Pod Save America - “Trump on shuffle.”

Episode Date: June 20, 2019

The President reprises his greatest hits from 2016 at his 2020 re-election kickoff, Joe Biden struggles to keep up with politics in 2019, and Bernie Sanders feels the heat from Elizabeth Warren’s rise. Then Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) talks to Dan about her decision to come out in favor of beginning an impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump’s abuse of power.

Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Later in the pod, Dan's interview with Congresswoman Katie Porter, who just came out in favor of an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. But first, we're going to talk about Donald Trump's 2020 kickoff rally and what it says about his re-election campaign, Joe Biden's rocky week, and the growing competition between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Also, my new episode of Pod Save the World dropped yesterday. Tommy and Ben talk about the escalation with Iran, some good news out of Hong Kong, and the bizarre story of why Trump has a new Secretary of Defense. Don't miss this week's episode of Hysteria, which also features What A Day's Priyanka Arabindi, who you know and love from our weekly Q&A live streams. And the latest installment in our presidential candidate interview series will drop on Friday. Tommy talked with Beto O'Rourke earlier this week when he was in Los Angeles. Dan, I believe you also have some book news. I do have some book news.

The paperback version of my book, Yes, We Still Can, Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump is out this week. Amazing. If you didn't get a chance to get the hardcover, get the paperback. I hope you like it. There you go. This is the kind of compelling book pitch that my editor tells me to make when the books come out. Buy the paperback, people. We're about to hit 2020. There's some fantastic advice on that book, and it's just a joy to read, so go buy it.

fantastic advice on that book and it's just it's just a joy to read so go buy it oh and and good important point new epilogue talking about what happened in 2018 and projecting forward some lessons we could learn from 2018 for 2020 so new content oh new content alert in the paperback buried the lead man you can't get that i know i'm so fucking bad at book selling it is a constant topic of discussion back with my publisher. Buy it for the epilogue, people, for nothing else. Okay. Let's get to the news. I'm going to go ahead and say that this was the week where the apocalyptic shit show of a campaign really kicked into high gear.

This was it, Dan. It started with the Donald Trump rally in Orlando, Florida on Tuesday night. The president officially filed papers for his re-election the day he was inaugurated and has been holding campaign rallies ever since. But he wants us to believe that the real campaign kickoff was Tuesday night, so let's go with that for now. In a speech that lasted more than an hour, Trump offered no new policies or any sort of real agenda for a second term and instead

alternated between patting himself on the back and painting himself as a victim of an illegal plot against his presidency and his family by the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Robert Mueller, the media, and the deep state, saying, quote, our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage and and want to destroy you, and they want to destroy our country as we know it. It's just all very cheery, very uplifting message from the president. And anyway, as he was saying all of this, the crowd responded with chants of, CNN sucks and lock her up. So the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Dan, what did you think of the speech? B for substance, A minus for style? Are we doing the Mark Halperin style grades? Yeah, that was the callback there. B minus for substance, C for style. Overall grade, A plus plus plus.

No. We are obviously, for people who are just tuning in to this podcast, anti-Trump. Yeah. But I will try for a minute to take off my partisan hat and analyze his speech from the perspective of a neutral political observer, a pundit, if you will. It was terrible. It was poorly written. It had no actual message. It had no story. The press strategy around it was terrible. The whole thing was terrible. You could not possibly diagram what the goal was, what the message was, what sort of strategic itch it was trying to scratch. It was just a man vomiting narcissistic

conspiracy-laden talking points. Yeah, look, I know that the big focus on Stephen Miller, as it should be, is that he is a C-plus Santa Monica fascist, as Lovett calls him. And his behavior, his policy positions, the way he sees the world, his xenophobia, his racism. These are the things we should focus on. But as someone who spent a lot of time in my life as a speechwriter, I just want to say he is without a doubt the worst speechwriter to ever write for a president of the United States in my lifetime, by far, end of story. for a president of the United States in my lifetime, by far, end of story. I mean, like, Michael Gerson wrote for George W. Bush.

Did I agree with a lot of what he said? Not really. Fantastic writer. Peggy Noonan. Do I like her columns? I do not. Did she write great speeches for Ronald Reagan? Yes, she did. Stephen Miller is, he like puts together phrases that are the most cliched, garbage, don't make any sense. Like Trump going off the prompter and doing his weird Trump thing where he just vomits up a bunch of words and says crazy shit is better than what is prepared by Stephen Miller. Just putting that out there. And I won't talk about Stephen Miller in speech writing again. Just needed to say it for the kickoff. Do you know the Charlie Day meme where he is standing in front of the conspiracy theory board with pieces of paper

and pictures and yarn everywhere? Yes, the one I send to Brian all the time when he goes crazy in Slack. I think that Charlie Day meme is basically Stephen Miller's speech writing process. It's just, it's not a great process. And it doesn't produce a very good speech. My other question watching that speech, here's how I watched the speech. We all watched it in the office. Our team here, you know, we did some response to the speech on the pod save america twitter feed the team did a fantastic job so we're all watching it i got about halfway

through and then i decided to drive home because i was hungry i needed dinner and it was getting a little late and i couldn't believe it was still on when i got home and it kept going like i was bored by the speech. Is Trump getting boring? For some people, I think. I mean, if the goal was to get attention, he got attention in the run-up for sure. But other than Fox, this cable networks, which are Trump's lifeblood, turned it off pretty quickly because he was saying nothing new. And you know this because you had to write Obama's re-election announcement speeches around this time in 2011. And it's a really hard thing to do because if you propose new ideas, people say, well, why don't you do those ideas now?

You're president of the United States. And you, like, finding the right balance between talking about yourself and you don't have an opponent yet is all very challenging. But you have to have something new. And Trump had nothing new. He just played all the old hits. It was basically Trump on shuffle. Yeah. I mean, we were a real campaign as our most presidential re-election campaigns, regardless of party. And I remember we decided to give a speech in the fall of 2011.

And then we gave a kickoff speech in December, I believe, of 2011. And the fall speech was in Osawatomie, Kansas. And it was, you know, the site of the new nationalism speech by Teddy Roosevelt, where he talks about breaking up the banks and trust busting and all this kind of stuff. And the reason we picked that location

is because Barack Obama decided that he would define the 2012 election as a choice between one vision that just gave tax cuts to the rich and cut regulations and let everyone fend for themselves, or another vision where we took on wealthy special interests and fought for the middle class. And he said the defining issue of this election in this generation is whether people in this country can actually succeed if they work hard. So we had this whole speech set. We decided to try to frame the race.

Yeah, we did have some new policies as well. But it was an effort by the president to sort of frame the reelection on his terms with his argument. This was not that. This was not that in any way. Let's talk about the, to the extent there was a message of the speech, which I believe there was buried somewhere in the steaming pile of verbal diarrhea that was an hour long speech. There was some kind, there was a couple of different messages in there. Um, what did you think the message was, or at least the various messages in that speech? What

did you think they were and what was Trump and his team trying to accomplish? I honestly don't have a fucking clue. It was 500 messages. There was a message, as you point out, about Democrats allowing immigration to destroy America and that MS-13 is going to come kill your family. There was a message about a deep state that was blocking Trump from more progress. There was a message about a great economy and these great accomplishments. And like in a truism in politics, if you have 500 messages, you have zero messages. And so it really wasn't clear to me. I think to the extent it bespoke a strategy, it was a strategy of exciting a base and demonizing the rest of the electorate. It was frightened and suppressed, which was a rerun of 2016 strategy. It's just not clear that the 2020 playing field is going to look a lot like 2016. playing field is going to look a lot like 2016. Yeah, I think, I mean, there's a few messages that are a few lines that stood out to me as attempted messages. Early on in the speech,

he says, we took on a corrupt political establishment that looks down at you, you know, my enemy. And it was basically a speech. It was, there was so much grievance in the speeches there always is. Trump always tries to cast himself as the victim. But what he tried to do in this speech is basically say what he's been saying for the last couple of years. My enemies, the people who have attacked me over the last three or four years, they're your enemies, too. And this election is about whether it's not just a verdict on me and everything that I've done. It's a verdict on, as he said, the un-American conduct of those who tried to undermine our great democracy and undermine you. And so what he's trying to tell these people is, whatever you think about me, my opponents, who he decides to categorize as Democrats,

