The Press Box - Trump and the Troops, Back to School (Remotely), and Time’s Molly Ball on Pelosi and the Election

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker dissect Trump’s complicated relationship with the military and the truth (2:36), and they break down Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic story on the president and the complexities of anonymous reporting (3:34:). Then, they discuss remote learning and COVID-19’s impact on education (22:37). Next, Time magazine’s Molly Ball joins to discuss her book ‘Pelosi’ (36:00). Plus: the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David? Mm-hmm. There were a number of Trump boat parades over Labor Day weekend, and alas, a number of Trump boats sunk. But one theory was put forward from one Carmine Sabia on Twitter, the likelihood of all these boats sinking at the Trump boat parade by accident is microscopic. We're dealing with terrorists. What I want to know is, what the hell do you make of that?

Oh my gosh, it's sabotaged. This is going to be the first time when the BC boy, when like a liberal band calls up the Trump campaign. They're like, no, you absolutely can use our song right now. This is fantastic. Yeah, I don't know what to say about this. I don't know if it's better to frame this as a perfect metaphor or to take the, you know, maybe my more usual stance of like,

this is in the Bible. there are things like this in the Bible and we have a really specific interpretation when they happen to people we don't like. Didn't a Fox host compare the boats to the Spanish Armada a few weeks ago? Didn't that happen?

Yes, yes. Just like it's the absence. It's just like I don't know anything about history. Well, you don't know anything about like driving boats in the wake of other boats. I mean, it's just, it's just unbelievable. It's unbelievable.

I mean, it would be, I mean, there's not even, there's not even a comparison for this because the comparison, the real thing is the thing. People, the biggest support Trump has right now is people piloting boats and not being, and sinking them during the pro-Trump parade. That is, that is our president, folks. That's who, that, that, that, that, those are the people who support our president. They, we, we love him so much. We're going to sink our boats in Lake Travis, of all. I mean, it's just, what the fuck. It's time for the press box. a part of the ringer podcast network.

All right. Hello, media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here with a big show for you today. It's back to school week, or it was supposed to be. David and I talk about what the hell parents like us are going to do. Molly Ball of Time Magazine stops by to talk about the state of the election, Nancy Pelosi in her career in political reporting. Plus, David guesses a strain pun headline and the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

But first, David, Donald Trump and the troops. And it's a disgrace. Who would say a thing like that? Only an animal would say a thing like that. We're going to get deeply into this. But I want to make a small point. Isn't it kind of weird to claim you didn't use a crude disparaging term by using a different crude disparaging term?

Calling soldiers losers, why you'd have to be an animal to say that. I thought you were going to ask me about the definition of. animals and whether or not we actually were animals. This is a better question. It is weird. I mean, he's denying that he used insults that he is publicly used and specifically used towards John McCain, which is one of the information points of the story. I'm not sure that the dissonance could get any louder.

But yes, that is very strange. I was fascinated by the whole Trump and the troop story because it's a media story with like 12 layers, which we should try to unpack. This all begins last Thursday. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, publishes a story about Donald Trump's history with members of the military who died at war. A couple of mind-blowing nuggets from that story. In 2018, Trump canceled a visit to On Marne,

the World War I American Cemetery in France, reportedly saying, Why should I go to that cemetery? It's filled with losers. He also called the dead suckers for being killed in battle. Trump's disdain for John McKee. who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam was even uglier than we knew. When McCain died two years ago, Goldberg reports,

Trump said, we're not going to support that loser's funeral. Trump also called former president George H.W. Bush a loser for being shot down by the Japanese military during World War II when he was a Navy pilot. And in one of the story's most striking scenes, Trump, with his former chief of staff, John Kelly, was at Kelly's son's grave in Arlington National Cemetery. And Trump says, I don't get it. what was in it for them? What was just your first reaction, David, when you read this story?

My first reaction was that, like, I thought it was undoubtedly true and that we would end up exactly where we are right now. I mean, that it would just become almost more of a media or, you know, side-taking squabble than an actual, like, look at the content. But, yeah, I mean, it definitely rung true from the very start. Goldberg's sources in the article were speaking on the condition of anonymity. So I'm sure, David, you could see where this was going.

It's a disgrace that somebody's allowed to write things like that. It could have been, you know, a lot of times the sources aren't sources that don't exist. And sometimes the sources are just people that are disgruntled former so-called employees. Let's talk a bit about anonymous sources. Because this argument gets spun into the partisan food processor. But it strikes me there's a lot of small gradations we should think about when you have an article like this Goldberg Atlantic piece that is filled with anonymous sources. Number one, is the news truly important enough to justify such an approach? In this case, do we agree?

The answer is absolutely yes. Yeah, yeah. Right. This is not the Red Sox trade rumor. Right. This is something that is, you know, is important to know about Donald Trump, and it certainly informs the way he thinks about foreign policy. So that's a yes. Another one, was it confirmed by other reporters? In this case, yes, right? Parts of the story confirmed by the Associated Press, by the Washington Post, and by Fox News. That seems really important.

Was it impossible to get this story in any other way? James Laporta, former Marine, who writes for the AP and is one of the reporters who confirmed parts of the story, says, that one of the reasons that active duty service members request anonymity is a real fear of reprisal and that they're unauthorized to speak. So again, this is not the baseball front office guy who wants to plant a story, right? These are people who truly have something on the line. I mean, I know this is obvious, but it bears mention that the hypothetical baseball story that you keep mentioning is a thing that we see every day and that nobody takes exception to, right? I mean, the fact, like, it's, it's, I mean, clearly this is a much more high-stake situation, and we should be more, it makes sense to be more discerning about the, you know, subjects such as anonymous sources, but we really do.

