The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, August 23

Episode Date: August 23, 2018

President Trump has called his former campaign chairman who was found guilty in court a "brave man." Meanwhile he is distancing himself from his former lawyer who pleaded guilty for campaign finance violations. With close allies to the president in legal trouble and another Republican congressman being indicted, how are corruption charges affecting the midterms? Plus, tech giants announced this week that more countries are attempting to influence the elections. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, reporter Sarah McCammon, political reporter Tim Mak, and editor correspondent Ron Elving. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Mary, Henry, Erica, Julia, Lloyd, calling from the drink stack, Horseshoe Island, Stony Lake, Ontario, Canada. We're drinking 12-year-old scotch, just like Michael Cohen. This podcast was recorded at... It's 1.30 on Thursday, August 23rd. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Okay, here's the show. And Microsoft and Facebook and Twitter all announced attempts by foreign governments to influence American voters. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Sarah McCammon. I'm covering the White House.

I'm Tim Mack, political reporter. And I'm Ron Elbing, editor-correspondent. All right, there is clearly one moment this week that we need to start with. And I'm talking about one moment in specific because near simultaneously in Virginia and in New York City, top close aides associates of President Trump were either being found guilty or pleading guilty to serious crimes. And this really reshaped the political landscape and the legal landscape of the Mueller investigation. Paul Manafort, the former campaign chair, found guilty on eight counts after a lengthy trial. And then a surprise, We weren't expecting Michael

Cohen, that longtime aide and fixer, saying he broke the law and saying that he did so with the knowledge and the direction of President Trump. Sarah, President Trump is responding to both of these guys in, to put it mildly, very different ways. Let's start with how he's talking about Paul Manafort. Yeah. And again, Manafort was his campaign chairman. He came into the campaign the summer before the election. And Trump has done a couple of things. You know, remember, Manafort, again, was the one who was convicted on eight counts in his tax and bank fraud trial. And he did not cooperate with prosecutors.

He did not cut a deal. He went to trial. And Trump has been praising him for that. He has expressed sympathy for Manafort. He said he felt badly for him and his family. He called him on Twitter a brave man. And he said specifically that he respects him for going to trial. He talked about this on Fox News this week. And I would say what he did, some of the charges they threw against him, every consultant, every lobbyist in Washington probably does. Given the way that Trump has liberally and politically

used pardons, has there been any indication so far that he would consider that with Manafort, given how much he's praising him this week? He was asked about that in the interview, whether or not he might pardon Manafort. And he didn't commit one way or the other. Sarah Sanders, press secretary, was asked about that this week, too, in the White House press briefing. Didn't commit one way or another. But again, Trump has been very friendly and very complimentary toward Manafort in his tone. And he certainly hasn't ruled it out. Tim, let's talk about the guy who in Trump's mind has flipped, Michael Cohen. How has Trump responded to Cohen this week? So basically, Donald Trump, in that same interview with Fox, tried to distance himself from Michael Cohen,

even though Michael Cohen was, of course, the personal lawyer of Donald Trump, was a VP in the Trump organization. Trump said, basically, they didn't really see each other all that often. And in that interview on Fox, he also contradicted Cohen, who said in court that Trump directed him to arrange the payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, the two women who say they had affairs with the president. Did you know about the payments? Later on, I knew later on. But you have to understand, Ainsley, what he did, and they weren't taken out of campaign finance. That's a big thing. That's a much bigger thing.

Did they come out of the campaign? They didn't come out of the campaign. They came from me. Let's take a moment and back up here, because the way the White House has talked about Michael Cohen has changed a lot. So can we step back and just give a timeline of who said what when, when it comes to what exactly happened here? His position now is that the money came from him, not the campaign, and that he knew about it after the fact. That's what he said most recently. Initially, Trump said he didn't know anything about this.

