The Dispatch Podcast - Can Anyone Save the Democrats? | Interview: Mitch Landrieu

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu joins Jamie Weinstein to discuss his experience advising former President Joe Biden, the challenges facing the Democratic Party, and where political messaging fails. The Agenda:—How bad was Joe Biden’s mental decline?—Strategy for the Democratic Party—The immigration debate and its impact on voters—Reaching out to the working class Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is Mayor Mitch Landrieu.

He was, for a time, the mayor of New Orleans. He also most recently served as the senior advisor to President Biden on transportation issues. And we get into a lot of issues on this podcast. First and foremost, whether he saw President Biden's decline, the decline described in Jake Kaeper and Alex Thompson's news book. He pushes back on the extent of what they describe in the book. But we also get into a topic that he is working on extensively right now, which is what Democrats need to do to win the white working class male vote and win back Congress in the White House in the coming elections. So I think you're going to find this podcast interesting.

So without further ado, I give you Mayor Mitch Landrieu. I want to get into a lot of things you've been working on since the election. I want to get into a lot of things you've been working on since the election, but I think we need to begin with this new book out by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. I'm sure you've seen it. They accuse the Biden White House of, I guess what amounts to a cover-up of, of President Biden's mental acuity. In one case, Jick Tapper says he thinks the cover-up

could be worse than Watergate in some ways. Of course. Why wouldn't you, if you wanted to sell a book? Why wouldn't you say it was worse than Watergate? You addressed us a little bit when he was still in the race. You said about the questions circulating then about President Biden's mental state. You said it was a bucket of BS that's so deep your boots will get stuck in it. Do you still believe that these allegations are false?

Well, I think the book is weak. And I think it's below Jake. He's a good journalist, not so sure about Alex. I mean, I think history will have to figure that out. But all I can tell you is about my personal experience. I joined the administration about a year after the president was in office. I think my first day was November 15th. The president asked me to come up and help rebuild the country.

It was the first time in 50 years that a president was able to encourage a bipartisan group of congressional members to rebuild of America. It's never been done in the past 50 years, like Post Eisenhower. It was a miraculous feat that could not have been accomplished without a guy that was on his game. It was a $1.2 trillion bill. It was to rebuild roads, bridges, ports, airports, waterways, high-speed internet to actually bring manufacturing back to the United States, which we successfully did, with not only the infrastructure bill, but the chips act. There are right now 30,000 jobs being put, on the ground in Phoenix, Arizona, where we're building manufacturing facilities

to manufacture chips that used to be made in Taiwan that are providing life-saving wages to young people that have never had a real job or if they had a job, they weren't able to pay for their house, or won't able to build generational wealth. So I got there on November 15th. I met the president that day. He looked great.

He was in great shape. I've known Joe Biden for 30 years of my life. He's one of the smartest, kindest, toughest guys that I know. And we were off to the races. And for the next two years, I think I traveled, I don't want to overstate this, but at least to 150 city towns and counties. I saw the president once every three weeks. Sometimes I sat with him for 15 minutes, sometimes an hour.

Sometimes I spent the whole day with him. And during that two-year period of time, and I left about a year before the end. I was in the middle two years. I think I was able to judge the president really, really well. I saw him, and this is what he had to insults to injury for Jake and those guys, I saw him stand at parties that he hosted for the press in one place where he actually physically told every member of the press corps, 300 people plus their spouses, hello, and probably remembered most, if not all of their names.

And my experience with him was really positive and thoughtful. I want to remind the public that when you engage. somebody's behavior, you gauge their accomplishment. So he not only saved the country by putting the recovery plan in place, and I should remind my fellow Americans, Americans were standing in line waiting for food, but we passed the Infrastructure Act, we passed the Chips Act, we passed the Chips Act, which to date provided 16 million jobs. We knocked inflation down from 9.2% to I think 2.8 to 2.9% before we left, although there was a lot more work to get done. So if you're judging people by their behavior, the thing that troubles me the most is that we're spending

so much time on this. Joe Biden's not the president anymore. You know who is the president? Donald Trump. And since the day that he's been in office, the country and the world have been in a cladoclysmic, chaotic moment that is as dangerous as anything that we've ever seen. So, you know, if they want to focus on the past, they can. I thought Joe Biden was a fine president. whether he was too old to run again, we'll let history judge that. But my personal experience with him is very, very different from the one that they described in the book. I was there. I saw it, heard it. I participated in lots of meetings with him, and I didn't see one thing that indicated to me that he was not capable of handling the job. It's clear that he was older,

but I would remind people that Franklin Delo, you know, Roosevelt was in a wheelchair for a large part of his presidency. And I know that him being older made people nervous. But from where I sat, I thought he made good decisions. I thought he made smart decisions. Obviously, we made some mistakes and history will record what those are, but nothing that approximates the allegations in that book. In the book, they talk about him using a teleprompter at events and in private settings that you think a president can speak off the cuff. I want to, this is the thing that pisses me off the most. And I don't want to, you know, Jake and then pick this fight. So let's have. They, they complain that Joe Biden showed up at meetings and used to teleprompter or had

notes or had people assisting him in managing the presidency. So let me kind of, kind of throw a little bit of light on this. The President of the United States, most powerful person in the world, got more responsibility on their shoulders than everybody. Not only runs the entire domestic agenda, but the national security agenda, which most people don't get to see because that we compromise national security. If the president's working hard, and this current president does not work hard, you get up fairly early in the morning,

depending on if there's a catastrophic event, like a bridge collapse in Baltimore or an interstate collapse in Philadelphia, which happened early in the morning or a bridge collapse at Fern Hollow in Pittsburgh, and your national security advisor wakes you up and say, we have a cataclysmic event. Can you get on it?

