader, consistent strategy here. During a press conference on Thursday, NBC's Peter Alexander said to Trump, Sir, the Constitution says treason is punishable by death. You've accused your adversaries of treason.

Who specifically are you accusing of treason? Without missing a beat, Trump says, well, I think a number of people. If you look at Comey, if you look at McCabe, if you look at people probably higher than that. Then Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney said in an interview on ABC on Sunday that the Mueller investigation, quote, could well be treason. Former Trump lackey Corey Lewandowski says in an interview, quote, I think we're going to see that biden is behind the steel dossier that james comey andy mccabe struck and page will be on trial for the crimes they committed against the fourth amendment and against this president uh should we take this literally seriously or both you know it's um it's not the first time a reporter has given trump the

opportunity to say something truly insane to to kind of like tee him up. So he says like, all right, you want me to say the most crazy fucking thing? I'm in. I'll say it. I'll say whatever you want. Treason? Yeah, kill him. Kill them all.

So, you know, I was thinking about this today because we really do feel like we're in this in-between space. Sort of there is the harbinger of the next step in American, like in the devolution of our politics. Like we are hinting at show trials. We are hinting at charges like this. We are like tilting toward it. And we also know that one of the reasons some of the more heinous anti-American norm violations that Trump sought, like arresting his opponents and pursuing his opponents, were only stopped because people around Trump weren't willing to do it. So I don't think norm violations that Trump sought, like arresting his opponents and pursuing his opponents were only stopped because people around Trump weren't willing to do it. So I don't think anyone knows the answer. And on the one hand, I don't want to say now's the time to ring the alarm. You know,

Trump's about to put people on trial for treason. But at the same time, I think it's silly to pretend that Trump doesn't mean what he says. So I'm like of two minds about it. We got it's got a real Weimar Republic vibe to it. I mean, this is intense, serious stuff. And I would be great if you know, when a fucking Liz Cheney says a word like treason that the entire interview stops and pauses and focus on nothing but that word for the duration, given that is a capital offense, or you can lose your life for treasonous activity. I mean, it's, it's a big word that democrats shouldn't throw around none of us should throw around it's a it's a significant

charge also even in the best case scenario where this is all just bluster from trump and his goons fascism for the camera it is it is very difficult to see the consequences the exact consequences of where this may lead right like let's not forget that a month before the midterm election, there was a man, a Trump supporter, who sent fucking pipe bombs to leading Democrats. When Trump is at a rally and starts talking about treason and the crowd starts saying, lock them up, and he says the attorney general is on to it, don't worry,

he's going to look at it. What do you think that starts telling people when they hear that the president of the United States starts saying to them that Obama administration officials, law enforcement officials, intel officials have committed treason against this country? What does that do to people who are already a bit unstable? You can't unring that fascist bell. No, you can't. Yeah. And it's also to remind her that Liz Cheney was Donald Trump before Donald Trump came along. She is somebody who for years, you know, when she said, you know, whose side are they on about Democrats for a long time?

She like basically viewed Democrats as being disloyal to the country. She was the one who led the charge against the Ground Zero Mosque, as they called it at the time. You know, her political action committee basically accused several Justice Department lawyers of Al Qaeda sympathies. Remember that? So, you know, it's worth remembering that this strain of vile kind of attack has been with the Republican Party for a very, very long time. And they're inviting everyone to follow the logical conclusion of what they're saying. And maybe they'll do it for real, or maybe they just want the points, but it's awful. Yeah. And I also say the media has a responsibility here as well, because what happens when Bill Barr drops his big report, his investigation into the origins of the rest

investigations a week before the election, or on the eve of the Democratic convention, or when it turns out to be entirely focused on joe biden for no good reason exactly clearly biden's being worked into this conversation because they currently view him as the biggest threat to donald trump right and and how and how seriously does the media take this because they didn't do a great job with the devon nunes release the memo bullshit they didn't do a great job with the struck and Lisa Page text messages that came out. They all treated it as big fucking breaking news that was serious. And they didn't do a great job

with the fucking four page bar memo. Horrible job with the bar memo. So when are we going to learn that like whatever comes out of Bill Barr's office about the origins of the arrest investigation should be treated like a fucking press release from the Trump campaign and no more seriously. I think the real big story and big takeaway is that the office of the attorney general has been

just fundamentally tainted and it's not going to be fixed until we have a new president United States. And it's something that it's hard to grapple with. It's a political arm of the Trump campaign. That's what the attorney general's that's what the Department of Justice at the highest levels is right now. You know, and Brian Boitler on Crooked.com made this point, and I think it's worth making. Look, you know, he's been one of the people ringing the bell, the bell, banging the drum, bells and drums, saying that the only logical step for Democrats to take is impeachment. And without impeachment, you're left open to these sort of specious investigations by Barr, et cetera.

