Pod Save America - “Trump gets Covid.”

Episode Date: October 2, 2020

The President and First Lady test positive for Covid-19 after flouting public health precautions and exposing countless others to the virus. Joe Biden, who has so far tested negative, resumes limited in-person campaigning and canvassing. Then Andre Banks of Win Black / Pa'lante talks to Dan about how we can handle the flood of disinformation being directed at black and brown voters.

When needed, I wear a mask. Okay, let me ask. I don't wear masks like him. Every time you see him, he's got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from me, and he shows up with the biggest mask I've ever seen. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau.

I'm Dan Pfeiffer. And that was the President of the United States mocking Joe Biden for the use of masks. On today's pod, Dan will talk to Andre Banks of Win Black about how we can handle the flood of misinformation being directed at black and brown voters right now. And before that, we will talk about how the President of the United States and the First Lady have contracted the coronavirus. how the President of the United States and the First Lady have contracted the coronavirus, Joe Biden's decision to resume in-person organizing, and we'll answer some of your questions about the final weeks of the campaign. Few quick housekeeping notes before we start.

Check out this week's Pod Save the World, where Tommy and Ben talk about everything from the security risk posed by the debt that Donald Trump owes to how Bibi Netanyahu quite literally brought his dirty laundry to D.C. Also, on Saturday, we will be exactly one month away from the election. Holy shit. Voter registration deadlines come as early as this Sunday, October 4th. So make sure to double check that you're registered on votesaveamerica.com. While you're there, you can also sign up to make some calls, send some texts, get some pro-Biden content to share, get other folks registered to vote before the deadlines. And we have something fun for you. Our brand new Vote Save America action calendar.

It's like an advent calendar, but for the election. And instead of chocolate, there are stickers. There you go. That sounds fun. That sounds very fun. Doesn't that sound fun? Everyone needs some fun right now. As always, a portion of every order in the Crooked store goes to vote riders.

So get yours now at crooked.com slash store. All right, Dan. Late last night, we learned the shocking and yet not entirely unsurprising news that President Donald Trump has tested positive for COVID-19, along with First Lady Melania Trump, Senior Advisor Hope Hicks, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, and U.S. Senator Mike Lee. According to various reports, McDaniel was with the president last Friday and tested positive on Wednesday. White House aides believe that the president was exhausted and feeling sick on Wednesday. Hicks tested positive Wednesday afternoon after traveling with the president to the debate in Ohio on Tuesday and a rally in Minnesota on Wednesday,

where she started feeling symptoms. The White House hid the president's symptoms and Hicks' positive diagnosis from the public on Thursday when Trump traveled to a fundraiser at his golf club in New Jersey. And according to the New York Times, quote, seemed lethargic as he interacted with about 100 people at the fundraiser. He also delivered remarks from the White House

for the annual Al Smith dinner, where he said, quote, the end of the pandemic is in sight. The president and the first lady are now isolating at the White House for the annual Al Smith dinner, where he said, quote, the end of the pandemic is in sight. The president and the first lady are now isolating at the White House with what's being reported as so far mild symptoms. Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, tested negative this morning, as did Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and a number of other Trump family and staff members. Just as a little reminder, here's how Trump talked about the virus at a crowded maskless rally just 10 days ago. But it affects virtually nobody. It's an amazing thing. By the way, open your schools. Everybody open your school.

Dan, is it weird that the most shocking news of the 2020 campaign almost seems like it was inevitable all along? I will say in that clip from Trump virtually is doing a lot of work there. I mean, like the way you sum this up is exactly right, which is it is obviously shocking that the president and the first lady have coronavirus a month before the election. That is, you know, it's a huge news event. But it is ultimately unsurprising, given the fact that Trump has flouted the advice of his own scientists, has refused to do even the bare minimum to prevent the spread of the virus, including simply just wearing a piece of cloth over his face. The right response is not, I can't believe that Trump has

COVID. It's, I can't believe it took Trump this long to get COVID. And it, I mean, it really is like the very, it was just three days ago, three days ago that the president in front of 80 million people made fun of Joe Biden for social distancing and wearing a mask as if that was a sign of weakness. But what we've seen is when you ignore the scientists, you ignore the doctors, it is a sign of stupidity. And Trump is paying the price for that. I do think that we should have a caveat, which is we don't want anyone in the country to get COVID. And that includes the Trumps. We want everyone who contracts COVID to recover without any complications. That includes the Trumps. But that does not mean that because Trump has COVID that he is now immune from criticism for what he has done to the

country and how he put himself in this position. And so you can hold both of those two thoughts in your head at the same time. Well, especially because of the virus we're dealing with here, which is incredibly transmissible, easily transmissible, very, very catchy. And so like, even though more than 200,000 people have died in this country of COVID, like another 40,000 plus were diagnosed with COVID yesterday in addition to the president of the United States. No one in America, no one in the world should have to suffer through this horrible, horrible fucking disease.

What makes this disease unique is that it's not just about you catching it. It's not just enough about whether you take precautions for yourself. It's when you have the disease, when you have COVID, you are very transmissible to everyone else. So you have a responsibility not to put other people at risk. The president has a responsibility not to put the fucking country at risk, which he has been doing the entire time by flouting scientist recommendations, by not offering easy, accessible, fast testing to every American by not requiring people to wear a mask. He's put the whole country at risk through his policies.

And over the last week, he put just about everyone he came in contact with at risk. There is now reports that the president of Notre Dame, who was at the event on Saturday at the White House in the Rose Garden, where the president nominated Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court that he contracted the disease. It could have been a super spreader event at the White House on Saturday. But even if that wasn't a super spreader event, there have been multiple potential super spreader events at the White House, at Trump rallies, indoors, no masks,

like just no social distancing whatsoever, people shaking hands, hugging. And like those, if those people don't give a shit about themselves, that's one thing. Doing that means you don't give a shit about anyone else around you that you come in contact with.