Eventually, he said he knew, but only after the fact through his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Then more recently, he's saying it didn't come from the campaign. so it can't be a campaign finance violation, which is not necessarily true. And he's also saying that campaign finance violations aren't that big of a deal. So he's sort of downplaying the whole idea of campaign finance violations. Well, we probably should add that even if the money came from him, ultimately, it went through a couple of creations of Michael Cohen's that made it an illegal campaign contribution. So the question then becomes, how much did the president know about those dummy corporations that were set up to make these payments? And was it all

done, as Michael Cohen told the judge, at the president's direction, which makes the president, of course, a conspirator. President Trump is not the first president to be in the middle of the scandal. He's not the first president to be in the middle of a legal scandal where he may or may not be being implicated by people in courtrooms. How is his response in line with or way different from previous presidents in this situation? It's really hard to describe the difference because Donald Trump is so accustomed to getting into the media in so many different ways's really hard to describe the difference because Donald Trump is so accustomed to getting into the media in so many different ways. He talks to rallies, as he did on Tuesday

night after these two rather disturbing events in his universe, and he gives his version of the truth and then sometimes a different version of the truth a couple of days later. He puts out tweets, as we all know, that are sometimes contradictory to what his own personal and or White House attorneys have said. So he is so much out there all the time that it really jury, to have him, as he did on Fox News, not only talk about, you know, going after those who flip, as he put it, but he said that maybe flipping should be made illegal. I mean, how unusual is it to essentially question the entire judicial process? You really have to go back to Richard Nixon to find someone this at odds with the judicial process. Richard Nixon was also at odds with the legislative process because members of the Senate and eventually the House did go after him for his alleged violations of the law. And

he was eventually named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Watergate conspiracy, the cover up of the Watergate burglary and a lot of other things. So that's really the comparison point that people are forced to go back to. Bill Clinton has some points of reference as well, and he was impeached in the House, not removed from office by the Senate, but impeached in the House, largely over the things he said in testifying to a grand jury. We could talk a lot more about these developments, but there's more criminal matters to talk about. So let's shift gears to a story that did not get much attention because of the time in the news cycle that it came out. And that was an indictment of California Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter for basically misusing campaign finances. Tim, can you fill us in on, first of all, who Duncan Hunter is and what this indictment alleged?

So Duncan Hunter, he's a Republican congressman from California in the San Diego area. And this all dropped in the middle of the Manafort decision and in the middle of what was happening with Cohen. But it is a wild story. I mean, I read the indictment and it's just charge after charge after charge. And it's a really kind of compelling story. And I don't even know what the most extravagant or eye-popping allegations are in terms of how he misspent campaign finance money because there was so much. Yeah. I mean, so it's important to note that these are alleged crimes. He said he's innocent and the target of political prosecution, but the indictment itself is 48 pages and you could read it as kind of like weekend reading.

It is actually an interesting indictment, but the bottom line is that they converted more than a quarter million dollars of campaign funds to pay for personal expenses. This is everything from electronics to vacations that they were taking twice a month, to clothing, to gifts for family members and friends, to concerts. They were essentially using campaign funds as a personal piggy bank. And talking pretty bluntly with each other about how to mask this personal spending as legitimate campaign spending. wounded warriors. Did he fall in hard times? Did he run out of funds, personal funds? Is there anything in the court documents that give us a window into his motivation? What it really seems like is that they were living well beyond their means, that they were personally broke because

they were spending very extravagantly. And you can see this over and over in the indictment, which again, I encourage you to read because it's a really compelling read, is that they would go to zero on their checking counts. They would have like $15 in their checking account. And then they would use their campaign credit card to buy dinner, groceries, whatever, go on vacation, go to Europe. It's just a fascinating story. Hunter is denying all of this,

is not resigning, is continuing to run for re-election. And Ron Duncan Hunter was the second member of the House to endorse the Trump campaign. The first member of the House to endorse the Trump campaign is Chris Collins from New York, who just a few weeks ago also indicted. He was indicted on insider trading charges. All of this, in addition to all the Trump stuff we're talking about, has Democrats talking a lot about corruption suddenly on the campaign trail, talking about

government reform. That's a message that worked well for them before. Yes. In 2006, the Democrats had a couple, three things going for them. It was a midterm election for President George W. Bush. The Iraq war was dragging on when people hadn't expected that. There were some soft spots in the economy. But the real thing that the Democrats kept emphasizing was that this Republican majority, which at that time had been running the House for 12 years, and the Senate as well, was a majority that had become corrupt and complacent and wasn't really representing the people anymore. Much of the corruption impression that was left was the result of lobbying scandals. People who had abused their relationships with members of Congress, taking them on long, expensive trips, things of that nature,

