Pod Save America - “Trump’s Grift-mas Miracle.”

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

Donald Trump unveils his own trading cards. Democrats look to finish 2022 on a high note as Republicans squabble about Kevin McCarthy. New polls show Ron DeSantis beating Trump, as Florida’s governor tries to out-crazy the state’s craziest resident. And then New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac joins to talk about the QAnon cult’s new love affair with Twitter’s new owner. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, Democrats look to finish 2022 on a high note while Republicans look like a train wreck. New polls show Ron DeSantis beating three-time loser Donald Trump as Florida's governor tries to out-crazy the state's craziest resident. But that was before the MAGA King's major announcement today. Aren't we lucky? We are very lucky today because we have dan in studio and we get to talk about trump's major i try as soon as trump truth that he had a major announcement i got on the first flight down here i had to be here for this so we'll talk about that in a little bit uh and then new york times reporter mike isaac joins to talk about the QAnon cult's new love affair with Twitter's new owner.

First, quick update on our holiday schedule. You'll be able to hear our annual holiday mailbag episode next Tuesday, December 20th. Our What a Year special on Thursday the 22nd. Then we're off for a week. And then we'll be back on our regular schedule starting on Tuesday, January 3rd. Over the break, you should also check out Crooked's newest podcast, Work Appropriate, where author and host Anne Helen Peterson brings on experts to help find answers to all of your workplace questions. New episodes drop every Wednesday. And finally, we want to thank you

again for all the ways you volunteered, donated, text banked, emailed, and knocked down doors for the midterms. Our friends at Vote Save America have compiled it all in one place at votesaveamerica.com slash 2022. Go take a look at your impact and enjoy a well-deserved victory lap during your holiday break. All right, let's get to the news. After a historically good midterm election, Democrats are feeling hopeful. Inflation is down. Gas prices are down. The economy's growing. President Biden's judges are being confirmed at a record pace. He signed a law protecting gay and interracial marriage this week. And both parties have struck a deal on a budget framework that would fund the government for a full year and reform the Electoral Count Act to help prevent a future coup.

So is it time to pop the champagne yet or what? You know me, always. Glass of champagne, half full. I suppose the budget deal could still fall apart over the next week. Sure. Because they agreed on a framework, which is not an actual budget. But at the very least, it seems like Democrats and a good number of Senate Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, want to get something done while Nancy Pelosi is still Speaker of the House. Why is that? Well, before we get to that, I would like to know that I do think all the things you said are great and that this could have been much much worse than it was but i am concerned that we have to pass a law protecting interracial

marriage here in 2022 yeah you know it's not a great statement about the state of affairs in this country well you know you got clarence thomas on the supreme court uh so just just writing an opinion in dobbs that maybe interracial marriage, maybe gay marriage, maybe contraception is next. But anyway. Let's get back to the budget deal. Yeah. We should also say there's a few other things that fell out that would have been important to include in sort of this lame duck session. There was some hope that the child care tax credit would get extended.

Who had that hope? I don't know. People who forgot who erased joe mansion from existence there's also the hope that there would be a deal that uh our our independent friend kirsten cinema and tom tillis were working out on dreamers on protecting the dreamers there's going to be an immigration deal that just fell out so there's a few things that fell out of this package at the end of the year that sort of it sucks that they fell out but hopefully we fund the government for the year that sort of it sucks that they fell out.

But hopefully we fund the government for a year. And the Electoral Count Reform Act would be a big deal if we get that done as well. Yeah, that would that would that would be superb. But why are they working so feverishly to get this done before Mitch McConnell's Republican colleague, Kevin McCarthy, or some other Republican colleague takes over the House? Because if there is one thing that Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill can agree on, it is that Kevin McCarthy is an incompetent loser. And so think about this. These Republicans are voting for this deal, believe in Republican principles. They would like a more Republican-friendly budget deal, better for corporations, less good for people who need help or whatever makes up conservative ideology in the back era. And they would certainly have a better chance of

doing that with Republican control of the house. But they think Kevin McCarthy is so dangerously dumb and so weak or whoever replaces him so dangerously dumb and so weak that they probably can't get a real deal done and the government would likely shut down. So they they are basically taking this decision away from the House Republicans because they think they are not up to doing it. Yeah. And it's not just how they feel about Kevin McCarthy. They think that the whole, most of the Republican caucus in the House is a bunch of lunatics. But they would be correct. Right. And I think there are a number of lunatics in the Senate Republican caucus as well that are going to try to oppose this deal.

But I think that McConnell probably believes he can get this thing done, that he has enough votes to get this thing done. Yeah, he only needs 10. Right. He only needs 10. So that's where we are. And Kevin McCarthy, by the way, is telling House Republicans to be against whatever deal comes out of this, whatever deal they end up with. And so they're not going to get any republican votes in the house but kevin mccarthy privately is probably hoping that the deal gets done because even he knows he's weak and incompetent yes yeah i i think he would like he he is going to vote no scream about it he told the republican caucus he is a quote hell no

on the vote right but he would he doesn't want this on his plate he would much prefer not to have to deal with this so mccarthy also uh still doesn't have the votes to be speaker uh even after the new york times reports that donald trump himself has been calling house republicans on behalf of his kevin meanwhile the five core members of the never kevin caucus told axios they intend to vote as a group. So if they vote no, we got ourselves a fucked Kevin. That's what we got. How do you think McCarthy gets the Never Kevin votes?