It's like, it has become this litmus test that if you act responsible, you are somehow insulting Trump in his eyes. So the president of Notre Dame is a great example. He is a university president. If the students in Notre Dame had done what he had done to gone to an event like that without a mask, they would be in violation of the policies at Notre Dame. Like no one is acting like adults here. It's not just Trump. It's everyone around them, right? It's the fucking debate commission, which put in place

rules for mask wearing, but then did not impose them on the Trump team when they did not wear them. Like everyone involved is so afraid of seeming biased in some way, should perform that they're ignoring scientists. The debate commission, the Cleveland clinic should have thrown the Trump family and the Trump staff out of that room because that is what the rules were, but they did not do that. Right.

They did not do that. And they put everyone at risk doing it. And it is, the whole thing is fucking disgraceful from Trump to every member of the Republican Party to the people who went to that event, who may wear wet masks normally but are afraid to do it in front of the president because they think they will be ridiculed for it. Everyone involved here. Like I started today. I discovered this news at 2 in the morning when I looked at my phone accidentally and wondered why I had 700 texts. accidentally and wondered why I had 700 texts. And like there's, and it's also there was like,

obviously there was shock. And then, you know, and then like you do think about in the context of what does it mean politically, which, you know, we'll talk about it. What does it mean for government to have the leader of the free world incapacitated potentially? Like, what does all that mean? But the place where I have landed emotionally is pure, unadulterated rage. Because this is what has happened to Trump. He has done to everyone else. And he is obviously someone who was older. He is not particularly healthy. He is in that vulnerable population, but he also has access to the best healthcare in the entire world. And at the same time that he is going around being the single biggest source of misinformation about the virus, modeling the absolute wrong behavior. He's trying to take health care away from all of the people who may get COVID because of his insipid stupidity. And that is just absolutely infuriating at the

most base level. I mean, you know, that Trump will eventually say or the White House will say, like, you can take all the precautions possible. You can wear masks. You can stay away from people. You can have rapid testing and still you might be able to contract this virus. And that is true. A lot of people take all every possible precaution and you could still do it. They have taken very few of those precautions. They vote the rules all the time. I mean, I remember during the debate seeing Naomi Biden, Joe Biden's granddaughter, tweet, like, we're all sitting here masked up, all the Biden family, all the Biden staff. And we're all looking at the Trump family and the Trump staff sitting there with no masks.

And it's like that it's just fucking common respect for other human beings and their lives and their well-being. Right. lives and their well-being, right? Like, I mean, just the idea that all those people who were at the debate, sitting there watching a bunch of people who didn't have masks on, because why? Because they said, oh, we were tested this morning. They know that even if you're tested walking into the debate hall, you should still, what's the problem with wearing masks? What's the problem with wearing masks while you're sitting watching the debate? There's no problem. There's nothing, that doesn't hurt anything. It's just an extra precaution to make sure that you don't spread it to people. Well, guess what? A bunch of them had the fucking virus while they were sitting

there unmasked inside. It's not even just being selfish. We have come to expect that from Trump and the people around him. That is their defining quality, right? Is self-interested narcissism. But that's the problem is they're just so stupid. Like I am not shocked that the Trump family, the Trump staff don't care about the Bidens or the staff who work the debate hall, but they're too stupid to even protect themselves. Like that is just how dumb this is,

which is even if you do not care about anyone else, you can't even do the bare minimum to protect yourself because you think – I don't even know what you think. Like events is weakness. I'm trying – I'm going to give myself COVID to own the libs. All of this is so stupid. And like everything else that has happened in this country since March, it was completely and totally preventable if we had the basic modicum of responsible leadership in this country, which we do not. Well, because they put and they politicize it from the start. Like I'm remembering. Remember that?

I forget which movie chain it was. Movie theater chain. But they said that we're not going to necessarily require masks because we didn't want to politicize. We don't want to get into politics. And everyone mocked them for that. Eventually, they relented and said they were going to require masks. But because of what Trump and Republicans have done since the beginning of this, the idea of doing something that every scientist say would protect you from a disease and protect others from the virus, that was politicized. And so

stepping in to say we're going to require masks became a political move for a lot of people across this country because of what Trump did. And the other thing, too, is like we can talk all we want about all the precautions that they have not been taking at all of their events at everywhere Trump has gone. knew that hope hicks tested positive for the coronavirus they all decided to get on a fucking plane and go to new jersey with the president and then have him mingle with a hundred people what like that is just like he knowingly the white house knowingly exposed other americans to the virus and then they tried to hide it from the press we only know this we only know this because of Jennifer Jacobs at Bloomberg News reported the news the White House if she hadn't reported that would they have ever told us or would they have just like let Melania and Donald Trump just like hang out at home for 10 days and the rest of us wonder why or if they

were feeling okay would they just let them go out and do an event who the fuck knows we didn't know because they didn't tell us they didn't tell us. They didn't tell the Biden campaign. They did not alert the Biden campaign that they may have been exposed because they were with them at the debate. Not even a fucking phone call. And it's not even just an abundance of caution. There were reports that Trump was feeling symptomatic on Wednesday night. So you have Trump being in contact with someone for days on end in a small room for debate prep with no masks on per the reporting by Dan Abash at CNN. Then you get a positive test for that person. Then Trump himself is exhibiting mild symptoms according to reports.

And then you still go and think about it. If he treats his rich friends at his golf club, this shitty, think about how he treats the rest of Americans. I mean, let's talk about what this means for like whether we can have a functioning government here. Like what happens with, you know, the Supreme Court nomination? What happens with Congress? We've got Mike Lee's tested positive. You know uh i guess every all the other congressional leaders have to get tested though there's not like a routine

testing regime uh for congress which is seems like a problem too um what happens with like you know the president was supposed to be on a call with governors uh even today after the diagnosis but then mike pence jumped on so we don't know how the president's doing. Like, what are the sort of implications for the functioning of government here? It's really hard to say because even under the best scenarios, government hasn't been functioning really.