for the benefit of their lobbying clients. And that included a guy named Jack Abramoff. That may ring some bells from some people. I mean, a couple of movies made about him, one with Kevin Spacey playing Jack Abramoff. So this has gotten a certain amount of notoriety, too. And with Paul Manafort bringing lobbyists back into a kind of special ill repute in recent days, that's another thing the Democrats can try to connect to. So, Sarah, Democrats still think health care is the top issue to run on, health care, the economy. They think that there's an argument about putting a check on the Trump administration that can resonate with voters. But they're talking about corruption more. How are Republicans responding to this idea that this is a lot of bad criminal type headlines? How are we going to deal with this? In the press briefing this week, Sarah Sanders was asked about this at the White House, and she said this is something that Democrats are just going to try to do to try to make an issue because they she said they don't have a message.

She said it's a sad attempt by Democrats. It's the only message they have going into the midterms. It is certainly a message we're going to hear going into the midterms. when I talked to some Republicans, some concern about where this all goes for the president and a sense that this will be an important issue for them as well in the midterms. Now, I don't know if that's a talking point, a political talking point to try to rally the base or if that's about genuine concern or both. But I would expect that we're going to hear some Republicans as they campaign ahead of them in terms, telling their base, you got to get out and vote for the president because otherwise this presidency may be at stake. The thing about this, though, is that there's a lot of news that you have to be following for this to stick, right? Like we all follow this every day and sometimes we get confused. Isn't

the average voter not quite following the blow by blow of these trials and everything else? I think that's certainly true. But when you have a midterm election, generally speaking, what everyone understands is that you're only going to get a fraction of the number of voters who come out for a presidential election. So it tends to be the harder core people and the higher information people, the higher education people, the higher income people who participate in a midterm. But when you get a special midterm, one where a big vote comes out larger than the usual midterm vote, that's usually persuadables, people who can switch if there's something that's energizing them. And that could be an unpopular war.

It could be a big recession or it could be a big scandal story or the perception that things in Washington have gone haywire. So as you say, Ron, the electorate for this midterm election already is a little bit more engaged, a little bit more informed. And pollsters have told us that those are the very kinds of voters that pay attention to things like corruption scandals, which are complicated and nuanced. So it's possible that the voters we're going to see this fall will be paying more attention maybe than your average group of voters to something like this. Yeah. Let's consider for a second exactly how complicated these corruption issues are. I mean, could you explain it on the back of a postcard? I mean, I got a text from a friend of mine who's a law enforcement officer in West Virginia. And he said, look, I've read five or

six stories about this. I still don't understand. Can you explain to me what is happening? And these are people who want to know and want to understand and are unable to really comprehend what the scandal is. And if they can't comprehend it on a gut level, that there is a lot of corruption out there and here's A to B, then how are they going to make decisions about their voting behavior based on that information? But that complexity, I think, lends itself to the president's tendency to sort of shoot from the hip, sort of speak to the gut rather than to the nuance and the detail. It makes it easier for the president to muddy the waters a little bit. Well, you know, the early stages of the Watergate scandal were about campaign finance and very kind of in the

weeds and boring. And what broke through for people was people hearing Nixon on tapes talking about the scheme or talking about his political opponents. That's what people understood on a gut level. And that made an impression in a way that may not have that the campaign finance issue and getting into the weeds on that may not have been able to ever reach. You're so right about the complexity of this issue. And then you have, of course, the comparison to a story with the emotional impact of the tragedy of Molly Tibbetts, the young woman from Iowa who went missing a number of weeks. And now we have the arrest of a person who is accused in that case. And that person, officials say, came to the country

illegally. And that has already been pounced on by the president of the United States, by many other Republicans who are on the ballot in November who want to talk about this. And that has such an emotional wallop. It's very difficult for a complicated scandal story to have the same impact. And, you know, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has said this himself in an Axios interview this week, that he basically said it's good for Republicans if the Smalley-Tibbets story stays in the headlines because it reinforces the president's message. Well, Sarah, you and I saw all throughout 2016 how President Trump would repeatedly bring up onto stage the family members of people who were killed by people in the country illegally. He's done that as president. That's something he likes to talk about.

