Pod Save America - “Trump’s Grand Opening.”

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

Trump reignites the debate over when to re-open the country against the advice of public health experts in his own administration, his campaign launches a Blame China strategy, and Democrats use their leverage to fight for a relief bill that helps workers and voters. Then Salon writer Amanda Marcotte talks to Tommy about her reporting on a sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden. Crooked non-medical masks, with proceeds going to the Coronavirus Relief Fund: crooked.com/store

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's pod, Tommy talks to Salon's Amanda Marcotte about her reporting on a recent sexual misconduct allegation against Joe Biden. Before that, we'll talk about the debate over when and how to open up the country, Trump's blame China strategy, and the negotiations over the next economic relief bill in Congress. But first, Lovett, how was the show this weekend? We had a great Lovett Relieve It. Guy Branum judged my monologue. Emily Heller gave us a tour of her garden that I was against doing, but happened anyway. And Dr. Joseph Meltzer from

UCLA talked to us about what was happening on the ground at hospitals across the country. Plus, we talked to some listeners. It was a great show. hospitals across the country. Plus we talked to some listeners. It was a great show. Awesome. One more note. The CDC says we should all be wearing cloth face coverings whenever we leave the house.

We've actually been ordered to do so here in Los Angeles. So if these have been hard to come by or make, we've got you covered. We are now offering three packs of reusable non-medical masks on the Crooked store. 100% of the proceeds go to our coronavirus relief fund. You can find them on crooked.com slash store. I ordered some last night

when I knew that the link went live. I'm very excited. Really kind of shaming me for getting some for free. Oh, how did you do that? I didn't do it. I didn't do it. I'm gonna buy them. I'm gonna buy them.

Okay, great. Well, either way. Okay, let's get to the news. Here's where we are. Over half a million Americans have been infected with COVID-19, and we have now lost more than 20,000 lives to the virus. It is now the leading cause of death in the United States. Just to put this in context, you know, the Iraq war, which raged on for a decade, we lost under 5,000 American lives in that war. So it is just horrific. In response to this catastrophe, the president spent the weekend on Twitter attacking anyone who's ever criticized the government's response, which he then bragged about as follows, quote, for the first time in history, there is a fully signed president disaster declaration for all 50

states. We are winning. So congrats on that, I guess, to him. Trump also reignited the debate about when it's safe to leave our homes and go back to work amid reports that he's eyeing May 1st or sooner when asked about what metrics are informing his decision about when to relax the CDC's social distancing guidelines, the president pointed to his head and said, that's my metrics. Lucky us. Love it.

Trump tweeted this morning that, contrary to news reports, this is his decision and not up to the states. Is he right? And what powers does he actually have here? He's not right. Obviously. That was an easy one. He's not right. Constitution says so. You know, first of all, it's amazing. You know, the the the suggestion that he's not making every decision really rankles him. It bothers him. And yet any blowback for any decision that has even the slightest of negative ramifications,

he denies any culpability for. He's evaded hard decisions this entire time. He's left it up to governors and mayors. Now, largely a lot of these authorities resort to governors and mayors, but he's also not even imposed sort of basic kind of leadership of suggesting what he thinks a lot of governors and mayors can do. Ron DeSantis refused to close the beaches in Florida for weeks on end. Mike Pence called him decisive in the briefing room and Trump refused to criticize him. So, no, it's not it wasn't his decision to make any of these closures. It's not his decision to make any of these closures. It's not his decision to undo any of these closures. And there's no one singular big decision for him to make.

The truth is that we're going to have to make a lot of very hard decisions over time to slowly reopen the economy. So on top of it not being true, it's also not preparing the country for just how hard the next few months and even the next year is going to be. Yeah, I mean, obviously, the CDC has guidelines for social distancing, but they are guidelines. This is largely up to governors, local leaders, businesses, right? But as you point out, he wants the credit for the easy stuff, and he doesn't want to make the hard decisions because he doesn't want the blame for anything that goes wrong. Tommy, you know, we heard over the weekend that, you know, we had heard from public health experts, governors of both parties, even Trump administration officials, all saying that the May 1st deadline isn't realistic. What are some of the reasons they're giving?

So, I mean, Dr. Redfield, the CDC director, said, I think this morning that reopening would have to play out community by community and county by county even. But first, that we would need to substantially augment our public health capacity to do early case identification, isolation and contract tracing. So that's a quote. And that's the key here. I mean, we did not have a national nationwide quarantine like Levitt was just talking about. Some states and localities move faster than others to enforce social distancing. Some really didn't do much at all. So that means that while New York City maybe is peaking in terms of cases, hopefully, fingers crossed, Florida could have a rough road ahead. So debating reopening the country is just dumb and it makes no sense. And it's like classic Trump to make us talk about something that isn't realistic. But more importantly, we haven't used this time to adequately ramp up testing or hospital capacity to prepare us for whatever a phase two post early

social distancing reopening is. And I think this is the part people really need to understand, because reopening almost certainly doesn't mean going back to normal life. It means massive, almost unimaginable changes to our own lives. Things like nationwide random testing at the scale of every individual is tested once every two weeks, maybe. That's an idea that's been floated. Huge new digital surveillance capacity for the government or some entity to trace our contacts. If we get the disease, we're using our cell phone GPS data. That will require tens, if not hundreds of thousands of new employees to actually do this tracing. We'll have to have mass serology testing to see who may have had COVID and not known it or, you know, now has immunity.