So, I mean, so let's do the executive branch in the White House and then we'll come back to the Senate and that confirmation of Amy Comey Barrett. It's really unclear in the White House, and then we'll come back to the Senate and that confirmation of Amy Comey Barrett. It's really unclear, the White House. Mark Meadows went out today and declared, essentially, he was in charge, I guess, in a not particularly confident sense. By the way, with no masks on, Mark Meadows walked outside, no mask on, and started talking to reporters. And so, well, I was tested, so I'm fine. And so if the White House is following the appropriate precautions, most of the White House staff would be at least working from home for the

next 14 days, as I understand it. Not sure if that's happening will happen. And I think the government the government is set up. In a crisis to function like that, right, in a world in which there was a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, the White House was incapacitated, we know that there are processes in place to do that. So I think the government should at least function at least as poorly as it was functioning two days ago. And so that's not high, super high on my list of concerns. They weren't doing a lot anyway, and I don't think they're going to be doing a lot now. Well, it's the fact that Trump did not make that call is interesting. And we just, and this is also the problem with dealing with a president administration that has zero

credibility is we don't, we just don't know. We're going to hear from the White House doctor. I've like, normally I would say that you could trust the White House doctor. I don't believe that anymore. And so at least with every, take everything report about who in the White House has COVID, what their symptoms are and what they are doing, certainly with a grain of salt because the Trump administration has not earned the benefit of the doubt, but it's just imagination. Now, right before we got on this Zoom or started recording, however you want to say it, Schumer and Feinstein asked for a delay in the hearings on Amy Coney Barrett saying that they have to happen in person for a lifetime appointment. Now, I am pretty confident that if the Capitol were on fire, Mitch McConnell would insist the Republicans vote to confirm a Supreme Court vote against the ACA before you could evacuate the building. So they will put everyone at risk. They will run over every norm to do this.

I think what has been driving so much of the momentum from McConnell and others here is they believe that Trump is going to lose. And I think that belief is probably even stronger today. We don't know that that belief is correct or not, but the urgency to get this done come hell or high water, I think is gonna continue from the Republicans. The Democrats should push back against that

as much as they can. I think it's good that Schumer and Feinstein did that. But I think we know where McConnell's head is on this. And look, and it's just, and beyond the politics, every Democrat who's working in Washington and their staff and everyone who comes in contact with the White House, like, should follow every single protocol and procedure to protect themselves.

You know, like, there there's the CDC has guidelines. If you were around someone who has COVID, you're supposed to quarantine for 14 days, maybe 10 days, like depending on what kind of tests you get back. And so like, yeah, we can't have live hearings where, you know, who was around Mike Lee? Who was around, you know, like Nancy Pelosi's got to get tested. She was around Mnookin, even though he was tested negative. Like who was Mitch McConnell talking to? Right? Like all these people work together all the time and they are all in like the line of succession here to the president or a lot of them, right? Like it is very important now that both Republicans

and Democrats in Congress, in the White House, take every possible precaution right now to make sure that there are no more positive tests in addition to the ones that may come out. I mean, Mark Meadows said when he went out there that he expects more positive tests to come from the White House, from White House staffers. So, un-fucking-believable, man. It's so stupid. Like, everything else that has happened, it is so stupid because we are led by stupid people who do stupid things for stupid reasons. And have no concern for other human beings, have no concern for anyone but themselves. That characterizes the whole fucking administration the whole time. They just do not give a shit about anyone else.

They care about their own egos. They care about their own fucking reelection. And they don't care who they hurt quite literally by possibly, you know, giving them a virus. The president's diagnosis comes with only 32 days left until election day with over 2 million Americans having already voted. The next presidential debate is 13 days away. We have no idea whether that debate or even the final debate will take place. We have no idea whether Donald Trump will hold another rally again. We have no idea whether there will be anything resembling a normal campaign. Those senior Trump aides have already told the New York Times that, quote, the president would face harsh judgment from voters for throwing the country into greater

uncertainty after one of the most trying years in American history. Yeah, no shit. Republican consultant Rob Stutzman told the Times it's hard to imagine this doesn't end his hopes of reelection. Dan, is it even possible to assess the political impact of this development yet? And like, what are the various factors at play here? I think you have to separate two related questions here. How does this diagnosis impact the conduct of the campaign over the next 32 days? And the other question is, how does it impact the outcome of the election? over the next 32 days. And the other question is, how does it impact the outcome of the election? On the latter, we just don't know, right? This is too early. We just heard right before this that Biden tested negative. I think he's probably going to have to get tested a couple more times.

That's a huge factor in how this plays out. We don't know that. I think we can make some guesses about what could happen, and we can talk about that. In terms of how the conduct of the campaign is going to happen, I can't imagine that the two presidential debates are going to happen in the same way in which they were before, right? Do they happen at all? Do they happen in Zoom? You know, the president should be quarantining for the next 14 days, right? So that's about half of the remaining time that he should not be out campaigning or doing anything like that. And we should tell people that 14 days is at the low end right that's like a minimum for the president if the president continues to have and hope he does mild symptoms and nothing more um then you

could see in 14 days getting another negative test and then he's clear because he just had mild symptoms and that's all um if he has moderate symptoms, even like it can take three weeks, four weeks, five weeks to recover. So like and that's another thing is he really we have to know that he can't leave the White House and expose other people unless he's had, you know, I think it's a couple negative tests within 24 or 48 hours of one another that he doesn't develop worse symptoms like all that has to happen before he can ever leave the house or go back to having any kind of public events where he's around people.

And there are two parts of that. Just there is the political impact, like when can he go campaign where I imagine people will want to push the envelope. And then there is the institutional effort to keep the president alive because of continuity of government, regardless of who the president is. Right. Like it, it was always reminded.