The question is, is that the type of thing that cuts through in some of these suburban districts where the House is going to be played out? So last question on all of this, and this kind of gets into what we've been talking about. We've seen in so many different headlines over the last couple of years, it's a really major headline. It's a serious news story. Then 10 days later, a poll comes out and nobody's mind is changed at all on President Trump,

on the direction of the country, on the key polling questions that decide midterms. Any indication at this point that this is any different? We don't know yet, but it has that potential because we have seen one poll result that already people are a little bit more confident about the Mueller investigation in general, that the approval for that has gone up by double digits since July. And that's pretty significant. If people are behind the Mueller investigation, that makes it all the more difficult for the president to resist it or to fire Mueller or to fire Jeff Sessions at the attorney general slot. And those numbers have been getting closer and closer to 50-50 and more and more partisan over the past year. That's right. But there is a big bump in recent weeks, and this is probably going to get a boost from the result of the Manafort trial, that will just continue next month as

Manafort goes on trial for another set of charges in another federal courtroom, this time in Washington, D.C. And there could be a building sense of momentum, as there was, as Tim pointed out earlier with Watergate, as people came to learn more about it. The president says he doesn't get enough credit for good news. And one of the reasons why we can expect that these poll numbers are increasing for the president, or at least not dropping due to some of these scandals, is because of the strength of the American economy writ large. We're now in the longest bull market that we have on record. So the president will point to both economic growth and job numbers to say, hey, actually, putting all these scandals aside, getting away from some of this static,

things are going pretty well in America. In fact, he was asked on Fox News about the prospect of impeachment. And he said, I don't think they can impeach somebody who's doing so well. It's not how the law works, but that is his mindset. He said that the stock market would crash if he were impeached and that everybody would be poor. He did. All right. We are going to take a quick break. When we come back, Facebook and Microsoft and Twitter all announcing attempts

by foreign governments to influence the midterm elections. The Democratic National Committee had a big headline, too, but that one's a little more complicated. We'll explain it all in a moment. Support for this program comes from SimpliSafe Home Security. SimpliSafe is self-installed wireless protection for your home. The company was founded by an electrical engineer whose friends were burglarized. They wanted home security, but most systems were too complicated and too expensive. So he built SimpliSafe. Now they protect over 2 million people. And with SimpliSafe, there are no annual contracts. Learn more about SimpliSafe today at simplisafe.com slash NPR politics.

Support also comes from ACT, a flexible CRM trusted by millions worldwide. Manage customer contacts, track sales opportunities, and create professional marketing campaigns, all from your laptop or mobile device. Call 888-643-6400, mention promo code NPR for a free Amazon dot with your purchase of ACT, or visit act.com slash NPR to sign up for a free 14-day trial. ACT, growth made easy. Hey, this is Stretch Armstrong. And this is Papito Garcia, the hosts of What's Good. We're talking with one of the coolest cats around, Lenny Kravitz. I remember this kid walked up to us in the hallway and he goes, your dad's white. And he pointed his finger like that. Subscribe now. And we're back. Let's start with the news from Microsoft and Facebook and Twitter. Microsoft disrupted six fraudulent

websites set up by Russian hackers, and Facebook shut down 652 Iranian-backed accounts linked to a disinformation campaign. Tim, walk us through this and the other tech world news, because it seems just like every few hours we were seeing more headlines about another thing that was found and stopped. It was a crazy week in the world of information warfare, which is what this really is, right? That we are entering this age where state actors are engaging in cyber operations. They're trying to penetrate various systems and embarrass public officials or spread disinformation. So here's what happened. With the Microsoft situation, what they did was they shut down these websites that were on the edge of attacking the International Republican Institute,

the Hudson Institute, and the U.S. Senate, basically trying to send emails to these folks using fraudulent websites to kind of take and steal passwords and information. That's different from what happened with Facebook. Facebook shut down a campaign that looks like it was started in Iran, which did take part in some traditional cyber operations, but also spread disinformation targeted at US, British, and Middle Eastern users on Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of people followed these accounts that were shut down by Facebook this week. What about Twitter? Twitter also shut down hundreds of accounts that were related to Iran. And separately and on top of it, Facebook shut down other Russian linked accounts this week. Wait, so I'm a little confused here. We've talked

so much about Russia, but some of this news this week was about Iran trying to meddle in the elections. They do have an interest in disrupting our democratic procedures because they accuse us of having meddled in their elections. And the world that this sort of thing can be done on the cheap and that you can create a lot of chaos. You can advance your interests forward for not a lot of money just by creating bot networks or spreading disinformation or using the power of the Internet in order to push your country's interests forward. So all that is going on. And meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee, which was the original when it came to being co-opted by cyber attacks, a key part of the 2016 Russian attempts to influence the election was getting into the