Some people are, you know, pick their battles in a very strange way, but go on. Well, that was, that was actually a point I wanted to bring up with you, because it feels like when we do the anonymous source thing with politics, it's such a kangaroo court. because you have journalists having this good faith discussion with each other, right? How many anonymous sources is too many anonymous sources? And should we all, as a journalistic class, really try to rein those in? Have we gotten a little bit sloppy and lazy? But people like Donald Trump don't care about anonymous sources.

They care about whether the article is positive or negative about Donald Trump. So you're actually having two completely different arguments here. Are we not? Yeah. I mean, and on top of all that, it feels so kind of just implicitly redundant to say that Fox News is a mouthpiece for the administration or, you know, use phrases like good faith and cognitive dissidents and dissonance and everything else. But the Trump administration defenders are out there, I mean, news figures are out there multiple times a day calling this story debunked based on the fact that, people who were around the Trump administration say they weren't they're not aware that that happened right individual people are saying I don't know that happened and just and so it's being

trumpeted this now it's this has been debunk 12 times or whatever because we found 12 people that don't have anything to say about the story right they weren't there Brian were you there did you hear this happen okay now it's 13 times debunked okay I mean that's it must not have happened I wasn't standing there at that moment so and the people aren't even making the case that they know for sure right but there but this goes in the debunked column so this is again Does that fall into the media conversation that we're having or the kangaroo court? Well, I guess it's more sort of the latter, but it's media figures having the former. So it's just really hard to know, yeah, what the terms of debate even are.

I don't believe the public has an aversion to anonymous sources that exists outside of, like, politics. I really don't. No. We look every single Adam Schaefter and Adrian Wojnerowski's group, we're like, you know what? I would love that valuable piece of NFL news, but I'm sorry, I'm going to have to object because it contains only anonymous sources. No one has ever said that. No. In the history of sports.

No one cares, right? They care because Trump weaponizes anonymous sources. And Trump says, you know, ha, here's why it's fake news. Here's why you can't trust the media because there are no names in this story. And to some extent, that's intuitive, right? I mean, you understand why it's an effective argument because there are people out there, making partisan cases on the record all the time. So why not do it off the record where it's even easier, right? It's a little bit, I mean, obviously some of those people are, you know,

have experienced that firsthand. They need to be looking in the mirror when they assume such things by other people. But yeah, Trump absolutely weaponized it. And it's sort of ridiculous. I mean, I don't know that it's, I guess the hardest thing for me to wrap my mind around is how seriously Trump takes it, how seriously his defenders take it. I mean, to go back to the point I just made, nobody who's counting the number of debunkings on Fox News actually believes what they're saying. They don't know, they don't believe that's a debunking, right? So, but do they believe, I mean, so where does, so where does, where does the ridiculousness begin, right? I mean, does anyone actually believe that Jeffrey Goldberg is just running

a partisan hit piece because who, who's funding this? Because Steve Jobs, because Steve Jobs, is funding the Atlantic and she's out there. I mean, just the conspiracy, I mean, obviously, you understand why the, why the conspiracy theorists are out there kind of like farming for retweets or whatever, but like, I don't, like, this is like so much else in the past four years. I don't know to what extent anyone believes anything that's out there. And I don't know to what extent it even matters. I think there's another factor to consider when we comes to anonymous sources. This is Fox News's Jennifer Griffin, another reporter who confirmed parts of the original Atlantic article,

talking to Neil Cavuto. Not every line of the Atlantic article did I confirm, but I would say that most of the descriptions and the quotes in that Atlantic article, I did find people who were able to confirm. And so, you know, I feel very confident in my reporting. Of course, you know, it's always better when people come on camera, but you can see how people get destroyed when they get crosswise with the president and on and they come out. And so people are reluctant. They've seen the way the language that used to describe people and the way, you know,

Twitter has been weaponized against them. In other words, the reason there are a lot of anonymous sources is Trump. Because if you put your name to the accusation, Trump will try to. to destroy you. So it's like Trump is complaining about something that he is the cause of. Yeah. Well, that's not the only time we've seen that kind of in effect this week. But yeah, he's absolutely causing it.

I mean, it's a very common refrain on the sort of pro-Trump conspiracy theorists, you know, dark clearance of the internet that like anything they want to believe, that the answer for almost any theory is like, well, no one can come forward because their lives would be ruined by Joe Biden and the, and the DC establishment. But, I mean, Trump is the one that's actually interested

in ruining lives anytime this sort of thing occurs. And indeed, Trump tweeted, Jennifer Griffin of Fox News should be fired for this kind of reporting. Jennifer Griffin,

just doing very normal reporting. As you referenced, and as CNN's Oliver Darcy has pointed out, Fox had this sort of battle going on on their television screens and on their homepage all weekend, where they had their own

own reporter having confirmed parts of the story, right? Essentially say, hey, what you read in the Atlantic is true, at least as far as they know, with the president's denials, Kairons that said fake news and stuff like that. This was a particularly good example. Here's John Scott, Fox Anchor, trying his best to be the sort of voice of skepticism with Pete Buttigieg. I have current and former members of the White House staff, though, who say they were with the president's, that day and that nothing of the kind ever happened. I'm talking about Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Actually, they haven't said that. They just said they haven't heard. They haven't said that. They just said they didn't hear. And again, multiple sources confirmed this. Multiple news organizations confirmed this. But if you don't want to believe that, believe your own eyes. Because this president has been disrespecting the military from the day that he let some sucker in his view go in his place to serve in Vietnam because he didn't want to.

Let me read the quotes from Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She was the president's press spokesperson at the time. She says, I was actually there, and one of the people, part of the discussion, this never happened. I've sat in the room when our president called family members after their sons were killed in action, and it was heart wrenching. Hogan Gidley, also part of the White House communications team, says, I was there in the press. I was there in Paris, and the president never said those things. And I could go on. there are a few other White House staffers who say similar kinds of things, but, you know,

it just comes down to a he said, she said, Democrats seem to be seizing upon this, and Republicans are blasting. He said, she said, because there's a lot of this stuff you can catch. I mean, look, the president today lied on Twitter about never calling John became a loser. Now he's asking us to believe that, okay, he's lying about that today, because we can check and see the footage, but he's not lying about the other stuff. He must think we're all suckers. And the amazing thing to me is how little respect he has for the intelligence of his own supporters.