Also, by the way, there's now the, I guess you want to call them moderates, whatever you call them, the people who back Kevin McCarthy, they have started to oppose the never Kevin caucus. They have started an only Kevin caucus with little buttons that just say, okay. Which is more enthusiasm than anyone has ever had for Kevin McCarthy. How funny is that? It's like the most fervent backers of Kevin McCarthy, all they can muster is a little button that says okay like was kevin forever so hard all right so how does mccarthy get this done what happens if he doesn't the republican the conservatives the anti mccarthy the never kevins i guess never kevins the non-oks the not-oks uh they have made a list of demands of kevin mccarthy which some of which he can easily do like various investigations yes 72 hours between when a bill is released and voted upon

some things like that but there was one specific demand they want which which is they have the ability to have something called a motion to vacate the chair, which means that at any time, at any moment, a member of Congress can make a motion to basically have another vote on the speaker and to oust them. And that is eventually how John Boehner got pushed out of Congress because Mark Meadows, who would go on to move to the White House to commit many crimes, all of which will be recorded in text to various people. The iMessage bandit, I guess, is he made that motion about Boehner. And so that went away. So that does not currently exist. And McCarthy has refused to do it. He has gotten a group of 50 or so moderate house members to stop that. McCarthy is going to get this by giving them almost everything they want, including maybe

eventually the motion to vacate the chair, because he has no other option. He benefits from the fact, as we sit here today, is that there is no other person who seems to want the job who could get more than 30 votes. And the thing that probably scares McCarthy the most is that at some point they will go to Steve Scalise. Yeah. Well, and Punchbowl went to Steve Scalise and asked if he'd heard from members who would like him to become speaker instead of McCarthy. And all Scalise said in response to that was, I've had a lot of meetings with members and we're all talking about the agenda that we care about together. Like he just, he's, he's leaving it open. This is how Paul Ryan became speaker because McCarthy was the heir apparent when Boehner was forced out by Meadows. And he then had to drop

out for a whole host of reasons. But one of them was he, as a, as part of his bid to show that he should be speaker, he that the benghazi hearings were effective because they hurt hillary clinton politically and which seemed to be saying the quiet part out loud yeah in this day and age that would probably be completely appropriate even you even hearing that from you even though i i've lived through that i was like so quaint yeah but 2015 was a different era and he got drummed out and they went to paul ryan and so the fear here is that steve scalise could pinch it's just like laying in wait for when mccarthy either can't get the votes before the vote or fails on the first

vote which he is currently on the trajectory to do there's also some reporting uh i think in playbook around like what mccarthy might be able to give the never Kevins as a compromise on the motion to vacate. Cause right now what they want is any member can, can hold a vote. They think that maybe, you know, he offers them a deal like, okay, 30 to 40% of the caucus has to, has to put forward a motion to vacate, uh, for it to actually happen. So maybe he could like live with that. Um, how's Republicans also plan on reinstating a rule that allows Congress to zero out the salaries of individual government officials. Now, the House can go ahead and do this.

It won't pass the Senate since Democrats have control and Joe Biden has a veto pen. But I think it just goes to show when we look forward to the uh the debt limit fight it's not just that republicans could hold the economy hostage for spending cuts for getting rid of social security for getting rid of medicare whatever they want to do they could also try to play games around all right you have special counsel jack smith um who's investigating donald trump we're going to zero out his salary uh and if you don't do that then we'll blow up the global economy with the debt sale like there's a whole bunch of shit they can do here that's very very dangerous bring us hunter biden right but yeah exactly it i mean basically mccarthy is going to have to commit to a bunch of performative nonsense to the with that

has dramatic implications because of the the debt ceiling is this one point of leverage that this otherwise powerless body has. Yeah. I do think we're in for, I mean, we'll see what happens with this vote and if McCarthy can get, you know, strike some deals before the vote. But like, I don't know, you go one round and he doesn't win. Then you go a second round and he still doesn't win. At some point, you really could see them say, okay, well, the compromise is Scalise. No, for sure. For sure. I have to say I'm legitimately looking forward to podcasting about this in January. It is high on my list of things. And I genuinely don't know what's going to happen. I could see McCarthy striking some deal because none of these people have principles. So they're all willing to strike deals. I could see that happening or I could see it becoming total chaos. So Trump might be the

only person in politics having a worse end of the year than his Kevin. Until today. Well, so two new polls this week have him losing a head-to-head matchup with DeSantis by double digits. And he now has the lowest favorability rating among voters since he first announced for president in 2015. But of course, these polls were all conducted before what Trump billed as a major announcement that broke just before we started recording. Let's take a listen. Hello, everyone. This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington, with an important announcement to make. I'm doing my first official Donald J. Trump NFT collection

right here and right now. They're called Trump Digital Trading Cards. Each card comes with an automatic chance to win amazing prizes like dinner with me. I don't know if that's an amazing prize, but it's what we have. Or golf with you and a group of your friends at one of my beautiful golf courses, and they are beautiful. I'm also doing Zoom calls, a one-on-one meeting, autographing memorabilia, and so much more. We're doing a lot. My official Trump digital trading cards are $99, which doesn't sound like very much for what you're getting. So as one Twitter follower said, it's the grift that keeps on grifting. It's important to note, this is not a fundraising tactic for his campaign these are not nfts to memorabilia chance to win dinner

with trump if you give five dollars or ten dollars or a hundred dollars to win this is money going into his own pocket yeah i mean it's just it's stunning from a guy who it's like it's hard for him to surprise us i was surprised i was shocked was shocked. I was absolutely shocked. Like, I didn't think, I was not under the illusion that the major announcement would be all that major because the man just, like, will do anything to get attention.

But just the, the, the naked transparency of the grift. There's, like, nothing, he's not dressing it up with anything else. It's just, like, give me money for nothing

i think you're gonna hear from a lot of crypto bots for that just it is at john favs there is an entire industry of which trump has participated in of trump memorabilia if you ever watch fox news and i don't recommend it there are these commemorative Trump gold coins that exist. If you can buy this, these Trump watercolors of him, like crossing the Delaware or whatever else. But I would, as I would like stocking stuffers, people, you still have a couple of weeks, but to get these Trump digital trading cards, you need, according to the fine print of this, a functioning crypto wallet. Yeah, of course. What do you think the overlap is of people with functioning crypto wallets? That Venn diagram, those two circles never meet. I mean, it was also possibly a money laundering scheme for people who want to give Trump money to do it in a way in which no one will ever know they did it. Yeah.

Yeah, that's possible. I mean, so obviously Trump's pivot from dining with Nazis to hawking NFTs is impeccably timed. If you look at the crypto market. And you got to get in while the thing's going up. Trump buys the dip. The dip buys the dip. Impeccably timed, a typically shrewd gambit to change the narrative and command the spotlight. But will it work? Will it work? I mean, I just... Did we just rename this podcast The Situation Room?