And I think that that is a debate worth having. But even apart from that, Democrats in Congress need a plan to counteract what Barr eventually does. And they need to be ready with the fuller story when Barr inevitably releases some completely one-sided document accusing Democrats of malfeasance based on a totally unfair reading of intelligence that they have access to, that members of Congress have access to. I will say it's another argument for pursuing impeachment proceedings because impeachment proceedings may be the one way to wrestle the megaphone away from Donald Trump and Bill Barr and focus the country's attention on

exactly what they're doing. Because right now, it's pretty hard to get that megaphone. And the investigations aren't doing it because they're being stonewalled. And the Democrats don't have a single message on this. And like you said, everyone's out there banging their own drum, ringing their own bells. But there's no focused attention on exactly what's happening right now. And whether they pursue impeachment proceedings or not, this is going to happen. The Trump campaign and Bill Barr are going to run their play no matter what. So we can either, you know, look at it and yell at it, or we can try to focus everyone's attention on exactly what's happening.

It's quite an amazing thing to watch as they run the exact same playbook with actually some of the same accusations and allegations, but just cross out the names like Clinton or Obama and just put the name Biden in and just say it and say it and say it until it's just one of two viewpoints. Which the Steele dossier thing is the funniest thing, right? Like, by the time the Steele dossier was released, right, it was like in the middle of the 2016 campaign joe biden looked like he was going to go retire from public life for good right like he was literally recovering from horrific tragedy he had nothing to do with it's literally just putting his name and steel dossier in the same sentence there's nothing else to do with it it is lazy but it is the kind of

thing that gets picked up you got rudy giuliani running around kiev with a magnifying glass looking for fucking clues. Yeah, dusting for prints on various doorknobs. Watson, Watson. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm talking to a fucking glass of scotch. All right, let's talk about the 2020 Democratic primary, which the president has decided to get involved in beyond just insults and nicknames that lead to entire New York Times stories.

On Monday night, he tweeted, anyone associated with the 1994 crime bill. He's really concerned about the crime bill now. It's just out of the blue on Monday night. Anyone associated with the 1994 crime bill will not have a chance of being elected. In particular, African-Americans will not be able to vote for you. Joe Biden was so heavily involved in passing that bill. I, on the other hand, was responsible for criminal justice reform, which helped fix the crime bill.

What's Trump trying to do here, guys? It's actually very subtle and hard to suss out. It seems to be for some people. He is trying to depress Democratic turnout. Yeah. That's it. He's just trying to, you know, he sees an attack from the left on Joe Biden about the crime bill and he loves to just dive into whatever stream of, you know, fighting he sees out there. It's so cynical and so obvious.

Yeah. I should say, too, because the reaction from some folks on the left has been, well, this is an example of, you know, why we shouldn't nominate Biden. Because the further left we nominate someone, the harder it's going to be for Trump to try to divide the party and attack that person from the left. You know, vote for whoever you want in the primary. Scrutinize everyone's records in the primary, for sure. If they had a bad vote in the past, talk about their bad vote. But don't for a second think that Donald Trump won't be able to successfully do this to any one of the Democratic candidates who become the nominee. He will find something with every single one. In this case, Bernie also voted for the crime bill in addition to Joe Biden. So he could do that with him. He could find something with Elizabeth Warren. He could find something with Beto O'Rourke. He could find something with Pete Buttigieg. He will find something with all of them. His purpose in the primary is to try to divide Democrats against each other. And we shouldn't let him do that. The mean, look, there's an important debate to be had about the crime bill.

Yeah, for sure. And about mass incarceration and the role it did or did not play. That's a worthy discussion. Don't let Trump kickstart it. Yeah, I mean, Trump tried to execute innocent black teenagers because they were black and he wanted the headlines. So let's eyes on the prize. What he's trying to do, he's trying to be the assignment editor for the primary.

Yeah. That's his whole, he lives for it. He is, oh my, oh my God. He is the world's assignment editor. The whole planet elected him the fucking public editor. The Times got rid of their public editor and the world replaced them with Donald fucking Trump. He's the, I'm freaking out.

