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crookedmediatranscripts · 7 years ago

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Pod Save America - Episode 77

9.11.2017 “Schumer’s bump”

“Irma portends the effects of climate change, the press heralds Trump as an independent dealmaker, and Bannon goes to war with Republicans. Then Erin Ryan joins Jon, Jon, and Tommy to talk about Hillary Clinton’s new book, What Happened.”

[MUSIC]

00:00:00.1

JF: The presenting sponsor of Pod Save America is –

JF and TV: Blue Apron.

JF: Blue Apron now offers 30 minute meals (meals every week that take 30 minutes [chuckling] or less to cook). In case you didn’t know what 30 –

TV: [Laughing almost hysterically] A parenthetical!

JF: minute meals meant. Designed with your busy schedules in mind and made with same flavor and farm fresh ingredients you know and love.

TV: That’s when you really like something.

JF: Get 30 dollars off your first meal with free shipping by going to blueapron.com/crooked. Blue Apron is a better way to –

JL: We’re gonna go talk to Hillary in the woods.

JF: – cook.

[MUSIC]

00:00:33.5

JF: Welcome to Pod Save America. I’m Jon Favreau.

JL: I’m What Happened.

TV: [Laughing] I’m Tommy Vietor.

JF: [Laughs] Joining us on the pod today, right here in New York City, the Daily Beasts’ Erin Ryan. And later we’ll talk to the host of Crooked Media’s Pod Save the People, DeRay McKesson. Guys, it’s Hillary Clinton Day. We are going to Chappaqua [TV: Laughs] to interview Hillary Clinton.

JL: To the woods. To the woods.

JF: Lovett has been asking for this since the day we began this podcast.

JL: I, well it felt inevitable.

JF: Just begging for it.

JL: Okay, let’s calm down. I didn’t even send one email.

[Laughing]

JF: Alright, we’ll get to this. Few housekeeping items. We still have some tickets left for our tour, go to crooked.com/tour to buy some. And we are adding a live taping of Lovett or Leave It right after Pod Save America in Madison, Wisconsin on October 5th. We’re –

JL: Tickets now.

TV: Huge news.

JF: We’re basically not gonna leave until [JL: laughs] Paul Ryan does.

[Laughing]

JF: On Pod Save the World this week, Tommy talks to a Republican from Texas.

TV: Congressman Will Hurd.

JF: Yeah.

TV: Former CIA officer, served in Afghanistan. Now making laws. I haven’t done the interview yet, so I can’t tell you how it went but –

JF: I bet it’s gonna be –

TV: I’ll let you know about –

JL: Republican in Congress, Tommy?

TV: Tomorrow. Yeah.

JF: He’s real –

JL: Did you say that already?

JF: I did. I did.

JL: I wasn’t listening, I was waiting for my turn to talk.

TV: [Laughs]

JF: That’s- that’s a great summation of what happens here on Pod Save America. Let’s begin with Hurricane Irma. Another massive historic storm. It has thankfully weakened from a category 4 to a category 1 hurricane as it makes its way up the Florida coast. At least four deaths reported in Florida, 27 dead in the Caribbean, and almost six million people in Florida without power. Storm surges and flooding are still a threat all the way up Florida, from Miami to Naples, as far north as Georgia. So, thank god this wasn’t as damaging as it was first predicted to be. But on the heels of Harvey, and with Hurricane Jose not far behind, I wanna talk about the role of climate change. Since not nearly enough people –

JL: Not appropriate.

JF: In the mai- [Laughs]

JL: We’re not allowed to talk about cause and effect –

TV: Not now.

JL: In our politics.

TV: Not today.

JF: So, let us begin there.

JL: We can’t talk about it now, but it’s also important not to talk about it later.

TV: [Laughs]

JL: There’s never a good time.

TV: It’s just divisive.

JF: So, this is what Scott Pruitt, [JL blows a raspberry] who is our administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has said. That it is not appropriate to talk about climate change. It’s a little bit like when Republicans say, “It’s not the time to talk about gun safety,” after a school shooting–

JL: Exactly!

JF: Now we’re doing this on climate change.

JL: It would be as if after, like 50 people got E. coli from Chipotle, that the head of the FDA was like, “Now is not the time to talk about food safety.”

TV: We eat Chipotle regularly here at Crooked Media.

JF: [Laughing quietly] Yeah.

JL: I love Chipotle! I- honestly it was a-

JF: Just ate it the other day.

JL: It was a boon for me! It was a boon for me because I went right in-

[Laughing]

JL: and they were just giving out-

TV: And there’s no line.

JL: They were giving out burritos left-

JF: Lovett –

JL: and right.

JF: was eating –

TV: New respect for the sneeze guard, though.

[Laughing]

JF: Lovett was eating Taco Bell for breakfast and Chipotle opened down the street. And now he eats some Chipotle.

JL: Yeah.

TV: I think you mean Del Taco. [JL: laughing] There was a piece recently though that the EPA now has a guy, a political staffer, who’s, like sole job is to go through research grants, monitoring them for ‘the double-C word.’ Climate change. They’ve- they’ve turned it into like an epithet-

[Laughing]

TV: Over there at the EPA. I mean they- that’s how, like far from logic and reason we’ve gotten under this administration. It’s just like, head couldn’t be deeper in the sand.

JF: Some sensible Republicans say, the Republican Mayor of Miami disagreed with Pruitt. Said, “If this isn’t climate change, I don’t know what is.” John McCain said something similar when he was asked on Jake Tapper’s show, which is the only Sunday show anywhere that mentioned climate change.

JL: Yeah. Sam Stein pointed out that it’s been two weeks since the Trump administration was asked about climate change.

JF: So, the talking point on the right here, is — well, the first talking point is – climate change is not real. The second talking point is, climate change doesn’t cause bad weather. And they have some meteorologists and they have some peo- and so I wanna dispense with that, because no one is arguing that climate change caused the hurricane. What we’re arguing is that climate change makes bad weather catastrophic. And makes-exacerbates the effects of bad weather-

JL: It makes –

JF: like hurricanes.

JL: It makes bad storms more likely and it makes storms worse. That’s– and that’s just true.

TV: And if sea levels rise in a place like Miami, where storm surge is a huge problem – it’s an even greater problem.