I'll witness all three of those events. to the president, 6.30 in the morning, on the phone to us saying, get in touch with Westmore, get in touch with the governor of Pennsylvania, get in touch with the previous governor of Pennsylvania, your governor will, and tell them that everything and anything that they need, we're on it. If there was a tornado, if there was a storm, the president was the first one on the phone, call and saying, make sure that they have everything that they need. Now I'd like to juxtapose this, to the current president that we have that basically said to North Carolina, you could just go eat mud. You don't need us anymore. Or not showing up a tornado

and hurricanes. So again, you know, you kind of want to focus on Joe Biden and you're not focusing on the end result of what he did. But let me get back to this point. I have been on many shows like this. And of course, I've been on CNN many, many times with Jake and other folks. And you don't know what I notice about those shows. I don't know if anybody else noticed it because you can't see it. Is that Jake's reading off of a teleprompter. And Jake has, they have these things in their ear. And you know who's in their ear? They have 40, 50 people in that building who are telling them what to say, went to take a break, who's coming up next? And the reason is, it's because no human being can keep everything that's gone on every day in their heads. The president oftentimes,

if you looked at his schedule, and the schedule was public, would go from a meeting, dealing with national security issues, to walking across the street to the executive office building, to talking to, you know, mothers who are fighting gun violence to across the street to see folks that have been visiting in the White House because it's a special day to commemorate a special Ben, it's impossible not to have people helping you and have notes in those particular meetings. The other reason why you do it is because if you're not scripted and you're not careful about what you say, the media is on literally every word that you hold. So that is like the regular course of business. And I just kind of quite don't get why Joe Biden's the only one that gets a

kick in the ass for doing this. I don't know if you've noticed, but Donald Trump the other day when Elon Musk was standing next to him, Elon Musk, they're like best friends. He was reading a script telling Elon Musk goodbye. Nobody said, wow, that's kind of weird. You know, why doesn't Donald Trump know that? So I'll find it to be, I don't know, I don't find that the accusations reflect my personal experience. I think Joe Biden was a great president. I think history would record that he got a tremendous amount done.

I'll let history record what everybody else thinks happened, but I can only just count on my, what I saw, what I heard, who I was with, what we did. And I'm very proud of the accomplishments that we had for that period of time. It will put it up against what it is that we're going through right now. And then let me put my political hat on. I don't think the world's better off today than it was 150 days ago when Donald Trump took office. I just don't. And I think that his mental acuity is far in a way more challenging to ascertain than Joe Biden. And the feeling that I have is Joe Biden, even on a bad day, was better than Donald Trump on any day.

And I know a lot of people don't agree with me, but that's just my opinion. And, you know, it's going to be what it's going to be. Just to put a fine point on it, because I think you're being pretty emphatic here, that you did not see any decline or his ability, as you mentioned at 630 in the morning when you talked to him, that he was completely in control, that he was aware of what was going on and what he was discussing. That is what you experienced. 100%. He's a 100%. He's a tough son of a bitch. Let me tell you something. If you had to brief Joe Biden, let's just say he came in. He said, hey, we're supposed to be rebuilding the northeast corridor, the trains because he's an Amtrak guy. And you had to have a meeting with him about Amtrak or you have to have meetings with him about a train or any other part of the $1.2 trillion bill, the infrastructure dealing with laying fiber optic cable or cleaning air and cleaning water. or having sewer systems that produce clean sewage in Lowndes County, Alabama. Not only did he know about it, but he straped you if you weren't up to snuff. And my impression with him, and by the way, you're talking to somebody, I'm a lawyer.

I went to law school. I've argued cases before judges. I've been before, you know, courts where judges really get out of you. He was as tough and as smart as anybody who I've ever dealt with. Now, listen, people get confused about this. Joe Biden was getting older. And every, I mean, we have many, many people in this country who are fully functioning and really good at what they do, but they gates a little bit slower, that walks a little

bit slower. Sometimes, I don't know, I don't know if you have any kids. I have five kids. Sometimes I forget my own kids' names. I'm like, you will, I will challenge every parent in America right now. There will come a time when you're really ticked off and one of your kids pissed you off and you start calling names and you misname your children. you'll say, what the hell is your name?

Get over here. And as will, and so, like, I think sometimes people have a little challenge with the older thing. But the bigger point is this. I don't think that book has pointed out one instance where Joe Biden was not fully capable of making a decision that was well thought out. Now, you may disagree with the decision that he made. You may say, I don't like the way you withdrew from Afghanistan, or I don't like the way you didn't talk about inflation, or I don't like the way you didn't talk about inflation, or I, I don't think that your industrial policy or bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States was, you know, what it, what it is that I liked. But I still have not seen it.

Mr. Mayor, I think, in fairness, I think it does even go farther than that. It says that at best, at least towards the end of his presidency, he was the senior member of a committee that made decisions and not. That's bullshit. That's full shit. That, first of all, I wasn't there. I left. I left in, I think, January. of the last year.

But when I was there, and there were people who were closer to the president that I was. But I never witnessed anything that indicated to me that Joe Biden was not fully in control

of his White House. That he just is. And he was, to the extent that Donald Trump's in charge of his White House and he's not being influenced by all of these other things that are not necessarily

consistent with the way the country ought to be run. I just didn't see it. And I have pretty good eyes. I have pretty good ears. So people have different impressions. That was my impression. I thought Joe Biden, I love Joe Biden.

I think he's a great guy. And let me just say this other thing about it. There are very few people in America that have suffered the pain that this guy suffered to serve his country. I want just to think about it for a second. He was 29 years old, got elected to the Senate. Before he got sworn in, his wife and one of his kids was killed in a car accident. You know what he did? He went great, got back up, went to work.

