What A Day - Trump's Rambling Speech

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

President Donald Trump gave his first speech to the American people since taking office Tuesday night, and it was long. The president's address to Congress lasted more than 90 minutes breaking Bill Clinton’s 2000 State of the Union record. Trump talked about everything from tariffs to immigration to trans kids to the economy. Pod Save America’s Jon Lovett joins us to debrief the president’s rambling speech.Show Notes:Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8Support victims of the fire – votesaveamerica.com/reliefWhat A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

It's Wednesday, March 5th. I'm Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, a show that did not expect President Donald Trump to become bizarro Oprah. Scholarships, Secret Service badges, wildlife refuges. It's all happening. On today's show, we're talking about President Trump's first speech to the American people. And the speech was, well, it was a speech, the longest joint session speech in history. And you felt every single minute of it with lots of capital letters.

It was a speech in which Trump emphasized that contrary to what you, me, Texas Democratic Representative Al Green, or millions of people think, everything is actually awesome, Super awesome. Except for Democrats who are mean. I look at the Democrats in front of me and I realize there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy or to make them stand or smile or applaud. Nothing I can do. It was a campaign speech, which is weird because the campaign is over.

It's been over, but not for Donald Trump, who felt the need to bring up former It was a campaign speech, which is weird because the campaign is over. It's been over, but not for Donald Trump, who felt the need to bring up former President Joe Biden, Stacey Abrams, and the nation of Lesotho. He brought up Biden a whole lot, actually, in the context of the economy, which he described as being way, way worse than I seem to remember, and immigration. The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation, we must have legislation to secure the border. But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.

Ew. But we did learn some fascinating, brand new, super fun things. Like that apparently trans kids are one of our biggest threats. A thing I absolutely do not believe for a goddamn second. We learned who really runs the Department of Government Efficiency, and despite what you may have heard from attorneys at the Department of Justice, it's who you think. Goage. Perhaps you've heard of it.

Perhaps. Which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight. Have fun in court explaining that, guys. We learned that Democrats should support Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. because he has the last name, Kennedy. And that we're super serious about cleaning up the environment, which is why we've handed the Environmental Protection Agency over to chemical lobbyists while cutting hundreds of jobs from the department.

Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong. But remember, everything is awesome. So awesome. Mars trip level awesome. We're going to lead humanity into space and plant the American flag on the planet Mars and even far beyond.

To debrief Trump's address, joining me is Pod Save America's John Lovett. John, welcome back to WAD. Thanks for having me. So, Lovett. Yes. There were a lot of horrible things said tonight. So many lies, so much scapegoating. What, in your opinion, was the most egregious part of Trump's remarks tonight?

I think what is most egregious is what he views as being worth time in the speech. It tells you a lot about what he cares about, right? There's more time spent on vilifying trans people than there was on... Medicaid. Medicaid wasn't mentioned. The only person that mentioned Medicaid was Al Green, the congressman who protested. But I would say if you're just going to pick out one lie, because it was so brazen and so long lasting, it was the extended social security section in which he goes through

in detail of all these brackets of ages of people that are receiving social security when basically he's saying, oh, these hundred year olds and 200 year olds and 150 year olds are receiving Social Security benefits. We got to send Pam Bondi out there to find these, these criminals that are taking this money, but this has been debunked. They're just, this is not true. It's not happening.

That was pretty egregious. The effort to paint trans teens. If you look at the studies, right? Like there are so few people getting gender affirming care as teenagers, even fewer of them are getting any kind of gender affirming care. Like it's such a fleetingly small group of people. I think it's part of a constellation of issues that they use to kind of show that they're

tribunes for the working people or for normal people, whatever that means to them, to a surprising degree because about all the vilification that we've seen, Americans are largely supportive of trans people, but they think they have an 80-20, 70-30 issue on athletes and on parents having a right to know. So that's what the focus of the speech ends up being on. It's just awful. And there's so many places where where we're, you know, issues that are being raised are, are traps. Right. But then sometimes like, I don't care, I just want to jump in the trap for a little bit. Yeah, no. And it's also like, I don't care how it

pulls. I'm not I don't I don't care. But an issue that actually doesn't pull that great tariffs. Right. Trump said that people would feel the pain a bit on tariffs, which was a hilarious thing for Republicans. And I'm starting to see that argument being made of like, oh we have to suffer a little bit. I'm like, seems like a you problem. But he definitely didn't linger on that topic even though it's the news of the day. Yeah. Considering it's going to wreak havoc on American consumers, do you think he glossed over it because it's not flashy enough to talk about or is he kind of nervous about how people feel about it? Because he loves tariffs. He thinks the