And there are people talking about plans to basically conscript individuals who have the disease now of immunity into high risk jobs. who have the disease now of immunity into high-risk jobs. And so, you know, they're also, I think we probably need to have improved treatments that are short of a vaccine that would reduce the mortality rate. And so if you don't do all those things, you're just gonna lead to a scenario where there's another mass of new infections,

healthcare workers are overwhelmed. And so like, I would point to the World Health Organization where an official said that the virus is gonna stalk the human race for quite a long time until we have a vaccine. And like that is the reality probably of the next year or two. And what's dangerous about what Trump is doing is he's giving political cover to a bunch of governors and local officials who want to be able to say we're back to normal, but we're not even close. I think the important point you make there is this is not going to be easy no matter what you do. And this idea, this false choice between like, should we protect people's health or reopen the economy is completely absurd, right? Like sick workers aren't productive workers. Scared consumers

don't go buy products, right? Trump could order the entire, say he had the power, he could order the entire economy open tomorrow. Business leaders could decide our doors are open. Governors could all decide to agree with Trump. And what would happen? Most people would either not want to go back to work because they don't feel safe, or they wouldn't want to go to restaurants or buy products or go shopping because they feel like they're going to get sick. I mean, the latest Fox News poll has 80% of voters favoring a federal stay at home order for everyone other than essential workers. So one poll here in LA, 95% of people here in Los Angeles agree with the stay at home order. So this idea that it's the economy or our health is so ridiculous. Like if everyone went back to work tomorrow, if all the

businesses opened, millions and millions of people would get sick and the economy would not get better. Like that would be a worse economic situation than we have right now. If we have millions of new infections and hundreds of thousands of more deaths by opening up the economy right now. And Trump doesn't he does. I mean, people are telling him that, but he doesn't seem to really grasp that. And he doesn't seem to want to make any of the hard decisions to plan for mass testing and serology tests and surveillance and all the things that Tommy just mentioned that we need to do in order to go back to normal. Trump does leave an out for himself. Well, I don't want to do it if we're not going to be healthy. He always throws an out inside of his saying, we're going to open back up. We're going to open back up as if there's some possibility that we could open up on May 1st without it being a risk to people's health. He always sort of gives himself an out to keep

pushing the date back. But even if you even if you look at his behavior recently, right, which involved him saying we'll be open by Easter, then taking it back, having Pence go out there and saying it's 15 days to stop the spread, and then 15 days later saying it's 30 days starting now to stop the spread. Even if you take all of that- It's always 15 days away.

It's always 15 days away from stopping the spread. Like, even if he doesn't make some calamitous, dangerous decision, saying that he wants governors to do this and blames governors for any economic pain by calling on them to open it, even if it's not time, even if he doesn't do something that reckless and dangerous, what's happening right now is reckless and dangerous. Suggesting that we could do it is reckless and dangerous because other than Fauci, occasionally in answer to a question saying reopening the economy isn't a light switch.

It's going to be hard other than the epidemiologists and experts who are screaming as they were in February about what the disease could do, screaming now that we have not fully countenance is how dangerous some of this talk is because it doesn't let Americans know with give them a reasonable expectation of what the future is like, what it looks like to begin slowly on unfling the economy, to begin coming out, even though we won't be able to go to restaurants as much, we won't be able to go to live events, we won't be able to go back to normal, we won't be able to sit in the same room with a lot of people, that their inability to set those expectations is going to cost lives because people are going to get tired of being in their homes with all this uncertainty, with all this inability to know what the future holds because they can't trust their leaders and they're not getting good information.

People are not going to take this for an entire summer if they don't get real, actual guidance from experts about what actually has to happen. What's infuriating is that it seems to be a choice between do we all stay home or does Trump get his way and we all go back? And the solution, you know, as Tommy was talking about, is a plan for massively ramping up testing, massively ramping up surveillance and contact tracing. And, you know, we've seen a lot of plans over the last week or a couple of weeks offered by policy wonks, mayors, governors of both parties, business leaders. Joe Biden just wrote a New York Times op-ed about it. What are some of the common themes in these plans and what parts what parts jumped

out as you as particularly important or realistic that we should really be pushing the federal government to do? I mean, I think we covered the core thing, so I don't want to repeat a bunch of stuff. But like I thought the the Biden op-ed was good in that what Biden seems to get is that Trump refuses to acknowledge that we are going to be dealing with this for a year or two and that we're going to have to totally rethink nearly every element of public life to deal with it. So, for example, Biden cites the need to rethink how offices and restaurants and factories are laid out to make them safer so that we could return to them. I mean, we're going to need that kind of thinking on a national, if not global scale. Think about buses, subways, emergency room waiting areas, movie theaters, Uber rides. Like someone has to be thinking all of those things we do in our general lives before we can resume those activities and call them safe. Maybe there's a way where we are doing, you know, practicing new ways of protecting

ourselves and others with masks, wearing gloves all the time. I don't know, a bunch of shit that makes it acceptable levels of risk. But like the thinking needs to be that big and that dramatic. And that is after all the testing and serology and surging of infrastructure. And what Trump seems to like more than anything is the drama of it all. Right. Like you read that insane tweet. I mean, imagine FDR treating like, you know, congrats for the first time we've Pearl Harbor has been bombed. Like it makes absolutely no sense to think that that's a thing to be excited about or proud of. that's a thing to be excited about or proud of. But what's frustrating about this conversation, as with so many in the Trump era, is like, we're debating the wrong thing. We're debating this narrative about him being this big decider when the reality is he has very little control. What also comes through all of these different versions of a plan is just how hard it is, just the extraordinary scale of what they're going to say we need to do. Like, extraordinary scale of what they're going to say we need to do. Contact tracing like they did in South Korea, color me skeptical about America's capacity under this president at this time with

the mistrust of institutions and the kind of whatever sclerotic nature of our response so far that we'll be able to ramp something like that up and say, okay, so then we're gonna need to test everybody. Fine. Okay. We need to find out new ways to go to restaurants. Restaurants are going to what half their capacity. Like I rest was the restaurant business fun and easy when they could fill up their restaurants. Like the, the scale of what we're calling for. A lot of this is like a bunch of different, nearly impossible things that we're going to have to choose instead of the impossible things. And again, like if we had a like we had a Democratic president right now, there would be a bunch of incredibly big and important conversations going

on and meetings going on and proposed plans going on. And then Republicans saying the Democratic president wants to destroy the economy because they're being specific about X, Y and Z. There'd be a real debate. It would be on a lot of bad faith and lies and deception, but there'd be a genuine debate about the really difficult set of decisions that are going to be made over time, which Trump is not interested in. I was just going to say, like, you know, we had a pretty competent administration. We had a tricky time with healthcare.gov and the rollout. Under the most competent administration you could imagine, this would be the most enormous challenge that government had faced in a century more to try to do what we need to do to sort of get back to normal. Right.