He got on the train every night and went home to take care of his two little boys. And he got remarried, and he got up and he went back to work. And then as life went on, he ran for office a couple times, lost. He didn't take his tail and tucked it between his leg. He got up and he went back to work to serve his country. And then the joy of his life, his son, died from cancer. After he had served his country, both as an attorney general and as a member, of the military for us.

And what did Joe Biden do? He didn't cry in his soup. He mourned his son. He got up and he went back to work. Then he had another son that became an addict. Like, I don't know, 100 million Americans. And what did he do when the rest of the world was crucifying this kid and still has trouble with the way he handled his son?

He taught everybody how to be a good father and to unconditionally love his son. Now, maybe people faulted him for maybe being, you know, not the person that they wanted to be, you know what he did? And every kid in America would love a father like this. He grabbed that kid and hugged him and said, I love you no matter. But you may judge his skills as a father, but you know what else he didn't do? He didn't quit. And then he gets elected president. He passes the four biggest pieces of domestic legislation that we've seen in the last 50 years. He puts America back on their feet. And he handed Donald Trump, by the way, an economy that was much better on the day that Donald Trump took it than the day that he took now. So, you know,

I'll let Jake and now. They can write whatever book they want. and history were recorded, but it's not nearly, but the bigger point is this, if that's what they want to spend their time on right now and argue that that's more serious than what's happening in the White House as we speak, God bless them, because I think they're very wrong about that.

Just two more questions, and we'll move on. Is then what you're saying that what we saw in the debate, what we saw sometimes of him wandering away or not answering questions, you know, being energetic like a lot of presidents are, were those aberrations? What are we supposed to make of what we saw as the public of him in public settings? Well, first of all, you've seen a lot of clips of Donald Trump, not knowing where to go or walk away.

I think once he got into the campaign, that debate performance was so bad, and it was so, it played so much into what the story was about it. There was no way to politically come back from that. I've just, you know, I've been through that. I've run for office nine times. I've won seven of them. that debate performance was inexplicable it was just inexplicable it was a it was a it was what it was um i don't i don't know anything other than to say that he he he he hit that ball so far out of the part that you could never get it back and the politics in the moment was such that after he

did that there was no convincing anybody that he wasn't up to fulfilling his candidacy uh whether or not he should have gotten out earlier or not i mean who the heck knows It's hard. You know, people speak like, you know, somehow someone was going to walk into Joe Biden's office and say, I'm sorry, sir, three years before he finished office. I'm sorry, but I've determined that you shouldn't be president anymore. Let's just wrap it up and we'll bring in, you know, all these other people to do it. That's just not the way the world works. The Democratic National Committee or the Republican National Committee doesn't run the White House. So, look, it was a difficult situation. I think, again, the president performed well in his first four years in office. I'll let history render judgment on. you know, all the other issues, but the thing that I know about that I can personally attest to in the time that I was with Joe Biden and the time that I saw him

was year two and year three. I thought Joe Biden performed admirably. I thought he made reasonably good decisions. We made mistakes. The mistakes will be, you know, debated for years to come. But I didn't see anything in my personal experience with him

that would indicate that he wasn't in full control of his faculties and making decisions in the White House. Is it possible that year, four was just dramatically different? Or do you think that's not possible that this was something that was there when you were working for him? Yeah, well, sure. I mean, I wasn't anything, first of all, if you're a lawyer, the only way you can answer that question is anything is possible. And yes, of course, there could have been some degradation, you know, after I left. I wouldn't know

about that. I'm just saying that all that stuff that's in that book about what happened in the first two years, two or two or two or three, that I didn't see it. And I, and I would have, and I think that I would have seen it. I wasn't with him every day, all day. But I think I think I was with him, you know, enough to know and enough to judge. And I think I know enough about myself to where if I thought that there was a problem, you know, I would have, I would have, you know, at least tried to say something. And he was getting older. There's no question about it. But in terms of him not being in control of his presidency, that's not, from my perspective, that was not accurate. It's not what I experienced. Final question on this. The account that you

give and the account that obviously we are seeing Jake Tapper give and Alex Thompson give in their book are diametrically opposed. It's hard for them to exist and both exist in reality. It's hard for them to both be true. What do you believe then is the motive of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in this book? Do you think their sources were lying to them? Do you think they're making their sources up? Do you think that they have some nefarious plan here with this book? Well, first of all, I don't know that they diametrically opposed. They may be talking of a different time than I am, but I don't know what their motives are. I don't, but I know this, that Donald Trump's presidency is much more dangerous by a lot than anything that could have possibly happened during Joe Biden's pregnancy and spending time on

this, rather than that, is a misappropriation of people's talents. That the country, there's nothing to be learned here that's going to make the country safer and more prosperous. There is a lot, a lot to be learned from the fact that Donald Trump is abusing the powers of the presidency to enrich himself, enrich his friends, to punish his enemies to challenge our constitutional order in a way that is far more dangerous, far more dangerous than anything that Joe Biden may or may not have done. Mr. Miller, and I can tell you that on this show, we have focused on the crypto coin. We have focused on this quite a bit. But we thought you would have first hand personal response to what these allegations of the book. Well, I do. I do. I do and I did.

They're claiming that he wasn't the person making decisions. He was a senior member of a... Tell him to prove it. There's nothing. There's nothing. I don't... Look, I don't... I mean, look, if they have hard and fast evidence, you know, of the fact that there

was some, like, goblin in the cabinet, you know, that they pulled out like Oscar the Grouch making decisions of the president, tell him to prove it. I mean, I'm just telling you I didn't see it. And I was in meetings with him, and I didn't see it. So maybe maybe something was happening. then I didn't say, I guess that's possible in me. I mean, I don't know, but that's not what I saw. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take

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And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Let's discuss something that you are working on right now, which is what Democrats have to do to take back the White House the next election. take back congress in the next election uh let's just sort of what why do you think the democrats lost in two thousand twenty four let's start that well first of all that's not that's not the right question what a what a what a democrats need to do what does america need to do to to uh get america back on track again to honor you know the principles that make us a special uh and exceptional country, while also make sure that everybody's got a chance and a fair shot at building a life for themselves and making sure that their kids have a better shot than them. That's the goal.