DNC system, stealing their emails, giving them to WikiLeaks, and then WikiLeaks releasing them right on the eve of the convention and causing all this disruption. So, Tim, you and I were reporting this the last couple of days. The DNZ comes out and says, hey, we were being attacked again. We flagged it. We called the FBI. We stopped it. We are on it.

And then the story took a little bit of a twist. So, yeah, we found out that actually it was a big misunderstanding that friendlies from the Michigan Democratic Party or a specialist working with the Michigan Democratic Party were actually trying to probe Democratic systems for weaknesses that they could identify and fix. And not just the systems, a central key part of this, the voter file, the national voter file where the party keeps all the information on voters it's trying to reach out to. Pretty sensitive stuff. One big problem, they forgot to tell the DNC they were going to do it. Yeah. So for all the talk about Russia trying to confuse and so, you know, lack of trust in institutions, sometimes our institutions can confuse themselves, it sounds like. Which the irony here is that Democrats have been trying to tell everybody for the last year how much more seriously they're taking all this. And they've said, look,

we've even created fake attacks on ourself to try and learn how these attacks come from. But there's a difference between an internal decision to create a fake phishing attack and some outside group doing the same thing, not telling you and then realizing, are we under attack or not? Well, everyone is on red alert right now for cyber operations.

And who could blame them? Just look at the other news of the week that we just talked about with Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, everyone. All the big tech companies are lining up to say, we've disrupted this effort. We've disrupted that effort. So the DNC is really sensitive to possible attacks. And so if there's bad communication, this sort of thing is going to happen. Tim, you said everybody is on red alert. Sarah, would you include the White House, President Trump as everybody on red alert when it comes to acknowledging the serious nature of these cyber attacks? First of all, I think it's important to

distinguish between President Trump and the White House, because those are not always the same message. The president, as we've been over a lot in recent weeks, has sent mixed messages about Russia, about, you know, he uses this term, the Russia hoax a lot to refer to the Mueller investigation, but sometimes seems to be referring to just the whole idea of Russian interference. He has, of course, come out and reaffirmed, yes, Russia interfered in the 2016 election. But bottom line, his messages have been confusing. At the same time, the message from the administration, from top Republicans and from top national security officials who work for the president has been consistent, that Russia did indeed interfere in the 2016 election and is continuing to try to do so.

Just a few weeks ago, I sat in a briefing with a bunch of top national security officials, CIA, NSA, FBI, et cetera, and they came out, kind of surprised all the reporters. We knew there was going to be a briefing. We didn't know what it was. And all of a sudden, all these top officials walk into the room and they're there to tell us again that we affirm that this is happening. We are doing something about it. They outlined all their efforts to secure U.S. elections and combat interference. And they said, importantly, that the president had directed them to make this a top priority, which seemed at odds with

some of the things he'd been saying just days before that. The president has been at pains to cast doubt on any suggestion that the Russian interference in 2016 was a key element in his win, that it was supposedly on his behalf and that it played a role in his winning. That's what he really cares about. He does not ultimately need to, in some sense or another, facilitate the Russians continuing all this. So there's no reason for him not to have his officials shut it down at this point and resist it in every way that they can, as long as he can continue to say there was no collusion between my campaign and the Russians in 2016. Here's the thing, though, Tim, Congress, unlike the White House, is all on the same page that this is a serious threat, but they haven't seemed to act too quickly in

terms of comprehensive ways to stop it. So we're left with this situation. All the people you mentioned flagging these problems were big private companies. And here's the worrisome thing about it is that we're relying on the altruism of big corporations, big tech companies deciding, hey, it's in our interest to come clean and say, there's a problem here, and we've found it, and we've ended it. And in many of these cases, they have to acknowledge, hey, they failed to prevent a campaign from developing in the first place. And so the incentives oftentimes push towards non-disclosure, that we are in the weird position and the awkward position of relying on the transparency of big tech firms to be honest with the public in ways that are not compelled

to do necessarily. And at a point when increasingly our leaders and public opinion as a whole is a lot more cynical and skeptical of these big tech giants than we were just a few years ago. It's a bitter pill for them to swallow to admit, as Tim says. It's also ultimately something they have pushed away to be seen as a media company making content decisions. They've always wanted to say, we're not that. We're just tech companies. We're just wonderful facilitators of all that stuff you love to do. We are not making any decisions that influence you in any way.