JF: Well, right, and we talked about this with Harvey. Which is, the storm surge was a foot higher in Harvey, in Houston than it would have been because of rising sea levels. And warmer temperatures mean that storms will dump more rain on places. This is ju- these are scientific facts.

JL: Look, you don’t have to listen to us. There’s this person on Twitter named Donald Trump, who has been endlessly fascinated by the severity of these storms. Who cannot get enough of just how unprecedented the storms have been. It’s, it’s obviously, you know. He’s an addled, old racist so he doesn’t really make the connection or he can’t.

JF: I thought he was an independent deal maker.

JL: You know what?

JF: We’re gonna get to that.

JL: We’re gonna get to that. You know what? You know what, Jon? I’m gonna-

JF: I just wanna make sure. I just wanna introduce it early

JL: I’m gonna have a controversial opinion during that section.

JF: Ohhhhh!

TV: Yessss!

JF: Boy!

TV: Controversy!

JL: Controversial position. Probably not.

TV: This is one, like this is also another unique challenge with Donald Trump because when you’re tweeting something crazy every day, when you’re like kicking around NATO or, you know, like Rosie O’Donnell, whoever it might be [JF: Laughs] is all these things happen under the radar, or off the radar. What’s the metaphor I’m looking for here?

JL: I don’t know.

JF: Under the radar.

JL: Well, I guess you can go under the radar but I guess, suppose you could also be off the radar.

TV: Hm.

JL: You’re either flying low or maybe you’re just not in the range of the, kind of the scope there.

TV: I think we’re technically off the- like all these things are happening at the EPA. Enforcement is lagging or, if not stopping. And it’s exacerbating this problem. I mean-

JF: Yeah.

TV: And there’s no way to get it covered. Because, like we were talking about earlier, two weeks without a mention on the Sunday show. Because when one side has a position where they dig in and you don’t move, the press moves on because it gets boring.

JL: One of the things that sort of protects us a little bit is the fact that Donald Trump is so incompetent. Because the place where he’s been most effective at undermining environmental rules has been at the administrative level in these lower level positions that just don’t get covered. You know-

TV: Right.

JL: the assistant secretaries and all the rest. But because they’ve been so disorganized and bumbling, they haven’t actually been able to do as much damage as they otherwise could have. Even though pulling out of Paris, plus all the rule writing that they’re doing at EPA and through the administration, has been devastating.

TV: Yeah.

JF: What’s truly scary about this is, for a long time it’s you know, ‘Oh, liberals are predicting climate change,’ and conservatives saying it’s never gonna happen. Well, it’s here now and it’s here in a big way. And with storm surges and these hurricanes destroying parts of Houston, parts of Texas, putting Miami underwater, putting, you know Naples is covered in wa- I mean, this is, we now have to do something about this because it’s here. And so now efforts are basically not just focused on mitigation but adaptation. Like, you gotta build sea walls and we’ve gotta have stronger buildings and flood protection and all this kinda shit. And–

TV: Um hm.

JF: That is a huge infrastructure project on its own.

TV: Yes.

JF: And it’s not gonna get done if we can’t focus on this.

JL: Well, one of the things that Trump administration rolled back was rules that accounted for climate change in the building of-

JF: Right.

JL: Of buildings and infrastructure-

JF: It’s not great.

JL: In areas prone to flooding.

TV: Mind-boggling.

JF: Yeah.

TV: And these are all expensive items that are fraught politically, that involve a lot of mind share. I mean the thing that worries me is, like, having gone through some natural disasters you know at the NSC and in the administration, like, there is only so many minutes of the day that your homeland security advisor or that your, your FEMA director can spend like managing each individual crisis. And Harvey’s just beginning. Irma’s not even over yet. God knows what could come next. I mean, it’s gonna take a lot of time and effort for them to fix this and a lot of money.

JF: I thought perhaps the best encapsulation of conservatism in 2017 was Rush Limbaugh-

TV: What a fucking idiot.

JF: Saying that Irma was ‘liberal media hype’ and then promptly evacuating [JL: Laughing] his palm beach home.

JL: [Laughing] Yes.

TV: You know, [Laughing] Alex Jones has sort of dimmed his terrible-ness star. But it’s good to have him back in our cross-hairs because the guy is just a clown.

JF: What did Rush Limbaugh sounds like broadcasting from an undisclosed location?

JL: I don’t know. Well let’s see what Liberal – what would Liberal Rush Limbaugh say about this? [Terrible Liberal Rush Limbaugh voice] Conservative traitors flooding Miami. They’ve set their terrorist climate sites on Miami and Tampa and St. Petersburg and Tallahassee. [TV and JL: Laughing quietly] I’m recording this from deep within NORAD.

[TV and JF laugh louder]

JL: [As Liberal Rush Limbaugh] The only place now safe from the climate disaster.

[All laughing]

JF: Very good.

JL: [Liberal Rush Limbaugh] Conservative traitors!

[Laughing]

JL: [Liberal Rush Limbaugh] Sacrificing your beaches at the almighty altar of the Koch brothers! [TV: laughing hard] The Koch brothers – conservative traitors!

[JF and TV laughing harder than necessary]

JL: [Liberal Rush Limbaugh, but becoming worse] Friends! [Strangled] Oh, god! [Loses Liberal Rush Limbaugh]

[Laughing really very hard]

JL: [Strangled, laughing voice] So stupid.

JF: [Breathless laughing] At the end there, that was like running away.

TV: Yeah, something-

JL: [Liberal Rush Limbaugh again] I have to-

TV: The water-

[Laughing again]

TV: water’s coming.

JF: [Laughing delightedly] Gurgling!

JL: [Liberal Rush Limbaugh] I’m so upset by these changing climates that I must attach yet another fentanyl patch-

[Laughing]

JL: [Liberal Rush Limbaugh] to my haunches.

JF: I was waiting for that. I was gonna let you keep going until you talked about the fentanyl patch.

JL: [Liberal Rush Limbaugh] The only thing changing faster than the rising sea levels is the level of opiate coursing through my bloodstream.

[Laughing too hard. Liberal Rush Limbaugh is terrible]

[Can hear people not Pod Save America boys laughing in the background]

JL: [Liberal Rush Limbaugh] Friends-

JF: That’s [Laughing] that’s Erin Ryan laughing in the background.