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the media, the deep state, Robert Mueller, all these people, they are not just out to get Donald Trump. They are out to get you. And if they win, they will open the borders of this country to hordes of immigrants who will come in and, you know, threaten your children and mooch off your tax dollars. And they will sell off America to China and to the to the highest bidder around the world. And what I will do is protect you and my enemies are your enemies and we have to beat them for four more years. That's sort of what he was getting at. I see that. Like, that's definitely there. And you can include a lot of things in a speech that

runs nearly 90 minutes. So he had the opportunity to touch on many topics and many messages. The thing that is, I think, very, it's an interesting tension within sort of Trump – the Trump political strategy, which is he does try at times to make it about his supporters. Like we are all in this together against these liberal elites who don't happen to be white. Like that is definitely a message he has. And he tries to laud the movement. He calls it the greatest political movement in history or whatever. But that always feels like an afterthought because 90% of it, if not more than that, is about Trump himself, things that have happened to Trump, things Trump did,

Things Trump did, problems only Trump can solve, and very little about the people who support him, who are theoretically benefiting from the policies that he may or may not have would always say, this is not about me. It's about you. And would talk about our volunteers, our organizers, the people who put on their marching shoes to use all the Obama lines and the role they played in changing America for the positive, pushing for civil rights, for workers' rights, women's rights, et cetera. civil rights, for workers' rights, women's rights, et cetera. But the best thing Trump can say about his movement is that in their infinite wisdom, they decided to support him. He is still the hero of the story. Trump is amazingly, in alternating sentences, the hero and victim of every sentence he admits. Yes, that is exactly right. And here's the big difference. He's been president already for a couple of years, and he's not railing against a system of which he is outside, which is the major difference between 2016 and 2020. whether you're not getting paid enough, whether you're pissed about immigrants, whatever grievance you may have in your life. It is the fault of the people who've been running the government, the establishment, the media, the Democrats.

And if you send me in there, I'll fix all this. Now he's caught in a situation where all he wants to do is both tout his accomplishments, which he believes are accomplishments. But I think with most of the country believing that the country is moving in the wrong direction and people believing that while the economy may be good, they don't necessarily credit Trump for the good economy. And they don't believe that Trump's economic policies favor them. They believe they favor the wealthy and they believe that Republican economic policy favors the wealthy. He has that to contend with. And so he sort of alternates between, yeah, I've done all these great things, but by the way, if you don't elect me again, all these other people, all these enemies that we have will ruin everything and what's missing there is we have to finish the job on x we have to do more on y i need four more years so i can do x y and z there's just

there's like you were saying there is no recognition that anyone in this country still may have problems or concerns and want to fix something because and that's and that's indicative of his new campaign slogan keep america great right he changed it yeah uh cag uh so he lost maga now he's got keep america great and i don't like i think it's a fairly i'm not talking about his base now we all know fucking know his base is there from they're all fans i don't like I think it's a fairly I'm not talking about his base now. We all know fucking know his base is there from they're all fans. I don't want to hear from everyone being like, oh, it's not going to work there. His base loves him. Yes, we fucking know that they're 40 percent of the country.

We get it. But for most people in this country, for swing voters, of which there are, there are up for grabs voters out there to tell them Trump's campaign is about keeping America great. It sounds like the job is finished. There's nothing left to do. Everything is wonderful. That's that. I think that's a danger. Yeah, that's right. Generally, when you are thinking through your re-election campaign strategy,

you have a very important data point. Obviously, you have your polls. You have your focus groups,lection campaign strategy, you have a very important data point, right? Obviously, you have your polls, you have your focus groups, your private polling, your public polling, but you have this data point of the intervening political event, which is the midterm election. And trying to understand what message was sent in that election that is worrisome, and then how do you set up your re-e election campaign to address it? So for us in 2012, other than just having to be president at a time of 10% unemployment right after a bank bailout passed by the previous president, not any of us had to be president, but one of the messages from

that 2010 midterm was that American voters liked Obama, they trusted Obama. They wanted to believe in Obama, but they thought he wasn't focused enough on jobs, on creating jobs and dealing with the economy. So our reelection campaign, both the speech you mentioned in 2011 and then the quote-unquote announcement speech we gave, very similar to Trump with our rallies in May of 2011, were about the economy and jobs and what Obama had done, the progress he made, and the things he was going to do to finish the project of getting America back and forward, our slogan, if you will, from the Great Recession of 2008. And Trump didn't, like, there is no indication that he is even aware of what happened in the 2018 midterms. That what the voters said, what it meant, why voters left him in key

battleground states and he needs to win, or any sense of what he will do to address those challenges in order to fix his political problems by 2020. Obama had to do a lot of work in a short period of time to fix his post-2010 political problems in order to win a big victory in 2012. Trump has, as of yet, not shown any indication. His campaign has shown much we can talk about, but Trump himself and the most powerful weapon in the campaign, what comes out of the candidate's mouth, seems both living in a bubble and living in the past. So I suppose we should ask the question, is speaking only to his base enough? Can he win this election by essentially rerunning the 2016 race, living in the past, playing the greatest hits on all these rallies,

race, living in the past, playing the greatest hits on all these rallies, firing up his supporters so they come out to the polls. Because you can make an argument that, you know, we said for an entire election in 2016, he's only speaking to the base of the Republican Party. He's not trying to reach out to any independents or anyone else. And sure, he lost the popular vote, but he cobbled together 270 electoral votes in the states that he needed. I mean, nothing is impossible, right? But it does seem improbable that the same set of circumstances that allowed him to lose the popular vote by millions of votes and squeak out an electoral college victory will replicate themselves in 2020.

victory will replicate themselves in 2020. And there are certainly some voters who left Trump in 2018, and he's going to have to find a way to get them back. So basically, he acted a certain way for the first two years. The voters delivered a verdict on that behavior, and he has done nothing to change that in the intervening six months or any suggestion that he will change it in the next 18 months that would allow him to win re-election. And so the idea that he can win states to get to 207 electoral votes at 46 or 47 percent of the vote in battleground states, this is what he accomplished in 2016, is unlikely. And you have to adjust from your initial election to your reelection. George W. Bush was in a similar situation to Trump in the sense that he lost the popular vote by a much smaller margin than Trump did. But he was able to win the Electoral College because enough voters voted for Ralph Nader, the third-party candidate, to tip the election to Bush.

Right. to tip the election to Bush. Trump won because enough voters were voted for Jill Stein and or Gary Johnson and that he was able to win with sub 50% of the vote in enough key states to get to 270. Or stay at home. Or stay at home, right. Or stay at home.

I'm even operating just from the people who actually voted, right? Because you need a third party candidate to get a decent number of votes for you to win in the mid 40s. votes for you to win in the mid-40s. And for that to happen again, he needs a third-party candidate to suck it up. Bush knew that Democrats learned their lesson. They were not voting for Ralph Nader again.

The error of their ways was made apparent. And so he had to change strategy. And so he had to change strategy. And Bush – now he – Bush improved his standing with female voters by five points, which is what allowed him to win the popular vote in the Electoral College in 2004. The question is what is Trump's plan to improve his standing with some set of the elector between now and then? That is not readily apparent from what he is doing. So it is – I don't think he can win with the exact same strategy he won in 2016. He's going to have to improve his standing with some voters somewhere. Now, that could be stronger base turnout.

Now, that's something of diminishing returns. But it's not – he's going to have to do something differently than he did in 2016 to win. Yeah. I mean the other thing I noticed in the New York Times write-up of rally was there was a 72 year old woman who attended the rally. And she said to the New York Times, I just want to hear his plans. And he doesn't have those. Now, is that going to be the deciding factor for that woman? I don't know.