That's all he has to do is, and you know, look, we can debate whether it's some brilliant strategy on his part or just like he saw something on the crawl of Fox and Friends and decided to tweet. Right. Like, who knows? It could be both. But when he does something like this now, everyone, you know, now everyone's going to be jumping in and talking about what he wants us to talk about. Well, he thinks he has a record on criminal justice reform because they passed a bill that did just the absolute bare minimum in terms of addressing some federal sentencing problems. Which the administration is now dragging their feet on implementing. Yeah. I mean, to make it worse. States preside over the bulk of the criminal justice system, but whatever.

A longer discussion for another day. Yeah. system, but whatever, a longer discussion for another day. Yeah. So while this was going on, a Washington Post piece over the weekend reported that unlike most of his Democratic rivals, Biden took Memorial Day weekend off and hasn't been campaigning as much or doing as many interviews as the other candidates. What do you think the strategy is here from the Biden campaign? And what do you guys make of it? I don't know. I mean i think uh it's always dangerous to run uh a campaign in which you are trying to avoid avoid being seen to avoid losing whatever kind of front runner status you have at the same time which basically in the piece hillary clinton's former campaign manager, Robbie Mook, admits. Right. And yet it's also early. And, you know,

I know we live in a permanent campaign. I would not be surprised to see a sudden ramp up of Joe Biden's activities and see him everywhere all the time as we get closer. So I'm not totally sold on the thesis. Yeah, I don't think Biden's trying to run a Rose Garden strategy, right? I mean, it's Memorial Day. I think that it's just after Memorial Day, I think it's safe to say that the election has officially kicked off. Isn't it funny to think we used to say that the election started after Labor Day? Yeah. That's crazy. That's not true at all anymore. I mean, I don't think there's really a lot of value to doing a limited schedule of campaign events. I think you need to be out there. You need to meet people.

You need to talk to voters, take questions. You get better at it. You know, it's just like he needs the reps. Yeah, I mean, I think there could be thinking within the Biden campaign that the more you put him out, you know, he's the front runner. His name identification is almost 100%. Every single person knows who Joe Biden is. They have an opinion of him.

And the more you put him out there, the more he's answering questions, the greater the risk there is for him to fuck up, say something that gets him into trouble. Crazy, because Joe Biden is fucking famously on message. Like he just sort of is a machine. So there is that concern. But I also think when you're running in this primary against

you know there's 23 candidates running um and obviously also biden's gonna get questions about you know his age does he have the energy to do this all that kind of stuff i would be running everywhere all the time making sure that i'm fighting for every single vote and like you said love it that very well could be the case in the next couple months it is fucking early fucking early. He's only been in the race for a month, but it's something to I actually think the more to me, I expect that that's what will happen. I don't know if he'll campaign as hard as some of the others who are just trying to fucking get there, get up in the numbers before any votes are cast. But I think the more interesting question I have is what share of events is it going to be where he just comes up to the comes up to the microphone, delivers a prepared speech and leaves, whether that's

fundraisers or public events versus how often he takes questions. I would not be surprised to find a strategy that says, you know what, we're going to stick to kind of hitting our points and we're going to avoid taking questions, which I think is a, you know, a choice. I don't I don't know if it's a good one, but I can see why they would make it. Yeah, I mean, I mean i just maybe the piece is just overstated like i don't think that any campaign would run a four corners offense and in june that does that's not a yeah no one would think that's an acceptable strategy it's probably the truth that he's doing a ton of fundraising events and there's just i think he's letting the press pool into them but he's not taking questions at them they probably realize that they're going to need

a lot of money. Like you got to imagine Mayor Pete is going to put up a huge number this quarter, like Bernie Sanders is going to put up a huge number this quarter. There's a lot of people that are going to wow folks with their fundraising. And Biden wants to be the front runner. He can't deliver a number that gets doubled or tripled by someone else. Do you think it matters how many campaign events these candidates do and how hard they're campaigning? The piece notes that since he announced a month ago, Biden's done 11 events, Beto's done 44, Warren's done 27, Bernie's done 17. Do you think it makes a difference whether you're running around that much? Matters in Iowa. Probably matters in New Hampshire, some of the early states, because you're literally meeting people who are going to caucus for you.