I always remember that the secret service takes protecting the president. So seriously that they put slip guards in the shower in the hotel season. So they don't fall and hurt themselves. And so they are probably got in trouble for saying that, but Alyssa will let me know either way. And so you get like there will be pressure to ensure that he does, because even when the election is in a month, he is still president for several months after that until January. And so there is going to be this impetus to try to keep him for the sake for the continuity of government to keep him safe to abundance of caution, to keep him safe, to abundance of caution. And so there will be a push there.

For the political impact in terms of what it means about who's going to win the election or not, like I said, we don't know. I do think we know enough to be skeptical of some of the takes we saw last night, which are this will lead to an outpouring of sympathy for the president. Will he be able to defeat COVID and look like some sort of superhero? I'm very skeptical of that because his greatest political weakness has been his failure to deal with COVID, his unwillingness to listen to scientists, his disregard of the appropriate behaviors like mass wearing and social distancing.

And so this is the embodiment of that in the biggest way possible. And the other thing to think about is we're just so conditioned to think about the October surprise. What are the things that happened in the days before the election that have a huge impact on the election? You think about in 2004, a lot of people believe that Bush won in part because bin Laden released an audio tape that final weekend which shifted the focus to terrorism in 2012 we were incredibly nervous about the final jobs report that happened the friday before the election and if that had been bad we were very concerned on that campaign that could hurt us but what is different now is that the bulk of the voting is happening right now right like in in previous elections something that that happened on October 2nd would have very limited impact because the voting wouldn't happen. There would be, you know, there's an entire month

for more things to happen. But right now, huge numbers of people are going to go vote this weekend in states with early voting. People are mailing in their mail ballots now. And so the impact of these things are bigger either way, positive, negative, neutral. The impact is felt more, will show up more in the final vote count than in a normal election year. I'm just trying to think of the voter who says to themselves, oh, the guy who for months has told us that the virus isn't a big deal, just contracted the virus. So I'm going to switch my vote from Biden to that guy. It's hard to imagine that voter. Like, look, you could see something where if Trump came out and said, I just want to say this virus has hit me hard. And I was wrong. I was wrong that the virus

was not as deadly as it is. It's not as scary as it is. It's very serious. I need to take it seriously. The country should take it seriously. Everyone needs to wear masks now. We need to be careful. I'm not going to do any more rallies. Like, if he did all that, you could start to maybe see something.

But like, I don't know how Trump's going to react to this whole thing. That's the other X factor, though. I don't imagine he's going to change his personality overnight, but who knows? Yeah, I mean, that's always the thing is you can always look at this in a vacuum and say, this is something that Trump could do that would improve his political standing. But it is almost always something that is not available in his temperamental toolbox, right? Self-awareness, apologizing, admitting he's wrong. If you know, despite all the new tone coverage we get every six weeks, is not something that he has ever shown any capacity to do.

And I am skeptical, highly skeptical, that that will happen this time either. It's also one thing if a president or a leader or a candidate falls ill and just sort of came out of the blue. Of course, there's an outpouring of sympathy. You want the person to get better. That's still the case in this scenario. But the fact that they tried to conceal it, knowingly exposed other people to the virus when they knew that Hope Hicks had it, and they knew that the president was in close proximity to her, and then they went to that fundraiser, he was in close contact with 100 other people. And the fact that he flouted all of the precautions that all of the scientists told him to abide by, and so did his team. The

fact that he did all that, I don't believe gets him much sympathy beyond hoping that he recovers from the virus itself. Yeah, it seems hard to fathom. So Joe Biden tweeted this morning that he and Jill send their thoughts to President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump for a swift recovery, saying, quote, We will continue to pray for the health and safety of the president and his family. How does the Biden campaign deal with this in the next few weeks? I read right before we started that now that Joe Biden has this negative test, he is continuing on to Michigan for an event. What do they do? I think a lot doesn't change for them.

I think you will, just because we know Joe Biden, you will hear him at his events express the sentiment included in that tweet. He will wish for the Trumps to recover. I think that will obviously be a sincere belief of his and very consistent with who he is. Their campaign was centered around how to protect Joe Biden, attendees, and everyone

else from the coronavirus. And I think they have confidence in those measures. And so absent some information that would suggest that they have been exposed in some way, they should continue doing what they were doing. I imagine there'll be some tonal shift, at least in the next period here, about how they talk about Trump. But I think for the most part, the campaign will stay the same. And I think you can wish Trump well and still talk about his failures at the same time.

And this is not one of those situations where it's like, although I can see the press treating it this way, where somehow Biden is being disrespectful if he critiques Trump's leadership on this very specific issue. It's the exact opposite. This is a reason to talk about it because this is the example of why we need change. Yeah. And also, I mean, this is the central issue of the campaign. The Biden campaign has tried to make it the central issue. It is. There are tens of thousands of people contracting a virus every day. There are almost a thousand people still dying from a virus every day. And the president of the United States hasn't had a plan to deal with it, doesn't really believe it's a problem,

and is trying to install a Supreme Court justice that may repeal the Affordable Care Act and take away health care from 20 million people in the middle of a pandemic and protections for preexisting conditions from tens of millions more. And one of those preexisting conditions is having COVID. Like, of course, we have to talk about that. Of course, that's part of the campaign these last 30 days. Right. Like that. It's absurd. It's life.

It's literally a life or death issue. I also think the Biden campaign, like you said, from the beginning, they have taken a lot of heat from Trump and from some pundits about like Joe Biden trying to be safe, trying to stay at home, trying to do socially distanced events, not trying to do big crowds, not trying to do all this stuff. And everyone's like, was that a mistake? Should, is Biden being too cautious? Well, no. Now we know what happens when you're not cautious and when you are cautious. We have like seen the contrast. So go ahead. Now, I was going to say, you're right that Biden has an obligation to push through whatever pearl clutching comes from the morning Joe panel to make a case to the country about why we cannot have a leader who can't follow his own rules and then catches coronavirus because of it and exposes his friends and family and staff to the disease out of stupid selfishness, right?