[All laughing hard]

TV: Oh, boy.

JF: Okay.

TV: Let’s cut off. Something else.

[Laughing]

JF: I think we- I think we covered that-

TV: I wonder if Hillary will like it when you do that later.

JF: Officially.

[Laughing]

JF: [Slightly sobering up] Okay. Donald Trump has been relatively quiet during this latest storm. That is because he is basking in the glow of his press coverage –

TV: There’s a lot of tv to watch, too, you know.

JF: As of late, you know. I wanna talk about Trump, the independent deal maker. Slew of headlines over the weekend. Here’s Peter Baker of the New York times, quote “In some ways Trump is the first Independent to serve as President in modern times.” Here’s Robert Cost of the Washington Post, quote “In spirit Trump isn’t a Democrat or a Republican, he’s a free-wheeling transactional politician who looks for wins.” The Associated Press, quote “Trump: The Independent.” Now, in fairness to Peter –

JL: [Snorts]

JF: He said that he didn’t in- he didn’t intend independent to mean moderate or centrist. Just that Trump isn’t beholden to the Republican party. Jon, you have a- what you’ve described and previewed for us is a controversial position.

JL: Well, you- you’ve- no..

JF: Oh.

JL: I don’t- I don’t know that’s-

JF: Cause I’m- I mitigated it.

JL: No, you didn’t, not yet. So, here’s what I think- you can tell me if it’s controversial.

JF: Okay.

JL: I don’t wanna- I don’t wanna hype it.

JF: It’s hyped. It’s hyped.

[Laughing]

JL: Donald Trump ran as a Republican, but in many ways he did run an independent campaign. The issues that were central to his campaign – immigration restrictions and anti-trade and just, general nationalism – would have worked also as an independent bid. And it was running against conservative and Republican dogma. I mean, he stood on that stage and says- said, “George Bush led us into war.” You know, he attacked a lot of precepts of the Republican party. And that helped him win a lot of people who were dissatisfied with the Republican party. And that could’ve been a platform he used if he’d run as an independent. That being said, once he was inside of the Republican party as the nominee, he was captured. Because his tax plan was deeply conservative, something Paul Ryan could get behind. The health care bill he’s signed on for is something that obviously Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell could get behind. So, he did run as an independent, and in many ways, he is an independent. But the policy apparatus he built around himself – by inertia, by who Reince Priebus put him with, by a lot of different forces – ended up making him govern more like a traditional Republican. And it’s actually been something that we’ve talk about a lot, that the great risk of Donald Trump was not that he’d come in- basically you know that we’d have Trump’s temperament and Ted Cruz’s agenda. The more frightening possibility was really that he’d adhere to what Steve Bannon wants, which is a populist agenda that includes big infrastructure proposals, and anti-trade, and anti-immigration, and he really hasn’t done that. So, I was more sympathetic to this version because, only because the first 8 months of this administration, he has so thoroughly governed like a you know, traditional Republican – plus some race- extra verbalized racism and verbalized anti-immigration policy and anti-Muslim policy – that the fact that he could sit down and make this deal with Schumer did feel so strange and such a departure. So, I guess my view of the articles is not that they’re wrong, but that they’re completely overstated. Like, making one non-ideological deal to extend the debt limit by 3 months does not make him the independent he could’ve been.

TV: Right. Right.

JL: That’s all.

JF: So, I’m going to disagree with you. That wasn’t in any way controversial. [Chuckles]

TV: Oooooh!

JL: You know, you know-

JF: Tommy?

JL: Erin, what do you think?

TV: [Laughs]

JL: She just…yeah, whatever. [Erin Ryan laughs in background]

TV: I think this is instructive in that- it’s like a sea change and how Trump is covered versus every other president.

JF: Yeah.

TV: Every other president is lashed to their previous positions and gets the crap beaten out of them if they change or diverge in any way. Donald Trump is constantly handed a blank slate. Axios the other day reported that he is a ‘chance for a reset on race.’ Because he [laughing] was meeting with-

JL: [shocked] Wait. Whaaaaat!?!

TV: because-

JF: [Laughing]

JL: [Still shocked] No!

TV: Yes.

JF: What? You didn’t read this?

TV: It was-

JL: [Scandalized] What are you talking about?

TV: Dude. I’m gonna read it to you. “President Trump’s botched Charlottesville response was the low point of his presidency for some key aides. Now he has a chance for a reset at the same time he’s reveling in the adulation for his surprise deal with Democrats.”

JF: [Laughing] Wait, I wanna say- Lovett’s face-

TV: But-

JF: [Still laughing] He doesn’t know why!

TV: But let me tell you why.

JF: He doesn’t know why!

TV: Let me tell you why-

JL: Oh my god.

TV: The reason was that he was meeting with Tim Scott.

[Laughing so hard]

JF: He has a meeting with a black Republican Senator on his schedule. Thus, the racial reset.

JL: Who wrote that!? Name them.

TV: I don’t know. Axios?

JF: It would be Mike Allen or Jim VandeHei.

JL: [Disappointed] Come on, Mike.

TV: I don’t know.

JF: Right, so I-

JL: Better than that, Mike.

TV: So, I mean I think this is- again, like-

JL: A reset on fucking race? Cause you’re meeting with Tim Scott?

TV: Right.

JF: There was a- Tommy, do you have the line there? Where he compares it to a movie character? It was like-

TV: I do not. I do not.

JF: It was something like, “It’s a classic story line. The bad, evil guy realized everyone hates him so he decides to turn things around by reconciling-”

JL: I just hope this is not the false victory. I hope this- what’s going on right now is false defeat.

TV: Yeah, so, I mean-

JL: I hope we’re not in the turn into three. I’m talking about classic [missing]. Based on the dumb book everybody reads when they move to LA.

TV: [Laughing] Right, Save the Cat’s great.

JF: Worked for us.

TV: Really helped me-

JF: Worked for us.

TV: Really helped me succeed.

JL: [Laughing]

JL: How’d you guys –

[Laughing]

JF: Got a protagonist yet?

JL: Got some nice characters?

TV: What the hell were we talking about?

JL: We were talking about Trump’s pivot on race.