And you're getting their information and then later organizing them and turning them into volunteers and whatever. I do think a lot of the campaign is run through the media these days, at least more so than before. Yeah. I would say two things. One, it's also just given how much Iowa revolves not Iowa revolves, not just around support, but like deep support. Being in front of people is really important. But and also just one other point, too, about answering questions at fundraisers. It's also worth remembering that as if you're if a Democratic politician is going to make a gaffe, you would be smart to bet it happened in a fundraiser. going to make a gaffe you would be uh smart to bet it happened in a fundraiser always oh again and again and again so i can see why especially in the beginning and religion deplorables just

go down the list the richer the crowd the crazier the conversation it's it's uh it's a one-to-one that's easy map yeah it's true san francisco and los angeles fundraisers yeah whoo let me tell you stay the hell out of the question some of the questions you're getting in those fundraisers are just... Yeah, not good. They lead you down a path. I'd like my jade egg to be covered by my insurance. It's also, it is what leads politicians to become sociologists when they should be politicians, right?

You're supposed to be there advocating on behalf of people, talking about issues. But super rich donors tend to want analysis and punditry about the race. And so they lure the politicians into offering punditry and analysis about the race. And when you are offering punditry and analysis and you're talking about how voters think, you sound like you're a fucking anthropologist and you get yourself in trouble. So the flip side of this is all the other candidates without Joe Biden's name ID who are trying to break through. The New York Times TV critic James Ponowozik wrote a great piece over the weekend. It was sort of started about the Beto doc, but it got into

Democrats trying to fight for media attention writ large. And he basically says that all these Democratic candidates face two big challenges. One is to figure out what entices news producers to show their clips and what lures voters scrolling their phones to hit play. The second, related to the first, is to implicitly argue how they, in a general election, would seize attention from a president who can re-scramble the day's news lineup by tweeting a mean nickname before breakfast. That was really smart, by the way. What do you guys think about that? And what Democratic candidates have been doing a good job meeting those two challenges, in your opinion? I think this piece was spot on. I think every Democrat from the ones running to

the people in leadership in Congress have failed to pull the mic away from Donald Trump. And it's just it's something we have not figured out yet. I think several candidates have succeeded in different ways. I will say, I think a signal moment for me was when AOC was talking about raising the top marginal tax rate and Elizabeth Warren was talking about her wealth tax. Those both happened at around the same time. And all of a sudden, it was part of the national conversation. It was a question for people at a panel in Davos. It was something that all of a sudden was being pulled and showing that actually not just Democrats,

but Republicans, independents supported policies like that. So Elizabeth Warren, I think, has successfully used policy as a way to get the microphone away from Donald Trump. I think Mayor Pete has successfully used his contrast with Donald Trump and his decision to go on Fox News, at least to have a moment where we're talking about what Mayor Pete said about Fox News, some of the lines he's used about his service versus Donald Trump's service have broken through. So I think there's like a few examples like that that show that there are still ways to grab the microphone without having to sound like him. Yeah. And I think that's the most difficult balance because, first of all, I think one of the toughest challenges on any Democratic campaign, and it was when we were on campaigns,

and it must be infinitely harder now in this media age, is you wake up every day and you say, how are we going to make news today? How are we going to break through? And there's a few traditional ways of doing that. One is we're going to roll out a new policy. And you're right, Elizabeth Warren has excelled at that, partly because her policies, it's not just she's putting out random policies every day. They are ambitious policies. They are all of a piece.

They're all about sort of economic inequality and the rules being broken in the system. And there's such a speed at which she's putting them out too. So she's been too good on the policy. The other way, but she's also found other ways to do it too, which is saying that she's not going to do a Fox News town hall. She also found other ways to do it too which is saying that she's not going to do a fox news town hall right like she's found certain ways to do that and i think mayor pete has done that too he really hasn't done it with policy at all but he's done it by you know he's very he he excels at sort of like democratic punditry strategy what's wrong with

the party what could we be doing better and that usually can make news as well yeah i mean and then i think the other the other way to do it is just showing enthusiasm in big crowd events. Right. Think of Kamala's first event where she got 20,000 people in Oakland or Bernie's rallies where he's gotten, you know, tens of thousands of people in some big cities. I mean, I think, unfortunately, the way you make news in a campaign often is by attacking your opponent. And right now that would be Democrat on Democrat violence. And that's not something we really want to see. It does depress the hell out of me to wake up and see the New York Times publish an article in quotes that is just them regurgitating all the nicknames Trump has given to his various opponents and friends. And then people are asking Biden, what's your nickname for Trump? And he's like, I'm going to call him a clown. I just think like that is one, an indication that the press has not learned any sort of lesson about how not to cover someone who treats politics like a sport for dumb people. And two, like, I don't think that we should have a nickname for Trump. We should not call him clown or condom or some stupid thing. We should make a case that is a little more substantive