There are people attending his rallies wondering where the plans are. What does that say about the voters he lost in 2018 to Democrats? And again, these are these are the real interesting voters here, because it could be the case that some of these people who voted for Donald Trump in 16 voted for a Democrat in 2018 to sort of provide a check on Donald Trump to stop Donald Trump and the Republicans from taking away their health care, to put a check on Donald Trump, to stop Donald Trump and the Republicans from taking away their health care, to put a check on Donald Trump's behavior, but maybe saying to themselves, well, I still think he's doing a good enough job. I want to give him another four years. That's very possible. The voters we won back in 2018, we do not necessarily have for good in 2020. And so I think the question, a big question is, what do those voters want? How do they see Trump? How do they see this election? And I'm sure both Trump and the Democrats are going to

be wondering how to put those voters in their column. Yeah, I want to be very clear. Like, I am not saying that Trump is going to lose. I'm not saying don't wet the bed. The bed is fully fucking wet. Trump is a favorite to win reelection for a whole host of reasons that I'm not saying don't wet the bed. The bed is fully fucking wet. Trump is a favorite to win reelection for a whole host of reasons that I'm happy to discuss. But it is a slight favorite, but he is most certainly a favorite. And Democrats are going to have to do everything pretty close to perfectly to stitch together 270 electoral votes. Are there any lessons or clues for the Democratic candidates in this speech? Are there any lessons or clues for the Democratic candidates in this speech? I think if I could take one from this, it is that there is no point in responding to the things Trump says.

You could fill a room the size of a warehouse with researchers and rapid response people sending out tweets, videos, documents responding to all the Trump's lies, the absurd things he says, the offensive things he says. And you will end up just doing the inverse of Trump, which is having 500 messages that add up to less than one message. And I think the key is you just have to have a story about Trump. Then you're going to tell that story every single day, no matter what Trump says, no matter what Trump does. And so, yeah, my take, my clues in the speech, I have jotted a few things down. One, he can't help but make it about himself, as we were talking about, and we should too. I mean, we've talked about this message a lot on this pod that Donald Trump promised to put America first. All he does is put himself first. He commits crimes to put himself first. He enriches himself with his office. He uses immigration and xenophobia and racism as a way to divide people

so he can win politically. Everything comes back to him. He only cares about himself and his fortune and his political standing, and he will stop at nothing to make himself better off. And he does not give a shit about anyone else. So, to the extent that he says things in the speech that try to show that he cares about other people, that try to, you know, where he tries to argue that he has the greatest economy of all time, even though that's not the case, I do think those things are worth responding to. His case depends on convincing people that the economy is great and that he's responsible. We should not let him make that case. He wants to be seen clearly from the speech as the one who's fighting corruption in Washington. We cannot let him make that case because it's not true. And of course, what we've known forever is when in doubt, he will scare, try to scare voters with

nonsense about immigration. And I think whoever our Democratic nominee is has to be able to not shy away from fighting him on immigration, but make a strong case in response. Yes. I wasn't trying to suggest that you should make issue-specific cases. You know the arguments you want to make, right? It falls under, you have a overall narrative, which is about Trump putting himself first. And I think the key to that message is you have to explain how that affects voters. Yes. message is you have to explain how that affects voters. It's not just the idea of having a narcissist as president is bad. It has to be why having a narcissist affects you. And like you have said this before, Trump puts himself first. He is in the White House to enrich himself, to reward

his friends, to punish his enemies. And he does all of that on taxpayer expense. And then I think you have to take it one more step, which is that Trump is too focused on himself. Imagine if you had a president who woke up every day thinking about you, not about himself, not about his grievances, not about his enemies, not about his own line. Totally agree. And I think that's really important. And you can fit all of that in there.

So it's like Trump says the economy is great. Of course he thinks that. he has taken millions of taxpayer dollars and put him in his pocket through his hotels all of his rich friends and political donors got rich off a tax cut that says that amazon pays zero in federal taxes and you pay more like there's just a way to do it that flows from that but if you're chasing every line for the viral hit the gotcha the fact check you're gonna you line for the viral hit, the gotcha, the fact check, you're going to lose the forest for the trees. And I should add, the message that we're talking about, it's a hard message to break through because what tends to happen is exactly what

you were just warning against, which is Trump gives a speech like that. There's a blizzard of lies. We're all conditioned to, because we've all yelled at reporters, talk about the lies, talk about the lies. So everyone fact checks, the president's a liar. He said all these lies, right? And so that gets a lot of attention. He'll usually say something crazy, offensive, dangerous, that gets attention. I mean, like I said, we were here basically making from crooked media as we were tweeting out on Pod Save America sort of the economic case that we were just talking about, the Trump selfish case. I happened to tweet about the quote, you know, our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage and want to destroy you and destroy the country. And I had noted that Donald Trump said this.

And, you know, back in October, a fucking Trump fan sent pipe bombs to leading Democrats. And basically because he was radicalized at these Trump rallies, he admitted. And now Trump's telling people the Democrats want to destroy the country and which is very dangerous. So I should read about that. That tweet got way more attention than any of the economic case that we were trying to make and it's just a small microcosm of the challenge that i think the democratic candidates have because if you respond to trump on his racist bullshit if you respond to trump on his xenophobic bullshit if you respond to trump on his lies on all the offensive things he says that leads the news that's what gets everyone. When you try to make a solid economic case, when you try to paint him as corrupt, when you try to do all these things based on policy, it is so much harder to break through.

And so it requires a sort of new level of creativity to sort of break through the noise machine of Twitter, cable, the media, everything else. I think it is very important for particularly the nominee to recognize that if you're depending on Twitter and the mainstream media, which is basically Twitter, to deliver your message to voters, you will never succeed. It is impossible. Their incentives, the things they're interested in, the thing that drives retweets, which drives traffic, which drives bottom line, have nothing to do with what most voters care about. And so if you're setting yourself up in a feedback loop of inane stupidity, if that is the way to do it, you are going to have to do it directly from your mouth when campaigning in their community and getting that message out through local media. And getting that message out through local media. You're going to have to have your organizers to do it on the door.

And you're going to have to do paid distribution through digital ads of your message to a targeted set of folks. Yes. The mainstream media, like there are opportunities for viral moments that can go very well for you. But those are few and far between on a day-to-day basis. You're going to be optimizing for the exact wrong thing. for the exact wrong thing. If what gets the most traffic, which gets the most retweets, which even frankly gets the most coverage in mainstream media, you will lose. It is just that fucking simple. And there are a lot of really smart people in the party who understand that. I really worry there are far too many at the top of too many of our campaigns who don't yet understand how the ground has shifted underneath our feet. So let's talk about Trump's overall campaign strategy here. In an interview this week with

CBS News, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said he thinks that Trump is going to rack up more electoral votes than he did in 2016 and win re-election by a landslide. He also said that modern polling is the biggest joke in politics, referring perhaps to the various public polls and leaked internal Trump polls that show Trump trailing Joe Biden. And the public polls show Trump trailing Bernie Sanders and other candidates in key swing states as well. Parscale said that Trump can win in Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico and, quote, even Colorado. In other news, Trump's already raised more than $25 million since his reelection launch. Dan, is he full of shit or what?

He really seemed full of shit in that interview. He said repeatedly the polls were wrong in 2016. He said every poll was wrong. And I think it's just important to recognize that that is just not true. The average of the polls was pretty clear that Hillary Clinton would win the national popular vote by about the margin that she did. Now, there were state polls that were up and down, and there wasn't enough state polling to get those things right. But I just want to stipulate that. I would just say, let me put it this way. It would not be a confidence-inspiring interview if I was one of the people who contributed to that $25 million fundraising total. if I was one of the people who contributed to that $25 million fundraising total. It was basically, he was speaking to an audience of one. That audience is Trump.