It's not from my perspective, and it never has been, something that's Republican, independent, a Democrat. That's the way that, you know, folks like me and you who are junkies organize our thoughts around this stuff. That's not how most voters think. They want the world to work for them. And they feel like, if you think about it, just broadly, if you can get your head, I know Trump is such a poison in all of our heads. If you can get him out of your mind for a second, which I would pray for every day, and think about how we got here or why we elected a guy like Trump. You know, and you're 25, 26, 30 years old. I mean, think about it. You know, Y2K, then you had 9-11, then you had Iraq and Afghanistan, you had control. You had control.

Trina. You had the BP oil spill. You had the massive recession and the cataclysmic downfall of the market in 2008. You had the rise of Donald Trump that scared to live in crap out of half of American exhilarated the other half. And you've had the upheaval of all of the war in Ukraine, you start to thinking that maybe things don't feel so good. Maybe the adults in the room are not handling a business the appropriate way. Maybe my fellow Americans, you know, who by the way, be across the table for me at Thanksgiving. All of a sudden, it could be my uncle and my aunt or my brother and my sister. It's feeling like really uncertain. I think it makes us susceptible to the theories that are not rooted in fact. Or we just think, look, we got to fix this thing because it's so broken and then

you're susceptible to burning it down rather than trying to rebuild what it is that you have. and Trump, I think, came into this moment. And unfortunately, I just think this man, and it's really, from my perspective, I know some people really love him, I think it's a sad waste of human potential. He's obviously not a stupid man. He has a feral sensibility that very few politicians have that most politicians would like. But unfortunately, he just seems to be ordered around himself being the center of attention, wanting power and wanting money. And instead of allowing the majesty of the responsibility of being president to help form you and use those things for good.

He's doing it to tear things down. And I just think that we got to figure out how to get back to reasonable common sense approaches. Abraham Lincoln said this better than anybody else. A nation divided against itself cannot stand. And we are in, unfortunately, a moment of choice from 2016 to today where we have decided to fight

and we need to figure out what we're fighting for and why we're fighting and what America's place in the world really is and a couple of big questions what does it really mean to be great can you be great if you're not good

do you have to hate to be great is there a way for all of us to win or does some of us have to lose in order for others to win what does it mean to be a man what I mean does it really mean abusing women of taking people who are less fortunate than you

or weaker than you and stepping on their throat and trying to erase them from the face of the earth. Is that really what it means to be a man in today's world? And I just think we're in a moment and it's a dangerous moment

because Donald Trump has taken us if we're not at the brink we're getting pretty close to it. And we need to kind of, you know, step back a minute and think about all these tough questions and then commit to finding a way together oh we might not have one ever met trump yeah many ones was the context of that what was it like

did you learn any insight for the rest of us no no no not well it's it was funny actually um after he won last time after the election in between and between that day and the day that he was sworn in i was uh i was a mem i was a leader in the united states conference of mares i think i think i was a vice president which meant the next year i was going to be president of it and as a as a matter of course, you know, all the leaders of the mayors go see whoever incoming president is. And so I went to Trump Tower at their invitation with a couple of other mayors. I got met at the door by Michael Cohen and soon to be vice president, Pence, who ushered ushered us into Donald Trump's office, which was a complete and total mess.

It was a wreck. He was sitting behind his desk, and he said, who are you got? He didn't know who we were. Donald Trump did not know who the mayors of major American cities were. He didn't know our names. He didn't know what we were. He didn't know where we were from. He was just like, who are you guys and where are y'all from?

Of course, we just came off a campaign where he was excoriating cities and calling them pits of hate and then the thing. He goes, oh, I love cities. We go like, okay. And began to talk about the crowd sides of the crowds that he had been drawing. And we spent about 15 minutes talking about stuff. we, you know, we will ushered out of the room. But I remember him saying he loved cities after he spent an entire campaign saying cities suck, which they don't, by the way.

But that was the only time that I ever met him. No, I'm sorry. That's not accurate. I actually was in his presence one other time when I was asked to do the Grid Iron Show. And they told me when they invited me, don't worry about it. Nobody's coming because Trump doesn't go to any of that stuff. and it turns out that the day before that he and his family showed up

and that was actually a pretty pleasant night. It was a lot of fun. He was in a good mood and everybody was joking and teasing people, but it was done in good taste. Was that 20 or 206? I'm sorry, was that the recent one in 2024

or an earlier one? No, it was, it was, it would have been, it would have been back during his first term. He was in a good mood that night. He was jovial. It was one of these nights where everybody got to put down their swords and had fun.

very gracious actually that night. Is there any issue that you think, I know you mentioned I'm probably framing it in the wrong way. I'm not talking about what Americans are thinking. I'm talking about Democrats. But are there any issues you think Democrats have to do to move on? Like the

border, transgender issues in order to win back the White House? Well, I think that, look, if you get your ass kicked, which happened to us, and whether that's in football, baseball, tennis, politics, whatever.