It was just like a batting cage because it was like Boudidjidjid came in with like a list of 10 lines he wanted to get on. And John Scott would say something like, well, let me go to number three on the list. John Scott came prepared with one line. That was the problem. Yeah. I mean, listen, the sound that you hear is, you know, conservative media budding its head up against the wall. It's really hard to make this case, right? I mean, the idea that, well, listen, there's always going to be really, really bad faith reporting, right?

I stumbled upon a piece last night from the Federalist where did you, I'm sorry, I'm just bringing this on you. It's like a terrible white elephant gift. Could you not sleep? What was happening? But the headline is, Atlantic editor concede central claim of Trump hit peace could be wrong. And then I think, man, that headline may have changed. I thought it was more demonstrative yesterday, but, you know, who cares? And or maybe just saw it retweeted in a different way.

And it just says, it repeats that in a very vague way, right? That's the reportage. And then all it does is just embed a YouTube video over the entire segment of Goldberg on CNN, where someone's just like, what do you say to this reporting, you know, in John Bolton's book that's not the same as yours? And he's like, well, I'm sure that's all true. I have more, I have additional information. And they just kind of very oblique.

legally say, well, that goes against the entire premise of the piece, right? I mean, and, and it's these sort of, these sort of fake gotchas that people think, you know, defenders of Trump think, you know, that gets him out of trouble or, you know, it's just, it's such nonsense. Um, you know, I don't know what the, I mean, I don't, I can only assume what would lead someone to go in an interview with someone like Pete Buttigieg, uh, with a set of talking points trying to think, imaginary talking point saying that defends the president. It doesn't. They know that. And Pete Buttigieg did a, you know, a stand-up job of making the case for, you know, reality and logic. Speaking of teeing up the Democrats, over the weekend, Joe Biden responded in a speech, speaking about his son, Bo who served in the Army. I'll tell you something, Biden said. My Bo wasn't a loser or a sucker. He didn't serve with losers and suckers. He served with heroes. If that's how you talk about our veterans, you have no business being president of the United States. States of America, period. The Biden campaign also launched an ad campaign featuring some of the

quotes from Goldberg's article. Now, I'm not trying to be the federalist surrogate here, David, at all. I don't doubt any bit of Goldberg's reporting. But I did rear up a bit the first time I read the article at the Oliver Stone script quality to some of the dialogue. Like, even by Trumpian standards, it is pretty wild, you know? It feels both like something Trump would actually say and something that a fiction writer would imagine Trump would say at the same time. And I know those two categories have just completely collapsed.

Then I heard the president on Monday. The military is in love with me. The soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren't because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.

Now, movie fans will recognize that is literally the beginning of Oliver Stone's JFK. So the dialogue all checks out. Never mind. Never mind. Fact checking is complete. It's sort of, I mean, this is a, I guess a small point in this grand, in the grand scheme of this, just entirely inane defense that Trump's launching. But the fact that he says, oh, I'm doing this because what the military industrial,

or this is happening because the military industrial complex is, is mad. me and then out of the other side of his mouth is talking about how he's funded the military to a degree it's never been funded before is like i mean i guess if you really want to separate those two things out if you really want to believe that those two things can go can can coexist yeah that's that's fine but there's a lot of i think what i just come back to over and over again and this whole issue is just like if to be like i understand the motivation of being like a pro-trump shouter on Twitter, right? That you're just out there trying to kind of like troll

and like derail conversations and just sort of win, you know, just kind of own the libs with whatever your talking points are. I don't know. It's hard for me to imagine that anybody except for those Twitter trolls is on Trump side and all this

or even believes him for a second, right? And it could be a world, we might be living in a world where there are millions, like every Trump voter is functionally a Twitter troll now. I don't know. But it is a very odd. It's just very odd to try to think of who's backing the president on this.

Yeah, I'm sure another article in the Federals will clear all this up. All right, David, tired for the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. News from the streaming world, David. The actor Hugo Weaving will not appear in. Amazon's upcoming Lord of the Rings series. Absolutely no, Weaving Tells Variety. To be honest, I think everyone had more than enough of it.

It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, Bored of the Rings. Thanks to Bacon in Jungle. Elsewhere in entertainment, Robert Pattinson, who is currently playing Batman, has tested positive for COVID-19. Now, the easy move here, David, would be to say, wait, he was wearing a mask.

But it was a better, overworked Twitter joke to write, wow, this whole thing is kind of come full circle for bats. Thanks to Tim Klass and Obi-Wan Jacoby. And finally, David, the Trump boat parades were back on Labor Day weekend all across the country. On Lake Travis down there near Austin, five Trump boats sunk because of the waves produced by other boats. Thank goodness, no injuries reported, according to NPR, which means we can do the jokes. and there were so many of them. This one, you've got to do the Trump voice.

I like boaters who don't sink, okay? It was just old boats and most of them had pre-existing conditions. Oh, that's true. Another one, Poseidon, Lord of the Seas, welcome to the resistance. That was Concepcion. And finally, calling the boat parade

dumb Kirk. Dumb Kirk. Thanks to Leah. That's good. John Gets, Soxside Sports. Mike Shaw is staying. six feet away and DRN 3030. If you shot fish in a barrel or trump boats on a lake, congrats.