Contact tracing. They're thinking you'd need 100,000 workers, paid or volunteer, to start doing contact tracing. Surveillance. Right. Apple and Google last week partnered so that, you know, on your phone using your Bluetooth. So it's not, you know, privacy experts were like more okay with this than usual. If you walk by someone, the Bluetooth will let you know that that person has tested positive. But of course, that's only voluntary, right, to protect people's privacy. So none of these things are perfect. All

of these solutions are going to require the type of imagination and competence that we have never seen from the Trump administration. And by the way, they all call for a federal response, not a state by state thing. Right. Like, you know, Boston's doing some interesting things. They're already having serology tests here in L.A. Right. Like individually, different states and cities can maybe do some of this. But, you know, say everything's going great in California and we're testing and tracing everyone. Still going to be people coming in from Florida to California,

which isn't doing too great. So what are we going to do about that? This is why you have a federal government. And Trump is too incompetent to run that federal government. And he just fundamentally does not want to ever condition the public for how hard something is going to be or offer bad news. And look, when you're talking about a best case scenario where the entire country willingly allows the Trump administration to track all of their movements and contacts,

like, hey, we all should be pretty freaked out by that. That maybe is something that like civil libertarians will decide is not worth it. And we should think of other avenues because it's a big deal and it's hard to unwind those powers once you've given them over a government. I just it's like like I don't want to be we're not in the prediction business. What planet? Where is this happening? Like, are we are we like a massive surveillance? It's happening in Asia right now. Yeah, sure. We're in the United States of America in this climate. I think that I think the only choice is that or stay home. It's that or a lockdown that lasts for a year or 18 months. And I think that I think given those choices, people might be willing to give a little on privacy if it's the kind of thing where I mean, what's going to happen is if it's voluntary for a lot of these things, it's less effective, but it's better for privacy. Well, you start to see, right, you start to see how actually you choose parts of all of these things and you muddle through with some opening and then closing with scaling up testing

and try to get as much testing as you can, especially for people who are high risk or maybe exposed some contact tracing in some areas where there's some capacity like you can, especially for people who are high risk or maybe exposed some contact tracing in some areas where there's some capacity, like you can conceive of California, which has responded incredibly well, having the competence and ability to deploy some of the some of the measures that that we won't be able to do nationally. You start to see how this gets to be an ugly muddle. But then you realize why companies like Morgan Stanley, who are just watching the money, look at this and say, here's what we think for the next year and a half. Here's what's going to happen. Investors need to know we're going to maybe have another peak next year.

We're not going to fully come out. That won't be done until there's a vaccine. Like the people in charge of money are able to tell each other the truth about this. Yeah. I just think I think all this comes down to every single one of these briefings. Reporters should be pressing Trump and Fauci and Bricks and everyone else up there. What is the plan? What is the plan for more testing?

What is the plan for serology testing, for testing asymptomatic people? When is it coming? When is it happening? Like, forget what was going through your mind when you made the biggest decision of your presidency. Where are the fucking tests? What's the plan? We know what was going through his mind. It was Fox News. Yeah, right. And the fucking CEOs who have been yelling at him that they want the economy open

because, you know, they can protect themselves, just not their workers. So Trump isn't very focused on plans, but he is focused on who he's going to pin this thing on so he can avoid blame for the response. The Trump campaign ran an ad late last week that blamed China for the coronavirus and accused Joe Biden of being too China friendly. The Daily Beast says this is now a central strategy of the Trump campaign, make China the villain. And some Democrats, they say, are worried it might work. First of all, Tommy, can you untangle for us the question of how much

responsibility China has in the spread of coronavirus in the first place? I mean, obviously, they didn't create the virus themselves, but I do think they deserve blame for how they initially handled the coronavirus. China censored news about the spread. I don't think anyone should believe the official figures about the death toll, for example. should believe the official figures about the death toll, for example. But I mean, anyone familiar with the Chinese government's handling of incidents like this should not have been surprised by that. And we know that U.S. intelligence officials were warning about COVID back in November and that that information was briefed to the White House, the Defense Department, and was in Trump's PDB in January. I mean, for God's sake, Peter Navarro was writing memos that

sort of spelled out the stakes of what could happen in January. So it didn't take a genius to figure this stuff out. Now, in terms of Trump's attack, I mean, it's probably effective, right? I mean, xenophobic racist attacks tend to work with his base. Democrats tend to fight back by calling it racist, which doesn't rebut the core argument that Trump is making. But I think the challenge for Trump is that he repeatedly and effusively praised Xi Jinping's handling of coronavirus. His secretary of state bragged about sending tons of PPE to China. So Trump was either knowingly lying about China's response, or he was too stupid to know what was happening. He was getting spun by Xi Jinping. Trying to make this about Biden being soft on China, to me, is just factually ridiculous. My fear is that Trump has

this massive structural advantage of huge social media followings, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in money that he's raised, and they can flood the zone, both in earned and paid media, to tell a story that muddles things. And I think that's something that all Democrats should be quite concerned about. Well, but what did you think of the ad? And why was it a little off? Well, yeah, I mean, it's off because it's, I mean, it's full of lies and misinformation. It has a picture of Gary Locke in it, who's just an American. misinformation. It has a picture of Gary Locke in it, who's just an American. So just sort of just, you know, it's just sort of like he's Asian. So that's bad as far as the ad is concerned.