than that. Disagree. I think de Blasio really cracked it with condon. That's a good example of trying to get in the news, interacting with Trump in a way that doesn't go so well. No, because I do think it's a balance, right? Like I think the candidates who treat Trump as someone who doesn't even exist tend to fall out of the news cycle because they're sort of running their own campaign. They're talking about their own policies. But you've got to get into the news cycle somehow. You've got to be reacting to what's happening that day without looking like you're too reactive. I know that sounds silly, but there's a balance there. Well, I think that's what Mayor Pete, I think, has done for a while that's really successful,

is actually a lot of the moments in which he's broken through to me are moments where he's talking about Trump and talking about how to talk about Trump. It's interesting like that. I think that that that there's such a fascination on the part of journalists and also people who pay attention to politics, who spread stories on Twitter. And that as Twitter, as you know, with Trump, is the assignment for politics, that's a fascination for people. How do you talk about Trump? And Mayor Pete often waxes incredibly eloquently and in a sophisticated and new way about the way he thinks about Trump. I remember when he talked about nicknames and punching back at Trump. And what he said was, in a strange way, when you talk about going toe to toe with Trump and successfully beating him, you're actually playing by his rules and in some sense seeking his approval,

which was a completely novel, at least public, you know, in terms of the public conversation way to think about Donald Trump. And I think it was one of the first moments people decided to give him like an extra hard look. Yeah. I do think when Trump, you know, does things like he did over the weekend with the Biden tweet or the North Korea thing, you've got to figure out a way to talk about that without minimizing it, without trying to just reduce it to a hashtag game or an attack back on Donald Trump, but try to bring it to a bigger plane. Like it's a big like you've got you've got to be big while still responding to what happened. And I do think that's really hard because I do I do think one of the challenges has been that there's been a lot of, you know, I joke about it, whether it's, you know, people tweeting like they're writing the Federalist Papers or everybody crossing the Delaware. There's been a lot of how dare you, sir. This country was strong before you and it'll be strong after you. And I think I'm very tired of that. I don't know. I don't know if other people are tired of it, but I think that there has been a it's we keep it's it's not crying wolf because he really is coming and crossing the delaware all the time but if you don't if you don't rise to that level if if your

view of the moment is hashtag condon that is small compared to what's happening right now so like you don't want to be eye rolling but at the same time you want to be big and let people know that this is urgent yeah but i mean look the trump doing what he did to biden over the weekend was a perfect opportunity for everyone to jump in and talk about his failed foreign policy record. Yes. The Congressional Research Service has a report out today that shows that the Republican tax law that passed did essentially nothing for the economy. Literally every single candidate should jump on that because that will help us drive a message to the entire country, not just Democratic primary voters, that President Trump is not in it for you. He's there for his big, rich, fat cat donors and corporate friends, etc.

It's like we need to be jumping on those moments, not occasionally, every single time they emerge. And the key there, that requires you to be incredibly nimble and to rip up your plans for the day if something else happens. Please stop tweeting stump speech quotes. Everyone. Definitely. But sometimes you might have a big rollout for a big policy and you're all ready to do it.

And if Trump says something and that's the news and that's an opportunity to really show what you're made of and why you should be president, you got to kind of rip everything up. Don't go off your strategy. You should stick with your strategy.

But sometimes you're gonna have to change your tactics last minute. Yeah, I do also think we're in this period right now where we're talking a lot about Trump's role in the administration, Trump's role in our politics, Trump's role vis-a-vis Congress, impeachment, the inherent powers vested in Congress versus the executive, what will happen with Bill Barr, what will happen with these classifications. And I do think we are looking to our presidential candidates to find ways to move us back to health care, move us back to the economy, move us back to the corporate tax cut, even as we are pushing, because we are pushing Congress to focus on impeachment, to focus on the crimes and corruption of the administration. But we also need to make sure that there's this other flank of people finding ways to make news around the issues that are going to drive a lot of people to the polls. Okay. When we come back, you'll hear