TV: In some ways, this is back to how Trump–

JL: Fucking something or other.

TV: Was covered in the campaign. Because everyone thought that there was this chance, deep inside of him, there was this liberal Manhattan Republican who was moderate on a whole bunch of issues. And like, that is belied by the fact that his entire election was appealing to the hardest, hard right audience he could possibly find.

JF: Right.

TV: And here we are. But just cause he hates Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan doesn’t mean that like, this is some new day.

JF: So, I agree with Lovett that there was a chance during the campaign that Trump could’ve upset the party and the party structure by going far to the right on the Republican party’s most far right positions on immigration and-

JL: Trade.

JF: Terrorism. And then, yeah, and then on trade and stuff like that. And then tacked more towards Democrats on issues like, he promised to protect Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. He at one point talked about raising taxes on hedge fund people.

TV: Um hm.

JF: And he talked about trade protectionism

JL: That’s a good one.

JF: Wherever that falls, yeah. And that’s where- and infrastructure. And this is where Bannon wanted him to go. Bannon wanted him to be this big nationalist. This, you know ethno-nationalist where we kick out immigrants. And then we you know do all this building and infrastructure bullshit.

TV: And tax the rich.

JF: None of that- but the problem is- absolutely none of that has happened since he started governing. And the only thing, the only time he has broken from the Republican party while governing – [emphasized] the only time – is when he made a deal to push a vote on the debt ceiling from 3 months, [TVlaughs] from 18 months to 3 months. He literally shortened the timeline for a vote and those are the articles we got.

TV: There’s nothing liberal about that either. It’s just a stupid deal.

JL: The debt ceiling is incredibly stupid. It’s non-ideologically stupid. I think one, one thing that’s instructive about how all of this went down is, there was- I think a report in Politico about the conversation between Mulvaney and Trump on cutting entitlements. And Trump’s like, “I said I wouldn’t cut Social Security and Medicare and all the rest.” And Mulvaney’s like, “Well what about disability? It’s like welfare.” You know, Mulvaney leaving out the fact that’s its Social Security disability insurance. And Trump’s like, “Yeah, yeah, we can do that.” And so, a lot of this is because of the people around Trump. You know, Bannon’s not wrong about that.

JF: Right.

JL: That a lot of this, a lot of this is because Donald Trump built a Republican apparatus.

JF: Well, this gets to my other point which is, like, so what forms Trump’s views? What is his ideology? He is a dotty old racist, Fox News viewer, and that’s how he gets his information and news. And so, he either gets it from the people he surrounds himself with and his administration, or he gets it from Fox and Friends. And thus, that’s how his views come to be.

JL: I have a question about this-

TV: Not Chuck and Nancy?

JL: I have a question about this. So, all these stories – the AP story, the Post story, the Times story, the Axios story – whatever’s happened on cable news is a result of those stories setting the narrative, Trump sees that. And he really likes it.

JF: Um hm.

JL: And it’s good. It’s good for the country that Donald Trump sees on the television that him-

JF: It’s good for the country that he’s now watching Morning Joe instead of Fox and Friends?

JL: Yes.

JF: That’s a terrifying thing to say.

JL: But, it was like-

TV: True.

JF: But you’re probably right.

JL: Look, you know we’re on the- we’re on- we are through the looking glass. This is the world.

[Laughing]

JF: It’s all relative. It’s all relative.

JL: Right? And look I don’t, I didn’t decide to move America to fucking Saturn. I tried to stop it. We all did. That’s the point of this book we’ve read,

[Laughing]

JL: “What happened” by Hillary Clinton, available now. And, uh-

[All laughing]

JL: But, because we’re on Saturn where the rules are different and gravity is strange and the earth, and there’s no solid ground beneath us and there are rings instead of moons, I’m asking the question! Should we be glad that the reporters are writing these pieces and if, maybe either subconsciously or consciously saying, “Let’s try to use the press to, to use fucking Pavlovian response to get the, to get the deranged poodle in the Oval office to kind of, whatever, you know, sit and stop shitting in the fucking house.” Like isn’t that a good thing?

JF: Yeah.

TV: I’m with you.

JF: All I’m saying is, we focus-

JL: That was a lot of metaphors, there.

TV: A lot. They were good.

JF: Press focuses too much on characters in a drama and not enough on like-

JL: I always like when you say that, “Characters in a drah-ma.”

TV: “In a drah-ma.”

[Laughing]

JF: And not enough on, like the larger forces here. So, in 3 months we’re gonna have a debate and, about the debt ceiling, about the funding the government, Dreamers, infrastructure, tax reform, whatever it may be. And Trump’s going to have to make, or not make, some actual deals with policy consequences. And then all of the stuff is gonna go to shit. Because if he makes some deal to legalize young undocumented Americans, then great for Chuck and Nancy, great for Democrats, great for America. And he’s gonna get, continue to get that great coverage on Morning Joe and stuff like that. But his pals at Fox and Friends and on the right, they’re not gonna be so happy. Like they’re-

TV: I don’t know that’s true

JL: I don’t know if I agree with you.

JF: They’re happy right now because it’s a deal with no consequences. It’s him as a deal maker but they’re-

JL: They’re not in, they can go, look-

JF: Steve Bannon says it’s gonna start a civil war if he legalizes them.

JL: Eh that’s next year.

[Laughing]

JL: We got December problems, first. But no, but you know, a little bit of like- Paul Ryan kind of being dragged into a deal that legalizes the DACA recipients is not the worst outcome for him either, right? They want this to go, you know, he’s voted against it in the past but it’s not like, it’s not a core belief.

JF: Um hm

JL: It’s a base play. But if Trump comes along with a deal with Democrats and they can claim some kind of victory, I don’t know. I don’t know. We don’t know what’s gonna happen, but I’m not so sure that Fox News won’t go along on the little, on the journey we’re about to go on.

TV: That’s what I, I think that Fox is, like pathetic supplication to Trump is financial and that they will kind of follow his lead. Look at Lou Dobbs’ segment just [JL: Laughing] shredding Paul Ryan.

JF: Right.

TV: That guy was a Fox Business reporter like, throwing all principle out the window.

JL: You know what, I just hope that there aren’t a lot of businesses watching Fox Business. Because I think they’re getting- I don’t know, I’m worried about their employees.