You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. Time of the notebook dump, David. And first up, I want to talk to you about this. Labor Day has come and gone, which means it's time for our kids to go back to school, except they're not. Our little snookums or snookumses, I guess, is the plural, are going to be engaging in remote learning, which means they're home with us. us. Remember in the springtime when this started and you and I were like the dad in Swiss

family Robinson, you know, stuck on the desert island? Oh, schooling. Yeah, let old dad have a crack at that. We can do this just fine. How did that go? And now we're staring at this future where it's like, oh, wait, that's not like a fun week or two weeks that you'll remember forever. that's now until infinity like there's there is no obvious end to this yeah

it's it really is sort of hitting home for the first time no pun intended you know I'm lucky I have a tiny baby who's not wouldn't be in school otherwise although you know we are starting to wonder whether

lack of like daycare socialization is going to be a long term issue for this whole generation of kids. But, and then we have an 11-year-old who, you know, is, you know, you can have a conversation with him. You know, I mean, I don't really know, you know, what the learning situation is going to be compared to what it would have been in school, but, you know, he's old enough to, like, fully understand what's going on. But that, it seems like all of our personal situations are, in some ways, it's easy for us to wrap our own mind around what's going on, right? Here's the thing we have to do to get through the next month or six months or year or whatever. I mean, we've been

managing for a long time. and we'll continue to manage. But all of the systems, I mean, some schools are going back and, you know, having all the kids back in school, and there's this practical element to that, but that's obviously going to end in catastrophe. But it seems like all the schools

that are going back halfway, and I mean, you know, New York City is doing that. You know, Prince and New Jersey, where I live looks like they're headed in that direction after the first couple of months. A lot of places, California, listen, there's a lot of people trying really hard to find good solutions

to what's going. going on, but I can't help but think that everybody, I mean, everything, every solution feels like a band-aid or everything is a half measure where the sole purpose is direct, it's more directed towards the perception of normalcy than actually educating kids, right? And, and, I just can't, like, we're going to get through. A lot of people have it a lot harder than you and I do. I mean, there's very hard decisions to make. Put that at the top of the segment. We are privileged. We are so, so lucky. But, like, talking about socializing the baby.

I mean, like, we're just going to have, I mean, we're going to, we have a whole generation of kids that are just going to miss two years of school, you know? I mean, like, we look back and laugh, you and I can laugh about how, like, oh, like, everything we learned in whatever,

ninth grade or eighth grade was worthless or whatever, but like, it wasn't worthless, you know, going to school is not worthless. And we have kids who are just missing it. And like no one, I mean, the president's out there acting like, like it's someone else trying to trick him, then to trick everybody into closing the schools.

Like, this is a, I mean, man, I hate, I feel like I'm ranting here. But like, everyone has lost a year, minimum, everyone. I mean, we're talking about grocery stores and movie theaters and restaurants struggling. And now we're talking about colleges a lot, and that's all good and well. That's important. And there's this perception or presumption the little kids are going to be okay. And it's a catastrophe. I mean, it's a, it is a, like kids are missing a year or more of school.

Some parents are missing a year or more of work. It's a, it's a fucking catastrophe. And the president or somebody should be saying that out loud, right? This is a natural disaster. I mean, it's a side product of another real natural disaster. But this is like, this is like serious, this is a serious issue for people besides us, right? I mean, you and I can say, you and I'll stop talking, but you, I mean, like, I was thinking about this the other day.

Brian. You and I were like, were like goody two shoes relatively speaking when we were in school, right? Yes, yes. We were nerds. Now, yeah, nerds. Chris, I'm sure you were, you weren't too far away. Just stop.

Just everyone who's listening to this, just stop for a second and think about how much suggested reading you did over summer vacation growing up, right? If you're not saying none, you're in the tiniest of tiny minorities, I could possibly whittle out of this, you know, of listeners of this show, right? And think about how much help tutors ever did you if you had tutors. Probably not a lot, right? No. We have a generation of kids losing a year, over a year of education. And they're supposed to make it up with the same tools that we have that suggested you read like six chapters of Red Badge of Courage a week or whatever. I mean, over summer vacation. It's like, it's so ridiculous. And it's, and what it adds,

up to, I mean, it's a small point of this whole thing, but what it adds up to is a real, real problem. And everyone's just like, it's like a, they're treating it like a logistical issue. It's not. I mean, we should start with this is, this is a catastrophe. Now let's figure out a way, like, let's figure out what we're going to do in the future or something because it's, this is not getting fixed in real time. No, because the biggest problem is the failure to contain the coronavirus, right? Yes. That's just like college football. The big number one problem is the failure to contain the coronavirus. So now what you're doing is, at in 1,000 different places around America is scrambling to say, how do we have school

when we have failed at the most basic part of this pandemic, right? And I'll take you back to ninth grade for one more thing, David. Your mom and my mom were both public school teachers. Yeah. Long-time public school teachers. We did not need the pandemic to figure out how tough that job is and how amazing those people are at doing that job, right? To now see, that we didn't have to be thrust into that job ourselves. All I had to do was look at my mom whenever she came home at night because she was worn out, right? And it was a tough, tough, tough job. And now you're asking all these parents to do that job, right?

You're asking teachers to do this job under incredibly adverse conditions. It's incredible. And if we can go from the macro of the micro for a second, what do you worry about David as a parent? I'm going to guess three things right here. your kids, your marriage, and your job, right? That's probably the top three. Sure. What if I could tell you, I would take all those three things you care about and put them under an enormous amount of stress all at exactly the same time?

Yeah. That is what is happening. That is the catastrophe you are talking. That's the micro of the catastrophe you're talking about. And again, for people that are less privileged than us, only more so. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know.