But yeah, I mean, look, when I saw the ad, what I thought is, oh, wow, Trump genuinely believes this is a liability for him. When Trump and the Trump people view that they have a liability, their first goal is to try to get some of the stink shared, right? That's what they did with Hillary Clinton and corruption. That's what they're going to do with Biden with China, because they know they have a real liability here. That said, it's like, you know, this is just a it's a classic kind of two things can be true situation, right? Like, I see a lot of Republicans, Kevin McCarthy did it today. They're like, they're trying to scapegoat China because there are legitimate questions about what China did and didn't do as coronavirus was taking hold.

None of that detracts from the failure of the Trump administration to not buy China's spin and not do enough to protect the country. Their one decision they keep hanging their hat on is that he decided to close the borders is a little bit like, you know, saying you close the safe door after the bank robbers got away. Everyone knows this. Everyone understands this. But he's going to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it because it's the one talking point they think they have in the face of their kind of terrible early response. Yeah, I mean, you know, Republicans always need an enemy. Having it be an invisible enemy as the virus is not really good enough. having it be an invisible enemy as the virus is not really good enough. You know, I think back to sort of after 9-11, right, the terrorists were the enemy. They had a clear enemy and Democrats were

not tough enough on terrorists. And that was basically the that was the play for the next decade for Republicans. Trump wants to do this again with China. He used China as a wedge issue in 2016, except it was about trade. He tried to say that, you know, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats weren't tough enough on China. So this is in his wheelhouse anyway. You know, Center for American Progress did some message polling on Trump's coronavirus response. And they found that, you know, the one thing that people are giving Trump a lot of credit for is this travel ban for China. So it is it could be an effective argument. I think what Democrats have

to make sure we do is not give him an inch on this. Right. Like, you know, on February 25th, Trump said and Tommy was talking about how he praised China on February 25th. Trump said that China was working very, very hard to contain coronavirus, adding that, quote, they're getting it more and more under control. On February 26th, Biden rebutted this line saying, I would not be taking China's word for it. I would insist that China allow our scientists in to make a hard determination of how it started, where it's from, how far along it is. You talked about how the ban itself was both too late and not tough enough. 400,000 people came from China here before the ban was instituted. thousand people came from China here before the ban was instituted. And even after the ban was instituted, 40,000 people came from China because it wasn't a strong enough ban. So you've had

Trump praising China's response to this back in February. You have a ban that was instituted too little too late. And so I think what Democrats have to make sure we do is don't let him have this issue. Don't let him be the tough on China guy here and pretend that he instituted this travel ban that did anything or that he didn't just praise and get rolled by the Chinese government throughout the whole beginning of this crisis. Well, the other key on the ban is that all it was going to do ever, even if perfectly implemented, was buy time to ramp up our capacity to test and treat people and, you know, get more N95 masks and ventilators. And we pissed away that time. So glad you did the ban, but you squandered all the head start it might have given us. If I was the Biden campaign or any progressive groups that run ads, I would put together an ad immediately of all the times that Donald Trump praised China, give people information about how they shipped 18 tons of medical equipment to China

when Trump's own cabinet officials were begging for more protective medical gear, and also talk about how the ban wasn't actually as effective as he brags about. I would put that in an ad very quickly because they are going to make China the enemy and they're going to say the Democrats are soft on China. They're tough on it and they're going to make the whole response about that. So I would I would get on that if I was the the Biden folks. I also just would add to like it's a larger argument, but it's an argument that can become part of sort of the 2020 conversation around China, which is how this fits into the larger questions about our supply chains, our reliance on China. And again, you will see Trump try to get better chains, our reliance on China. And again, you

will see Trump try to get better than Democrats on that. And while you've seen over the past sort of three years, Democrats like Sherrod Brown not instinctively argue in favor of certain kinds of trade agreements and what have you, because they understand that there's a legitimate, important place where Democrats need to get some leverage. Democrats just need to be smart on this issue, too. They need to not let Trump own trade with China, too, especially when what we've seen is some of our supply chains and a lot of other economic challenges have been born of our reliance on Chinese manufacturing. All right. Since we've had 16 million people filing for unemployment in just three weeks and parking lots full of cars in line for food banks, let's talk about the debate in Congress over more economic relief. So the original plan was to negotiate a fourth stimulus bill, which has earned the catchy nickname Phase 4.

which has earned the catchy nickname Phase 4. But then last week, Mitch McConnell said that even before Phase 4, he wants to get another $250 billion out the door to shore up the Paycheck Protection Program, which gives small businesses loans to cover the salaries of all employees making under $100,000. And they don't have to pay back those loans so long as they don't lay off their employees or cut their pay deeply. Democrats are saying, wait, hold up. We like that program. We're the ones who fought for it in the first place. But if we're going to vote for an emergency relief bill, let's make it sure it covers all the real emergencies here. One, there's a lot of small businesses in rural and urban communities that can't get big banks to give them loans under this

program. So we got to fix that. Two, we need more money for food assistance because people are going hungry. Three, we need more money for hospitals and health care workers. Four, we need more money for testing because that's the only way we get out of these lockdowns. And five, states and cities need money because they're at risk of going bankrupt. McConnell and the Republicans are so far saying, no, we refuse to negotiate and are accusing Democrats of, quote, blocking job saving funding unless we renegotiate unrelated programs. Tommy, how should the Democrats play this? I mean, the point of accruing political power is to use it. And that remains true in a time of crisis. And that's not a partisan statement. It's the Democrats believe that

our policies and ideas are better and will help more people. So we should fight for them. And Mitch McConnell is a disgusting, cynical monster. And but voters know that they agree. So like, I think you should fight a messaging war against him. Politico did this big piece on sort of hardball ideas for the phase four stimulus bill. And it like, you know, kind of crudely but accurately points out that the conundrum for Democrats politically is that when you help the economy, when you bail out governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida, who have totally screwed up the response, you're bailing out your opponents, right? And you're helping them politically. And while that's right, like there's just no way around it. So I think Democrats, you know, need to think about the long game here. And I think