Lovett's interview with ACLU attorney Chase Strangio. Joining us on the pod, he's a staff attorney with the ACLU's LGBT and HIV Project. Please welcome Chase Strangio. Thanks for having me. How's it going? It's going all right, you know. It's a new adventure every day. So the Trump administration moved on several fronts last week in ways that could make this country less safe for transgender people. This time, it was about health care and housing and homeless shelters, other steps taken by the White House of Concern, the military, schools, prisons, workplaces. How would you describe the philosophy

that's guiding the actions the administration has been taking? Yeah, since day one, the Trump administration has put individuals in charge of federal agencies and other positions of power. and then, of course, from the president and vice president as well, who are committed to systematically excluding transgender people from public life. And so this means that we are seeing policies from 2017 through the present that sort of chip away at the ability of transgender people to protect themselves in basic ways, whether it's with respect to housing, with respect to health care, with respect to access to employment,

with respect to more safely being held in prison. The philosophy is transgender people don't deserve legal protection, and we will do everything in our power to create legal norms that exclude transgender people from both formal legal protection, but also sort of basic access to life necessities. So what exactly is the Health and Human Services Department seeking to do under Trump? You tweeted that the effect of this rule could mean people like you are essentially erased by law. Yeah, I think that there's two things that are critically important to note about what's going on with respect to the regulations coming out of HHS.

The first is that it seeks to roll back some critical protections that were put in place under the Obama administration that were part of the implementation process of the Affordable Care Act. protections sought to provide transgender people with some explicit ways to protect against healthcare discrimination, whether that's discrimination when going to the emergency room and just being turned away because of being transgender, and then protections from exclusions from coverage on healthcare related to being trans, so things like hormones, surgical care, counseling related to gender transition. And so, you know, since the Trump administration has come into power, we've seen, you know, them alluding to the idea that they're going to take these away. And so this proposed rule not only sort of eliminates all of the—proposes to eliminate

all of the good, robust language that came through Obama implementation. But then the second thing it does, and this is what we're seeing across the federal government, is it tries to define sex in more restrictive and limited ways. It's not the rule that we had sort of feared that had been reported about in the New York Times that created its own regulatory definition of sex. What it does is it strips away the protections and refers to legal protections under other federal laws. And those protections under Title IX, which protects against sex discrimination in education and elsewhere under federal law, are also being chipped away by the administration. And the Supreme Court is currently considering this very question. So we sort of have this two-pronged attack, one, to take away protections

that existed, and then two, to sort of implement across the federal government a more restrictive understanding of how people are protected under federal sex discrimination protections. So, you know, you said this on Twitter recently. You said, I don't know if I'm aware of a trans person who hasn't been turned away, mocked, harassed, or received shitty care by a health care provider because they are trans. So there, you know, even as the administration is rolling back protections, what limited protections there are, it is still, it is currently difficult, not just because of what's enshrined in law or not enshrined in law, but because of how people feel free to treat trans people. What do you see as the goal of the administration, not just around changing regulations, but about how the country sees trans people?

sees trans people? Yeah, I think this is such an important point because the ACA, the 1557 regulations under the Affordable Care Act tried to create some, you know, legal mechanisms for what is on the ground, a sort of horrific set of discriminatory practices that people experience separate and apart from what the law may or may not say. And so, you know, the law can only do so much, and the sort of violence and discrimination that trans people face in health care persists. I think what is particularly concerning about what this administration is doing is not only are they sort of taking away the few legal protections that we have, the few sort of efforts to normalize trans existence in ways that will, over time, increase access to care in really truly life-saving ways.

I think that the goal here is not only to take away the formal protections, but to really instrumentalize an ideology that trans people don't or shouldn't exist. And we know that that is very much the position of many people that are at high levels of government under the Trump administration. You know, I've been litigating in North Carolina for the past three years, challenging North Carolina's anti-trans laws, HB2 and HB142. And almost every person that was involved on the side of defending those laws has a senior position within the federal government now, from Noel Francisco, who's Solicitor General, to Kyle Duncan, who's now a federal judge for life. The head of the Office for Civil Rights under HHS is someone who has, for his career, focused on ways to systematize attacks on LGBTQ people and particularly trans people.