And Trump, it just wasn't great. I just put it that way. It was not great. Well, so do these general election polls mean anything at this point? No. Yeah. And I listened to our friends at FiveThirtyEight talk about this and they actually, you know, did research into this. And this far out, they are almost worthless general election matchup polls. The only now with one exception, they were going through some of them elections where both candidates have very high name

identification already they might be a little closer to the truth but not by much so you can make an argument because everyone knows who joe biden is and everyone knows who donald trump is perhaps it's a little better but it's so far out from election Day. There's so there's ages and ages and ages of campaigning to go. Donald Trump has not fully defined Joe Biden yet or whoever else the nominee may be. They have not even fully defined Donald Trump yet. We don't know what the race is actually going to be about the issues that are going to be fought on. We don't know all the controversies that are going to come up. We don't know what kind of foreign interference. We don't know anything. So I do think, you you know we say take all polls with a grain of salt but in my view look at some of the uh early state horse race polls if you're really looking for some polls

and even those represent a snapshot in time right now but the general election matchup polls do not mean much at this point yeah that it is cold comfort to Democrats looking for reasons to be confident about what's going to happen in 2020. There is one interesting trend in these polls that can very much change, but it is something to take away, which is in these states, whether it's Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, et cetera, Trump's approval number and his vote share are almost identical. Yeah. party candidate, if it is essentially a two-person race, unlike 2016, Trump is going to have to get to a vote share that is higher than his approval rating has ever been since he's been president. And that is going to take a lot of work and some real shifting of the ground that we have not yet

seen from him or his campaign. It is possible, don't get me wrong, but there has been this theory that people don't approve of Trump but will vote for him anyway because they like the economy or they hate the Democrats. But we have not yet seen that in these polls. And even in the ones that I think are probably the closest to real, which is still pretty far from real, which are the Biden-Trump ones because Biden is a well-known quantity. When it's just a generic Democrat, then people can put forward whatever views, positive or negative, they put on that. But when someone you know, like you point out, the 538 folks said, it's closer to reality. But I would be very worried if I was in the Trump campaign and I saw that relationship between my approval number and my vote share.

One other quick thing that we should mention just before we move on to the primary. Police in Orlando had to get in between a group of Proud Boys who tried to confront an anti-Trump protest outside of the arena for the rally. Some of the Proud Boys, who are part of a neo-fascist organization that promotes violence, that's what the Proud Boys are. They are neo-fascists. They promote violence. We're captured on video outside the event chanting things like, Pinochet was right and Roger Stone did nothing wrong. Trip Gabriel of the New York Times quoted one Republican operative as saying the following,

quote, of the organized participation of Proud Boys rallies merging into Trump events. They don't care. Staff are to treat it like a coalition they can't talk about. Pretty scary. It should really be close to the biggest story in American politics right now, which is neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists are a part of the Republican coalition. And that is something, and that is not just about Trump. That is how Marco Rubio plans to win.

That's how Paul Ryan planned to win in 2018. That is the modern Republican party. For every one of those people who put on their Brooks Brothers suits and go work for Ben Sasse or whoever else, you are working for a party that knows it needs the votes of white supremacists to win elections. And there are two approaches to that. You could disavow that and try to broaden your coalition to still win, or you could just keep quiet about it and hope the proud boys show up on election day. And that is the choice the modern Republican Party made after the 2016 election. And that's where we are. And I think that it is a tremendously undercovered, under-discussed part of politics in the Trump era. Yeah.

And you know what? I was probably most annoyed when I woke up the next day on Wednesday by the fucking Politico headline about Trump's rally. Greatest show on earth. The greatest show of all time. The greatest show of all time is what a journalist, a media organization, that's how they decided to characterize a rally where the president of the United States said the Democratic Party is out to destroy America, where he lied the entire time, and where neo-fascists were outside the rally, blending into his own event. That's how they decided to describe that. So the other big problem we have is the way that, and we could do a whole fucking episode on that, and we will do

more, and we're not going to do it today, but we will uh no one should think that the media has learned any lessons from 2016 as we head into 2020 zero lessons so uh that's something that we have to all be aware about as and democratic campaigns as they're trying to figure out as you were saying ways to get their message out because the media is not a way to get your message out. You do that through paid advertising. You do that through your candidate. You do that through a whole bunch of different ways, but do not count on the press corps to, you know, talk about what you want to talk about every day,

or even to cover it in a way that actually captures the sheer insanity of the political crisis that we're in right now. No, their brains are broken by Twitter and Trump, just like the rest of us. And if you want to do something about the fact that Donald Trump just raised $25 million in a day, you can donate to our Unify or Die Fund. Again, this is a fund where all the Democrats in the primary right now are going at each other.

They're trying to win the primary, so they're trying to raise money on their own. Whoever the nominee is, is not going to have much money by the time they face Donald Trump. Donald Trump's going to have an enormous war chest. And so what you can do right now is donate to the Unify or Die Fund and make sure that whoever the nominee is, they get that pot of money the second they become the nominee. Go to votesaveamerica.com slash unify. Also, if you want to do something in 2019, we have elections in 2019. Some of them are very important. Last week, the Virginia primaries took place,

which means we can now focus on the general election when we'll have the chance to flip both of Virginia's legislative chambers. In each chamber, Democrats just need to flip two seats and hold all of their current seats to take control. If we have control of the VA legislature, that means we get to draw the maps in 2021. That means Democrats can make sure they have seats in Congress, that Congress isn't gerrymandered. This is a huge, huge deal. So go to our Fuck Jerry fund.

That is votesaveamerica.com slash fuck Jerry. All right, let's talk about the Democrats. Vice President Joe Biden has an odd way of celebrating Juneteenth, Dan. How long did it take you to come up with that intro? Honestly, it rolled off the tongue. how long did it take you to come up with that intro? honestly, it rolled off the top at a fundraiser in New York on Tuesday night he decided to wax nostalgic about the time he served with segregationist senators James Eastland

and Herbert Talmadge here it is, as recounted by the New York Times I'm just going to read it verbatim quote, I was in a caucus with James Eastland said Mr. Biden, 76, slipping briefly into a Southern accent, according to a pool report from the fundraiser. Quote, he never called me boy. He always called me son. Biden called Mr. Talmadge, quote, one of the meanest guys I ever knew. Well, guess what? Mr. Biden continued. At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn't agree on

much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side, and you're the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don't talk to each other anymore. Biden's comments were criticized by several other Democratic presidential candidates, including Cory Booker, who said, quote, you don't joke about calling black men boys. Men like James Eastland used words like that and the racist policies that accompanied them to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O'Rourke, and Bill de Blasio also criticized Biden, while several members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including James Clyburn, came to Biden's defense.

So, Dan, there was actually a second gaffe at the fundraiser, but let's take one thing at a time here. So the Biden camp responded by saying that the vice president did not praise a segregationist. He said that sometimes in Congress you have to work with terrible and even racist politicians to get things done. Biden himself responded by saying that he doesn't have a racist bone in his body and cited his long record of civil rights advocacy, including his work to extend the Voting Rights Act in 1982. What do you make of this whole situation? Not great. I mean, it's...

Yeah, okay. I mean, honestly, just to... I'm going to try to analyze this from two perspectives. Sure. Personally, as people who have known Joe Biden and have tremendous admiration for him as a person and as an incredibly loyal vice president to President Obama, the whole thing makes me sad. Me too. Like it is just – I hate that he – like Joe Biden is far from perfect.