we need to think about how bad this could be and how long it could last and like how many things could spiral out of, you know, an economic catastrophe that lasts 12, 18 months. And so that debate needs to be scoped around what do we need to do to help people? How do we fight for it? How long can we extend it without having to come back to Congress? So for example, like an automated sort of data-based extension of unemployment insurance or other payment mechanisms to individuals, that would be a good thing to fight for so that you don't have to go back to Mitch McConnell over and over again. I do think that like there was some stupid, silly stuff that was easy to

pluck out and demagogue in the last bill. No more like fucking Kennedy Center funding. Like let's force Republicans to pass and accept hundreds of billions of dollars of funding for hospital systems and for testing capacity. They want to make this economic in nature. But I think we need to fundamentally reject this idea that an economic relief bill cannot include like huge efforts to fix our health care system. So like, you know, it's easy to be worried about these arguments. McConnell says, oh, you're blocking critical funding, whatever. Like, I think this is the point of having Nancy Pelosi in charge and they need to step up now and make this bill better. Otherwise, it's going to turn into a giveaway to a bunch of businesses. Yeah. I mean, I want to talk about phase four in a second, but just on this sort of interim relief bill, the politics. So, you know, McConnell starts blaming the blaming Democrats and saying, oh, you're blocking job

creating measures and sky is falling and all this bullshit. And then Mnuchin starts talking to Pelosi anyway to negotiate. And Trump at the briefing basically hints that he's game too, because Trump knows that he needs as much economic stimulus as possible to make the economy better, because he knows that his entire reelection hinges on this. So it's not just that like Democrats have leverage, which they do, and they should use it. But they also like Trump needs a better economy. He realizes that. I don't know what the fuck Mitch McConnell is thinking, but Trump realizes he needs this. So I think that gives Democrats even more leverage to ask for what they want. And, you know, a Senate Republican aide said to Axios this morning, for as much as we hate it, it's very

clear that Dems aren't just going to let the Paycheck Protection Program funding through on its own. You also saw bipartisan governors over the weekend. Larry Hogan in Maryland, a Republican, and Andrew Cuomo in New York wrote an op-ed about how states and cities need funding. So it does, I mean, love it. It seems like Democrats should learn a lesson from even how this interim bill is going as they look towards phase four in terms of how much leverage they have. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you look at just this one aspect of it, right, about re-upping these sort of forgivable loans for small businesses.

What is the argument about even on that one axis? It is that there are some businesses that have relationships with banks. They already have a lot of banking. They have a relationship that's allowed them to get access to loans. Other businesses that are either smaller or haven't gotten loans in the past or haven't built up a relationship with the banks are having more trouble accessing this program. Well, those are businesses that are maybe more on the brink and that need the help more urgently, but are maybe not a natural constituency of the Republican Party. So that's just sort of a good

example of where you need to get in there and force Republicans to do something for businesses that need the help most. And in the kind of larger context of phase four, you look at what's happening. And so what do we need to use our leverage for? I think it's two things. It's one, we need to do the most we can to help people in this emergency. And two, we need to do the most we can to protect our economy and democracy from future Republican sabotage. Because what we have learned from this crisis compared to 2008 is that when a Republican is in the White House, Democrats will do what it takes to save the country.

When a Democrat was in the White House, Republicans were willing to sacrifice the country for their own political ambitions. That will repeat if there's a Democratic president. That will repeat if Republicans are in a minority and or if Republicans can sabotage a Democratic effort in the future. And so everything we need to do is not. Yes, this is about politics, but it's also about our future ability to respond to a crisis. I just think this is like this is win win for Democrats either way. Right. bill that you believe is what is necessary to help people both fix the health crisis, the economic crisis, the democratic crisis, as you said, love it, right? You write the most ambitious bill possible. This is what we believe. Either you get Republicans and Trump to accept

that and then you go say this wouldn't have happened without Democrats fighting for it, or they don't accept it. And the campaign in November that Joe Biden runs and all the other Democrats becomes, here is what we believe America should look like right now. Here is our plan to rebuild America. It is focused on helping people. They are about helping their rich friends. They are about, you know, $500 billion bailouts with no strings attached. They are about helping the biggest companies. We are actually trying to help the people who have been hurt most by this crisis. And so like I, you know, Nancy Pelosi has a majority. She can negotiate all she wants with Mnookin and McConnell. That's fine. But pass the bill that you want to have passed.

I mean, Michael Grunwald in Politico, you know, he sketched out a few different scenarios about what it would look like if Democrats are actually willing to play hardball, which I think is a great piece. You know, more congressional oversight for any money that's going to businesses since we didn't have tough enough

oversight in the first bill. I think Tommy mentioned this, triggers so that future relief payments would automatically go out when unemployment rises to a certain level. So that, you know, if Joe Biden becomes president, suddenly the Congress says, oh, we're not giving you any more relief. Republicans in Congress just decide to cut it off like they did to Obama.

Funding for the kind of public health infrastructure that countries like South Korea are using to lift their lockdowns. What we just talked about, mass testing, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, a big jobs program. lockdowns, what we just talked about, mass testing, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, a big jobs program. And then most importantly, as we've been talking about, at least voting protections for November. I do think like, you know, we've talked about this a lot here, but we really, really got to make sure that that voting is that people feel safe when they vote. Yeah, they also just like they need to think a little bigger. I mean, I saw some data that like the UK is paying 80 percent of worker salaries. Denmark's doing 75.