I mean, you're talking about our parents. I think what the first semester of of remote learning did was I mean everybody was trying to figure it out on the fly but you saw I mean it was really clear that like the people that you might have kind of offhandedly referred to as like the good teachers figured it out right and certainly there is a huge age barrier or whatever

I mean their technology barrier in terms of some of that zooming and everything else but there's these I mean all the teachers are just, they're all doing their level best. But it's just like this is a whole new skill set. This is a whole new skill set teaching like this. I mean, I mean, my 11 year old. Especially for elementary school, right? Yeah. Just, I mean, like an elementary, elementary school and I have a, you know, one kid in elementary school. One kid's about to be in elementary school. Like, what is elementary school about? It's about sitting around your teacher and like reading books and stuff. And it's gotten a lot, it's got a lot more complex than when you and I were in kindergarten. But that is still the

basic thing is like time with teacher. Yeah. And now you're trying to tell a teacher they're going to transfer that over a computer. No. I mean, it's, and, and, and, you know, it's a different skill set than what, than we, what we as parents have, right? I mean, even the, even the, even the parents who are most committed parents who are teachers, like whatever. And we don't have the same relationships with their children that they have with their teachers, you know? I mean, it's a, it's a whole different thing. And, and again, it's all, I mean, the young kids are, forget social studies in English and even forget math for a minute.

Do they still call it social studies, by the way? Just a world, just a world moment here. What did we call it? Yeah. What was it called in sixth grade? Humanities. No, my sixth grader had humanities. And that was English and social studies together.

But I mean, they're learning all, kids of all ages are learning the tools to learn in the future, right? I mean, they're learning socialization. learning like, like comprehension skills. They're learning how to like follow instruction. They're learning how to like exist around other people. Yep. We talk a lot about like the life without the newsroom. I mean, this is going to be this. We're risking having like a whole bunch of kids who wouldn't know how to function in a room full of other people if that was given to them.

You know, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a real problem. A couple of really good Michelle Goldberg columns about this subject. She wrote one called New York School Chaos is. breaking me. The first line is I'm writing this column at 4 a.m. because I can't sleep again. I would recommend those. And she said one paragraph really stood out to me. A friend who works in chronically underfunded city high schools pointed out that privileged parents like me are getting a taste of something that other urban parents have always gone through. No matter what I do, no matter how much futile energy I spend trying to think my way out of this, an adequate public education is now out of reach for my family. Yeah. Just add one more curly.

cue to this whole subject. You sent me this article from New York Times that was just amazing about the backlash that's happening for parents at tech companies. Tech companies have been trying to be nice to parents when the pandemic started. You get some extra paid leave if you have kids and stuff like that because we're trying to make your life a little more helpful. The New York Times reports, it wasn't long before employees without children started to ask, what about us? At a recent company-wide meeting, Facebook employees repeatedly argue that work policies created in response to COVID-19, quote, have primarily benefited parents. At Twitter, a fight

erupted on an internal message board after a worker who didn't have children at home accused another employee who was taking a leave to care for a child of not pulling his weight. So that's where we are in the tech sector. Krasamade is nodding his head really, really broadly, right now. I'm just kidding.

I mean, that story read like dark comedy, right? I mean, it just seemed like, it's sort of unbelievable. And we've seen this happen, right? I mean, we work for a giant tech company. You know, our HR department or, you know, or company at large, I think was, you know,

no one, no one knew how to react, right? When this whole thing started. And I think it took a little while we talked about on the show for people to wrap their heads around the fact that parents etc. On our footing, we're having a difficult or at least a different time, right? A difficult or at least a different time, you know, Spotify reacted to that. And, and, you know, Spotify reacted to that. And I think in the product, and you can understand how, you know, if you're sitting at home

getting five emails a day about, you know, different benefits that don't accrue to you or whatever, even though, you know, most of those benefits are very available, how that might get, like, frustrating. But, I mean, but no, no, no one's taking anything away to you from you to give it to somebody else, you know, and you just, I just like, I just can't even argue with this point of view. It's just so unnecessary. I felt a little bit of sympathy because before I was a parent, I didn't understand it either, you know, and it was just, it was unimaginable to me.

And then you cross over that line, right? And all of a sudden, you're like, oh, wow, look at it. I'll look at what's going on here. Right. And it's like you realize nobody is, you know, if you did an A minus job, job that day, that day at work, nobody is making the saber metric adjustment and saying, well, you know, he had two kids and it's really a tough time. He actually, that's actually an A plus effort. Like, no, nobody, nobody cares to think that. And by the way, it's the same for your kids, right?

If you and I are doing a really big project or working hard, are you doing a piece of NBA art on the weekend, your kids aren't like, well, you know, dad was kind of. absent there for an hour, but, you know, is a really important piece of art. Like, no, no, they don't care either, nor should they care, right? Like, that's just, that's not it. So it's, there's not, there's not, there's not, there's not, again, it's almost like fixing the schools. There's, there's no, there's no policy that's going to be like, okay, well, that makes it all right. That, that fixes everything. It just, it just doesn't exist. David, it is less than two months until the presidential election. And I thought we needed an update. on politics and such. Here is Time Magazine's Molly Ball. Molly Ball is the national political

correspondent at Time where she's written recent cover stories about Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Julia Louise Dreyfus, or as you know them, the entire lineup of the Democratic National Convention. A veteran of the Atlantic and Politico, she's also the author of a new biography of Nancy Pelosi, and she's here to talk about the speaker and the presidential election. How are you, Molly? Doing great. Well, you know, with an asterisk, it's a fraught question these days, doing as well as I can be. How are you? There you go. Also with an asterisk. Let's start with Nancy Pelosi. Absolutely. She comes out last month and says, Joe Biden should not debate Donald Trump.