I have to hand it to the White House. They immediately tweeted a tweet from President Biden that said, I've had some major announcements too. Lower inflation, lower gas prices,

Brittany Griner comes home, gay marriage. It was very good. It's good. Well done. They made fun of the major announcement thing. And lest you think that

we're all laughing about this, us libs, we're all having about this, us, us libs, we're all having a good time. And, and really, this is a move that's going to excite the base, the Donald Trump's base, the MAGA, the MAGA diehards. Here's how it's landing. Here's how the major announcement is landing with the Trump fans over at Newsmax. All right, breaking news right now. Here is that announcement, the major announcement by the 45th president of the United States. He says this, my official Donald Trump digital trading card collection is here. These limited edition cards featuring art of my life and career. You can collect all your

favorite Trump digital cards, very much like a baseball card, but hopefully much more exciting. Favorite Trump digital cards, very much like a baseball card, but hopefully much more exciting. He says, don't wait. I believe they'll go quickly. So that is his major announcement. Many thought it would be political. Many thought it would be about maybe creating a new party. I mean, there was so much speculation on this. But it's not that. It's a digital trading card. It's 99 bucks, and he said it would make a great Christmas gift.

Oh, there's a bunch of them. Interesting for that yeah there you go that's that there's the announcement perfect just perfect i just love but it's not that it's a digital trading card interesting timing on that one there were a uh number of tweets from magGA diehards surfaced over the last several hours of some of like Trump's biggest fans just showing real disappointment in this announcement. Is it possible this could do him some actual damage among his MAGA media fan base? Maybe. I don't know that we will like look back and be like, this is the moment it all fell apart for Trump. I don't know that we will look back and be like, this is the moment it all fell apart for Trump. But he is at, as you did in the run-up to this, he is at his weakest point in a long time.

He's had a miserable several weeks. His numbers are dropping. His primary opponent's numbers are surging. And his response is a patently ridiculous grift. And that does matter, right? It says something about the state of his campaign, the state of his strategy, racist questions about whether, you know, how much his corroded black heart is in this, right?

It's idiotic. It is absolutely idiotic. And when you are beating everyone in the polls and you are the incumbent president with a dedicated base, you can get away with a lot of idiocy. When you are in the position he's in right now, that idiocy can hurt you. I think the vast majority of Trump voters may not ever even hear about this, but he's in a primary now and the most committed pundits, activists, MAGA world people, they're going to pay attention and not too many of them are going to be happy about this. Like, I think Trump's appeal has always been that his enemies are your enemies and he's a con man who can make a rigged system work for you. Right. That's like the right? That's the appeal.

But now he's openly pitching himself as a con man who just wants to make money for himself and avenge his last defeat, and that's it. And I don't know that a lot of his fans are going to want to go along for that ride because selfishly there's nothing in it for them. People are making comparisons about, oh, well, everyone was laughing at him in 2015 and early in that and yes that was true but then he was out there talking about saying horrible things about

immigrants stuff like that like he was at least aligning himself with um the feelings of the MAGA base at that point or at least some segment of the population who loved hearing his xenophobic racist tirade. Right. And now like what's in it for any voter with Donald Trump? He's just going to make money. His 2016 appeal. And I use appeal in the broadest sense of that word was that he was a giant asshole, but he was going to be a giant asshole on your behalf. Now he's a giant asshole. Who's was going to be a giant asshole on your behalf. Now he's just a giant asshole. Who's all about himself and about no one else. Let's talk about Florida's other biggest asshole,

Ron DeSantis. He is taking advantage of Trump's weakness by trying to out-MAGA the MAGA king. On Tuesday, DeSantis called for a state grand jury He is taking advantage of Trump's weakness by trying to out-MAGA the MAGA king. On Tuesday, DeSantis called for a state grand jury to investigate, quote, crimes and wrongdoing related to the COVID-19 vaccines. Even though DeSantis has gotten the vaccine himself and called them lifesaving, he's now insinuating, contrary to all scientific evidence, that they may be ineffective and dangerous. Before we get into the politics of why he's doing this, can we talk about why this is just nuts from a public health perspective?

Because vaccines save lives? Yeah. I mean, there's no scientific basis to do what he is saying. He's making two absolutely incorrect and deeply dangerous points. One is he is taking out of context, deeply dangerous points. One is he is taking out of context, unproven allegations that individual people suffered from getting the vaccine. We don't know any evidence of that. We obviously know that well over 100 million people have gotten vaccinated and you don't hear these reports. It's cherry picking anecdotes is part one. Part two is to say that because the vaccine does not give you 100% protection about getting from getting infection, it serves no purpose. And so if the vaccine could possibly cause these adverse reactions to you and serves no purpose, you shouldn't get it. What everyone knows is that it may not 100% keep you from getting the virus, but it does make it much less likely you get it. And it makes it

extremely less likely that you could possibly get very sick and die. They are lifesavers. And this is bigger than COVID. Because what he is trying to do here is he is riding a surge in broad anti-vax sentiment in this country, propelled by COVID, propelled by the anti-vax grifters who use the pandemic to do that, that is affecting everything. You are seeing in some localities MAGA extremist Republicans trying to undo vaccine mandates for things like measles and mumps and rubella, smallpox, polio. And when that happens, it means that these diseases could come back. It also puts at risk immunocompromised children and others who may not be able to get the vaccines.

It's an incredibly dangerous thing to do. He is insinuated many times now that public health officials lied about vaccines reducing the transmission of COVID, like you said. And when they said that vaccines would reduce the transmission of COVID, it was before Omicron, which is much more immune evasive than the other strains of COVID-19. And so, yes, the vaccines actually still do reduce transmission, but not by nearly as much as they did with the original strain. That's not the fault of public health officials. That's the fact that the virus evolved. And like you said, if you get the vaccine, most people are still going to be kept out of the hospital and alive.

That's a fact. It's also a fact that your chance of an adverse reaction from the vaccine is not zero, but it's pretty close to zero. It's like 0.0001%. That is the range we're talking about here. Meanwhile, over 3 million lives in America alone have been saved by the vaccine. So the risk of an adverse effect, minuscule. And the good that the vaccines do by keeping you out of the hospital and saving lives has been well documented, not only in this country, but all over the world. It's fucking nuts that he's doing this. I mean, no one is great at probabilities and math, but getting the vaccine is exponentially safer than 99.9% of the things you do every single day

in your life. Totally. If you think that is dangerous, don't drive a car. Don't walk on the street. So a Trump advisor told Politico, this is a shot across the bow. We know exactly what Ron is up to. What is he up to? And how is it a shot at Trump? To understand this, you have to go back to two moments in 2021.