South Korea is 70. We're like, hey, here's a one-time check for like $1,200, maybe a little more unemployment insurance. Like that's not going to cut it. And, you know, people are going to be in desperate situations pretty fast because the economy is not going to reopen up. Like things are not going to be normal. And we need to plan for that and plan for it over like a two year time frame. I'd also just would add to that, like, you know, one of the things we certainly shouldn't be worrying about is sort of like the short term claims by people like McConnell and McCarthy

and Trump that Democrats are holding it up, trying to trying to hurt the economy, won't want to help people. I mean, do we think, like, here we are, it's, you know, I've lost sense of time because we're all in our homes, but it's been, what, two weeks since the passage of the previous package that was, that Democrats fought and negotiated for some protections and some changes. During that negotiation, Republicans were saying they were destroying America, they were hurting people, they don't care about the economy.

I don't believe voters will be thinking about that in November of 2020, that two day period of of broad sides against Democrats. So the most I saw it. So as long as Democrats don't lose their nerve and so far, it seems like they are at least saying the right things about willing to fight. We have leverage. Yeah, look, there's been some good ideas out there, too. Schumer unveiled a proposal called the Heroes Fund that would provide $13 per hour hazard payments for frontline health care workers, grocery store clerks, truck drivers, drugstore workers, pharmacists.

Elizabeth Warren and Ro Khanna just released a workers' bill of rights plan today that also has hazard pay, like Schumer's bill, adequate protective gear, protections for unions, universal paid leave, funding for child care, whistleblower protections. protections for unions, universal paid leave, funding for child care, whistleblower protections. I agree, Tommy, that like, you know, Pramila Jayapal has a bill that would basically guarantee, you know, like sort of like the program in Denmark and some countries in Europe that would guarantee that you are paid while staying home. You know, some people here say what we did in the last bill for unemployment insurance, which is for the average worker, 100% paycheck replacement is just as good as that. Though, again, you like the difference between unemployment when you have to leave your job versus just being able to still be employed and get paid, I think is a real difference to talk about. So there's plenty of good ideas here. But I just think Democrats

need to be as ambitious as possible. We mentioned that we've been focused a lot on the voting part of this here at Crooked. A lot of you have asked us what we can do about it. So we are launching a new call tool on Vote Save America that will help connect you directly with your representatives and give you a script to help you out with what you need to say. If you go to votesaveamerica.com slash call, you can get connected. Here's what you can ask for when you reach out to your representative. You should say that Congress should pass a fourth coronavirus relief package that includes at least two billion dollars in safe election money. They should require states to invest in expanded vote by mail and early voting, and they should ensure that in-person

polling locations have the resources they need to operate safely and efficiently. Voting thing is it's a big one it's a big one it's it's sort of uh the thing that keeps me up at night you know yeah all right great so uh again vote save america.com slash call check it out uh also before we go uh some breaking news here in the middle of the podcast bernie sanders has endorsed joe biden uh i think it's in a zoom call i think it is too as uh as all good endorsements happen. So it's great. It's a full throated endorsement basically says today I'm asking all Americans, I'm asking every Democrat, every independent, and I'm asking a lot of Republicans to come together

and support your candidacy, which I endorse. They also announced a joint task force between Sanders and Biden worked on by their staffs to talk about, you know, various progressive issues and policy positions. So that's some good news. Yeah. Good for Bernie. Good for Bernie. Good for Biden.

And, you know, it's I think both of them realize this is this is bigger than either of them. So that is a that is a good sign. OK, when we come back, we'll have Tommy's interview with Amanda Marcotte. I am now joined by Amanda Marcotte, a politics writer for Salon and the author of Troll Nation, How the Right Became Trump Worshipping Monsters, set on rat fucking liberals, America and the truth itself. That is just a phenomenal book title. Thank you. Thank you for doing the show. Thank you for having me.

Appreciate it. So, Amina, thank you for doing this show today. And I just want to warn listeners in advance that what we're going to be talking about are sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden. So this is a difficult subject matter, and I want to warn people in advance. So until this weekend, only you and a couple of other news outlets had reported on these sexual assault allegations. And then on Sunday, there were a series of investigative reports about a former aide to Joe Biden named Tara Reid, who was accused Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993 when he was a U.S. senator and she was a staff assistant. Can we start with the basics of the story? And could you walk us through the allegations that Ms. Reid is making against Joe Biden?

Yeah. So she worked for Senator Joe Biden or Joe Biden when he was a senator in the 90s like for a few months in 1993 basically and about I'd say a year ago she came out when there were a lot of reports of Joe Biden's like discussion of Joe Biden's kind of handiness the the way he touches people's hair and their shoulders and stuff and she said that when she worked for him, that he would do things like put his hand on her neck and run his finger on her neck and do other things like that without her permission. Her discussing that really didn't rise to anybody's attention. It was covered by like a local newspaper in her part of California.

And that was basically it at the time. newspaper in her part of California. And that was basically it at the time. And then I'd say a few weeks ago in March, she started a few months ago, she started hinting on Twitter that there was something more to it. And then in March, she gave an interview to Katie Halper on a podcast called Useful Idiots, where she accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her, of pushing her up against a wall and digitally penetrating her against her will. And that's kind of the sum of it. There's not a whole lot more to the accusation.

Yeah. So I should read the Kate Bedingfield, who's Biden deputy campaign manager, told a number of outlets that Vice President Biden has dedicated his life to changing the culture and the laws around violence against women. He authored and fought for the passage and reauthorization of the landmark Violence Against Women Act. He firmly believes women have a right to be heard and heard respectfully. Such claims should also be diligently reviewed by an independent press. What is clear about this claim? It is untrue. This absolutely did not happen. So I just want to read the Biden campaign

statement. And so you hinted at something that I think is important, which is I think following this subject can be confusing for readers because there are these two distinct allegations and they've come out at different times. So this year, most recently, Reid alleged that Biden sexually assaulted her. Previously, she described separate incidents of sexual harassment. So in April of 2019, she described to her hometown paper in the Washington Post these incidents of sexual harassment. Those included things that you described like Biden rubbing her shoulders or neck in a way that made her feel uncomfortable. There was also an allegation that she had been asked to serve drinks at a fundraiser because Biden thought she had nice legs. That was something she said she overheard two other staffers talking about and not Joe Biden himself say that.