And so what we're seeing now is an effort to use the law to send a message, not just to take away formal protections, but to send a message that transness isn't real and that we're going to scare people into believing that we need to stop people from being trans. And that is a really dangerous addition to the messaging that we're seeing. And that part is certainly escalating. Yeah, I mean, the rollback of protections in homeless shelters feels like particularly cruel. It seems really does seem rooted in cruelty. And I know a lot of people say cruelty is the point. But that's not the internal logic, right? There is, do they claim any other logic other than truly eliminating the idea of

trans people from our rules, from our society? Like, what is their rationale, even to themselves? I think we see a number of different rationales, and all of them are sort of grounded in the same set of sort of core beliefs that trans people don't or shouldn't exist, sadly. But, you know, I think the sort of on paper justifications are, you know, false claims about safety that somehow if we let trans people into spaces that are sex segregated, that safety will be compromised. And we know this isn't true. You know, every bit of data that we have says that it's both not true and that the people who are at risk of violence are trans people. You know, they'll raise claims about privacy, the idea that a person's body, a trans person's body somehow inherently threatens the

privacy of others. You know, notably, they teed up this question for the Supreme Court about whether protecting trans students from discrimination violated the constitutional privacy rights of non-trans students, and the court today just rejected review in that case, which is a really actually important win for trans students. And that was a case that had been brought by Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization that is behind a lot of these policies and lawsuits. And then, you know, I think we're seeing a new strand of arguments about, you know, sort of faith-based objections to trans existence. And that is obviously coming into play here. But whatever you, when you strip away sort of whatever is

attached to the justification at base, the goal is to say that a person shouldn't be trans. And they're actually saying that explicitly in a case that's before the Supreme Court now, which is a case in which a trans woman was fired by her employer when she announced that she would be coming to work as a woman. The organization that's defending the employer before the Supreme Court has publicly essentially stated that they're acting out of this benevolent concern for her living her authentic truth, that somehow they think they're doing her a favor by trying to guide her back to her quote-unquote biological sex. So there is this sort of coercive conversion therapy that's also animating a lot of these policies. And I will note it's also what we're seeing with the military ban, for example. The

Justice Department and the Trump administration are defending the trans military ban by saying, no, no, you can be trans and serve. You just can't actually live as a trans person. And so these are policies that are actually, you know, almost gaslighting our existence by saying, no, no, we're not discriminating against you. Just go be somebody else. It feels like a kind of new version of don't ask, don't tell. Of course you can serve. You just have to serve as someone else. Yeah.

And of course you can get married when we ban marriage. You just can't marry someone of the same sex. So, you know, you mentioned this court case and this ruling today. And, you know, there's been a lot of questions about what's going to happen with some of these rulings around health care. Can you tell people what exactly the Supreme Court did today to uphold this lower court ruling? And how do you think that's going to impact other attempts to stop the administration and the courts? Yeah, I mean, so today's action by the Supreme Court was upholding a lower court ruling that essentially said when a school district protects trans students, that they have every right to do that and that isn't violating the rights of the non-trans students. So that's sort of one version of the cases that we see in the context of

anti-trans discrimination, the cases that are brought by the non-trans students, challenging protections for trans people. The other sort of brand of cases are the cases brought by trans people who have experienced discrimination, arguing that the discrimination is sex discrimination prohibited by federal law? And that set of questions is before the Supreme Court. So that is being briefed now and will be argued next term. And that really is at the core of a lot of the actions of this administration about sort of how and whether and how are LGBTQ people protected under federal prohibitions on sex discrimination. So that question is very much live. And I will

note that for the past, you know, 15 years, the lower courts have held that trans people are covered under federal law, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex or under Title IX and Title VII. The question about, you know, can schools protect trans students? I think the fact that the court denied review in that case sends an important message to schools that want to do the right thing, schools that want to ensure that students have equal access to educational opportunities, that that means the good ruling stands. There's no counter, you know, rulings in the lower courts in comparable cases. That doesn't mean we won't see more, but I think what we can take away from the court's actions today is schools, employers should go on doing the right thing,

protecting trans people from discrimination. Same with homeless shelters. We have state law, we have state constitutions, we have lots of mechanisms for people to be protected. Unfortunately, the court has taken up a series of questions that implicate the rights of LGBT people, and that will be decided next term. But I think no matter what happens there, what we have to keep fighting for is an increased understanding of how dangerous it is to fundamentally try to remove people from the protections of the law in some basic and fundamental ways. So we're in this sort of strange moment. I think it's fair to say that there's never been more visibility around trans issues and around trans people. I think that a

lot of people have come to learn a lot in recent years about the challenges facing trans people, trans people in their own lives, how important these issues are. It's become something that Democratic politicians talk about that is just part of the conversation in a way it wasn't before. We see trans actors in roles in a way that is unprecedented. And yet at the same time, we see an administration launching an all-out assault on trans people at this moment of sort of cultural progress. I guess my question is, how are you feeling right now about the state of acceptance and progress on behalf of trans people? I think they just have to hold a lot of sort of tensions at once. I mean, there is obviously an increase in visibility.