He has an obligation to do that this close to the election. The stakes are too high. And I promise you, promise you, promise you, promise you, the voters will not penalize him for that. Joe Biden has been incredibly respectful of this president, respect this president does not deserve, has not earned. And if he keeps with, as I mentioned, with the tone he has used throughout this campaign, that will be perfectly consistent with how to talk about this situation in a way that the voters will respect, even if I'm sure there'll be a lot of stupid gotcha driven by the MAGA media. So there's a lot we still don't know. There's a lot of news breaking probably while we're recording this podcast, but we had another topic on the outline that we'll jump into. So there's many other topics that were just discarded when this all happened. um melania trump was was caught on tape uh attacking christmas and uh and children who were being separated from their parents that was something that can we can we talk about that for a second sure yeah yeah

like when you talk about melania's uh quote unquote friend not so great of a friend at all recorded a conversation with her where she was complaining about Christmas decorations and then complaining about being asked by children being separated from their families at the borders. And what is she supposed to do about that? She said it was sort of horrific to hear. I think like when we talk about the political impact there, I guess if you were to like dig deep into this dark cloud for Trump to try to find some silver lining, it would be there were two stories this morning that in a normal world would be relatively devastating. One, we got the final jobs report before the election and the economic recovery has slowed.

And we're going to go into election day, down 11 million jobs since before the pandemic. Great job, Trump. And the other one is this audio tape of his wife saying, who the fuck cares about Christmas? Which really shouldn't matter. First ladies are put in this really sort of an unfair position anyway. But it only is politically relevant because Trump has been running around taking credit for winning a mythological war on Christmas. And so for his wife to be on tape saying fuck Christmas, I sort of think would be like Eleanor Roosevelt being caught on tape saying fuck Normandy. It's like,

it is obviously fallen to the wayside. We should not let it, we were going to even lead the show with it. It was going to be in the intro before that, before this happened just for fun. So let's at least we can, we can just remind people that that actually happened moments before this happened. Well for fun uh so let's at least we could we could just remind people that that actually happened moments before that this happened well and also the president you know he

went on hannity last night when he at that point knew that he was positive for the virus probably um and started uh and he finally uh after the third attempt the third time he was asked denounced white supremacy though there were plenty of stories yesterday about Republicans either trying to run away from him on that or just directly criticizing him. Like former RNC chair and Montana Governor Mark Roscoe said that I decided to endorse Joe Biden because I believe that Donald Trump is a threat to the republic, a threat to the existence of the republic. That's what was being said yesterday by republicans before this happened that this mark roscoe not like some like never trump or middle of the road guy conservative governor like chair of the fucking rnc i'm with biden because donald trump is a threat to the existence of the republic that was yesterday before we learned about all this and let's not forget in that interview, he blamed the troops and law

enforcement for giving coronavirus two ho picks. I forgot about that one. Forgot about that one. Yeah, he did. She just can't stop herself from hugging them. That's what she. Yeah, that was his explanation. That was his explanation. All right. Well, let's let's talk about the Biden campaign, because this is somewhat related to what we've been talking about. They announced on Thursday that they'll be relaunching in-person canvassing efforts in the battleground states in order to connect with voters who are hard to reach remotely, starting with Nevada, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. Campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon explained the change in plans by saying,

We're now expanding our strategy in a targeted way that puts the safety of communities first and foremost and helps us mobilize voters who are harder to reach by phone now that we're in the final stretch the decision came amid an nbc report that dave wasser the decision came amid an nbc report by dave wasserman that said quote new data from the past few months shows that republicans have swamped democrats in adding new voters to the rolls and that quote several democratic strategists are deeply disturbed by their party's failure to keep pace with its registration successes in 2016 and felt the Biden campaign's lack of in-person outreach for the lag. Why do you think the Biden campaign changed

course on this? I don't know the exact reason, although I think it's probably embedded in that Dave Wasserman report. You and I have heard from lots of, you know, people we know, activists in the states that we've adopted, deeply concerned about this, right? It feels like asymmetric warfare. This is how we've always campaigned. We've put such pride into it. It was such a huge part of how we won in 2018. Now you see Republican canvassers going door to door and Democrats not doing it. So you feel, are we losing because of that? And when I originally heard Jen, who is someone I know very, very well, and I think is the smartest, most accomplished organizer in our party, explain that they weren't going to do it, that made sense to me.

And if you've had someone come to your door unexpectedly in the last six months, you know, you sort of understand their reasoning that who wants that, right? Like someone knocked on our door yesterday and I thought like I had to put on a hazmat suit. I was like, where did this person come from? Do I have to talk to them? And no, I did not want to buy solar panels being sold door to door, which was an odd choice to do that in the middle of a pandemic. But then relatedly, Howley was doing calls for the North Carolina Democratic Party this week. These were calls. They're called cure calls. They are to North Carolinians whose ballots have been rejected to tell them that, A,

the ballots have been rejected, and B, here's how you fix it. The people doing the calls are doing tremendous work. I was listening to the training as it was happening. But it's really hard. It's a complicated process. And when Hallie was an organizer in North Carolina in 08, what she kept saying to me is before this announcement was, this is the sort of thing that you really need to go door to door for.