word is beautiful. It's interesting the tilting at, there may be some disturbance, but we'll be okay. First of all, it's incredibly, an incredibly glib way to describe what could be like a recession, what could be like a sudden increase in the cost of the daily necessities of life that will make life much, much worse for a lot of people, not billionaires, not Elon, not him, not the people that can afford to take the shock, but a lot of people, not billionaires, not Elon, not him,

not the people that can afford to take the shot, but a lot of people can't afford a sudden price shock. Also, I don't, he's constantly talking about how brief it's gonna be, and I genuinely don't understand what is supposed to happen briefly. It takes a long time to build a factory. It takes a long time to increase our ability to produce whatever it is you're tariffing

from these other countries. Like you're gonna make a steel plant, you're gonna make an oil refinery. Like these are things that take a long time. So are these tariffs just gonna sit there for years, making life more expensive while we slowly build up capacity? The president also congratulated himself

on his handling of Ukraine, saying that he received a supplicant letter from President Zelensky basically saying, Ukraine was ready to bend over backwards and sign the minerals deal. How do these developments put their bonkers meeting into perspective? I don't know whether that meeting was a setup or not, whether it was Zelensky taking the bait or not. But in the morning, signing this kind of deal with Ukraine, becoming more

economically entwined in Ukraine in some way, whether or not there was a security guarantee, was seen as the right thing to do. And then there's a fit of peak and now all of a sudden we're cutting off aid. And now all of a sudden Zelensky is saying he wants some kind of a deal and wants to sign what he had already said he would sign. All these guys, these like America first guys that kind of rationalize and intellectualize what Trump does are like, we can't have an emotional foreign policy.

We can't have a foreign policy based on namby pamby values and the international order. We gotta be realist, we gotta do what is best for America. We gotta always think about what is in our interest as a country, that is the only thing that matters. If you are realist, if you are making decisions based on hard-nosed logic, no argument or TIF should change the long-term security interests

of the United States. Ukraine wasn't a different kind of ally in the morning than it was in the afternoon. The interest of Europe and how they aligned with ours versus Russia versus China didn't change because Zelensky called him JD instead of Mr. Vice President. And so like, what are we fucking doing here? We'll get to more of our conversation with John Lovett in a moment, but if you

like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five star review on Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube and share with your friends more to come after some ads. What a day is brought to you by Zebiotics Pre-Alcohol. Let's face it, I'm in my late 30s. After a night with drinks, I don't bounce back the next day the way I used to. I have to make a choice. I can either have an amazing night or a great next day. That is, until

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Let's get back to our conversation with Pod Save America's John Lovett. So something that struck me, like Trump at his core, if he has one, is an entertainer or wants to be an entertainer. And tonight seemed especially rife with like glitzy bullshit. There was like salesmanship and handing out college acceptances and renaming a nature refuge.

Clearly his favorite part of the speech. What did you make of that? Does he want to be weirdo Oprah? So yeah, he loves being Oprah in these parts of the speech. So the part where that kid gets into West Point and the part where he made that little boy a secret service agent, it worked on me.

It's bullshit. It's exploitative. It worked on me. I thought it just did. But then he starts to turn it into how we've got RFK Jr. and he's going to look into toxins and he's going to look into autism in this sort of conspiratorial way. And then of course, like the moment is ruined by the fact that this kid's being exploited and being run to this

ridiculous agenda. Then you have this really dark moment where basically naming this federal nature reserve after the victim of a brutal murder, all to kind of gin up anti-immigrant fervor because it was a crime committed by an undocumented immigrant. And like that was sort of, that's what a lot of the people in the room were there to represent, right?

You had a volleyball player who had a run-in with a trans athlete in some way, had some sort of injury or I don't totally know the story and that's why we've got to stop the trans athletes. And we have victims of crime from undocumented immigrants and like kind of all the different kind of Trump villains and like the Trump enemies kind of that's what the showmanship part of the speech was about. I think Democrats were stuck in to me an unwinnable position tonight. Some Democrats held up signs saying like Musk steals, save veterans, they were using their phones. Some didn't go. Women lawmakers wore pink. A lot of people just left early.