Both at a rally in Mississippi and at an event with Bill O'Reilly in Dallas, Texas. Wow. You're really taking us on a journey. Just bear with me. It will bear fruit. Donald Trump told the crowd that he got his booster. And in both those instances, the entirely pro-Trump crowd booed Donald Trump. And Donald Trump's, it says so much about the modern Republican Party, about the MAGA base, that the only positive thing you could possibly say about Donald Trump's handling of the pandemic is the vaccines were developed on his watch. Now, I am not saying he had anything to do with that. I don't think he was in the laboratory. I don't think he was meeting with the scientists, but he did not fuck it up. He was a real micromanager when it came to Operation Warp Speed. And so he should be, this would be one of the, he doesn't have a lot of accomplishments, so this should be one of them.

But the fact that the one thing he did right is his one major weakness with his base. And so this is a way in which Ron DeSantis is trying to get to Trump's right on something. Just the most cynical tactic imaginable. Like as Jonathan last over at the Bulwark, you know, he wrote a piece on this today and he pointed out that like none of this is going anywhere, right? Like DeSantis saying, I'm going to convene a grand jury, like they're not going to find anything. But this is sort of part and parcel with all of DeSantis' strategies and dumb little stunts that he's done. Like the courts blocked his Stop Woke Act for schools, which

everyone knew was crazy and the courts were going to block it. They blocked his Disney punishment. Remember, he's going to take away their tax breaks. They blocked his fake voter fraud arrests. But DeSantis is fine with all that because the whole point of this, as Lass says, it's the governing version of shitposting. All he wants is the headlines. And he's pretty sure it's not actually going to work. Maybe it will. Maybe he'll get lucky. He'll find some right wing judge that goes with it. But all he wants is the headlines. He just wants, like the appeal that Trump once had, for his enemies to be your enemies.

And he's going to show you that he fights those enemies. And he's going to get those headlines. And the question is, does this work for him? And does getting to Trump's right on vaccines work? My view on this is if the primary was being run in 2021, maybe. But like next year, we're going to be talking about COVID response and Donald Trump's COVID response back in 2020 and vaccines. I don't know. I think it is too diabolical by half.

Yeah. If these vaccines were so dangerous, why did Ron DeSantis get them? If these vaccines were so dangerous, why did Ron DeSantis'

government distribute them to people all across the state of Florida? Yeah. He's going to claim that, like, oh, he was just, he was fooled, he was lied to.

That's not going to work really well either. It's just, it's not, they have not thought through the second separate. Now it is effective in the governmental shit posting view in the sense that we are talking about it today. And that was the ultimate quote. We talked about the migrant stunt.

We talked about this. Yeah. He's very good at getting attention. He may even be better at it in some ways than Trump. Certainly more disciplined right now. Yeah, it is. Well, let's see. We'll see. We're going to be off for a couple of weeks.

Do you think he's going to release an NFT collection? Unbelievable. It is so... I did not expect it. I would have never guessed it, but it is perfect. What do you think the chances are that there is going to be a winner

who gets to dine with Trump? He's not going to dine with anyone. Well, I think he famously did several meals with Trump. He gave them away during the campaign and met with none of those people. I think I remember that happening. Look, his dance card is filled with Nazis.

You know what he should have done? He does not have time to eat with anyone else. He should have said that Nick Fuentes was a random drawing. Had to do it. He paid his 99 bucks. Yeah, look, sweepstakes rules

are sweepstakes rules. As we end 2022, how are you feeling about Don versus Ron? How serious is the threat posed by DeSantis, do you think? I think as we sit here today, it is very clear that there is a opportunity

for a right-wing extremist candidate who is not Donald Trump to win this primary. I do not think we know that that person is Ron DeSantis. As far as I can tell, no one outside the state of Florida has heard him speak publicly in months. Could you even tell me what Ron DeSantis' voice sounds like? Yeah, he just goes out, does a press conference, bitches at reporters, yells at them about something, and then just goes back in and whatever. He is an idea. He is an avatar for a smarter, just as mean Trump.

Without the baggage. And whether he really can pull that off, whether he gets into an actual fight with Trump, can punch back. Can he communicate with humans on a personal level? There's a lot of reasons to suspect he can't. There are a lot. So I think we should not think of Ron DeSantis as this overwhelming favorite or this person, but that the Ron DeSantis success says something about where the Republican primary mindset is. And that means it's someone other than Trump could win that nomination. I would say Trump is still the favorite for that just because of

institutional advantages and name ID and just connection with the base. And he's ahead of everyone else, but he is, as you said, weaker than he has ever been. And I think CNN had a pullout today as well that shows like even though there is a substantial percentage of republicans who are open to someone else besides trump and actually don't want trump to run again if you then ask them okay what if trump's the nominee they're all fine yeah or at least the vast majority of them are fine and we'll back him so like you said there's an opening and i do think trump Trump is, I mean, the NFT thing is funny. It's like almost sad.

I have never felt such pity. Not feel like in a nice way, but like I have never seen him as such a pitiful human being than watching that announcement today. That is just fucking awful. It's, yeah, it is. He looks more like a loser now than I think he's ever. He's never looked as big of a loser as he looked right now. It's sort of like when you see actors who used to be a big deal, like doing a infomercial or on QVC.

I mean, there are these testosterone ads like Frank Thomas, the baseball Hall of Famer, doing that every time I see it, like my heart breaks a little bit. And I think, feel like that's sort of where Trump is. He's in this sort of desperate twilight of your career pitch man phase and he's running for president at the same time. Yeah, it's wonderful.