TV: [Laughing] Their investment advice.

JL: [Laughing] Yeah.

JF: You know, when Bannon talked about a civil war, the supplicants on Fox may be, may be, the people who, you know are on Fox and Friends don’t have much intelligence at all. Sean Hannity’s gonna be there with him ‘til the end, Lou Dobbs, Breitbart-

JL: Sean Hannity’s gonna be buried in Trump’s coffin.

JF: Breitbart will start a war against the administration, against the Dreamers.

TV: Totally!

JL: They’re a bunch of lunatics.

JF: They will.

JL: Yep.

JF: And right now, everyone told them they’re fired cause it’s just a deal about a fucking vote. So, it’s all too early. Okay, when we come back we’ll be talking about Steve Bannon on 60 minutes.

JL: Great job.

JF: With Erin Ryan.

0:21:13.7

[MUSIC]

0:21:19.2

JF: Pod Save America is brought to you by Lyft.

JL: Lyft!

TV: Lyft.

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JL: A little bit of that is some grade inflation on these 5 stars. You know?

TV: [Laughing]

JF: Okay, well if you wanna be stingy with your stars that’s one way to do it.

JL: I just think we sort of changed the way we, you know. Anyway, doesn’t matter.

JF: Let’s go.

TV: [Laughing]

JF: Lyft was the first ride share platform with [starts giggling] tipping built right into the app because getting tipped shouldn’t depend on your passenger having a crumpled bill in their pocket. Or even a neatly folded one. You keep 100% of the tips and they add up fast. Drivers have been paid over 200 million dollars since the feature’s first introduced. And express pay lets you get paid almost instantly!

TV: That’s the second time you said, like “meel-lion” I think.

JF: Did I say- did I say that?

JL: You say “meel-lion” sometimes and you also say “sh-cheme” when you mean “scheme” sometimes.

TV: [Laughing]

JF: Anything else you got?

TV: That’s funny.

JF: Anything else?

TV: “Drah” when you say “drawer.”

JL: You mispronounce “epithet”-

TV: “Room.” “Rum.”

JL: -pretty regularly, too.

JF and TV: [Laughing]

JL: It’s a 50% success rate on that one. Battin’ 500 on “epithet.”

[Laughing]

TV: [Giggling] Tough ad for Jon.

JF: Drivers have been paid [TV and JF: giggling] over 200 [emphasized] mil-lion epithet sh-cheme-

TV: Buckaroos.

JF: Dollars.

JL: Well, yeah that’s how you say it. It’s so weird.

JF: Shhh-cheme.

JL: It’s so weird.

JF: Sch-eme.

JL: You know what it is?

JF: Scheme

JL: It’s because it’s a speechwriter thing.

JF: It’s a scheme.

JL: You do what I do sometimes, which is because you’ve thought about how they sound all the time-

JF: Yeah

JL: You pronounce the [MISSING] word

JF: I know it’s a scheme, guys. It’s a drawer and it’s a room. Lyft has taken the guess work out of pick-ups. The new “amp” device uses color coding to help passengers find their drivers. So join the ride sharing company that believes in treating its people better. Go to Lyft-

JL: The other day you said, “Attorney generals.”

TV: [Starts giggling again]

JF: I did not.

JL: You did

JF: It’s attorneys general. I know that.

JL: I know it is, but you said it wrong.

JF: I think that was Dan.

JL: No!

JF: [Hurried] Go to lyft.com/crooked today and you can get a 500-dollar new driver bonus. That’s lyft.com/crooked. Lyft.com/crooked. Limited time only. Terms apply.

TV: Dan’s getting attacked by his cohosts. He’s getting attacked on Twitter by Ann Coulter. It’s a tough day for Dan.

JL: I will, I will tell you

JF: Ann Coulter, yeah. Ann Coulter attacking Dan on Twitter by defending Harvard. Didn’t know she was a big elitist Harvard defender now.

TV: Well, she is-

JL: I don’t really wanna…I can’t- just…don’t. Engaging with that person is a mistake.

TV: She’s gross.

0:23:23.7

JF: Pod Save America is brought to you by Winc.

JL: Winc!

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JL: They are trying.

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TV: Fact.

JL: Trump is President, get Chardonnay drunk after work.

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JL: Why is it wrong to put ice in wine?

TV: [Chuckling] I don’t know.

JL: It’s so stupid.

JF: Ah! So wrong!

TV: It waters it down, I guess?

JL: But who cares? Like why can’t you- I, why can’t you have-

JF: It’s a gross thing to do.

JL: A nice cold glass of wine?

JF: Well you can chill it if you want.

JL: Ice cold glass.

JF: Winc uses their expertise to pick the best wines for you based on your taste preferences. Winc will even introduce you to new, rare, and custom wines that are-

JL: Order a rosé on ice and all of a sudden, you’re like Fred Flintstone.

TV: [Laughing]

JF: Yep. And the first round is on us because right now Winc is offering listeners 20 dollars off your first order when you go to trywinc.com/crooked. That’s “trywinc”, spelled ‘T-R-Y-W-I-N-C” dot com slash crooked to get 20 dollars off your first order now. Trywinc.com/crooked and use all the fucking ice you want.

JL: I just think the wine people are killing themselves without having, just le,- just stop being so haughty about the whole operation.

JF: Just…crushed, cubed…

JL: “Oh this is an earthen vibe.” Whatever.

TV: [Laughing]

JF: Just, dump…

JL: It’s a drink.

JF: Fill up a tray-

TV: Like a hint of cigar box.

JF: Fill up a tray freeze it up, and just dump it in your glass.

TV: Fresh cranberry?

JL: In “The Sun Also Rises”, Hemingway, he’s drinking wine like it’s, like it’s Gatorade.

TV: Out of leather bladders.

JL: Yeah, like it’s Gatorade.

JF: Order a glass of wine on your next flight, put some ice cubes in it, and let that seat recline allllll the way back.

TV: It’s hard to go populist to elitist so fast with ice in your wine and then “Sun Also Rises”. You’re like Steve Bannon of messaging.

JL: I will not be- do not

JF: You are. You’re Steve Bannon.

TV: You’re Svengali.

JL: Don’t you dare-

JF: Lovett is wearing two shirts right now. You can’t see it.