Does any of this matter? And was there any way for Democrats to win this night? Like, should everyone have left Al Green's style? Because here's something I was thinking about, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Like, there's the base that's like, we want people to fight back. We want toughness. We want something like that. And then I just keep thinking about swing voters. Or people who don't pay any attention. Who are like, why are they being so divisive? We want to see people working together.

And I don't know how you work those two things together. I don't know if that's possible. I don't know how that works. I thank God I am not a political consultant. I would be a terrible one. But like it seems like you are caught in a trap where if you do things that are like, yeah The base is up. Well, the base would be up Anyway, the base is gonna be there for the midterms But you need the people who are who were somehow convinced Trump was gonna give them free IVF Or you need the people who were convinced that Trump because he said he wasn't involved in a project 2025

He wasn't like you need people who don't care about politics, but do see things on their phone. It's fine, we just recorded Paws of America and we're talking about this ourselves and the way we kind of yo-yo on this, right? Like, we come out of a common law, we're like, it was too much about democracy, we need to focus on kitchen table issues.

Then we see Donald Trump doing this and people are kind of like, but what about the price of eggs? He's like, wait, you're missing the moment. This is about authoritarianism. This is about democracy. And I think the way to me, you square that circle is we're not like the midterms are a long ways away. Donald Trump, barring things getting much, much worse, is not going to be on the ballot again. And things could get much, much worse. So what is our goal right now? And I, like, it is true that in the run up to 2024,

Kamala Harris did not have a lot of runway. And so she had to convince people based on where their heads were at right then. And at that moment, some share of voters were awake to the threat of authoritarianism, some share of voters were into it, and then there were some share of the voters in the middle, right? And I think the question for us is, okay, we have this group of people that understand

the authoritarian menace. They want us to fight. But there's this other big group of people that we also need to reach, as you said, that just don't view this as anything other than normal politics and are concerned about kitchen table issues. And I think we have to think about doing two things at once, which is one, making sure we're speaking to those real needs, right?

We need those people to view us as credible advocates, but also thinking like, hey, let's change this, right? Like, what do we do now to wake up more people to this menace, right? Like, Donald Trump is rewarded for the fact that he can berate an ally. He can side with our adversaries. He can vote with Putin at the UN.

He can dispatch Elon Musk and illegally destroy federal agencies. And like, yeah, you may see some noise in the polls, but like America's not suddenly awoken to the fascist menace, right? Like where things still feel as they did. Maybe the polls are ticking against them, but there's not some seismic shift. And I do think it's worth using this time to think about not how do we deal with the reality of the current politics of exactly what we're describing, but how do we change that?

How do we get more people to understand this as a menace? And what does that look like? Al Green walking out Green walking out, like if more Democrats had done it, like by the way, snap poll came out, most people thought that was divisive, right? Most people watching didn't like that. Is that okay? Maybe that's a good thing, right? Like what if what we have to do right now

to make people understand the threat is do things that people don't like for a B, right? That maybe don't poll well, that maybe don't test well. And the problem is when you do that, you kind of leave the a B, right? That maybe don't pull well, that maybe don't test well. And the problem is when you do that, you kind of leave the data behind, right? And then you become what? Just like, it's just about like our feelings and our instincts, but the other part of it is like,

we've tried these pull tested messages. We've tried offering people a normal alternative. It did not work. So like, I don't feel like, just to be clear, I don't know what to do. I don't know what's right, but I just think we need to be open. Like we need to like widen the aperture a little bit about like what a good idea could be. John, as always, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me. That was my conversation with Pod Save America's John Lovett. Before we go, the Oscars were on Sunday, so you know Keep It hosts Lewis and Ira are taking their gum out, throwing it at Georgina Chapman, and rushing to the mic for some hot takes. Plus, they're joined by the Prindle Queen herself, Brenda Song. Catch their full recap of Hollywood's Biggest Night and an interview you don't want to miss on the Keep it feed or YouTube That's all for today if you like the show make sure you subscribe leave a review vote for whomever makes future presidents send all This shit in an email and tell your friends to listen

And if you're into reading and not just about how seriously presidents used to send their state of the union or joint address to Congress as a written report before Woodrow Wilson, one of the worst people to ever live, resumed the big in-person state of the union in 1913, like me. What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Coaston. And as always, Woodrow Wilson was the problem.

What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded in a mix by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Four. Our producer is Michelle Alloy. We had production help today from Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adrian Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gillyard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of

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