All right, before we get to the interview, we promised you we would nerd out about the midterms when we got data that's more reliable than exit polls. I'm sure people are holding us to that promise. Every day people are tweeting, you promised us the data has been out. Where's the nerding? You know what, Dan? That moment is here. So the New York Times' Nate Cohn had a piece this week that explains how Republicans lost the midterms despite winning the popular vote by three points. The National House popular

vote was 51-48 Republicans. And I think if you take out uncontested races, it's still like two points they won by. The GOP also performed better than Donald Trump's 2020 campaign in nearly every state. They overperformed in districts with large black and Hispanic populations. And if the midterms were a presidential election, House Republicans would have won with 297 electoral votes. So knowing all this, why did Republicans lose the Senate and barely win the House? Three reasons. One is candidate quality. Republicans nominated really terrible candidates, particularly in the Senate, but also in a number of House races that gave Democrats an opportunity they would not otherwise have. These candidates were so bad that there were voters who,

under normal circumstances, would have voted for something resembling a generic Republican. But they did not get a generic Republican. They got unfit, corrupt, out of touch with reality, dangerous individuals who are obviously dangerous individuals. Second reason is Dobbs. The Dobbs decision was a cataclysmic political event that changed everything in this election and possibly for elections to come. And it made real the extremism of the Republicans. It made it not seem just simply as an affect, something that would affect everyone's lives. The Republicans then doubled down on that hearing by offering, in the wake of the Dobbs ruling, a series of extreme positions on abortion, same-sex marriage, contraception, banning books, all of that that was very, very real. And they were so extreme,

and Dobbs made the extremism argument so real that it trumped the economy. It's why that half of voters who somewhat disapproved of Biden picked a Democrat or Republican. In both 2014 and 2018, those voters who somewhat disapproved of the incumbent president voted for the other party by more than two-thirds. So that is the gap in the states. And the third reason is this election, primarily the Senate, but also the House, took place in one of the most favorable maps that Democrats will ever have. It is all six of the states that had the core Senate races, Democrats won five of those six, were in states that Joe Biden won. In most cases, won quite narrowly, but we could expand our Senate majority without flipping a single state that Donald Trump won. We didn't have to win in North Carolina or Florida. And the House map, because of redistricting, this is a weird thing to say, but it's actually less Republican than it has been in a decade.

a majority of seats in the country that Joe Biden won. Now he won many of them quite narrowly and we lost some of those seats, but this was a much better map that sort of served as a levy against a red wave and gave us some advantages and had more seats that we could win than we otherwise would have. I would add one more reason. You talked about candidate quality in terms of Republicans nominating really bad candidates. I think Democrats also had really good candidates and ran really good campaigns. And Nate points this out in the piece. If you look at Colorado, for example, Colorado was the one state where Republicans nominated for a Senate candidate, sort of like an anti-Trump Republican who was supposed to be reasonable and more moderate and stuff like that. And Michael Bennett still won

by a lot more than he probably should have in this environment where Republicans win the national House vote by three. And that happened also in a lot of House districts where the Republican candidate was not a typical MAGA extremist, but just like your standard Republican. I think Democrats ran really smart, effective campaigns. They had good candidates. They had good ads, good strategies. And like, you know, we spent a lot of time criticizing Democrats for stuff here and there, and especially like the online pundit class of Democrats. But the people who are running the campaigns, the candidates, their campaign managers, their strategists, like they did a good job in a lot of these places, which is why Democrats did better in almost all of the battleground districts and states where

there were fierce campaigns waged than some of the districts and states where there weren't as competitive campaigns. The Joe O'Day, which I think was the name of Bennett's opponent, that was a real thing. There were a lot of people saying that he was going to win or do incredibly well. But at the end of the day, if you step back, do you really think you're going to out-reasonable Michael Bennett? America's most reasonable man. So what, if any, implications does all this have for 2024 as we look ahead to both the presidential and then the House and Senate races there? I think we have to, as you just did, celebrate the successes of this race, give credit to the Democratic candidates, the Democratic campaigns, the DCCC, DSCC, the White House, President Biden, everyone for pulling off something no one thought was possible. The fact that we have 51 Senate votes, the fact that the House majority is so

narrow that we have a very good shot at getting it back in 2024 is a tremendous success. So we have to do that while also recognizing the fragility of our victory. That as you point out, underneath all the success are some signs that are quite worrying. And they speak to long-term challenges for the party. And the reason why it's important to recognize that fragility is we are so close. Every election is going to be so close. It's going to be decided on the margins. And I think you were there for this, but in 2011, the Obama senior staff did a offsite retreat. We were like planning what the next two years were going to look like. We had a bunch of new people who had

joined the senior staff after the midterms and people made various presentations about things. And David Plouffe, who had run the 2008 campaign and was now had just come on board as the president's senior advisor, did a presentation where he took the 2008 electoral map, a massive landslide for Obama. He won everywhere. He won easily. It was such a big thing that the moment they could call the election, they called it. At the 11 o'clock news on the East Coast, Obama was declared president. And he showed, he went through adjusting the numbers within the states Obama won by just a little bit? What happens if youth turnout goes down two points? What happens if black turnout goes down two points? What happens

if independents who Obama won by huge margins go back to Republicans by five points or two points? And with just the smallest changes in that election, if that were to happen for 2012, we would have lost. And it just shows that even in races where you feel like you win by a lot, just a little shift among one demographic group in one part of the state can change everything. And so think about this in terms of 2024, Joe Biden won a huge popular vote victory, massive one, but he won the electoral college by 40,000 votes spread across a handful of states. He did, I think, about five points better with working class white voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. That's what got him to that narrow victory. What if we lose that by two points?

Yeah. What if we just go back? What if we split the difference between 2016 and 2020? We lose Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin in that thing. What if black turnout or support among black voters drops by a point or two? We lose Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania in that situation. We're in line with, by the way, which is in line with the trend over the last several elections, right?

Same thing with the Latino vote. Like I looked at the Nate Cohn piece and like not only did Republicans overperform in districts with large Black and Hispanic populations, the turnout among Black and Hispanic populations were down in a lot of those districts. So we have a lower turnout there. Also, we have talked a lot about how it's great that a lot of independent and Republican leading voters, voters who otherwise would vote for Republican candidates cast their ballots for Democrats this time. Having your coalition rest on a bunch of Republican-leaning voters who just voted for your party because the other candidate was extreme is not a, that doesn't make you feel, that doesn't make you sleep easy at night when you think about future coalitions. There was another piece in the New York Times about the suburbs and said the gains that the Democrats made in the suburbs in 2018 and 2020 weren't completely reversed,

but we lost a little bit of ground in 2022. Well, that's great, but we can't lose much more ground as we're heading into 2024. So yeah, there are a lot of places if you look at the win in 2022, where there are some real flashing lights underneath. And I also think like there needs to be some real research into sort of why working class populations have been, of all races, have been sort of slipping away from the party. And I think a lot of the explanations tend to be simplistic when you read them in punditry, and they're obviously much more complicated than that. And I think we would do ourselves a real favor by digging into that over the next couple of years.