JL: I am wearing the exact right number of shirts. This is a lovely sweater.

JF: You can’t see it.

JL: I will not be talked to in this way. It’s a sweater I, it’s my Senator sweater. It’s the sweater I wear when I talk to people that aren’t you idiots.

[Laughing]

0:25:24.5

[MUSIC]

0:25:28.6

JF: And we’re back!

JL: And we’re back.

JF: And joining us is Erin Ryan!

Erin Ryan: Hi!

JL: Hey!

TV: Hello!

JF: How’s it going?

ER: It’s good! I was so surprised that you all 3 were here, in New York. I thought I was gonna come in and there was gonna be…a phone situation.

JL: No…

JF: Oh no, we travel in a pack.

ER: Wow.

JF: Of course.

ER: That’s great.

JL: We’re all here

TV: [Chuckling] We’re all here.

ER: Do you guys have, like matching pajamas that you wear when you go to bed in hotels on the road? Do they have your first initial like monogrammed on it?

JL: They won’t do it.

TV: Who told you that?

JF: Um.

JL: They said no.

JF: Hey, Lisa. Take a note next time.

[Laughing]

JF: Okay, so we wanna talk about Steve Bannon on 60 minutes. Did you sit through the entire interview?

ER: No, I saw bits and pieces and I saw a gif of the best moment of the video, which is where part of his face moved independently of the rest of his face [JF: chuckling] but I mostly just kind of read recaps of it.

JF: Yeah, it was um, he made a few different headlines. Let’s start with, he declared war on the Republican establishment and accused Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell of trying to nullify the 2016 election because they don’t want Trump’s populist economic nationalist agenda to be implemented.

TV: Cool.

JF: Seems fair.

TV: Yeah, I didn’t disagree with that.

JF: Right?

ER: Yeah, I don’t think that’s wrong.

JL: Cool.

JF: [Laughing]. He also said something interesting which is on the first, he said on the first day — he ratted out McConnell. On the first day Mitch McConnell told him, ��Enough with the drain the swamp stuff. I can’t hire any good lobbyists” basically.

TV: Yeah.

JL: Man, Mitch McConnell is exactly who we think he is.

JF: It was weird to root for Steve Bannon. But in that moment, I sort of rooted for Steve Bannon.

JL: It’s like alien versus predator.

TV: Can we pause on this for a second, though.

JF: Sure.

TV: Because he is right that the swamp is a business model. [JF: Yeah] And that it’s gonna take generations to drain, or whatever the hell they really wanna do. But Steve Bannon is profiting off it as much as anybody else.

ER: Um hm.

TV: His entire entity that he runs, Breitbart, is funded by a billionaire named Robert Mercer, who is a right-wing lunatic who funds all these other things. Like Steve lives in a house that houses Breitbart News. He is as much a swamp creature as anyone else. He just doesn’t play one on TV.

ER: Um hm.

JL: Then why is he so handsome?

[Laughing]

TV: Cause he wears-

JL: What kind of swamp creature looks like that?

TV: Cause he perfected the polo under a [JL: What?] black shirt under a black blazer look.

JL: I wanna just-

JF: Yeah let’s talk about that.

JL: Let’s just talk about that for one second.

[Laughing]

JL: So, he wears…I- I really was flummoxed by it. So, he wears a button-down shirt under a button-down shirt under a jacket.

TV: All black.

JL: All black. So, I don’t mind the all black. You know Johnny Cash, you know. It’s as if Johnny Cash had a stroke, like halfway getting dressed.

ER: You know what’s interesting is, is Steve Bannon-

JL: And put on an extra shirt by mistake.

ER: Steve Bannon’s actually really skinny and it’s all-

[Laughing]

ER: Shirt weight. That he just, like layers over and over. So, it takes him about 45 minutes every day to like, peel off every single layer of…shirt.

JL: It’s just like…is he cold? Is he kind of …does he always get chilly? But then it’s like, why not wear a sweater over it?

ER: I don’t know.

JL: I mean it’s sort of like the cautionary tale of the…of the middle aged divorced man, you know. Like, how does this happen? I don’t get it and it does-

ER: What happened?

JL: Feel like his, even his-

JF: What happened? [Laughing]

JL: [Laughing] what happened when you got dressed. It feels a little bit like just another “fuck you” from Steve Bannon. Like he’s like, “Fuck them I’m gonna be dressed like a crazy person.”

ER: Yeah, I think that’s true and I also think, but I will say that Steve Bannon’s a little bit of a trailblazer in that I- it feels so nice to be talking about clothes that a man is wearing.

TV: Hm.

ER: Instead of clothes that a woman is wearing. So, like thank you, Steve Bannon, the feminist.

JF: Let’s go after Steve Bannon’s appearance a little bit here.

ER: Yeah, yeah. He’s, I’m feeling very feminist right now. We can make fun of men, too. There you go.

JF: I saw that you tweeted that he should drink more water. That’s…

ER: [Laughing] Yes. Every time I see him I’m like, “Oh my god, how much water have I drank today?” And I go drink some water.

[Boys laugh hysterically]

TV: Megan Amran tweeted that he puts lipstick on his eyeballs.

[Laughing]

TV: Can I say, working in the campaign and working in the White House is like, the worst thing you could possibly do for your health. We all watched Barack Obama age two decades in 8 years. But, I’ve never seen someone look worse for the wear than Steve Bannon.

ER: Yeah.

TV: Like, you- I genuinely, I’m not concerned about him, but his health doesn’t look good.

JF: What do we think about him out there, in general? Like, is he someone who is…successfully spinning a 7-month stint in the White House, where he got fired, as a success? Are we not really buying it? What?

ER: I think you can only have so many demonstrable apparent failures in a row before it stops looking like you’re playing some kind of master chess game and it starts looking like you’re just pretending like you didn’t lose.

JL: Right.

ER: And like, he, I think he’s, he’s kind of running out of time. I think most people haven’t been, I think it’d be fair to not be generous and assume that he’s just a loser. But you know it is possible that he’s got some other tricks up his sleeve. I don’t know.

JF: Um hm.