None of us are perfect. He is one of the most human politicians you'll ever be around. And his strengths and his weaknesses are out there for the world to see. But he is a truly decent, good, caring human being. But it is also true, and this is one of the reasons why a lot of those of us who care about him or are nervous about him running, is that he's not necessarily well-equipped for the political moment we're in, both in his campaigning style, his demeanor, and also just the fact that he's been in politics forever and things have changed a lot. And you see this all the time when people who have been out of

politics and he hasn't really had he hasn't had to run a race for seven years to and even then he was the vice president doing so. He was not the lead candidate. Just this is the thing that I've been worried about from the beginning about Biden's campaign. Now, from the analysis of the politics of it, it's a gigantic problem because it undermines his two greatest strengths, which are that he has by far the most support among the African-American community, and he has seen it by people as overwhelmingly the most electable candidate against Trump, which is theoretical and bullshit, but it is something that voters, a strength voters have given him. And when you make multiple gaffes, which was this, it undermines electability case. And when you fail to understand why those comments would be offensive and hurtful to

large segments of the American population, then you are undermining your support. to large segments of the American population, then you are undermining your support. And it's just, I think the whole situation is incredibly problematic for his campaign. And I'll leave it at that. There's a lot of people today, Thursday, making the case. Why is it so bad? This is how things get done in this country. You work with people that you don't like. You work with people that are sometimes awful people, right? This is what the Biden campaign responded with. No one is saying, at least I'm not saying, and I think a lot of Joe Biden's rivals aren't saying and his critics aren't saying, that Joe Biden should have said, I refuse to co-sponsor, sign on to, work on legislation with anyone who is a segregationist.

That is not the problem here. It is not the problem. The problem is that what he said represents a fundamental misunderstanding of our history and what was going on back then. James Eastland. Here's Mississippi's James Eastland at a rally in 1956. Quote, when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives. and knives. Okay. So that guy comes up to you and you're in the Senate and you know who he is and you know what he believes. And he says to you, Hey, let's sign on together to a, a, a bill to build a highway that goes through both of our States. And it's going to create a whole bunch

of jobs for both of us. okay, for both of our constituents. You look at that guy and go, well, he's a real fucking racist asshole, right? But I need a lot of jobs in my state, and we need a highway, and that makes sense. Are the jobs in his state going to go to black Americans? Obviously not, because he's a racist prick. But this is a good thing to work on, and sometimes you just have to work on things with people who you don't like, so fine. Sometimes you just have to work on things with people who you don't like. So fine. That's fine to do. But 30 years later, 40 years later in 2019, to then point to that example and say, those were the days when civility reigned and you could get stuff done with people you don't agree with.

Well, that's not what happened there. Like back then, the divisions in the Senate, the divisions in American politics were you had liberal Republicans in the North, you had liberal Democrats in the North, of which Joe Biden was one back then. And then you had conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans in the South who were mainly segregationists. and conservative Republicans in the South who were mainly segregationists. And to the extent that there was bipartisanship between those groups, it was bipartisanship in terms of doing things that left out and excluded black Americans. That was the only way you could have bipartisanship with people from the South, is if you worked on bills that excluded African-Americans that trampled

their rights, that made them less human. That was the only way you could have bipartisanship. So all these years later to look back and say, that was a golden age of bipartisanship and civility and look at all the stuff that we got done. It's not racist. It's just a fundamental misunderstanding of politics, of history and of where we are now and on top of that and on top of that saying he never called me boy he always called me son like yeah i was gonna bring that up that i mean come on man you have to know the reason he didn't call you boy is because you were white it's just it it hurts me too because this is i don't know it's it's it's exactly what i thought was going to happen

yeah i mean there is the it just the response right which i know we're going to talk about but It's just the response, right, which I know we're going to talk about. But Cory Booker, among others, criticized Biden. And the question that Biden got as he was getting out of the car at a fundraiser, which I would just note from a campaign perspective, is that is terrible advance work. That in the middle of a crisis, Biden was able to be cornered by a CNN reporter on the way between the driveway and the door of a house. There's better ways to do this. But the answer, I think the question was in the context of Cory Booker. So Biden responded to Cory Booker and said, Cory should apologize. And I don't have a racist bone in my body, which is problematic on about nine levels. Cory Booker, obviously, an African-American senator and presidential candidate and not someone who is prone to demagoguery in any way.

I mean, whatever, I don't know whether you support people, support Cory Booker or not, but he's a very thoughtful person who chooses his words carefully. And when no one, Cory Booker did not call Joe Biden racist. He did not.

No. He explained why, from the perspective of an African-American man living in America and serving the United States Senate, why that story was wrong and offensive and hurtful to him. And Biden should, instead of stubbornly yelling back at Cory Booker in a fairly dismissive and patronizing way, should instead try to understand why that was hurtful, as he knows Cory Booker. And Cory Booker wouldn't say that lightly and try to address it and have a conversation with Cory Booker about like that would have been the right approach. voted my body is a response to criticism on racial issues that is very, has a, has a long history and is a, and is the defense that Trump uses,

which is to somehow say that the thing I said that offended people on racial issues is you treat in this binary way that either I'm a member of the KKK or I don't have a racist bone in my body. When these issues are much more complex and nuanced and everyone should be willing, especially someone who wants to be the leader of the Democratic Party, should be willing to analyze why it is that what they said caused hurt to someone they respect and trust. And what I really worry is that, you know, the way that Biden sees all this stuff is, oh, this is just the new left, woke Twitter, all these people, they criticize everything. Everything is a problem. Everything's blown out of proportion. And I'm a good person. I know I'm a good person. I have people around me who tell them I'm a good

person. And so fuck this. I don't need to worry about this. And it's like, you know what? fuck this i don't need to worry about this and it's like you know what yeah maybe it is possible it is entirely possible that um that this is a controversy that stays within you know liberal circles activist circles it's a thing on twitter it's a thing on cable and that a lot of other voters in the democratic party who aren't paying as close attention are saying and and they could be black voters too because joe biden has a lot of support among the black community right now with black voters. And they could be saying, fuck this, it doesn't really matter. I love Joe Biden, right? And so fine, he can sort of skate by.

But we are in a moment right now where we have to do, every one of these candidates has to do everything humanly possible to unite this party, to beat Donald Trump, which is the most important thing in the fucking world right now. And so everything you say, you have to be careful and you have to make and look. And this goes, by the way, for people on the far left, too, who were like, fuck all the centrists and bullshit like that, too. No, we are in a moment right now where we need to have a great debate about the future of the party for sure. And we need to argue about it. But we have to be careful as we do this that we're not cavalier and just pissing off people or dismissing their concerns all the time.

And that's what I worry about. The thing is, like, Joe Biden, if he wants to make his point about, you know, the good old days of civility, he could have very easily talked about how he worked with bob dole republican bob dole to extend the voting rights act in 1982 a piece of civil rights legislation and and john and joe biden sat down with bob dole and fucking ronald reagan signed it into law and it was a good piece of legislation and it was around civil rights and joe biden got it done he could talk about his work with john mccain he could talk about his work with John McCain. He could talk about his work with other Republicans. You know, people on the left, maybe us, we might still roll our eyes a little bit, but it would have been totally fine.

Did his advisors tell him to do those stories? Yes, they did. Did he listen to his advisors? No, he didn't. And that's part of the problem with this campaign. Yeah, I mean, this is, Joe Biden has been telling the James Eastland story forever. It's in his 2007 book. It is a and I've been hearing Joe Biden tell stories forever. He tells the same stories all the time, as every politician does. And the longer you're a politician, the more those stories become rote. And you're right. There are a thousand different ways to say this.

And it is a failure to adjust to the moment we were in and to understand how, like, something may have been true 40 years ago, but you have to talk about it in the present with the knowledge of everything that has changed and we have learned in those 40 years about what that all meant, how that moment looked then and how it looks now. And when you've been telling the story since, I mean, let's just go back to 2007. If you have not – if you were still telling the same story about working with segregationists in 2019 and you were telling it in 2007, let alone 1997, 1987, 1977, then you've missed a massive shift of what's happening in this country in that time. And it is – and your point that his staff told him to tell – to pick a different senator because you can pick anyone, not to mention the fact that James Eason was a Democrat. So it makes it a poor parable about bipartisanship. Right. It speaks to electability, like candidate skill.

How is he going to be nimble and adjust on the campaign trail if you ran through this light? This wasn't a flashing yellow light. This was a red light, and he ran right through it. And yes, maybe this will end up being a cable news Twitter thing, but I think there will probably be massive record numbers of Americans who watch the debate Biden is in next Thursday. Yeah. And he's going to be on stage with people who have been critical of him. And how is he going to respond to that?