And so like you noted, this was during a period where there was considerable coverage of what was described as unwanted touching, creepiness, inappropriate behavior given a power dynamic and not sexual assault. And so I raise this not because I think one allegation invalidates the other in any way. But I do think that understanding the details of the story, including what details were sort of shared contemporaneously, can be hard to follow in some of the reporting. And so I was hoping to just lay it out for folks. I mean, can you talk a little bit about the allegations of sexual harassment that were also made? the allegations of sexual harassment that were also made?

Yeah. So basically at the time Tara said, told this reporter and she repeated this to me when I interviewed her, that she just kind of felt like there was an atmosphere in Biden's office of, of like a kind of madman type atmosphere, right? kind of madman type atmosphere, right? That she repeatedly felt pressured to be kind of a pretty girl and a sex object in the office, that she was asked to serve drinks, and that she refused to do it. And then she said that she was punished, retaliated against by the staff for refusing to serve drinks. And then she said throughout this time, Biden was touching her like her neck and her shoulders and things like that.

And she said that she complained about it to multiple people to me. I got a hold of two of them and they said, no, that they don't recall any such kind of complaint. She says that she did not tell anybody in the office about the alleged assault at the time. So that, again, when I asked her about why she waited a year between saying that she was harassed in the office and then retaliated against and then saying that she was assaulted,

she told me that she got scared, basically, of saying more. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like she specifically felt like, I believe the journalist who worked for her hometown paper, she said she considered telling the full story to that individual, but felt shut down by the tone of the questioning. It was also notable that I believe she talked to the Washington Post the day after that story ran. And this was one quote the Post published yesterday that I thought, you know, I think that people are, I think we've learned that people talk about allegations of abuse in their own time, in their own way. And that trying to fact check them, I think, is unfair. But there was one quote that I thought was different, which was she said, talking to

the Post, I want to emphasize it's not him. It's the people around him who keep covering for him. Looking back now, that's my criticism. Maybe he could have been more in touch with his own staff. Do you think that this was sort of a quote that seems, it's hard to interpret given that the assault allegations are very clearly about him? Was this sort of compartmentalized, do we think, about the harassment allegations? It's tough to say because I think, unfortunately, one of the difficulties in reporting on this case, I found, is that there... Tara has said a lot of different things about Biden and her opinion of him over the years,

and it's gotten increasingly negative, and it sounds to me like what she was saying was that she reported sexual harassment to the people in charge and that that was all they were reacting to, if that makes any sense. So let's just talk about the evidence, um, that has been cited in these news stories, uh, including contemporaneous conversations about her treatment in Biden's office. So a number of news outlets have talked with Reid's brother and two friends at the time who say they recall talking with Reid about incidents in Biden's office. Reid, like you noted, says she raised harassment with her bosses in Biden's office. And she said she

filed a complaint through a Senate personnel office about allegations of harassment, but not the assault allegations. NBC News reported that if there were such a filing in a Senate personnel office, it would require a hearing by an independent board, but they haven't been able to find evidence of that happening yet. Were you able to talk to these individuals who had these contemporaneous conversations? And do you have a sense of whether we could, you know, investigative reporters or others could find these records that Reid says she filed with the Senate office? See, this is where it gets really confusing. So on the first part of the question,

I did ask Tara to connect me with the people that she said she told at the time, and she did not do that. I followed up. I asked on the phone. I asked on Twitter. She didn't get back to me. I don't know if it just didn't rate as important to her, or I don't know why she didn't.

I did find her brother's information, and I did contact him twice, and he also did not get back to me. So I wasn't able to independently verify any of that. It does sound like the New York Times and the Washington Post had more luck than I did. As for the paper filing, I haven't seen any evidence. It sounds like the New York Times and Washington Post reporters did do everything they could to try to turn that up and haven't had any luck.

When I talked to Tara, she emphasized more that she reported it in person to her supervisors. So that was what I got out of this story with her, was she was had meetings with people and asked them to do something about this. So that I felt like precluded a paper trail. And we didn't really talk about a paper trail. Right. Right. And so she talks about in some of the interviews talking to a woman named Marianne Baker, who was Biden's executive assistant at the time. Dennis Toner, the deputy chief of staff, and Ted Kaufman, Senator Biden's chief of staff at the time. Three individuals are obviously very close to Joe Biden, but all three say they don't recall the conversation or deny the conversation. Yeah, she told me about the conversations with Marianne and Dennis, and they have both denied it to me.

Okay. So then another update was last week, Reid filed a complaint with the D.C. police. She said she did so because she was being harassed online. She wanted the police to be aware of this harassment, I think, to protect herself. What do we know about filing this report or how it could maybe help an individual from harassment? Yeah, I guess all I would say is it sounds like it was a somewhat different process than what we usually think of when you're filing a police report because, and that might just be a result of how long ago it was, but I don't know anything about it, so I can't really speculate. Sure, sure, totally fair. So, you know, the New York Times, I mentioned how there were, you know, a bunch of stories. And the New York Times wrote in their piece, which appeared first on Sunday, quote, No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reed's allegation.