We're just neutral tech companies. And let's face it, that's just not supportable anymore. And even though, as we mentioned, this is a relatively bipartisan issue in Congress, if not the White House, their attempts to deal with this in a bill form have kind of stalled, haven't they? Right. Well, this week, the Senate was supposed to mark up or consider what's called the Secure Elections Act. And what that would do is require backup paper ballots, post-election audits and notifications of states from the Department of Homeland Security if there was some sort of breach in their election system. But instead of what was planned, it does not appear that there was enough Republican support for this bill to move forward. And it's stalled. There's not going to be, in the foreseeable future,

a vote to press this legislation forward. I mean, but in fairness, it is a complicated problem. And when we saw that in the last few weeks, when Twitter and Facebook tried to figure out what to do with someone like Alex Jones, who pushes fringe conspiracy theories, because when you make one declarative decision here, there's all sorts of ripple effects, and the technology is always changing. Are they going to ban Alex Jones, but then turn around and allow lots of other people who say outrageous things to be carried

on all these social media? Because Alex Jones is not the only person out there being unreasonable. So who's going to make those judgments? And of course, we've heard many people among conservatives and other places saying that already Facebook and Twitter are making way too many decisions of an editorial nature, and they are violating the free speech rights of the people they're shutting down. It is a tricky problem because we have, you know, in our constitution, right, we have protections for free speech and we have limits on what government can restrict. But private companies have become so, so powerful and so technologically advanced that they have abilities to facilitate conversations and block conversations

that they've really never had before in the same way. And I don't know that we have a robust theory collectively about how to regulate that and how much to limit that. That's in line with our larger ideals as a democratic society that allows free speech. And that can't be exploited by foreign enemies. Right. And when we talk about election security, what we're really talking about is how to protect the heart of our democracy. And that takes several forms. It's not just about election infrastructure and how we cast ballots. There's also disinformation and how to prevent folks from pretending to be people they're not or creating bot networks. There's also the hacking that could take place and whether or not Americans can feel secure about communicating privately. It's a super complicated question

with multiple angles. It's multi-jurisdictional. It requires private industry to cooperate with government and law enforcement. And there's not a simple solution to it. But I think the best solution that listeners can kind of lean on is to be more skeptical about the information they get and to verify the information they receive. All right. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, the one thing we can't let go of this week. Support for NPR and the following message come from Newsy, can't let go of this week. context, more solutions, and greater understanding of the people and events that shape our world. Learn more at newsy.com slash watch. Support also comes from ZipRecruiter. Hiring is challenging, but ZipRecruiter can make it simple, smart, and fast. ZipRecruiter sends your job to over 100

job boards with one click. Then it scans thousands of resumes to find people with the right experience and invites them to apply to your job. Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash weekly. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, one of your new hosts for On Point. We take on the news with the smartest guests and live calls from every corner of the country. NPR's David Folkenflik hosts the Friday Week in the News.

Join David and me for On Point. All right, we are back and we are going to end the show like we do every week by talking about the one thing we cannot let go of politics or otherwise. Tim, why don't you get us started? So in the coming weeks, there's going to be a pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C. called the Mother of All Rallies. And I was taking a look at this and I came across this genre of pro-Trump rap. And there's this song called Maga Like a Mofo. mofo. This isn't good, but it's better than the Tea Party rap I remember hearing

around 2010 for the first time. Here's what I kind of wanted to go on a mini rant on. It was like, you can't find good political music. And what I mean by that is not politically themed or that touches on politics matters, but like anything that ever touches on a politician is terrible. You think about, you know, the Obama Girl song in 2007, 2008. You think even about, even really good artists

when they do political music sound terrible. Like Eminem had this anti-Trump freestyle that he shot. Springsteen. This music video. Springsteen singing for John Kerry in 2004.