JL: Yeah, I mean, look, I sort of go back and forth here. You know, he is in many ways, like a classic, sophisticated crank, right? He has a whole bunch of arguments, he had a real career before, but then you listen to what he says and it’s like, “Populism will win the day. The question is if it’s the left wing or right wing and all the rest.” And it’s like, okay, there’s some truth to that all, kind of crank noise. There’s like a kernel of truth in there. But he’s a sophisticated crank elevated because he helped elect a President.

ER: Um hm.

TV: Yeah.

JL: And he did do that.

JF: Yeah.

JL: And what he said was, you know his case for why Trump would win was correct. I mean, he was right.

JF: But like, he is right that the central problem with the Trump administration, which is what we were just talking about, is that they are, he didn’t staff the administration with a bunch of Steve Bannons. He staffed it with some Steve Bannons and then some traditional Republicans and then, like wall street bankers.

TV: Right.

JF: And so, Bannon’s dream on the populist economic side of like, infrastructure and draining the swamp and tax reform and all this bullshit, isn’t getting realized because Gary Cohn and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are there.

JL: Right.

JF: That’s correct, right?

JL: And Mulvaney. I think Mulvaney-

JL: Mulvaney.

JL: Mulvaney has played a big role in all of this because everything that they’ve, he’s basically been a Paul Ryan acolyte inside the administration and it’s made a difference.

TV: I think he’s a Jim Comey, like you’re right that he sounds sophisticated. He quotes President Polk and cites history, right. But like he’s a Jim Comey letter away from leading the most racist, losing campaign in modern history, than the most racist winning campaign in modern history.

JL: That’s true.

TV: I think we can’t remember that. One of the things-

JF: Hillary Clinton would agree with that.

TV: Yes, she would.

JF: In what happened ‘til now.

TV: One thing that is remarkable to me, though is like, again like the sort of totally rejiggering how the press covers these things. The fact that he still gets away with calling, bragging about sexual assault just, “It’s locker room talk.” There’s no follow up on that. “Just locker room talk.” You know, just, it’s just the guy is…disgusting.

ER: Yeah. I agree.

JF: How about the Chris Christie stuff? [Laughing] He was like, “No, the Access Hollywood tape, that was a real test. If you got on the plane afterwards you’re a part of the team. If not, we don’t wanna talk to you anymore.”

JL: Yeah, I mean well [scoffs] true and awful. [Laughing] Right? Seems like that was true. Terrific.

ER: Yeah. You know, it’s awful but it’s also like, another irritating about this whole thing is how, like, I don’t know. It’s like, there’s a whole crew of people in power right now who seem like they’re trying to play guys who are bad guys on TV. They’re like, they’re playacting a version of what they think evil is based on a movie they saw in the 80’s.

TV: Yes.

ER: And it like, doesn’t, it’s really odd because it’s like, it’s really disingenuous. It feels really fake. Have you ever talked to somebody who was, like acting? Or like you’re-

TV: Yeah.

ER: It feels like you’re in a cultural reenactment of, like the bad guys from Revenge of the Nerds.

TV: “I’m a street fighter.”

JL: Are you?

TV: How many fights have you been in lately?

JF: Yeah, he was so excited to call himself a street fighter.

JL: I’m a street fight- you’re a guy that got some Seinfeld money!

[Laughing]

JL: Calm the fuck down! Who the Mercers like because you’re a nut.

TV: And to your Christie point. They were like, “That guy was dead to us. He was off the plane. He was never given an important job.” Chris Christie now leading our opioid task force, by the way.

[Laughing]

TV: Like, we handed him that piece of shit.

JF: No, I love when he rails against elites and he’s like, “limousine liberals and blah, blah.” It’s like, “Hey buddy, you were fucking on Wall Street and Hollywood. That was your career.” Like, who would-?

JF: [Chuckling] You’re as elitist as they come.

JL: Also, Gorka, Bannon, they all do this Obi-Wan thing where they’re like, “Strike me down, I’ll become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.” It’s like, you run a fucking blog for racists.

[Laughing]

TV: It’s a racist zine.

JF: But, as Tommy mentioned, the alliance with Mercer makes him at least somewhat influential and powerful.

TV: It’s capitalism.

JF: And what came out of that interview [JL: That’s right] that I think was most consequential is that Mercer and Bannon are planning primary challenges to Republicans like Dean Heller, Jeff Flake, possibly Bob Corker, possibly-

JL: Dirty Dean Heller?

TV: Dirty Dean.

JF: Possibly Roger Wicker of Mississippi. Currently they’re trying to take down Luther Strange, who I didn’t even know was a Senator.

JL: That fucking liberal- liberal Wicker.

TV: [Laughing]

ER: You know he’s like a million feet tall and his name is Luther Strange. Like-

JF: I didn’t believe that was a real name of a real Senator.

TV: I didn’t either.

ER: He like, came directly from Hogwarts. He took time off from his teaching position there to, like to be in the Senate. And now he’s getting primaried.

JL: Oh, is he the Defense Against the Dark Arts guy?

ER: Yeah. Again, he’s having a really bad year.

TV: Eighth book.

[Laughing]

TV: Poor Roger Wicker’s like, ‘How did I get on this list? Like, what did I do?”

JL: I’m trying to think of something like tea party puff…puff tea party…

[Laughing]

JL: I don’t have it.

JF: So, I’m struggling with the primary-

TV: [Gasp] Racist puff!

JF: I’m struggling with the primary challenges because in the pre-Trump world, I would say, “Excellent. A bunch of moderate or conservative Republicans [TV: The exact same journey] are being taken down by a bunch of right-wing freaks. That’s good for Democrats. We’re gonna win.” In this world, I don’t know. I don’t know if, like, Roy Moore is the stronger candidate against a Democrat than Luther Strange, whoever he may be. [Laughing] I don’t know if, like, Dean Heller’s challenger is stronger than Dean Heller against whoever we pick, may put up because the argument they’re gonna use against these Republicans they’re trying to knock is, “They’re part of the establishment. They’re part of the swamp. They’re part of the special interests. And you should knock them off for a change.”

ER: I think that’s assuming that the level of energy that existed on election day 2016 is gonna be present in 2018.

JF: That’s a good point.