You gotta go figure out why you got beat. And there are always a lot of reasons for it. And there are also a lot of Monday morning quarterbacks. You know, I call it the peanut gallery. People that have never run for office before that are so smart. You know, they know everything and they never had to do it as though somehow the answer is easy. There are some simple explanations, and I don't mean to be a smart outlook here,

but they got more votes than us. That's why they want. Now, they got 1.5% more votes than us, 300,000, which means the election was razor-thin. Now, before anybody makes any judgment about what I just said, even if an election is razor-thin, it could be a cataclysmically devastating election because of what it portends. You don't know if you just caught it when it was gone down and it's going to go down fast or whether or not you just missed by a little bit. You can start from that point or whether or not you misread it so you better try to understand what happened then of course

you know when you lose nobody likes you so that's not a big surprise they call you a loser because you lost and if you want to be a winner you have to win so i i kind of started thinking about it a little bit and uh you know i am aware of a couple of things that i think are uh important but hard and one of them is that Democrats used to be able to rely on people that go to work every day and work with their hands and live paycheck to paycheck. And that when you look at the demographic trends, I know the media is focused on we lost black men and we lost Hispanic men. And that's important, but not nearly as important, numerically, I should say, all very important, but not as many as white men who are working class that used to form the basis of the Democratic Party. We have been losing

them for a very, very long period of time. And so, you know, when you're losing folks, you should go and say, well, if we got them before and they're capable of or willing to vote for us, like they voted for Obama and then they voted for Trump, and then they voted for Trump, you could logically conclude that, you know, those people are not ideologically bent. They're not political junkies. They're not paying attention to politics every day. They're not watching all the things that you and I are watching. They're worried about getting their kids to school. They're worried about paying the rent. They're worried about paying the lease on that truck. They're worried about trying to figure out how to build enough wealth so that their kids can have a better opportunity than they had

and they're feeling left out and they're feeling left behind. And I think that we may have missed more of that than we should have. I think that we relate to the immigration issue. I know that this is not something that is necessarily on Joe Biden's doorstep because if people forget this, but when Ronald Reagan left the office, he gave a, I thought, a wonderful speech and I wasn't a huge fan of his, but I liked him all right about some things. He gave a great, the last speech he gave his president was a great speech about immigration. And the immigration system has been really broken for a very, very long period of time. So one of the questions America has to ask itself is, are we a nation of immigrants or are we not a nation of

immigrants? Do we welcome people into the United States of America that may not look or act and talk like us, much like my folks? My folks came from Sicily and from Malta. So you're looking at a mutt right here. I'm English, German, French, I mean, Italian, I mean, the whole nine yards. You know, we came and now we're kind of starting to say, well, we're really not a nation of immigrants. But, well, yeah, we are, but we need to do it a certain way. And I think that in the last 20 years, our inability for Republicans, Democrats, everybody to come together to decide those big issues has created a lot, a lot of tension. And I do think that we were too late to understanding how moved people were and why particularly they were moved by that issue. And as you

talk to working men and women, whether they be white, black, Hispanic, whoever they might be, what you hear that makes a lot of sense is not we hate people who don't look like us, but it's, listen, we could be a nation of immigrants and we should be, but we ought to be able to figure out who comes in and doesn't. People shouldn't be coming across the wrong way. And oh, by the way, it's not fair for the rest of us who came here the right way to have to wait in line behind folks that didn't. And we shouldn't be spending public money on that kind of stuff. And so it's really kind of a fairness issue. And I do think that notwithstanding the fact that the president was ready to sign a very comprehensive and strict President Biden immigration

bill to Donald Trump tanks because he needed the issue, putting the politics of that aside. As a country, we have to get that part right because it is very troubling to people in America. and I think we relate to that issue. I think obviously from polling, you can tell that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was devastating for President Biden and his polling numbers never really recovered from there because of either unwillingness

or inability to address that issue more forthrightly. And then the third and important thing was, and I'm partially, I was a part of this as well. when you when you when you when you seize the power of the presidency and you're able to pass massive legislation and that legislation moves you forward aggressively and you create 16 million jobs as opposed to for example Donald Trump who in his first term lost 2.5 million jobs but in fairness I'm not a fan of Donald Trump but that was COVID losses right

that was because of COVID I'm just even if you even if you even if you bring COVID into it okay And you measure the number of jobs, Joe Biden's administration, like, by the way, like all of the Democratic presidents, where we're beating the Republicans like 50 million to one, we can be, we should be able to be able to say, we did a lot of great work and we created a lot of jobs and we brought manufacturing back to the United States. And by the way, a lot of those plants are in red states. That is a fact. It is also a fact that we brought down inflation faster than any other major country from 9% down to 2. But in our talking about it, what we miss was the fact that those macro numbers that were really good on any day for any administration did not accurately reflect the cost of the pain of the cost of living for working men and women. And they heard from us that we did not see them. And we did not do a good enough job of communicating to them that we understood that notwithstanding the fact that we said, that we had great growth numbers, we had great GDP numbers, we were working hard on inflation,

that we had low unemployment, that we weren't sensitive enough to the day-to-day things that working men and women were feeling, and they felt frustrated, and they felt things were broken. And the other side ran a great campaign, too. So, you know, you look back on all that stuff,

and you go, well, like, you know, what can we do to fix that? And mine is you've got to go see people that feel left out that you haven't seen in a long time. And to the extent that people who want to run for office want to win, they better go see everybody. And they shouldn't assume that people are not going to be for them because they look a certain way or they act a certain way

or they work in a certain field. You got to go see everybody and ask them for their vote. And then you have to have policies that are reflective of what it is they say that they want. And if the other side does that better than you, you're going to lose. If you do it better than then, you're going to win. Do you think cultural issues as well? I mentioned transgender men in women's sports or biological men in women's sports. I think I saw that the best ad that Trump campaign had was the one that was most effective is that said something like he is for you and she is for they them. That was the best. I mean, just as a look, putting aside any other issue, just like in the in the competitive world that we live in about good ads that hit a certain point,

that was a devastatingly good ad. I thought it was, you know, it was what it was. But let me but let me see if I can address the issues. It is really important in America that we honor the principle that we all come to the table of democracy as equals. I don't think there are a lot of people in the MAGA movement that actually believe that. But I believe it, and Democrats believe it,

and I think most Americans believe it. That's number one. Number two, I think that it's really important that whether you're conservative, a moderate, liberal, or progressive, however you self-identify, that you commit yourself to the worth and the dignity

of every human being and that we should not discriminate against people because of race, creed, color, or sexual orientation or difficult issues like transgender issues. Those things are very important.