I mean, you can really see a world where that suburban coalition, which is, leans more conservative, more, you know, there are people who have previously pre-Trump voted for Republicans their entire lives in that coalition. Without Trump on the ballot, if there's a different Trump, even if that person is just as MAGA as Trump, could be problematic. Or the gap between, another thing worth remembering, there's, I wrote about this in the message box last week, but Third Way had this report about the dangers of a third-party candidacy. And the difference between Trump's victory in 2016 and his loss in 2020 is not that he lost support. He actually gained support across

the board over that four years. The difference was that there was a significant support for third-party candidates in 2016. There were no legitimate third-party candidates in 2020. If there is a third-party candidate that gets even 3% of the vote in a battleground state, it's going to make it much easier for a Republican to win because some of those never-Trump Republicans or people who would otherwise be a Republican but don't like Trump have a place to go that is not Joe Biden or not a Democrat. And these are the tiny little things. And there are Republicans who are right now, there's a reason everyone's trying to get Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema run for president,

because they make it easier for Donald Trump to win. And all these little, we are right, everything is in American politics in this age is on the razor's edge. So celebrate these victories, study the weak spots and figure out how we can make gains for 2024, because we're going to have to if we want to win, in my opinion. Yeah. And none of this is to tell people to like everyone should be gloomy and freak out. It's that we should be smart and work hard because like we just faced an incredibly tough environment in these midterms and a bunch of Democrats ran really smart campaigns. A bunch of people volunteered, donated, turned out, and we did way better than anyone expected. So it can be done. It's just it's, you know, take a break, but don't just celebrate for too long.

As they say, worry about everything. Panic about nothing. That is what they say. That is what they say. You should NFT that. Sell Dan Pfeiffer message box trading, digital trading cards. I think you may run a company that turned into a stress ball at one point. Shit, we did do that.

All right. When we come back, Dan talks to the New York Times' Mike Isaac about Elon Musk and QAnon. On Monday, Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted a cryptic message saying, follow the white rabbit, which appears to be a nod to QAnon. Here to help us understand all the crazy shit happening at Twitter is New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac. Mike, welcome back to the pod. Thanks for having me, man. All right.

It's fair to say that Elon Musk's Twitter habits were not super normal before he owned the company, but it seems to have gotten a lot worse in recent months, culminating with this potential likely QAnon tweet. What is going on here? Does he believe this stuff? Has he been red pilled? Is he trolling? Is there some sort of strategy here? What are people in the tech world telling you about what is happening with Elon and his behavior? tech world telling you about what is happening with Elon and his behavior? Totally. I think, well, so it's funny because not super long ago, let's say five or six years ago, he was super revered. I think like, you know, with normal people who are not like you or me and looking at Twitter, still probably the vibes are like, you know know smart entrepreneur guy or whatever and and um a lot of his more recent stuff is just starting to get out i think into the the larger world of like normies who are not media connected all the time um but like he used to be fairly normal and just kind of like

um basically what i would call a shit poster or a troll, right? Which is just someone who messes around online and tweets like random stuff. He kind of does dad tweets because he like checks Reddit for like two week old memes and post them basically. And nothing like crazy or super harmful that I would say just more like, like Rick and Morty humor or something, right. Which is, which is, is what it is. It's fine, I guess, you know? Um, but since he, uh, since he, a, since he bought Twitter, but even before that started really surrounding himself with, uh, Silicon Valley figures who, by the way, he's not the only one who has more right-leaning conservative views in Silicon Valley these days. I think this is, uh, he's sort the only one who has more right-leaning conservative views in Silicon Valley these days. I think this is, he's sort of speaking more about it than other, frankly, other billionaires would

because of not wanting to mess with whatever politics, their companies, their image, and sort of voice more concerns about how he feels that the quote unquote woke mind virus is taking over or that, you know, leftism is sort of predominant. And so there's that. But then this most recent slide is like the most extremist version of that. Right. Like now he's posting, you know, there was a homophobic sort of attack on the former head of Twitter's trust and safety that sort of plays into this groomer stuff that super right wing folks are obsessed with these days. The sort of Q phenomenon. So, like, the thing that I've been really struggling with is, you know, how much does this guy believe any of this stuff? Does he sort of like actually buy into it? Is he surrounded with so many right wingers that are more extreme that this is the paranoia taking over? I think on the one hand, he does need to drum up activity on this very expensive purchase that he made and sort of bring folks out. And I think everything he's been doing

so far leads to that. He practically is begging Trump to get back on the platform, which he has not done yet. And then on the other hand, I don't think it matters because his actions kind of just speak for themselves. Like even if you don't believe any of this stuff, even if you're that deeply cynical that you just want to do it for engagement, it's still having real world effects. Yeah, I mean, for sure. I mean, the head of trust and safety, he mentioned had to leave his home because of violent threats because of this absolutely false accusation that he was somehow involved in grooming or pedophilia or all of sort of pizza gate insanity. You had a

story the other day about the fact that Twitter has stopped paying rent on its offices. They are not paying bills for private jets. They are exploring ways to avoid paying the severance packages promised to the employees laid off after Elon took over, which seems challenging considering, according to another report, there are no lawyers working there anymore. And I'm sort of confused by this because Elon Musk keeps saying Twitter is in financial crisis. But before Elon Musk took Twitter over, as I understand it, it was a totally fine business, not a giant growth business like some of the other tech companies a few years ago, but it made money. People worked there. It wasn't in danger of going bankrupt.