You need to be able to show people the ballot, how to do it right, or leave them a note. Who answers the phone from an unknown caller these days? It's very hard to reach a note. Who answers the phone from an unknown caller these days? It's very hard to reach. I mean, I don't. Yeah. And so being able to go to someone's door, leave a door hanger that says your ballot was rejected, please call us, or to be able to talk to them is hugely valuable. And so I think there's, particularly because of some of these ballot rejections in these states that have a cure process, this makes it even more important to do. And I'm sure it's like per the report, it's going to be more limited. It's not

going to be this sort of mass effort, but it's going to be focused on hard to reach voters, people you can't get in contact with. And, you know, you can know where people live, but the number change is a huge, people's phone number changes a lot of times. So it's sometimes hard to find people whose votes did not count. And so I understand why they are doing this. It seems probably necessary in this area. And I have trust that they can do it safely on a limited basis. How much concern do you have about that Wasserman story on party registration? I've heard a few different things, you know, and Dave says in the story to some of this is like, you know, people who've voted who have been registered as Democrats forever in some of these states who actually did already voted for Trump in 2016, as Democrats, just finally moving

their voter registration over to Republican. A lot of it is just that, you know, the time period that Dave's story covers is sort of the end of the primary through the summer, which is when the pandemic was at its height. And so Democrats just didn't do a lot of voter registration drives in person. And so they fell behind a little bit. But that if you look overall at registration numbers since 2016, like we're still doing okay, but I don't know what, what, what level of worry do you have about that? It's definitely a level of worry. I would say I'm worrying about it, but not panicking about it. There you go. Okay.

Look, there's definitely real truth to the caveats you mentioned. It is a relatively typical thing for when a party takes the White House for there to be a voter registration shift in their favor because it's almost an incentive to now finally become a Republican or a Democrat. We saw similar things with Obama. The hard part is we need new voters in many of these states more than Republicans do. And the best way to register voters is in person in ways that are very hard in a pandemic, which is standing outside of supermarkets, universities, the places where you would normally do it, and getting people to fill out voter registration cards. In some states, Republicans have gone, like Texas and Florida, have gone to make that incredibly

difficult by basically lording criminal penalties over people who register voters. But in the states where you can do it, that is a tool in our toolkit that has been denied to us. Even with the pandemic, we're still not going to be able to do it at the same level we would, because you can't put, you're not going to put people out there just standing on street corners and there's going to be less traffic on those street corners and supermarkets places like that. There would be in a normal world,

but everything we can do safely, we should be doing here. Cause yeah, it is, it is absolutely concerning in a very close race. And speaking of like doing things safely, I mean, reading a lot of these stories about rejected ballots, and just how, how difficult both how difficult Republicans are trying to make it to vote by mail in states all across the country. Like, is it should people think about if

you can, if it's's safe like voting in person voting early like as long as you can be safe about it like just make sure you go drop your ballot off like i'm starting i'm starting to think i want to drop my ballot off in person like just because i mean california is a good state for this because they're not like rejecting ballots left and right but like if i was in if i was in a swing state, I would probably figure out a way to like either drop my ballot off early or vote early in person to avoid crowds. So it's going to differ massively by state and by person. Right. Everyone has a different risk factor for coronavirus themselves and for the people in their lives. Right. Like that's right. Like we like I see my in-laws all the time. They're older. So we are extra careful than we would otherwise be. So it's

like super, super careful to super, super, super, duper careful, right? And so we may think about that differently. Now, if you mail your vote in or you drop off your mail ballot, you are still at risk of some of the similar challenges around secrecy envelopes in some states, signature matches in others. Now, if you're in a state that has a cure process like North Carolina, the sooner you turn your vote in, the longer time you have to find out that it did not get counted and to fix it. And so I would encourage everyone, whatever path they go through, to do it early. Voting in person early is probably your best bet to have your vote counted in the most states. And so if that is something people feel they can do safely, that's what I would encourage people to do. Yeah. And again, go to Vote Save

America. We have all the options in every state for you so you can figure out which voting option is right for you uh and safe for you um okay let's take a few questions before we go questions john staley asked us and this we got a lot of versions of this type of question no i mean i can't imagine it's like yes trump is a liar yes we you should take everything instead of the grain of salt i struggle to imagine in what sort of hypothetical three-dimensional chess world trump saying he has coronavirus would be some sort of master stroke, it doesn't seem like a big win. I mean, look, I totally understand everyone who is skeptical, not trusting anything they hear

conspiratorial about this kind of stuff. Like Trump has given us every reason to be all of those things for the last four years. I get that. But remember that at their core, these people are incompetent buffoons. Like that is what drives them more than anything else, more than scheming, more, you know, like they're just they're bumbling idiots. And everything about this story so far and they're bumbling selfish idiots. And everything about this story so far fits very neatly into how they've acted for the last four years. Don't care about anyone but themselves. Don't really take science seriously.

Don't take a lot of precautions. Only thinking about Trump's election, not thinking about other people. Like all of that just fits perfectly into this story. So, yes, there's like an outside possibility they could be lying to us. But again, you have to think why. You have to think what's in character for this crew. And everything we've heard so far is's in character for this crew. And everything we've heard so far is perfectly in character with this group. Yeah, I mean, here is someone who in the middle of a pandemic has repeatedly met with strangers without a mask on. So it is a safe assumption that if he

says he has coronavirus, he probably contracted it. It was a matter of time. Jessica Bondi asks us, can you touch upon media strategy for Biden going forward since Trump will likely dominate the news cycle not in a novel way, meaning it won't be campaign coverage, SCOTUS confirmation processes, taxes, and there will be a unilateral focus on Trump's battle with the virus? What do you think about that? Well, if the Biden campaign were to pick one topic to be the number one topic between now and election day would be coronavirus, because it is the issue where he has a plan, Trump doesn't. It is the perfect manifestation of Trump's incompetence. And that is like, we've had some fears when you and I have talked privately about things we worry

about. This idea that for some reason or somehow coronavirus receded into the background of the public consciousness would be an opportunity where Trump could gain some political strength. background of the public consciousness would be an opportunity where Trump could gain some political strength. That seems highly unlikely now. I think Biden is going to have to find ways to communicate with groups that he has probably under-communicated with and needs to communicate with more, Black voters, young voters, Latino voters, and doing that in targeted ways, both with communications that, media know, media outlets, platforms that speak directly to those audiences and paid communications. You know, he's not gonna be able to go on, you know, MSNBC or CNN and talk about something other than the president having