That turned the whole election around. Marilyn Monroe singing for John F. Kennedy. I just want to know what makes a rally the mother of all rallies. And if it is the mother of all rallies,

then why do you insert the word mofo? I just feel uncomfortable with that juxtaposition. But whatever. I don't think that song was made in reference specifically to the mother of all rallies. Okay, but what makes something the mother of all rallies? Just big? We'll see. They had one last year and it was not very large.

It was the aunt of all rallies. What's the aunt? A-U-N-T. Aunt. I think we need to hear some more of this song to end this segment. Now everybody want a MAGA like a mofo. But everybody wants to try to keep it low. We the people really gotta go for brodo.

And MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA like a mofo. Ron? I'm trying to think of how to wrap this, but I can't let go of Foster Freeze. But I will have to let go of calling him Governor Freeze because he was not nominated to be governor in his primary this week in the state of Wyoming. Now, he is not a native of the state of Wyoming, but like a lot of other people with money, he has enjoyed going out to Wyoming and spending time, and he has been spending time there. And he has also been a candidate for the Republican nomination in a five-person field. And there were two reasons to think he might very well win this nomination. One was that he had spent well over a million

dollars of his own money. Wall Street Journal says he's got 500 and some other millions of dollars. And he was endorsed by the president. In no uncertain terms, he said to the incredible people of the great state of Wyoming, go vote today for Foster Fries. He will be a fantastic governor, strong on crime, borders, and Second Amendment, loves our military and our bets. He has my complete and total endorsement, which is no small matter, because as he was telling the crowd in West Virginia on Tuesday night, just before the results came in in Wyoming, the president's record as an endorser is almost perfect. I mean, he has been a fantastic determiner of the results in Republican primaries this year. And yet, it didn't work out.

Came up short when it came to Foster Freeze. Well, every streak's got to end. Sarah, so this week, President Trump, at his rally in West Virginia, made a point that he's made a lot about his trade policies, that even though there's been a lot of pushback from our trading partners and retaliation against his steel and aluminum tariffs. It's important for people, especially people like farmers, to wait and give his policies time to work because it's going to work out great. And in order to make this point, he used a bit of an unconventional metaphor.

Sir, can you get this deal done immediately? I said, it doesn't work that way. I don't want to go too fast. The deal's not going to be any good if we do that. We've got to take time. It's got to gestate, right? The word gestate. It's like when you're cooking a chicken. Time, time. Turkey for Thanksgiving. My mother would say, oh, eight hours. I said, eight hours? She made the greatest turkey I've ever had. He's not wrong. Yeah, yeah, but for the record, again, gestate, as far as I know, is not a culinary term. This is a medical term.

It usually refers to a growing fetus in the womb. But I guess, I think what he was trying to say there is we just need to, you know, marination. You know, as someone who takes the lead on cooking Thanksgiving dinner, he is not wrong. Especially sometimes I smoke the turkey. You got to marinate. You got to smoke it. And you can't, you know, you got to let it do its thing.

Wait enough time. You don't want to rush it, take it off early and have chewy turkey. I just know a good friend of mine who is overdue with her first baby texted me the other night and said, I feel like I'm gestating like a turkey. I'll go last. I feel uniquely unqualified to have a can't let it go this week because I was off for a long period of time and by and large avoided the internet, both the news portion and the pop culture portion.

So I will just say what I can't let go is how delightful it is to be back with all you guys on the podcast. Welcome back how delightful it is to be back with all you guys on the podcast. Welcome back. You're smoking more than just turkey over there. And congratulations. Thank you. Big life moment. I did smoke some ribs over this break.

I let it for eight hours. Marinate. As the president said. And they were delicious. Not just eight. All right. That is it for this week. We will be back in your feed the next time there is political news.

Before we go, I want to give one quick shout out. This is the last week our amazing intern Libby Barry is working with us. She has been a huge superstar, especially when it comes to fact checking this podcast. We will miss her very much. Thank you, Libby. You can keep up with all of our digital work by subscribing to our weekly newsletter. Go to npr.org slash politics newsletter to subscribe. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Sarah McCammon. I'm covering

the White House. I'm Tim Mack, political reporter. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.