More people are feeling safe and comfortable on some levels to live publicly as themselves. And that is progress. live publicly as themselves. And that is progress. You know, being able to not hide a fundamental truth of who you are is essential for many people's survival. So I think that is incredibly important. But with visibility comes both, you know, sort of state backlash, as well as interpersonal backlash. And so I think that's also the moment that we're in, that we really have to be responding to. One of the most painful things about last week was three black trans women were murdered. And the response of our government was to announce some of the most restrictive policies with respect to trans people and rollbacks and protections that will absolutely escalate violence against the communities who are most funneled into street-based homelessness,

into criminalized economies, and to other sort of instabilities that then lead to increased vulnerability to violence. Right. It's not just targeting trans people. These are rules targeting the most vulnerable trans people in our society, people who have already been victimized by so much injustice that they either are living on the street or seeking help in homeless shelters, right? This is targeting people who have already seen the consequences of systemic injustice directed against them. Yeah, exactly. This is, yes, we're talking about a government that is invested in targeting, you know, the absolute most vulnerable trans people, the people who are most likely to be killed.

And announcing that on the week where we have three black trans women who have been murdered and the trauma to the community of having to hold that. And so while, you know, seeing trans actors on television and seeing trans narratives, you know, sort of in popular discourse and media is important. It's not saving the person on the street. It's not disrupting those acts of, you know, interpersonal violence or governmental aggression. So I think we have to sort of know that visibility won't alone save us. I do think that the more we have cultural conversations that include trans people and the truth of our stories, the more we're going to see trans people empowered to ourselves speak in these halls of power and disrupt the conversation. I know for me as a trans lawyer, it's been incredibly powerful to be visibly and vocally trans in government spaces, in state

legislatures, in the courtroom, in depositions, because that in and of itself is a disruption that perhaps I could not have done without all of the ways people who came before me were able to produce cultural content that allowed me to imagine myself in the future. And so I think we want to hold the value in that. It's just that alone isn't going to feed people, isn't going to keep people from being homeless, isn't going to make sure that we can disrupt those acts of violence on the street. So what can people do if they're looking to help with the fight? You know, I think there's so much that people can do. And I would say start small,

sort of, you know, with your friends, with your family, sort of challenge people's understandings about who trans people are and just start to include trans people in conversations. And I think that's something that can really make a difference. And then in the next year, not only are we going to face a number of critical, you know, federal elections and state and local elections. But the Supreme Court is going to be answering some critical questions about are trans people protected under federal law. So what we want people to be doing is really raising the profile of this issue of trans survival as not some sort of fringe, quote-unquote, identity politics issue, but really a core issue when we're talking about economic justice and racial justice

and criminal legal system reform, that how we conceptualize gender and bodily autonomy is always going to be central to those questions. And if we neglect to pay attention to how trans people are treated, and we are the canary in the coal mine. You can watch it happen. I think we're all going to end up missing out on some important transformative conversations and accountability. Chase Strangio, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right. Thanks to Chase Strangio for joining us today. And you know, we didn't talk about

what's that? We didn't talk about? What's that? We didn't talk about the hilarious story in CNN about being trapped on Air Force One with Donald Trump who doesn't sleep. Oh, I did see that. That did look like hell on earth. Could you imagine? Imagine. I think these people deserve more. Fucking locked in a conference room with a Diet Coke-addled fucking nut bar.

Who's watching. Talk about how cool he is. Tivo'd Fox and Friends and finding things to get mad about all trip long just sort of you put your cut you put your chair and recline you glance up that fucking mug is staring

down on you those trips are awful for a variety I hope eternity is like that for all those what yes I do too yes fucking never land Trump is the rating Fox and friends over and

over that is the best punishment flying around Air Force One forever with Donald Trump in your ear. Just constantly thinking you're about to land and they're like, nope, we're refueling in the air. We're refueling. We're refueling again. He must fart with such impunity all over those poor staffers. Whoa.

Yeah. Don't act like that's surprising to you. You know damn well. It's not surprising. I just didn't see that's where we were going. All right, everybody. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. just didn't see that's where we were going all right everybody we'll talk to you soon bye