coronavirus for a while. But there are still opportunities to get your message out. You just have to be a little more nimble about it. I'm sure that's what they're thinking about. And then finally, brian marble asks us when was the last time an outline survived 24 hours you know the outline always survived well i guess it's not i was gonna say debate outlines always right but that's only that's all because they're only like eight hours old when it happens yeah just yesterday we were like we've done two pods this week we got a third you and i were going back and forth all day yesterday with michael and jordan trying to figure out like what we're

gonna do and we're like all right i think we got enough now and then all of a sudden this happened where i was like in the middle of it was like nine o'clock when this started happening and i'm just like staring at the screen emily came downstairs looked at me and she's like you look sort of crazy right now and i'm like i think donald trump me and she's like, you look sort of crazy right now. And I'm like, I think Donald Trump has coronavirus. She's like, what? Are you crazy? Is this like, have you like lost your mind? Now there's like conspiracies.

I'm like, no, I think he has coronavirus. He like, we should have known by a test by now. He has rapid testing. He hasn't told us. And then of course it broke. And I was like, well, I'm done with the outline for tonight. And I'm just going to do this tomorrow morning. You know, up until like the last three months,

the sort of the naturally occurring dynamic with our podcast is we record the podcast, then the news happens. It has changed slightly, which is on a fairly regular number of occasions now. I will say to you, I really don't know what we're going to talk about this week. You guys have covered a broad range of issues on Monday.

Not that much has happened. It's sort of the same stuff. And then that happened with the woodward story i sent you the outline after a lot like we had a long back and forth about what are some off the news topics we could bring up and then to have the woodward story break i think it happened with a couple other things recently and so this is fitting with the dynamic of 2020. All right, when we come back, Dan talks to Andre Banks of Wynn Black about how we can handle the flood of misinformation being directed at black and brown voters right now. I'm now joined by Andre Banks, founder of AB Partners and Win Black Palante, an organization dedicated to stopping the spread of misinformation targeted Black and brown voters. Andre, thanks for coming on Positive America. My pleasure. Tell me a little bit about your organization and what led

you to start it. Yeah, absolutely. So Win Black Palante is an organization that is focused on countering misinformation and disinformation targeting Black and Latinx voters. And what led me to start it was an article that I read in the newspaper back in 2017. In early 2017, the Senate came out with a report about the 2016 election. And what they said was that black Americans were actually the number one target of misinterference by Russian operatives. So basically, Russian people, trolls and content and running people running content farms and bots were really had an active campaign, the most successful campaign in history to misinform voters and black people were the number one target. So we brought together a network of organizations across the country, some great creatives, great researchers to try to push

back. And what are you seeing this cycle in terms of that kind of targeting? We are seeing more of the same, you know, the strategy in 2016 was incredibly successful. You know, there was a 7% drop in Black voter turnout from 2012 to 2016. And so one thing we thought coming into 2020 was like, why would they stop? This really worked the last time. Why wouldn't they try it again?

And that's a lot of what we've seen. Every time we see big protests around Black Lives Matter for racial justice, huge upticks in misinformation, lots targeted around voting by mail, pretty much anything you can think of, we're seeing pretty negative activity. And what are some specific examples of what that misinformation looks like this cycle? Sure. So, you know, every time there's been kind of a key moment where people have gotten into the

streets, you know, after the murder of George Floyd, more recently around the decision not to prosecute the police officers who shot Breonna Taylor. We see in literally hours, massive numbers of posts generated from all corners of the dark web that do a lot of things. They basically say that the protests are not actually run by Black leadership, that they're sort of just puppets who are driving these things. They say that the protests are violent even when they're not. They push people to fake demonstrations that don't actually exist. So that's one thing where we've really been trying to keep our eye on. I imagine you're in somewhat regular contact with the social media platforms who claim

to be doing monitoring and they tout when they take things down. What are you seeing from them and what are you still concerned about from their efforts, Facebook most notably, I guess? I mean, what am I seeing from them? Not nearly enough. You know, when you look at the scale of what's happening on their platforms, if you look at the level at which Black voters and Latinx voters are being, you know, depressed and suppressed, the level of effort that they're bringing is just nowhere near to meeting the challenge. to meeting the challenge. And so, you know, what we've seen is like, you know, it takes sometimes weeks, days, weeks to take down a bot that's generating thousands of comments and driving a conversation in a wrong direction, like so much that it actually gets picked up by mainstream media. You know, it's just really not sufficient. It's been a challenge. Are there some specific things you'd like to see them do that they are not doing or policy changes that they are refusing to make?

Sure, absolutely. I mean, I think one big thing is like, you know, when we see misinformation and we identify it, you know, it takes a very long time. Even when you see something like that, you know, we had a case earlier in the year where you might have remembered where the CEO of Goya Food sort of made some positive comments about Trump. And there was a lot of blowback. Right after that, there was suddenly this like wave of like support for the Goya CEO. It looked like there was kind of this online wave coming behind him of folks, conservative folks who were supporting him. What we found through our research was that actually almost all of that wave was bot activity. One bot driving thousands of comments and engagements. And so that's the kind of thing where we saw that, we identified it, and it still took us days, close to a week

before that was actually taken down from Facebook. One of the strategies that you guys employ is creating viral content to combat misinformation. Talk to me about how you're doing that and why that is so important and why it's not sufficient just to get this stuff taken down, even if their companies were able to do it quicker. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, what the scale of what we're up against is huge. You know, I told you about the what the Russians were doing. We also learned last week through some reporting that came out of the UK that that the Trump campaign in 2016 had a database with three and a half million black voters where they literally had a column in the database that said deter. inside the country to deter black voters. So, you know, this is, to me, massive. I mean, it feels much more scandalous, even in things like Watergate. Can you imagine a sitting U.S. president has like, his campaign has actively tried to stop three and a half million American