Biden's team comes back and says, no, no, we're definitely debating Donald Trump. But I thought those comments were interesting because they revealed a little bit about the way Pelosi thinks about Donald Trump. So as a Pelosiologist, how does she think about Donald Trump? Yeah, I think she was being honest when she made those comments that. she actually just sort of considers him beneath contempt at this point, sort of the same sentiment that inspired her to rip up the State of the Union speech a few months ago. You know, there was all kinds of speculation at that point. Was she being strategic? Was she trying to, you know, divert attention in some way or change the debate? And I think it was really just an

honest sort of visceral expression of the revulsion she feels at this president, at the way she believes he has trampled the institutions that she's devoted her life to, right? I mean, she's very much an institutionalist. She's someone who believes in the Constitution and the Congress and all of these rules that Trump, in her view, has really trampled on. So, you know, I think she looks at the debates and the, you also see a lot, I write a lot in the book about her life as a young mother and the sort of leadership lessons that she took from that. And I think it is a similar sentiment of, well, if you're not going to respect the rules, you don't get the rewards. You don't get the things that come from that. So I think strategically it was probably a mistake. It required, you know,

it inspired, as these things tend to, dozens of segments on Fox News and conservative talk radio and accusations that the Biden campaign was in on this and they had to then do a cleanup job. So that was probably not something that they welcomed. But I don't think that she had a strategy in mind when she said that, I think she was just expressing her honest opinion. I wanted to ask you about Fox News because for more than a decade, whenever they needed a quote unquote scary Democrat to be in a graphic, they would put up a picture of Nancy Pelosi. She may have lately been eclipsed by members of the squad, but for a long time it was Pelosi. How did she regard being used as a symbol in that way in right-wing media?

You know, and it's not just the media. You know, the Republicans have featured her. She's been the star of the Republicans' advertising campaigns, really going back as far as 2006, but it was really in 2010 when after her second term as Speaker, her first alongside President Obama, she really became the focus of those tens of millions of dollars of political attack ads. And when you ask her about this, you know, they do this obviously as a strategy. She's quite unpopular as a national figure. She's quite polarizing.

She tends to inspire a sort of visceral reaction in particularly, you know, conservative-leaning voters. And so they put her in these ads because they believe that it works. And the idea is that she somehow symbolizes, you know, the San Francisco liberal, the culture wars. She believes that it's essentially a homophobic dog whistle. She believes that it's essentially saying to voters, you know, that if you're against gay rights, this person coming from San Francisco, being an out. outspoken, you know, proponent of gay rights symbolizes all of that. And she actually, you know, the whole idea of the San Francisco liberals really came out of the 1984 Democratic Convention,

which Nancy Pelosi, at that time, a non-professional political activist, was instrumental in actually bringing that convention to San Francisco and helping to run it in 1984. But all that is to say, you know, she spends a remarkably little amount of time sort of thinking about her national public image. And when you ask her about it, as I did in our very first conversation, she'll just sort of bat it away and say, well, if I weren't effective, I wouldn't be a target. I think there's some truth to that, but she also has a really thick skin, a really incredible ability to just sort of block out the haters. Going back to her first congressional campaign in 1987, people would come to her and say, oh my gosh, they're saying these terrible things about you.

And she just shut them down and say, I don't want to hear it. Don't, you know, pollute my head with that stuff. If you don't like what they're saying about me, go out and work harder. Go out and, you know, walk another precinct. Go out and raise more money for my campaign. And she just really, I've tried repeatedly, you know, in conversations to get her to sort of reflect on this incredible demonization of her that has occurred. Literally hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on attack ads focused on her

tying Democrats around the country to her polarizing image. And she just won't really engage with it. She's just not interested in it. She'll turn the conversation to something else. She wants to talk about strategy or she wants to talk about policy. But she's not particularly interested in her own public image because she believes that it doesn't have anything to do with her ability to achieve her goals. Her goal is Democrats winning elections and moving legislation through the Congress, moving

progressive legislation through the House of Representatives. And so, you know, what somebody thinks of her in Peoria really does not affect that as far as she's concerned. Speaking to which, when you go to her office and say, I'm interested in writing a biography of the speaker, how does she react to that? You know, I am told, I went to her staff. I am told that it took a little bit of convincing. She, as I said, she is so focused on her goals.

And I think the idea of participating in a book, her first question is going to be. many people, well, what's in it for me? What does it get me? Particularly a book that she doesn't have any control over, right? This is an independent project. I'm coming to my own conclusions here. I don't work for her or speak for her, and I like to think I'm not in the tank for anybody. But, you know, I feel like she should be considering her legacy at this point in her career. She really has come to a point where I certainly thought it was reflecting on the whole story of her life and her time in politics. But what does that get her in terms of her immediate goals? I don't believe she's read the book. I think she's probably pleased that it has gotten pretty good reviews. But it was,

I think, a project that took some convincing on the staff to her to provide time for. Another big story with Pelosi. There was a high-profile Democratic Senate primary last week in Massachusetts where she came out in favor of the Challenger, Joe Kennedy, over the incumbent Ed Markey, which was interesting because she's generally in a position of fending off primary challenges for Democrats. What did you read into her motives in coming out for Joe Kennedy? Again, I don't, I thought I was surprised that she did that. It did not seem like a very strategic thing to do. If anything, it was divisive within her own caucus as well as among Democrats generally.

By the time she waited into this race, it was starting to look like Kennedy was going to lose. and, you know, most politicians don't like to back losers. Markey was a good ally of hers when he was in the House. I have a whole chapter in my book about how she moved heaven and earth to get the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill through the House in 2009, 2010. It's still the only major piece of climate legislation that has ever passed a House of Congress, although it did not pass the Senate at that time. So I don't really get it.

And her stated reason was sort of Camelot nostalgia, which, I'm sure she does have quite a bit of that. She was head over heels for John F. Kennedy from the time she was a teenager. And I argue in my book that a lot of her own personal politics is sort of modeled on that Kennedy style. But it doesn't explain why she would do something that's sort of strategically boneheaded. So I really don't know. I like to think I understand her pretty well. But that was a strange decision from where I sit.