When you find a wedge issue, like who's gone to the bathroom with who, are boys and girls playing sports against each other, and you politicize them, it's easy to not, be able to get to a reasonable and thoughtful place about what the policy should be, or even whether it should be in the president's mouth. I mean, there are three, I don't know how many

there are. I'm going to say that 3,000 athletic associations in America that can figure out who's supposed to go to the bathroom with who or who's supposed to be planned. But when you get into those issues and you talk to working men and women, who are not, by the way, who you can feel from the meetings that we have with them, who are not homophobic, they're not bigots, they're not racist, they're not anti-immigrant. What they say about the cultural issues is on somewhat of a spectrum. Some people say, I just don't like that, I don't know what to talk about it. Some people say, I don't care if someone has an alternative lifestyle. Are you fighting for women's right to choose? Just quit talking about it all the time. That's all you talk about. And I don't mind you

feeling the way you feel but it just means that you're not focused on my economic issues and i want you focus on the fact that i can't make a living and that's why you say well it's the economy stupid first and so and then some of it is you know what i just don't think it's fair um competition's supposed to be fair and it's not really even a gender thing per se they they say there was an example in one of the focus groups where somebody said listen um in ncaa a wrestling that is man, man versus man, you would never put a 98-pounder up against the heavy weight because that person just is, and that's not fair competition. The same thing you hear with immigration, which is I'm not anti-immigrant, but it's just

not fair for people to be jumping in line. So there's a fairness issue that runs through that. On our side, you know, some of our folks hear that and they go, oh, my God, I don't believe that. There's only one way you can be. And now I'm going to judge you because you have a little bit of a different opinion than I have that doesn't fall into the discrimination pattern. And so I think they began to feel whether we made them feel this way

or whether the Republicans said we made them feel this way, that we were judging them in the harshest way for coming up with something that they thought was a reasonable answer to how their kids and their family members could be with other people in the kinds of complicated situations that they had in their life, whether it's at the ballpark or at the gym or at the football field. And they felt that we were intolerant and not open enough. And there's a lot of good reason to believe that we can be overly judgmental and that

we don't have, we're not, we talk big tent, but we're not really as big tent. If you're not right on abortion, you're not right on trans issues, if you're not right on this, then you can't be right on anything. And I think that people are looking, people are more complicated than that. And they're more, and this is a word the right hates, they're more, intersectionable than that and they're lots and they're more complicated than that than politicians and media people give them you know the benefit of the doubt for and they don't like that and by the way they're not these folks that we're talking to they're not necessarily trumpers they're like

for whoever's going to help them and they're up for grabs but you got to go see them you got to talk to them and you got to have a bit look I'm a big tent guy I'm a I'm a I just think that we got to have a lot of room for people that think differently and we have to invite everybody in but don't lose up principles, but at the same time, be tough-minded and be smart. And that we ought to run, we don't have to run an either-or world. It can be a both-hand, and we can figure out how to do all those things at once. Fly Air Transat, seven-time players, champions out again.

Fly the seven-time world's best leisure airline champions, Air Transat. Well, let me read you. The New York Times had a piece on the Democratic plans to win back men. This was part of the story on it. It says, for now, Democratic donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working class voters, commissioning moot projects that can read like antipological studies of people from faraway places. The prospectus for one of the new $20 million efforts taken by the Times aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic. support among young men, especially online. It's codenames Sam, short for speaking with American men, a strategic plan, and promises investment to study the syntax language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces. It recommends buying advertisements and video games, among other things. How is it, though, the Democratic Party, which as you mentioned was

you know, talked, you had a lot of working class men, union men. They're coming up with anthropological studies, how do we this, how do we even communicate with men? Well, first of all, that, that's just, that's just stupid. Whoever wrote that is, I mean, when nobody's doing an anthropological study, let me, what, what is wrong? This, I don't understand this. First of all, it's not 20 million bucks. I don't know what it is, but that's, that's, it's not an anthropological study.

You go, what, if someone voted against you, and, and one of the reasons they voted against you is because you never came to see them or you never talked to them, or you don't understand what it is that they're saying, what the hell is wrong. with going to do the hard work of going where they are to their homes and to the ballparks and doing focuses and listening to what they have to say. How much more respect can you give and how else would you figure it out if you didn't go see them? And you didn't say, well, maybe the kind of hell, the stuff we've been saying doesn't make any sense to people. Let me give you an example.