How did we go from a fine business to we can't pay the rent on our headquarters in a few months? Sure. No. So a few things. One, I would say Twitter is an anomaly in social media ad-supported companies in that Facebook is throwing off cash. TikTok, it's a private company, so we don't know their exact finances, but they are doing a lot in revenue for where they are in their life cycle. Google is not social media, but they're also throwing off cash and it's ad supported. Twitter is, I would say, fine is probably a good summation, maybe even middling, because for eight of their past 10 years, they've been in sort of investment mode, meaning they're not profitable, but they've turned a profit a few times. And so you inherit that and you could kind of go along and maybe break even

or whatever and be okay with that. But the problem for Elon is the way he bought this company, he saddled himself with tons of debt, like $13 billion in debt, which means he owes a billion dollars in interest per year alone just on paying back those loans. So it's less, I think, about the specific company's immediate financial issues and more Elon's financial issues and really overpaying for a company at the height of the market before everything took a dive, right? So he kind of screwed up. That's the whole reason he tried to get out of this whole thing, which didn't work. And so now the other part of it is he goes into this cost cutting mode that we did some stories on. Basically, he did this at SpaceX. He did this at Tesla. He just of like finds everything he can to to minimize costs now there's cost cutting and

then there's literally like wage theft and like severance packages like not paying people and i think his philosophy is basically if you want to go to court let's go to court i'm the richest person in the world and i will tie this up in litigation it's very like dispassionate and pretty brutal version of a hardball business you know and that that goes from everyone from the top like not paying severance to the the c-suite which you know you can cry river for folks not getting their multi-million dollar exit packages but he's stiffing them as all the way down to the bottom and folks who basically have left of their own accord or got fired from him. So it is his standard playbook, but it's also, I think by most measures, pretty messed up because people are counting on that. And the job situation in the

Valley right now is not what it used to be, basically. I sort of struggle with this because Elon has run several successful businesses, right? Many people will debate how much credit he gets for Tesla or anything else, but Tesla and SpaceX are very successful businesses. PayPal, which I know he was removed from at some points, but was also a very successful business. I do not pretend to be an expert in business, but it's very hard to see what the strategy here is because, yeah, as you referenced, maybe if you're trying to ascribe some strategic thought behind his crazy tweets is he's trying to be Trump in the absence of Trump. We want someone whose tweets are must see that people that drive the conversation every day that there's always a

twitter main character pump engagement up but twitter's business to date at least and we will get in a second to what comes next but has been brand advertising from major companies yeah and so how do you get coca-cola apple etc to advertise on a platform where the CEO is pushing Cuban on? Is there anyone at Twitter, anyone around Elon? And I know they have no communications department anymore, but is there anyone who tries to explain that there is a plan here? No, not really. I mean, I was having a private conversation with someone who I would say is an Elon supporter the other day, and they had felt like he's getting too much heat or if you take the focus on every moment, give the guy some breath or breathing room and look at it longer term or whatever, you know maybe maybe he can get there but right now it's under the spotlight i have a hard time believing that just because i do feel like a lot of his decisions so far have been based on emotion and like what he wants the the company to be like take the badge

stuff the blue check stuff um which just in short went very poorly because he tried to redefine what it meant and it is now in kind of totally upheaval and trying to get people to pay eight or now $11 for a blue check throws all sorts of identity issues into the mix. The brand advertising stuff is crucial because it's so brand advertising is like, like exactly what you said, Coca-Cola wants to come in, buy like a hashtag or buy a little like emoji or a campaign that just sort of says, go buy Coke or whatever, you know, or like TV shows are really, really popular on Twitter and people like tweet about the White Lotus. And so like the White Lotus had a whole campaign and that's a brand thing. It's not like a Google ad where you

go click something and buy it immediately or an Instagram ad. And Twitter's whole bread and butter is brand advertising. You know, it's just about awareness and pushing this stuff out there and showing up in between other tweets in the feed because people are looking at those and then they can see this. What advertisers don't want, advertisers are famously conservative in the lowercase sense where they are scared of any sort of controversy. They don't want their they don't want Coca-Cola appearing next to like a QAnon tweet or like a groomer accusation or whatever. Right. Like that's the last thing. And so what you've had as the service has rapidly sort of spun into Elon 24-7. And this happened with Trump too, on Facebook and Twitter too, is brand advertisers

being like, all right, forget this. We are pausing momentarily. Maybe that means long-term, but we're going to just wait and see how this goes because this is crazy. And that is existential for Twitter's business right now because their whole business is basically brand advertising, like the vast majority. And so he's working to replace that with subscriptions, basically. That's Twitter blue, right? That's right. And he has implied that's coming out again quite soon. Do you have any sense of how they will avoid not having a blow up in their face like they did last time so it's funny last time there were like problems with the badges and like who gets a badge and what does the badge mean and now i believe they're rolling it out with like okay if you're an organization you

get a gold badge instead of like a blue badge and then anyone who pays for it i mean his whole point in revamping twitter blue was basically to try to eliminate bots which is his obsession because he you know to be fair he is followed around by every bot on the service 24 7. it's all crypto scams beneath him but like you know it just feels like he's trying to redefine what this blue badge means after 16 odd years of it meaning a different thing you know so it comes with all sorts of weird identity issues scamming issues eli lily stock tanking because of like a random tweet saying that insulin was free um and his idea just business-wise is offset brand advertising declines with subscription fees. But it's like

he's chasing pennies while throwing dollars out of his pocket, basically. Because these multi-million dollar campaigns are no longer being paid for. And instead, he's getting new subs 11 bucks at a time, basically. So I don't know. I have a hard time seeing it. And it also, as has been reported, the legal department is quite empty at Twitter. And if I recall correctly, the reason that the blue check bar was ever created by Twitter was because baseball manager Tony La Russa sued Twitter because there was a fake Tony La Russa account going around, uh, attacking him based pretending to be Tony La Russa. And in order to avoid being sued by every person under the sun, they created this. And so they're opening themselves up to all kinds of trouble, right? I think so. I think he, I think his biggest issue, and I think this follows him around at

every company is he needs a team of people to basically to handle him. This is like famous people syndrome or billionaire syndrome. You need a team of people around you who know how you work, who know how to handle you, and who know how to steer you into decisions that might be good for the company. And there are folks who would disagree with me and be like, look, he's a revolutionary. He has these crazy ideas and that's why we like him or whatever. But I think he's figuring out why Twitter did what it did for so long in real time by stepping onto Rake's sideshow boss style over and over basically. And so I don't know, until he builds up that executive staff with more lawyers, you can be like, hey, this is probably not a good idea because X, you know, I just think he's going to keep running into walls here. I mean, some of the people who gave him the money to buy Twitter are Elon.