The least important Nancy Pelosi story of the fall was her going into. to this San Francisco salon the other day in the surveillance video showing her not wearing a mask in the salon. She said she was set up by the owner. Did you make anything out of that whole strange little media tempest? Yeah, I did actually. I mean, look, I'm not going to defend her. And again, I don't work for her. If she did abuse her position to break the rules or if she ignored the rules because she thinks that, you know, she's better than that. And they only apply to the little people. I'm not going to defend that. She says that's not what happened. And, you know, And the facts are in dispute.

She says she was misinformed and that there was a political bias against her. She does like to get her hair done. She considers it sort of her only luxury, the 20 minutes every morning when she has someone else wash and brush her hair. It's basically your only downtime. She, her habit, she always says, thank you, Paul Pelosi as her hair is being brushed because it sort of makes her feel pampered and it's her husband's money. But, you know, do we think that this would have been a massive multi-day news cycle if it was Donald Trump? for Mitch McConnell getting his hair done. I feel like the one thing I've learned

from covering Nancy Pelosi is that whether or not you think she's doing the right thing in any given situation, the level of scrutiny applied to her lifestyle and her personal choices is pretty insane. I tell the story in my book about when she first became speaker in 2007, her staff made a routine inquiry

about whether she'd be able to use a military jet to commute back and forth to her district exactly as the previous speaker. Male Republican Danny Hastert had done ever since 9-11. Again, it blew up into this all-consuming news cycle, right, days and days of wall-to-wall coverage, Republican congressmen making speeches on the floor of the House, demanding investigations, headlines throughout conservative and mainstream media, people calling her, you know, fancy and entitled. She is a very rich person. But somehow, you know, anytime that she

demands things, she's labeled, you know, entitled, even if they're the things that come with her, position. And I really do think that, you know, when an important man demands the trappings of his position, we don't tend to call him entitled. We assume he is actually entitled to those things, right? The whole, the whole idea, the whole term of a prima donna just does not even exist for men. So, you know, they attack her in this way because they think that it works. And that's what it really reflects, is that voters, meaning our society, have this visceral reaction to her. acting as if she's entitled to anything, whether it's money, power, respect. It just seems to piss people off to see her, you know, eating ice cream or flying on airplanes or getting her hair done. So, of course, Republicans are going to go after her for it. Pelosi turned 80 years old this year, and I've seen a theory on Twitter that Biden wins in November. Republicans retake the House in 2022 because that sometimes happens in midterm elections. And that becomes her cue to retire, knowing her as you do, Does that seem plausible?

That's a lot of hypotheticals, and I have a firm policy of not making predictions. And this is a really touching subject for her, right? I mean, no politician wants to lame duck themselves. But she also, she'll, if you bring up her potential retirement, she'll accuse you of sexism and ageism. She claims that, you know, since she didn't run for office until her kids were grown and she was 47 years old, a lot of her male contemporaries in politics have, you know, 10 or 20 years more political experience. So she seems to think that you ought to knock 10 or 20 years off her age for that reason, which of course is not actually how chronological age works.

But, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if she retires after this election. She claims she's told me and others that she was considering ending her career had Hillary won in 2016 and that she only stayed because without Hillary in the White House, there would not be any woman in that room when the president sits down to negotiate with the leaders in Congress. Now, who knows, she suspiciously, she doesn't seem to have said that to anybody before the election, only after that she was thinking about retiring if Hillary won. But there's an anecdote in my book that I, that was previously unreported, that in 2018, after the Democrats won the midterms when she was fighting to regain the speakership, she negotiated. the final vote in order to get the gavel came from her making a deal to accept a term limit, that she would serve until no longer than 2022.

So to your point, if she does want to stay speaker past 2022, she's going to need to come up with some sort of change to the rules and face-saving excuse for why she's not abiding by the limit that she set for herself. But after she accepted that term limit, she walked into her next meeting with some other Democratic members and she was laughing and she told them, well, I was only planning on staying for one term and now they've given me two. And this is a common tactic of good negotiators, right? The fake concession pretending that you're giving away something you really cherish when actually you didn't want it at all. And who knows if something's changed since then, but that's the

only indication, the only clue I've been able to find that she has been thinking about this topic and that at least as of, you know, before the current term, she was looking at potentially ending it after her current term in Congress. We're a little less than two months away from Election Day. The polls, at least the national polls of state, fairly level at Biden, like plus seven and a half, slightly closer in the swing states. Is there a way you see Trump winning this election? Or should I say, let me not be, let me not speak for as an overconfident Democrat.

How does Trump win this election, do you see? Well, look, I think 2016 taught everybody that anything can happen. that to the extent that we previously thought there were sort of normal rules of the road in politics, they had sort of gone out the window. Whether or not there's been an actual sort of realignment in American politics, whether it was sort of a fluke or an acceleration of previous trends, we could have hours of entertaining political science arguments about that. But anything can happen. A poll is a snapshot, not a predictor. And the polls have been quite stable. It's possible we've overlearned 2016, right? It feels to me like people are sort of falling all over themselves to

come up with ways for Trump to win rather than look at the massive majority of the evidence that we have in front of us. But part of the reason I don't like to make predictions is because I don't like being wrong and looking stupid later. And I don't know what's going to happen. We don't know what the future holds. What happened in 2016 was that a lot of people, voted in certain states in ways that contradicted the polls in those states. So, you know, the national polling was pretty much on target, but the state level polling was badly off. That could happen again.

Polsters obviously have been trying to update their methodologies and do better this time around. But the electoral map is always a moving target. So this is a very, very, very wordy cop out of an answer to say, I have no idea. I'm all forwardy copouts when it comes to predictions. You were writing about Biden's acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. And you were talking about how Biden's sort of whole theory of this campaign has been remarkably consistent. You say his whole ideology, his whole political framework was premised on an unquenchable belief in the overriding power of speaking from the heart.