When I was in the White House, we had the mission because Congress gave it to us of rebuilding the country. One of these things was laying high speed internet all over the country, which is important, fiber optic cable. That's a debate that goes on about whether or not, you know, you should do that everywhere or some places and Starlink and blah, blah, blah. But all the experts said that laying fiber optic cable, all right, and giving everybody access to broadband was one way to bring people into the economy because if you don't even have access to your phone or to a computer, you're SOL. well. And so the country said, yes, let's do that. So we were coming up with a plan to do this. And I remember one of the memos that came across my desk said, we got to lay broadband everywhere. One of the young men that worked for me went home that weekend. He was talking to his daddy. And his daddy said, what do you do? He said, I worked for this guy, Mitch Landrieu

and described all the stuff we were doing. And he says, we're laying broadband. And the dad said, what is son? What is broadband? I don't know what broadband is. The son said, well dad it's high speed internet and he said you dumb ass why don't you just say high speed internet right and so there's all these things in washington look i'm i am not of washington i'm a local government guy i was a state legislator i'm a lawyer by trade i got five kids i coached every one of my kids ball games at all the ballparks that we went to and traveled all around the damn country to as many travel games praying on sunday night that the game was going to end so we had to get kids in school to that day i was a mayor i worked in washington two years and well i find that

Washington can sometimes complicate, you know, how you cut a tomato. And so concentrating on how we interpret language that people give us and try to feed it back to them in ways that they don't understand, it's an art that only Washington knows how to do. And so what I'm telling people is, can we just go talk to folks, regular folks, and be simple and listen to what they say, and don't gussy it up. And, you know, don't talk about, you talk about the dignity of work. you know what working folks say they go man i'm out here humping i'm working three jobs for a one job paycheck and i can't make ends meet that's that's what they say and you don't ever find that in like a document that gets down to the and so the point is to go back to the roots and to go back

to common sense and to just listen to people so that they know there's one issue and i'll give this to every politician in america and all these you know these focus groups that were working on the working folks that we talk to. Housing comes up every time from everyone. Housing. Now, I would ask you to think now, we're now 130, I don't know how many days I went to the Trump administration. And everybody's talking about tariffs and everybody's talking about Panama and everybody's talking about Greenland and everybody's talking about the war that Donald Trump is not brought to an end that he said he was going to end on one day. Nobody's talking about housing. And it comes up from every person in every group that we talk about because people are, we're four million

houses short, folks can't afford the rent, folks can't afford the interest rates, people are feeling squeezed out of the neighborhoods that they're in. It's an essential part of the American dream to be able to provide for your family. And it's a major issue facing the country that we haven't, we haven't dealt with. And nobody's talking about it. So I will kind of like tell everybody, if you go talk to folks and ask them, they want you to fix the housing problem. So let's do that. Find a problem, fix a problem. Where's the plan?

That's a good segue into my next question, both that and the broadband you mentioned. I don't know if I've seen you comment yet on Ezra Klein is out with a book called Abundance. And his criticism is that the Democrats pass these major solutions, but do bureaucratic red tape, nothing is delivered. And one of the examples he gives is the broadband from the transportation bill where he says, You know, they had earmarked $40 billion for rural broadband, but by the end of 2024, almost no new broadband connections were actually delivered. What do you make of that? Is he on to something about the failure to actually implement some of these big grandiose plans?

Well, if you tell a half a story and not a whole story, it's half right and it's half wrong, which means it could be all right or it could be all wrong. Like so, let me see if I can address this a couple ways. When I became mayor of New Orleans, five years after Katrina hit, after the city had 17 feet of water in it, we lost 1,800 people, 250,000 homes, it was right before the BP oil spill, the city was bankrupt. I had to bring a, I had to bring a city back from total destruction, and I could have legally taken the city into bankruptcy. I knew that if he got into bankruptcy, it was hard to get out and that I would have to make some hard decisions. So I'm one of the few elected officials, I think, I know,

and I don't want to overstate this. But I had to cut 20 to 23% out of the budget of a city that was on its deathbed in six months. Now, I want you to think about what Elon Musk said he was going to do and did not do, less than one-tenth of 1% of a budget, 22%. I cut out of my budget. and I basically became a really aggressive hawk on waste, fraud, and abuse duplication and making

government work better. And I'm the most in-person person, you know, although Joe Biden's pretty impatient and kept the foot up my butt all the time about getting stuff done fast. So I think that even though I'm a Democrat, I believe government should figure out a way to be an active agent for change. And anywhere that there's waste, fraud, and abuse, duplication, or corruption, we ought to every day work hard to make that better. all right the second thing that's true is no matter where you are in america and my one of my concerns about ezra's book is he kind of focuses on democrats being the ones that make it hard to build stuff that's just generally not fully accurate that that government as a way um if you don't

train it every day like you're not going to the gym every day of of getting bigger you know and getting slower and that whether you're in a Republican city or a Democratic city, or Republican state or a Democratic state, these things tend to build up and that we ought to all, irrespective of what state we're in, work on that all the time. I'll give you an example that evidently doesn't go mentioned in the book. In the 13 lower southern states from Virginia all the way down to Louisiana, including Texas and Florida, those states have primarily been run by Republican governors since the beginning of the country. There hasn't been much change. And every one of those states has every statistic that is worse than third world countries. Just this. Low birth weight

babies, maternal mortality rates, the structure of the schools, the functioning of the roads, crime rates, they're all bad. And there's nothing in that book that talks about, well, that too, or even in California, for example, that people use as a place that doesn't work. My recollection, without really kind of studying this too much, is that Pete Wilson was the governor who was a conservative Republican anti-immigration, a whole bunch of stuff. Ronald Reagan was the governor for a long time.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was the government. They have Republicans and Democrats there. So my beef with it is just to say it's Democrats, not Republicans. Now, the other thing to think about is in cities, the cities of America are majestic places. And one of the views could be they're terrible because they have too many homeless people

there's too much poverty, there's too much crime, and shame on the mayors as though somehow all these people that have served as mayors, and by the way, they're like 30,000 cities in America, 3,000 of them are fairly large. It's their fault because they couldn't figure out as though somehow they just all, you know, not smart people, how to govern well. Well, you might want to kind of broaden out your thought and think, well, why, how did cities get the way they got? people left rural areas. They moved into the cities. When red governors took over states with blue cities, they basically took everything from the cities. They take their revenue streams. They're doing this as we speak where cities are generating huge amounts of revenues because that's where the sons and daughters from folks around the country come to live and they bring them up to the state and then they disperse them around the state and they don't get the cities the tools that they need to fix all the problems. Then they come visit. Then they complain that the city is not functioning as well. So that kind of symbiotic relationship that should exist where places work really, really well because of issues of race and issues of migration and issues of immigration, we have not done a