voters, black voters in particular, from trying to cast their ballot? It's actually really crazy. So, you know, we've got to fight that with fire. So that means that we can't just like research our way out of it. We've got to actually create content that like can get on the feeds that can compete with everything else that people are seeing. So what that looks like is a war room that involves creative directors, strategists, editors, people who make video, people who are copywriters, sitting together with researchers who are tracking misinformation and coming up with like the best content we can make and getting it to millions and millions of people. So, you know, we're doing that every day of the week. We've built a partner

network of 100 organizations in 17 states to help get it out that way. And then we're also pushing it on people's feeds through various kinds of other media. I mean, you know, we talk a lot when we talk about sort of misinformation online about the Russians and other foreign actors. You know, what are some of the domestic things you're seeing, in addition to what you just mentioned about the Trump campaign, you know, trying to stop people from voting? Are you seeing things from right-wing groups, you know, other things happening that's domestic in nature? Yeah, I mean, we definitely see a lot coming from domestic organizations, lots of like partisan activity. You know, we see bots. But you know, at the end of the day,

I always say it actually doesn't, it's problematic, but it doesn't matter where it's coming from. And it's actually kind of hard to tell in the short term where it's coming from. And often what ends up happening is we don't act until we know where it's coming from, but that might take days or weeks or months of research. So a lot of our effort is to say, wherever it's coming from, it's here and it is actually working. It is depressing voters. It's convincing people to sort of move towards cynicism, not want to participate in this election. And so we've just been trying to make sure we have a volume of content that's true, that's inspiring, and that we're getting it in front of folks. You know, a lot of what are sort of where the misinformation and radicalization things are

happening. There's this type we see like on our Facebook feeds or on Twitter or elsewhere, but there's a lot that's happening both within private groups on Facebook and Instagram in particular, but also in private networks like WhatsApp. How do you go about finding out about and then targeting misinformation that's happening in those Walden Gardens, if you will? It's really tough. It's really, really tough to find it. But what we've been doing is partnering with a couple of research collaboratives that have come together just to do this thing. So these groups are looking through with every tool that's available to us, scouring every corner of the Internet, looking at sort of both the open platforms and closed groups where they can get into them to try to identify both the trends that we see in misinformation and also new things that were coming up. So like I just got in and a message and a signal group that was telling me about, you know, what are some things that are popping up right now around Trump announcing that he has COVID? What are the conspiracies that are starting to like

populate and starting to get get traffic and gain ground. So we're working really closely with those partners and every day get a brief from them on like what's happening and where we need to take action. So if you're someone who's listening to this podcast, who sees information, you know, what they believe to be misinformation online, what should that individual person do? What are some of the best tactics that a person can use to push back against that? Yeah, absolutely. So I think one thing that we say is like, if you see something, say something. So if you see something that looks like a bot, report it. Don't be afraid to click that button. it's one of the few tools that we have with the platform to actually make sure that they will

somebody will like look at it and investigate um the other thing i say is like you know sometimes it's actually really good people who have the bad information so it's not always um the the paid troll and sometimes it's like your mom or your grandma or your uncle or your brother who's in the family group chat. And it's like, don't just walk away from that crazy chat room. Actually get in there. Actually try to educate folks. You know, one thing that we've done is created a ton of content that we've made publicly available for people at winblack.org where you can find memes, infographics, videos, the stuff that you need to just jump into that conversation, that conversation yourself. There's also a lot of misinformation that's

going around in Spanish targeting Latinx voters. And my understanding is there hasn't been a lot of coverage of that within the Spanish language media. What are the you know, how are you guys thinking about approaching that challenge in this election? Yeah, we've been doing quite a bit of Spanish language content. We actually just yesterday worked with Univision to do a piece about misinformation that's targeting Latinx voters. So one big part of the way that we work is we felt like it's not enough for me in Brooklyn to be running a campaign like this and trying to figure out what all the right messages are. So we actually built this network that includes state-based organizations in 17 states, in Florida, in Arizona, people who do this work day in and day out, are talking to communities there and actually surfacing for us what are the big messaging challenges, what are the things that are happening in South Florida, in Spanish, that we need to figure out ways to combat? So that's really helped us be able to refine our content, make sure that we've got stuff in Spanish that's

allowing people to get into a different story. For our listeners who want to support your efforts, to want to contribute to what you're doing, what's the best way to do that? Yeah, you can go to winblack.org. You, you can smash that donate button. Um, you know, we, one of the big things that we're doing now, you know, at this point we actually, all of our operation is paid for. We're not, you're not paying for like my time or any of our staff's time. It's literally just to pay for us to amplify content, getting in front of more people in more states. So that's a huge help. And also, if you go there, you can find a link to our library of videos, content.

And the big thing for us is like, share this stuff. It's not enough for us to be right. It's not enough for us to be smart. We actually have to be in the conversation and we have to be getting other people excited about the selection and getting people in the right story about it. So please use your feed and let us help you do that. Andre, thank you so much for being here at Potsdam Works. Thank you for the work you're doing. This is incredibly necessary and impressive. And I encourage everyone to support your efforts. So thank you so much and good luck down the stretch here.

Yeah, thanks so much. My pleasure. Crooked Media has a new video series on disinformation. You can watch episodes at youtube.com slash crooked media, which I'm sure you've already subscribed to via some form of previous smashing. Thanks, Andre, for joining us today. And, you know, we'll talk to you guys on Monday. Stay safe, everyone. Stay safe. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. We'll talk to you guys on Monday. Stay safe, everyone. Stay safe. Pod Save America is a Cricket Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez.

Our associate producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Quinn Lewis, Brian Semel, Caroline Reston, and Elisa Gutierrez for production support. Quinn Lewis, Brian Semel, Caroline Reston, and Elisa Gutierrez for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Narumel Konian, Yael Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.