Is this idea right that as a nation we can return to this pre-Trumpian state, we can heal. That is essentially what Biden is saying. from this vantage point, do you regard that as a brilliant theory of this election, at least to get him to this point, no predictions, past this? Or was it a decent theory of this election that looks better because of the circumstances the country finds itself? Well, look, go back to the Democratic primaries, right? Biden gets into the race. He says it's because of Charlottesville. And he has this sort of corny mantra about the soul of America. And there's a bit of ridicule and a lot of skepticism from the left. But I think what we saw was that whatever you think about, you know, the potential or alleged deterioration of his mental faculties, someone who's been in democratic politics

as long as he has, has a very well-tuned understanding of internal democratic coalition politics, right? He knew, he decided from the beginning that he was going to run against Trump, not on a, you know, particular policy platform as much as on this sort of feeling, and that he was going to run aggressively to the middle, despite the fact that everybody else in the field pretty much seemed to be sprinting to the left. And that turned out to be a really good bet based on where the Democratic base actually was. And so, you know, he certainly could not have known that we would be dealing with a pandemic and economic collapse right now. But again, those same political instincts that say you run to the middle, you don't run as a base candidate, and you run based on your personality, your connection with voters, more than your policy platform, more than any particular agenda.

His campaign is very much about him being a good person, right? About compassion, about empathy. and then sort of secondarily about these issues that are traditionally strong for Democrats like health care and supporting workers economically. So those have coincided quite neatly with this moment. But I think they also reflect his sort of general political instincts that have been honed over decades of experience of seeing how electorates actually behave. And so far, it seems like that's put him in a really good position. I was looking over your bio before we came on. Your first job, this is unusual for a political reporter, reporter at the Cambodia Daily and Phnom Penh.

What did you learn from that job? So that was a great job. And I learned a lot from it. And it changed my life and my outlook on the world. I did work for several newspapers in college. I actually started a newspaper in my neighborhood when I was in the fifth grade. so it wasn't my very first reporting job. And my first real byline was in the Toledo Blade in Ohio.

But I ended up in Cambodia because, number one, my post college, Washington Post internship did not turn into a job. And I needed something to do. And what I'd been doing for the post was I was in a suburban bureau. And I would have been eligible for sort of that job at another Metro Daily. And I didn't get into journalism to report on, you know, fruit stands in the suburbs, which is what I've been doing. And I regretted never taking a year abroad when I was in college.

So I got a job in Cambodia, and I set foot in my very first ever developing country. So it's an amazing experience to live abroad, particularly in a developing country. It teaches you so much about the world. It teaches you so much about the United States. And for me, it was a real lesson in the meaning of the rule of law that I think. a lot of people take for granted here that is not quite the same in a place like Cambodia that's rebuilding from, you know, decades of dictatorship and genocide. But yeah, it was a great experience.

I reported on, you know, Ancor Watt and more crimes tribunals and getting used refugees, all kinds of fun stuff. One more for you. The sports writers I run around with all have strategies when they're interviewing an athlete to try to move them off the cliches, right? they're going to come off the field and say certain things. And we're, you know, you try to get past that and get to the, to the meat of the interview. Do you have a strategy when you sit down with a politician to push past the political cliches,

the things you know they want to tell you and get to what you need to know? That's such a great question. Yes. I mean, on the one hand, yes, of course, you're always trying to move politicians off their talking points. And I think the main thing is just to be really aggressive, right? We're sort of programmed as humans to be polite. And I feel like years and years of journalism have just given me more and more practice

in not being embarrassed to ask really rude questions and interrupt people. But you also want to have a conversation, particularly as a feature writer, right? Ideally, when I am sitting down with politicians, I have quite a bit of time with them. I have the ability to go deeper than just peppering them with interrogation questions them recording their responses or or trying to get them in a gotcha over some, you know, contradiction or hypocrisy. And so I do think that what they want to tell me also matters, right? Just because it's something they've decided in advance they want to say. That too is interesting. That too is revealing. So yes, you've given the opportunity to deposit the talking point,

try to move them past it, try to get them somewhere more interesting. But also, I think sometimes we don't do enough thinking about why is it they are, they want this cliche to be the thing that I print. What is it about, you know, what is this message that they're trying to send? With athletes, there may not be, you know, a policy. They are trying to propagandize for, I don't know. But yeah, I mean, it's just, you just have to have a feel for it, I think. Yeah, it's like of all the cliches in the universe, why did they land on this particular one, right? What does that say about them and their view?

of the world. No, I think there's something there. You can read Molly Ballas pieces in time and read her book Pelosi, which is available everywhere right now. Thank you so much for doing this, Molly. Thank you so much for having me. It's been fun. All right, it's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strained pun headline. Thursday's pun headline about selling airplane food to people who aren't flying was grounded beef. Grounded beef. Today's pun headline comes from literally every listener of the press box. It references a story. I'm sure you heard, David.

I read a little bit of the CNN version. A professor of African and Latin American studies who portrayed herself as black has now revealed she has been lying. Jessica A. Krug, an associate professor at George Washington University, has written extensively about Africa, Latin America, the diaspora and identity,

all while claiming her own black and Latina heritage. But in an article published on Medium Thursday, Krug revealed the truth. She is white. Now, the New York Post was waiting for this story. I mean, this is, this is a front cover. The Post has waited its whole existence for.

The word I'm looking for, the pun word, is pigment. What was the New York Post's strained pun headline? Pigment of your imagination? We're done. We're done. All right. Pigment of her.

imagination. Yeah, that's good. That's a good one. Of her imagination. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almata, production magic by Lonnie Rinaldo.

Listener mail coming Thursday, along with a well-known novelist who has a lot of takes about Trump and the state of the world. In the meantime, sources close to the president say there will be more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David.

I don't believe it. See you, Brian.