Is he going to have a more thoughtful response than no, you should apologize? There's not a racist bone in my body. And you and I also know that Joe Biden, for all of his strengths as a politician, he is not someone who – he is very strong-willed. He is not someone who is easy to prep. If he has his mindset on doing something, he is going to do it. Prepping Joe Biden is a very challenging thing to do. He is very reticent to be, quote-unquote, managed by staff. staff. And there are some real strengths that come with that because it has allowed him to develop an authenticity and speak his mind that has been a huge part of his brand for many years.

But it also leads to situations like this. And it is not hard to project the challenges in a general election if our nominee is making mistakes like this. And again, not to mention, there's two ways to look at this. There is that he said something that was wrong and hurtful and responded to it in a way that was neither thoughtful nor empathetic aside from the politics. And that is important. Then there is also the what it says about the politics. And both of those are very problematic for him. Yeah. And again, it's like it is so hard to talk about this because, you know, I love Joe Biden and he has a good heart. He's a fundamentally decent person who has learned and grown and changed over the years. But he's not our vice president anymore.

He's running for president of the United States and he's running for president of the United States at a moment when we are in a political crisis of epic proportions against Donald Trump, who is the president right now. proportions against donald trump who is the president right now and when you're in a race like that you have to take it fucking deadly serious and you have to lock it up and make and make sure that like everything is right and you're saying everything right and you have to be willing to change and you have to be willing to say the right things and like man and and knowing and you have to have a fundamental understanding of the politics of the moment you have to and that goes for joe biden bernie sanders elizabeth warren but all of them they all have to have a fundamental understanding of the politics of the moment. You have to. And that goes for Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, all of them. They all have to have that. So it's not just about Joe Biden, but in this case it is.

So it's tough. And then there's another gaffe too. He also said in front of the same group of donors that he doesn't want to demonize wealth and that, quote, rich people are just as patriotic as poor people. Fine. But then he said how income inequality brews political discord, but told the wealthy donors that they had nothing to fear from a Biden administration. Quote, We can disagree in the margins, but the truth of the matter is it's all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished.

No one's standard of living will change. Nothing would fundamentally change. I need you very badly. I hope if I win this nomination, I won't let you down. I mean, just, you know, you're with a bunch of rich donors in New York. You're telling them, if you're president, don't worry. Nothing will fundamentally change when it comes time to your tax policies. I don't know, man. That is on the list of campaign gaffes. That is a potential campaign ender.

Now, it has gotten almost no attention because there's another incredibly damaging, controversial statement within that same sentence. But to go before a bunch of rich Wall Street donors in 2019 while running for the Democratic nomination to tell them, don't worry, your standard of living will not change, is an insane thing to say. And it is something that would be brought up in a primary. It'll be brought up in a general election. It is up there with Mitt Romney's 47%. And it is such an insane thing to do because Joe Biden has already talked about repealing the Trump tax cuts.

Right. It's one of the first things he would do. So, yes, their standard of living would change. He's already pledged to raise their taxes. And this is one – like Biden is an old school politician, obviously. But one of the things he has a habit of doing is telling people in the room what they want to hear. It is how we ended up with the controversy over the Hyde Amendment when he told the woman on the rope line that he would repeal Hyde. And then he said he wouldn't.

And then he said he would. He is trying to win the room. He always tries to win the room. And oftentimes that is great. But you have to be incredibly careful when you are doing that in a room full of Wall Street donors with reporters in the room. This isn't the case of some server had an iPhone going like Mitt Romney, the 47 percent. He was looking at people with notepads and recorders as he was saying it. Yeah.

And, and the funny thing is the reason, according to reports, why the Biden staff decided to open up the fundraiser was because open up all of his fundraisers to print reporters was so that one, he would be more careful with the things he's saying. And this is what he said. It's, uh, It's not great.

I'm sure we'll see some of this. I'm, like, banging my head against the wall because we're just – we are having this – I mean, it's just – there's so much stupid shit happening, and now we're contributing to it ourselves. I know. I know. But it's also, like, you know, don't run a race like this and force everyone to talk about all this shit by continuing to screw up. Don't do it. Run a better race, man. Run a better race.

One more thing about this that is important, which is Biden has clearly adopted the no apology strategy of Trump. And that, I think, is a fundamental misreading of what works in the Republican primary or what works in the Democratic primary. And if you make a mistake, you should apologize. You shouldn't apologize just for the sake of apologies, but being thoughtful and nuanced and respectful is a way to win in Democratic primaries. It is not a way to win in Republican primaries. So emulating what worked for Trump in 2016 in the Republican primary, I think is a very poor strategic decision for what will work for Democrats in the 2020 primary. All right. One more smallish primary controversy before we get to Katie Porter. On Monday's podcast, we talked for a bit about how Elizabeth Warren's recent rise in the polls seemed to be eating away at support for Bernie Sanders. So on Wednesday, Politico ran a story with the headline, quote,

This story basically quotes a couple of people in the centrist organization Third Way saying they actually really like Elizabeth Warren. That's about it. That's the whole fucking story. Bernie Sanders then tweets the following in response to that story. Quote, the cat is out of the bag. The corporate wing of the Democratic Party is publicly, quote, anybody but Bernie. They know our progressive agenda of Medicare for all, breaking up big banks, taking on drug companies and raising wages is the real threat to the billionaire class. Dan, I was a bit surprised that Bernie or maybe his campaign chose to tweet this. Were you? Obviously I was because you and Tommy

and I all tweeted about it almost simultaneously, which is not a conspiracy. It's just we're all on the same Slack channel, so we see information at the same time. But I was surprised. In reading everything that has come since, I have come to the conclusion that it was a poorly constructed tweet from the Sanders campaign. But it speaks to a defensive crouch that the Sanders campaign has adopted as Elizabeth Warren has begun surpassing him in polls. What they really should have done is just screenshotted the part – the quote from Third Way that said that they would support anyone but Bernie.

Right. Which is the point they were clearly giving is that you were attacking Elizabeth Warren. And that's just not the impression that we had. It was also a lot of people who were very supportive of Bernie were concerned about the tweet. Waleed Shahid of Justice Democrats. Arun, who used to work. Arun, who now works for someone else, but he, I think, still is very fond of Bernie and said that they should delete that tweet. A lot of people read it the way we did. So I am willing to chalk it up to a misfire, but it fits within a pattern of behavior within the Sanders campaign, which suggests Sanders campaign is running very differently in 2019 than it did in 2015. Well, I also think it speaks to sort of the

challenge that they're facing right now is how do you separate yourself from Elizabeth Warren if Elizabeth Warren is the one gaining in the polls and seems to be acceptable to both progressives and at least mainstream Democrats in the party? And, you know, I think there's always been sort of a faction of the Sanders campaign, whether it was last time or this time, who sort of revels in making a contrast between Bernie Sanders and the Democratic establishment or centrist Democrats or corporate Democrats. Like they kind of like to have this fight within the party. It's we, you know, we talked about this when they sort of went after Think Progress. Remember that little controversy a couple of months back? And i don't and i think they do that

because they're like well how else are we going to separate ourself from warren and i don't know i mean in some ways i i understand the challenge that they have in the sanders campaign because there's they're they're probably sitting there saying you know we're the ones who moved the debate in the party to the left after 2016 because bernie was out there for a long time on all these issues and now he's not getting as much attention as Elizabeth Warren is what's the deal how do we get attention again which I think is a actually a tough challenge I mean what would you do if you were in that position I like it's it's very very very hard for them to figure out how to like Warren's success is at least in the moment, a nightmare for Bernie.

Yeah. It is much easier for Bernie to become the vessel for progressives, uncomfortable with Joe Biden or whoever else is the front runner when it is Bernie versus Elizabeth Warren, then it's not like that. This is a heart. None of the things that he said or did in 2016 are applicable here. And there is just – our friend Jennifer Palmieri, who was Hillary Clinton's communications director in 2016.