The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, end quote. But there have been several allegations of unwanted touching or violating personal space. That's obviously a different allegation than assaults. base that it's obviously a different allegation than assaults. But I mean, I guess if we're talking about patterns, I mean, how significant do you think that statement is from the times or important it is to evaluate patterns in cases like this? This is a tough one because the fact of the matter is, as I think we saw with the Me Too allegations that have come out over and over and over again, is that usually when you're dealing with men who sexually assault women,

they don't stop at one or only do it once, usually. It's a pattern of behavior for most men who do this, especially if they're older. pattern of behavior for most men who do this, especially if they're older. You know, it's not everybody's Harvey Weinstein. I mean, he's an extreme example, but it's pretty rare that there's only one. But I want to be clear that a lot of the time, especially when you're talking about a politician, they've met a lot of people. And so any reporter who's trying to shake the bushes to see if there's another allegation out there is like, going to inherently only be able to talk to a tiny fraction of the people that a politician or another powerful man like that's ever encountered. So sometimes what happens is you publish the story. And then all

these people start coming out of the woodwork. So I wouldn't discount that possibility just because at this point in time they haven't found anybody. So unfortunately, as painful as it is for us all to have to deal with it this way, it's a wait and see kind of thing. Right, right. And so to the wait and see nature, I mean, so I mentioned at the top, like before this weekend, it was noticeable that not a lot of major publications had yet published articles on the story. That changed Sunday when the New York Times, NBC, Washington Post, the AP all published these long pieces that they'd clearly been working on for weeks. Many of them talked about how they've been speaking with Misread for weeks, if not a year. You talked

about this in your piece, which emerged before this reporting. Can you talk about why you think it took so long for major outlets to run pieces on this? Should we interpret anything in that lag? And was there any like standout detail or reporting that you think sort of advanced the story or taught us new things this weekend? Yeah, so and I said this in my original piece, like I said, it came out a couple weeks ago. So to sort of give you an idea of why we were able to publish a little faster. It's a lot it's perversely because salon, we don't have like a lot of resources. I'm like a reporter at the New York times or the Washington post. I don't have a research assistant. You know, I don't have all these people to help me. It was just me and my editors, me making all the phone

calls, me working all weekend. And what I quickly realized after talking to Tara, after talking to the folks at Time's Up, after talking to at least one of the lawyers that Tara interviewed with and some other folks with the Biden campaign and stuff, it became pretty clear to me pretty early on that the chance of actually finding out what actually happened here, especially with our limited resources, was pretty low. And so I kind of refocused my investigation on trying to figure out what kind of political eruptions were coming from this and how much I could debunk the sort of conspiracy theories that were out there from both Biden supporters and Sanders supporters who were the people that were really kind of pushing this story early on. And that was the most I could do with my resources. But luckily, that was the kind of work that we could turn around really fast. I think that with the New York Times and Washington Post, even though they have a lot more resources than I do,

they were hitting their head against the same wall that I was hitting my head against early on, which was it was very difficult to figure out the truth of what actually happened in 1993 between Reid and Biden. And they, I think what happened is they just spent more and more time just trying to get all the like facts in the order and do all the interviews and, and see how many more people they could talk to just to see if there was any chance of finding something that could tell us the truth one way or another. And that just takes time. It's a lot of hurry up and wait, right? You file a FOIA request, you make phone calls, you try,

you ask everyone that you can find. FOIA request, you make phone calls, you try, you ask everyone that you can find. I didn't have to deal with that aspect of it quite as much. So I think it was a little easier for me to get it out fast. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, that makes total sense. I think it just speaks to how challenging it is to figure out anything that happened a long time ago. The challenge of reporting generally takes a lot of time, people are being conscientious. I guess you talked about the conspiracy theories. I mean, so this is one of them. And frankly, it's like the least interesting part of the story to me. But a lot of attention has been paid to Tara Reid's writings about Vladimir Putin. The very short version is she wrote some effusive things about Putin, like, quote, he's a compassionate, caring, visionary leader, which is obviously not accurate.

But, you know, it's not really relevant, except that there were all these accusations then that she was a Russian agent. And understandably, that really bothered her. And it seems like those accusations became part of why she sought and failed to receive support from the Times Up Legal Defense Fund in particular. So can you talk about the pood piece of this? Is it worth anyone's time to care or are people just like scarred and overreacting to 2016? You know, obviously that was a big part of the conspiracy theories that were going on online. So I looked into it. I was able to find the writings. She had written them on Medium and then deleted them.

I think obviously because it was embarrassing. And she was worried about that. When I asked her about it, she was pretty all over the place about what she believed about vladimir putin and um i think you know she just i think what the truth that's closest to it is that she did watch some oliver stone documentary and just got like caught up in like putin worship right um but ultimately have to conclude that if someone was a Russian agent they would do a better job of hiding that fact. Yeah, seems right. You know, like if Russia was paying you to spread propaganda around the

US you wouldn't like run around like saying things like that because it would just credit you, right I think I believe her that she just really got caught up in um some Oliver Stone style propaganda about Vladimir Putin and I think what's most important is I don't really see how that changes what happened between her by 1993 like people with bad ideas and bad beliefs can get sexually assaulted. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, frankly, I debated whether even to raise it. It's just, there's so much traffic online. If you search for this about that issue that, you know, it's, it's demoralizing. So look, we know, we just talked about these

allegations old and new for 25 minutes. I mean, do you have any advice for listeners who heard this conversation or read the stories and they feel like they're despondent? They don't know what to believe. We don't know how to process complicated, painful allegations like this in a way that, that, that is fair and factual? Is there any advice for listeners? I mean, I would just mostly caution patients. What was heartening for me in seeing the New York Times and the Washington Post and NBC News and all these other places publish pieces about this was that it was true that reporters were actually working on this reporters are actually working on this We may never know the truth of this and that may be something we just have to live with

But Like wanting the information right now and just feeling like if we don't have it right now then Everything is like hopeless or lost is not the attitude. I think everyone just needs to sort of wait and see. It's okay not to know. It's okay to say, I don't know. Yeah, that's a good, that's very good advice. I feel like we will continue following the story. Hopefully it'll be more reporting that offers more clarity, but Amanda, thank you so much for talking with me today. And everyone should check out your book, again, Troll Nation, How the Right Became. Trump Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-Fucking Liberals America in Truth Itself.

I just wanted to say it again, but thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Amanda, for joining us today. And I'll talk to you guys soon. See you later. Bye. us today and I'll talk to you guys soon. See you later. Bye. Pod Save America is a product of Cricut Media. The executive producer is Michael Martinez.

Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somanator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Reston, and Elisa Gutierrez for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian,

Yale Freed, and Milo Kemp, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.