They're in the Elon business, right? Some of these VC funds, they're doing this because whatever the next thing is after this, they want to have first shot at it. But there are real people, banks and others who gave him money. Is there at some point here where they step in or or have a real conversation with Elon about trying to get this thing on stable footing, about having a real CEO run the like he can own the company, but that doesn't mean he has to also run it to get a serious person that are trying to fix this before it falls apart on him. Because I mean, he is according to Elon, bankruptcy could be around the corner. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a great point that it's funny, because the banks who so to your point, there are people who are like, yeah, we'll get in on this deal, including some of the banks that will get on this deal because deal flow down the line. We considered this an investment. If we have to spend a billion dollars right now to get in on Elon's next thing, we'll do it. Even though that might be flawed because who knows if the guy's going to have the golden touch forever or whatever. But the banks now, the debt that they took on for instance they can't

even resell that debt for 60 cents on the dollar of what they originally paid for it like it's the the number of bad decisions that he has made not just in you know the liberal biased media's eyes but valuations by financial experts who are looking at this dispassionately have been multiplying every day, basically. And I think that I think you're right. I think at some point folks are going to be like, how do we sometimes if you can't get a new CEO in mind or if he doesn't have one in mind, then they might put a new CEO alongside of him. Someone who knows how to like really operate. I think right now he's kind of has, he's brought in folks from SpaceX and Tesla, like basically like ranks of folks from his other companies to kind of do this because he doesn't have those at Twitter. He

doesn't have people that he trusts at Twitter. He really doesn't trust, as you can see with these like Twitter files drops that he's doing, doesn't trust basically anyone from the old regime and is sort of doing these tests to make sure folks are signed up for like new Elon Twitter, basically. But I think it's going to take time. Again, if he can turn around and if he can do a good job, I think it will take time in building up a bunch of folks that he trusts and will actually like rely on their advice. And then they have to be good at what they're doing too. But these are hard problems. And Twitter has tried to solve some of these problems for a very long time with mixed results. Basically, there has been a sense over many years that because of tremendous dysfunction at Twitter pre even pre Elon, right? Seven, a million CEOs. Totally. They basically had like a person running the company halftime for many years. Yep. Yep. That it was, you know,

there was this time when they thought Twitter was going to surpass Facebook. You know, that was the real fear of the Facebook folks. And so there's always been this belief that you have this global platform that drives attention. The president of the United States was on it yet. It was this middling business that never really got to the sort of advertising that Facebook did or use their data in that way. And so it seems now that as a lot of people see are fleeing Twitter, maybe Twitter is collapsing, maybe it's going to end, that there's this huge market opportunity for someone to do this. And there was a report the other day, there've been a couple of reports that Facebook is looking at a Twitter alternative.

And I think they revealed something called Instagram notes or something. Anything, I know you cover Facebook incredibly closely. And then you can tell us about how some, either Facebook, some of these other companies are thinking of trying to take advantage of Twitter's weakness right now. Yeah, no, I mean, it's classic facebook to see someone

either succeeding or floundering it's the other stuff yeah mark go in and copy it like that's what he does and he does it without um compunction and you know you can argue the benefits or the merits of that or whatever but that's what he does um i think they i think facebook is actually in a pretty rough place right now. And what I've heard is that they're minimizing the number of projects that are outside of their core importance. Before, when they didn't care and they were just printing money every quarter, and it was just checking a box like, yep, we're doing great um mark could be like yeah go chase that go do this go spin up this whole org that creates new products which didn't create a single

popular product this entire time and now as you've seen this downturn you know like hiring issues in silicon valley layoffs at facebook you know in mass um there are big companies who are having to sort of really prioritize what is important to them and fix, fix their problems with ads, you know, Facebook versus Apple and Apple's sort of like cracked down on tracking. So I'm skeptical. And also, just frankly, whenever Facebook clones something, it doesn't always work, you know, like people have real have cast dispersions on how they feel about Facebook, you know, and don't necessarily flock to their products. I think there is opportunity for startups that are new and don't have overhang on reputation or some things that just can take off.

If you've seen, I don't know if you've used BeReal, that new app. I am way too old for that, but I am familiar with how it works. I don't know if you've used BeReal, that new app. I am way too old for that, but I am familiar with how it works. I don't know if your children use BeReal. I'm the old guy on these apps who has to use them, but it's taken off very quickly. And I still think there is, as dominant as a lot of these companies are, I think there is the ability for certain companies to grow really popular really quickly, and they still can. And so we're seeing a few different startups that are basically Twitter-ish pop up. I don't think really any of them have nailed it. This Macedon thing got a lot of attention, but it's just way too difficult for the average person. Yeah, nothing that calls it

toots is going to succeed. I'm sorry. Maybe the service won't succeed, but I think they're going to have to rebrand there. I thought it was a joke when someone was like, oh, I'm going to go toot on masses. No, that is a real joke. Do that in private.

That is an interesting point you make about be real or those sorts of things because we have been stuck with these small handful of social media platforms for a number of years because basically anytime anyone started to grow they either got bought or got crushed and now the the institutional players do not have the cash to necessarily do that facebook cannot just throw billions of dollars at the next Instagram or anything. They just can't do it. And they certainly, as you point out, that's interesting.

Or Lena Kahn will be like, nope, you're not doing that. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. Acquisition stuff. Mike, Isaac, this was fascinating. My heart goes out to you and having to cover these stories on a regular basis. I have Elon alerts on my phone and it's straight up PTSD. I think it seems wrong that you have had to cover both Uber and Twitter under Elon, but that's for you to raise with the higher reps of the New York Times.

So Mike Isaac, thank you so much for joining us. We will talk to you soon. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. All right. Thanks to Mike Isaac for joining us. Everyone have a great holiday

and we'll see you in 2023. Happy holidays. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Andy Gardner Bernstein. Our producers are Haley Muse and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show. Thanks to Hallie Kiefer, Ari Schwartz, Sandy Gerard, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montu. Our episodes are uploaded as videos at youtube.com slash podsaveamerica.