So obviously she has run a campaign against Bernie, but she noted on Twitter that in the last election, one of the things she really admired about the Sanders campaign was just how cool they were. They never got too up, too down. They never reacted whether they were the same way, whether they're winning or losing. And the Sanders 2016 campaign was a superbly run campaign. To go from where they were to where they ended up was a tremendous achievement and a real understanding of the political moment in the party, if not the country. But whether it's fighting with the Center for American Progress, as you point out, whether it is the long-running and very aggressive Twitter war that David Sirota, Bernie Sanders' speechwriter, has been having with Nate Silver about which polls are included. This fight, which is as notable as the original tweet was about that was construed by many people, including us, is attacking Elizabeth Warren, was the follow up tweets where Bernie Sanders himself, the presidential candidate who came within a few million votes of being the Democratic nominee last time, is now engaged in a back and forth with Jim Kessler, the one of the leaders of Third Way, about who they would support and otherwise. It's just there's something that feels just – there's sort of a lashing about looking for some sort of grievance, establishment grievance to hang on to here that I think is just very different than – I don't have an alternative strategy for them. I'm not saying this is the right one or the wrong one.

It's just very different than what worked for Bernie in 2016. And I just think in general, if you have fought in the last few weeks with two think tanks and Nate Silver, that those are probably not things that are advancing your path towards a delegate majority. David Sirota is Bernie Sanders' is bernie sanders speechwriter can you imagine dan if in the 2008 primary i had a twitter account and was as speechwriter was spending a lot of my time in like twitter flame wars with fucking nate silver and various like like shadow boxing various members of the clinton campaign on twitter what you and pluff and axelrod would have done to me? I mean, you would not have been the speechwriter. Plouffe would have shooed you out of the building carrying a shoebox with your possessions if he didn't just murder you on the spot.

So bizarre. And there are very, very smart people running the Sanders campaign. I think Faz Shakira, his campaign manager, is incredibly- He's one of the best campaign managers out there, for sure. Yeah, bright death strategist. And I'm willing to bet that there are a lot of people in the campaign uncomfortable with a Twitter flame war with Nate Silver. Probably fast. I could make a case for why the third way fight or the cap fight makes some strategic sense for Bernie.

I'm not sure that those are paths I would take, but I see how it fits a strategy of sanders branding himself as the anti-establishment democrat whenever and we have all been guilty of this the obama campaign you and i individually of publicly fighting with pollsters about the makeup of their polls or their models you weren't that it that is never something that comes off well. Un-skew. It is a flashing sign of weakness. Un-skew. Yeah, exactly. Okay, when we come back, you'll all hear Dan's interview with Representative Katie Porter. Our guest today is California Congresswoman Katie Porter. Congresswoman, welcome back to Pod Save America.

Thank you. Delighted to be here. So earlier this week, you released a video where you laid out why you came to the conclusion that you would support opening an impeachment inquiry. Help us understand what it was that led you to make that consequential decision. Well, it was really my decision to support the beginning of an impeachment inquiry really grew out of the Mueller report. And I think it's important that we take it back to that. I think we were all very patient in waiting for Mr. Mueller to do his investigation and in supporting him being able to do that unimpeded. But when you look at the

Mueller report, it's really important, I think, for people to know that contrary to what the president has been tweeting or saying, in point of fact, Mueller found that there is substantial evidence that the president engaged in four potential acts of obstruction of justice. And each one of those acts is a potential crime. In your video, you talked about how you read a lot, you went back and you read cases, the Constitution, the arguments around previous impeachment. Was there anything in particular that pushed you in this direction that you read or learned about since then? I think one of the things I took note of was how relatively little the Constitution actually says about this. I mean, it really comes

down to one sentence describing the procedure. So this idea that somewhere out there, if only we wait long enough, is some impeachment handbook that tells us everything we need to know, that's just not true. The founders really put this duty on the members of the House of Representatives, including me now, to make this determination. And so I think it was important for me to kind of really go back and understand the role of the House of Representatives, which is to impeach, not to convict, that that is for the Senate. And then thinking about what is the evidence that's necessary to impeach, and that is a different level of evidence that's necessary to convict. And the Mueller report, in my review, gives us that level of evidence.

report in my review gives us that level of evidence. Now, the assumption among virtually everyone alive and breathing today is that no matter what the House does, the Senate will refuse to convict Trump because Mitch McConnell's in charge and you need two-thirds. How do you think about, how did that factor play into, or I guess, how does the idea that no matter what the House does, Trump is highly unlikely to be removed from office play into your decision? Look, if we were thinking about our work in the House with a lens of what will Mitch McConnell do, we would just all go home. Because the truth is, we haven't seen the Senate Majority Leader do anything yet. So he hasn't acted on gun violence prevention. He hasn't acted on the Violence Against Women Act. He hasn't acted on any number of the Equality Act. So that can't be our benchmark. So one of the things that really bothers me is hypocrisy. It's something that I've fought against my whole life. And kind of hearing people say, well, we have to keep

passing these bills because they send a signal. So things like the Equality Act, they signal our shared values. Things like gun violence prevention, they signal that we are fighting to make our community safer. Well, that is equally true when it comes to upholding the Constitution and enforcing the rule of law. We need to do what is right to signal to the American people that we are on the job and doing the work that they sent us here to do. And I don't think you can draw a meaningful distinction between that. I absolutely wish that Mitch McConnell would do his job. The joke in my office is my staffer wanted a pet. I said, absolutely not. No pet. I have three kids. I have a bunch of

staffers. I have two offices. I can barely take care of everything I have to kind of keep alive and healthy and paid for. And she said, but I want a turtle and I want to name it Mitch. And for her birthday, I got her a pet turtle named Mitch. And it has a little tag on it that says, hi, ask me about my 2019 legislative agenda. So that problem is real with Mr. McConnell, but it's equally real for everything that we're doing. And I don't think it lets us off the hook. I guess the sort of the inverse of that question is, let's say your position within the Democratic caucus does not prevail and the Democrats decide to do what has been Speaker Pelosi's position to this point, which is not to impeach. Do you think there are consequences over the long term if the House does not undertake what you what you have stated is you believe its constitutional obligation is?

I think it's really hard to predict the future with any certainty. But I do think as we're trying to, I mean, for me, running for Congress was about standing up to President Trump. It was about fighting for the things that I believe in, a fair economy, affordable health care, a fair banking system. But it was also partly about restoring the American public's confidence in Congress. And that is not a partisan issue. I mean, the reality is that across party lines, a lot of Americans don't believe that Congress is doing its job, is doing it ethically, is doing it in a way that respects the rule of law. And so I think we have to earn back that trust. So it's impossible to know kind of what the consequences might be of failing to act. But I

do know that by making the decision I did and by doing it in what I hope was a thoughtful way, by taking the time to talk with my constituents about it, that I have given the people of the 45th District confidence that I am taking their concerns and this work as seriously as I can. What did your constituents tell you, both in the run-up to your decision and then since you released the video earlier this week? So while I was campaigning in Orange County for almost two years, I really rarely heard about impeachment. I certainly never brought it up. It just wasn't my focus. My focus was really on who I was, what I had done, what President Trump was doing that

was creating problems for Orange County families. And so relative to other candidates around the country, I think I was probably in the very bottom kind of of those candidates who talked about impeachment. Partly that reflected that I really did respect the process. I really do believe that the special counsel, the appointment of the special counsel was the right approach. I really believed in being patient and allowing him to do his investigation. But that is done. And we have that report. And Mr. Mueller has stated that his report is his testimony, that the facts in the report are what we should be relying on. And in his report, he says, you know, if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice,

we would so state. And they do not so state. And so I think waiting for that report, I think, helped give my constituents confidence that I was being deliberate and being fair, trying to honor the rule of law. After the Mueller report came out, I got many more constituents who asked questions about impeachment. They asked really thoughtful questions about how to understand the Mueller report, really terrific questions about executive privilege, which Mueller report, really terrific questions about executive privilege, which the president is offering up at every opportunity as an excuse to continue to obstruct justice. And he simply is overstating the role of executive privilege in