great job of coordinating the efforts between the federal, state, and local governments. And that lays at the responsibility of both Republicans and Democrats that have run the government, which gets you to the point of the book that is absolutely correct. And I don't have any quarrel with this. It takes us way too much time to build stuff. and we have to get faster and better while we're making sure that we protect people's clean air, clean water, and neighborhoods. That is not a Democratic or Republican thing either. It takes us way too long to build stuff and government is too inefficient and government does not

deliver services the way that it should. That does not mean that we ought to burn the whole thing down. It means we ought to fix it and fix it in ways that have a meaningful impact on the quality of people's lives from what your relationship is with your Social Security office, whether you can go to your office of motor vehicles and get what you need quickly, whether you can go to the state office and get your birth certificate, whatever it is that you need that should be working with the government, it should be a much better experience that it is right now. I just don't, I just quarrel with the idea that somehow it's the Democrats alone that's true this up. Let me end with this. If you went into a rural parish in Louisiana or a rural county in Pennsylvania that was used,

by a rice farmer or a cattle farmer or any, and you wanted to put a massive carbon capture facility or a massive solar plant. The people that live there, most of whom would be conservatives, by definition, would ask the governing authorities to please stop that from happening and to put any roadblock in place to not change that quality of life. This is a natural thing that happens across America, and we have gotten away from being able to resolve those differences in a way that protects people's livelihoods, protect people's culture, and simultaneously produces economic growth. We've got to get a lot better at that, a lot faster. It's just not the Democrats alone. This is something that we all share as a governing group, and we've got to get better at it.

Let me close on these two questions. First, is there any issue that you think that Democrats can work with the Trump administration on, that Democrats should reach out to them and proactively try to come to some sort of joint issue or congressional bill on. I think that, you know, again, I don't speak for obviously the folks in Washington, D.C., and I don't speak for the leadership in the Senate or in the House. But I think that if Mike Johnson went to Hakeem Jeffries, you know, or Senator Thune went to Senator Schumer and said, hey, look, let's put together a reasonable and thoughtful, bipartisan immigration bill or an infrastructure bill or anything.

And there was a lot of give and take. I'm quite sure that the Democrats would say, let's do it. But what they're not going to do is say, we got a bucket of shit to hand you, and we're going to make you eat it. And if you don't vote for it, we're going to punish you. I don't think that they're going to give into that. And I don't think that they should. But for example, I mean, it's not really rocket science.

I mean, notwithstanding the fact that Elon Musk thinks everything is rocket science. you could come up with a comprehensive immigration bill that protects the border and at the same time honors the idea that we are a nation of immigrants. You could fix public safety problems by being tough on crime and being smart on crime as well. You could figure out how to deal with housing if you thought about public and private sector stuff if you really wanted to find an answer rather than a political advantage. And by the way, on this big, beautiful, on this big, big, beautiful, I don't know what to call it anymore because now Elon is like calling it disgusting and fat or big and beautiful. I don't know what the hell it is. And they actually put in the bill. That's kind of cheeky. You can call this a big beautiful bill. You could figure out a way how to have targeted tariffs that bring manufacturing back that don't eviscerate the growth that we're going to have. I mean, just the other day somebody came out and said, we're not growing but 2.9% anymore. next year we're going to grow 1.6%.

The stock market is actually lower than it was when Donald Trump came into office, not higher. And I think this idea of chaotic tariffs that are across the board that are not targeted, most people are gone, that doesn't make a lot of sense because it's going to raise a lot of prices. But I'll bet you that if you came up with targeted tariffs that brought the manufacturing back in the right places, that if you thought about not tax cuts for working people that make a lot of sense and not tax cuts for folks that make more than $900,000 at the expense of taking away health care from people, or you found a way to help working folks with child care, or you found a way to do that with the early child income tax credit, but you didn't do it at the expense of health care that, you know, there probably, there's a lot of, there's a lot of room in there. But coming up with something that 65, 70% of Americans agree with. But if you say take it to leave it, I'm the boss, I'm the king, and if you don't do it, I'm going to hurt you, I think people are going to say bring it on.

And let's see if we can find a better way. And by the way, most of the folks that we're talking to, back to the issue of fairness, whether they're red or blue or mag or they're not maga, they just wanted to work for them so they can have a better light for them and their family. And that's the promise that we made to each other and the covenant that we made that kind of has been broken in the country. And they don't think it works to them. And we got to get better at it. All of those that are part of this, you know, thing that we call the government and partnership with the private sector and they're not for profits, we just have to get better at it.

And we have to reclaim some sense of confidence of the people because we've lost it. And I think that's not, that is not untrue of the Republicans as well. And, you know, we just got to keep working at it because the country, the future of the country depends on it. And I'll just end with what I began with. A nation divided against itself cannot stand. This kind of conversation that we're having can't last forever or is going to break and that we are always much better together than we are apart. We ought to choose double down and work hard on restoring the covenant that we made to ourselves almost 250 years ago. And I'll close on this. What candidate are you looking at for 28? Which ones do you think have the message that could win back the White House? I'm not I'm not looking

at any of them right now um i'm just one foot in front of the next right now 2028 will take care of itself um you got 2026 in between you got to believe given with the first 150 days of this hellscape has been that the world's going to change a million times uh between now and 2026 and 2028 you know so we'll see mayor land you thank you for joining the dispatch podcast good a good being with you You know,