the legal system. You know, we on Potsdam America obviously talk about the debate around impeachment, the morality of it, the constitutionality of it, the politics about it all the time. It's a topic that obviously dominates cable shows and Twitter. you and your colleagues are debating and talking about a lot? Is it sort of an unspoken topic? Because it's so, you know, maybe it's so tense for people? Or just like, is it? Is it? Is it? What are the conversations like you guys are having about this? I'm really glad you asked that. Because one of the things I want people around the country to know is that the on the Democratic side, people are discussing this. And whether someone's particular congresswoman or congressman has come out with a public statement or not, I am seeing almost universal interest and kind of responsiveness from the delegation in terms of, you know, Democrats asking questions, wanting to be updated on what the committees are doing,

thinking about the consequences, talking about the rule of law. So this is something that comes up. It comes up not just in leadership, but it comes up among freshman members. It comes up among members like me who flipped very, very tough-to-flip districts and are already paying the political consequences of it. very, very tough to flip districts and are already paying the political consequences of it. I mean, it took the National Republican Campaign Committee 48 hours from when I issued my decision that we need to begin an impeachment inquiry to go up on social media and hit me with ads. And I think some of my colleagues have asked me, how do I feel about that? And I really told them, I think I

have to make the decision to do what I think is right. And this isn't a political decision, nor should it be. It isn't a political decision, but obviously there are politics at play here. And as you point out, this is a decision with great political risk for someone who won such a tough district. When you are home in August doing town halls or talking to constituents, and you talk to those voters know that there are a lot of Trump porter voters. There are some. But to be clear, the district that I represent supported Hillary. It did not vote for Trump. There are a lot of Republicans who I think supported me, and I'm very grateful for their support, and I want to continue to earn their trust. But I think there was a fair amount of skepticism in Orange County about some of President Trump's leadership.

I hate to use the term qualities because it seems like an oxymoron, but some of President Trump's leadership potential, shall we say. And I think some of those concerns have only deepened with some of the things that he's done. Well, maybe the better way to put it is, so you have, so we'll call them Romney voter voters. But there are people who supported you in part because of your focus on issues and they thought you were maybe different for whatever reason from either Speaker Pelosi or quote-unquote Democrats in Washington. Washington, I guess I would say, how do you make the case to them instead about that you're going to be able to both impeach slash investigate Trump and deliver on the issues you talked about on the campaign trail? I don't think anybody who has watched my questioning in hearings has any doubt that I am fully prepared for every single hearing on the Financial Services Committee. I've released a number of terrific bills that I'm really proud of,

most of them bipartisan on things like mental health, on the cost of child care. So for me, I am working hard on a whole bunch of important legislative initiatives. Just today, I took to the House floor to try to get additional funding for to test rape kits. We have 13,000 plus rape kits in California that have not been analyzed. And those are victims and survivors who are waiting potentially for justice. So it is absolutely important that I continue working for my constituents and for the American people on legislative priorities. But that does not stop me from also being able to read the Mueller report, from talk with colleagues to study some of these concepts like executive privilege and how they apply and don't apply and then be able to make a decision.

We haven't had you on the show since you've actually been to Washington. And I am just curious, how has serving in Congress been? What have been the best parts and the worst parts about it? Yeah, it's funny. I thought a lot about something that my former teacher, Elizabeth Warren, said when she first went to Washington and I think was working on the oversight of the bank bailout. Somebody asked her a similar question, you know, do you like Washington? And she said something like, I'd rather poke my eyes out every day than go to Washington. It's a challenging environment here. I do think the freshman class and my class of colleagues among the freshmen,

both on the Democratic side, but there are some strong representatives, I think, in the freshman class on the Republican side as well. I think that has been an incredibly important part of my experience to come in with a group of people who really ran on values, who have substantial expertise in other areas. So just today I was talking to Lauren Underwood, my colleague who used to be a nurse, about a health care initiative that I want to work on. I went up yesterday to talk to Congressman Tom Malinowski to give his thoughts about a national security issue. So that camaraderie among freshmen and just the depth of expertise in issues

that the freshman class brings, I think, for me has been the most rewarding part of doing it. The worst part by far is just flying from California to here. I fly back and forth every weekend. And there's just no easy way to make that happen. No, that is always the hardest part for members who have to travel across the country. That is always the hardest part for members who have to travel across the country. How do you think your freshman class, which, you know, has been, as you point out, lauded by everyone for the talent in it, the diversity of backgrounds and experiences. How can your freshman class change how Congress is run? So we talk about this, the freshman class talks about this all the time, about kind of, the way I like to talk about it is sort of, is Congress going to imprint onto us,

or are we going to kind of imprint and shape this Congress? There's a committee to modernize Congress that was formed by Speaker Pelosi. I think rather unfortunately it doesn't have any freshmen on it, but it's not true. It has Mary Gay Scanlon. I take that back. It has my colleague Mary Gay, who's terrific on it. But that Committee to Modernize Congress has had many opportunities for members to get engaged, and the freshman class has done so. So my colleague Dean Phillips, for example, has talked a lot about the need to have bipartisan working spaces so that Democrats and Republicans can sit down together and meet and sort of run into each other in our everyday

business and really working on trying to think about, for example, the ethics rules that we have in Congress, focus on a lot of prohibiting a lot of things that I think the American public would support. For example, I have a constituent who's dying if she doesn't get a bone marrow transplant, and I wanted to publicize these bone marrow drives that we were doing in the district. I myself got swabbed as a donor, potentially to help save a life. And the Congressional Ethics Committee said I could not publicize bone marrow drives, that that would be an ethical violation. At the same time, we have all kinds of sort of patently unethical behavior going on in this Congress that the committee has nothing to say

about. And so I do think freshmen kind of questioning, why are these the rules? Who makes these rules? Why are we doing it this way? How can we improve it? There's a lot of that that goes on, on everything from the schedule to, like I said, the kinds of meeting spaces that we have. Last question for you. You bring up the idea of bipartisan meeting spaces. Do you, now that you are in Congress and, you know, either being in a committee or on the floor with Republican members, do you see a world in which Democrats and Republicans in the nearish future could have a more cooperative relationship in Congress? Or are we sort of doomed to the polarization that we've had for the last, you know, at least decade? I mean, I think at the top levels, I'm very discouraged about that in terms of the president. I mean, when President Trump said that if we in Congress continue to do our constitutional duty

to conduct oversight, that he would not be willing to work with us on prescription drug pricing and on transportation and infrastructure. That was terribly discouraging to me and I think should send a real signal to the American people about where Trump's priorities are. They should be with solving problems for the American people, not with punishing those who do their job and who have different role in government than he does. At the level of my fellow congressional Republicans, I think it's really been about, you know, not assuming what they believe, but really going up and trying to pitch them on bills. And I've had some of them come up and try to pitch me on bills. And so, you know, we're not always going to find that common ground, but I think creating those repeated relationships where they say, I want to do something about this.

Does that interest you? And you say, maybe I'm working on this. Would you be willing to co-sponsor that? We need a lot more of those conversations going on at the member level, not just at the leadership level if we're going to make progress. level, not just at the leadership level, if we're going to make progress. Congresswoman Katie Porter, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to be on Podsafe America. Thanks so much. Thanks to Katie Porter for joining us. And oh, a little note, we will be recording next week's pods note we will be recording next week's pods on tuesday we will have our tuesday pod with uh john tommy and me and then on friday we will have a special in studio podcast debate special with

me dan tommy and john love it all four of us here in studio will be talking about the two nights of debate proceeding. So tune in for that next Friday. So it's Tuesday, Friday next week, not Monday, Thursday. All right, everyone. Have a good weekend. Be prepared for all the theater criticism

and optics discussion you can possibly handle. The figure skating judges will be here. Bye, Dan. Bye, guys.