ER: And among the exact same people. So, like that’s a pretty big gamble to assume that like the Trumpian-like rally attendee, MAGA hat wearing set is going to be as fired up and mad. And I don’t think that’s gonna be the case. [JF: Um hm] I mean, and cause, whatever, polls screw up all the time. But if you take a look at like what people, what media people are consuming now, what political publications, what broadcasts people are watching. Like MSNBC is killing it because people are mad and fired up on the left. Like, just as how when Obama was first in office, Fox News was killing it. It’s a midterm election and that’s a huge gamble. I just can’t that playing out.

TV: Yep.

JF: Yeah, that’s right.

TV: I had the same journey which was like, initially I’m like, “Great. Spend money, bleed these guys dry.” But I have this fear inside me that these more, you know these sort of somewhat moderate individuals — even when they’re cowards like Dean Heller — seeing them go down, like a Jeff Flake going down. I don’t know that that’s a good thing for the institution. I do think it’s back to the moderating of Trump question. Like, is he gonna go all in with the Breitbart crowd and like, primary people? Like he’s been doing in Nevada? Or is he going to get with the program and like support the caucus? I, we just don’t know yet.

ER: I think the Breitbart crowd plays in extremely red districts though. And if Trump likes national headlines that are fawning, he can’t align with that crowd. Because he’s found throughout the first months of his presidency that every time he’s aligned with them, the papers, the TV shows, talk shows, have hated him. And he liked the, he liked the Schumer bump. He liked getting press coverage, so like he’s- That was gross. “Schumer bump.”

[Guys laughing]

JF: Schumer has a Schumer bump from the Schumer bump.

ER: Yeah, right, right.

[Laughing]

ER: Oh, god. No, but he likes that!

JL: [Laughing] That stays in!

JF: That stays in.

JL: That’s staying in. I saw your face, that’s staying the fuck in!

[Laughing hysterically]

ER: Yeah, but he likes good coverage and he-

TV: I think that’s the title

ER: Yeah, he’s- the Schumer bump. [Giggling] I’m so sorry, guys. But he’ll do what he needs to do to impress the audience that he’s in front of at the exact moment. And if he can’t impress the nation with aligning himself with Breitbart, he’s not gonna continue to do it.

TV: True.

JL: Yeah, I mean look, I think that what we’ve seen the past, you know eight months is he’ll do both, right. He’ll bounce around. I think you’re right, he’ll pivot one way, he’ll try to help these people, but he won’t be disciplined enough to follow through. I mean he’s already threatened some of these people with primaries. He basically threatened Dean Heller in front of him. But then following through means making people mad to their faces, which is something he’s never been comfortable doing, which is why the ‘fire guy’ can’t fire someone.

TV: He can’t look Gary Cohn in the eye! Like that’s just discipline.

JL: I feel like there’s, I remember, I feel a little bit like how we’re worried about what’s gonna come out of these primaries the way we did early in the Republican primary where –I remember us talking about this a lot, that it was, you know, “Who do we want to face Hillary in the primary.” And there was Jeb, and Marco, and Cruz and some other, kind of homogenous white faces I’ve mostly forgotten. And then there was Trump.

JF: And Ben Carson.

JL: And Ben Carson. And then I, and I remember us talking about this. That, like, you know, “Who do we want to come out of the process?” And Trump was the wild card. We, there was this back and, there was a feeling like, “Oh, it’ll be great if Trump got that. He’ll implode. But maybe he won’t. We’re not sure. We don’t really know.” But in our minds, we’re like, “But Rubio’s harder than Jeb, and Jeb is harder than Cruz.” Like, that was an easy math to do. So, it’s a little bit like, kind of, different math. Like we don’t really know what comes out of it. But I do think we’re maybe a little bit traumatized and we’re not going to make the exact same mistakes in every single election.

JF: And it still could be another year of the Sharon Engle year. The Todd Aiken legitimate rape guy. The Christine whoever who was the witch or not the witch. Remember they-?

TV: Yeah.

ER: Yeah.

JL: What a year. By the way-

JF: What are your- and they all lost. And they put up those, they put up those crazy candidates and they all lost and Democrats won those races.

JL: Aiken lost because of talking about whatever he, I can’t even remember. What was it called? “Legitimate rape?” And then Donald Trump brags about legitimate sexual assault and he doesn’t get-

JF: And he’s on his way to the White House. Okay, this brings us to Hillary Clinton and her book, “What Happened.” Which we will be interviewing her about in a couple hours. Erin, you read the book.

ER: I sure did.

JF: And you wrote a review already.

ER: I did write a review already. Somehow, I was able to.

JF: That’s amazing because the three of us basically just like finished the book late last night.

JL: Honestly. The three of us getting through a book over the weekend. We’re like, “This tweet is so long.”

[Hysterical laughing]

JL: “I can’t believe how long it’s taking me to read this tweet by Hillary Clinton. I never knew tweets could be this long.”

[Laughing]

ER: Yeah, it’s, it’s-

JF: What’d you think?

ER: I thought, you know, I was of a few minds of it, on it. First of all, it wasn’t a bad book.

JF: No.

JL: No.

ER: Like it’s not bad. There’s parts of it that are like, really funny. In a way that’s kind of deadpan and like, “Oh that’s actually really funny” when she was like writing about her staffers fighting over hot sauce brands and she was kind of dead panning how she goes through her day. It was like actually funny.

JF: When she was talking about the inaugural and she’s like, “I wish was anywhere but here. Bali? Bali sounds good.”

[Laughing]

ER: Yeah.

JF: That was like dead pan.

ER: Also, I liked how she kind of ping-pongs between being like, an aggressively basic suburban woman and like, one of the most intelligent and powerful women, like, love her or hate her, like who’s ever like lived in the modern era. So, it’s like you know, she’d be like, “I love NCIS: Los Angeles. It’s the strongest of the franchise.” Which was [laughing] a horrifying line.

[Guys laughing v hard]

ER: And then she’ll, and then she’ll talk about how she’s got a plan for meeting resistance with steel. Like, with steely resolve and it’s like, “Oh my god, this woman is scary but also, like, super nice and I kinda wanna hug her but she’s also very-” So there’s that. The book is actually a good book. But I think reading it, I was put into a mind space where I was like, “I don’t wanna hear this from you right now.” And like, not that I’ll never wanna hear it from you, but I understand why people are like, kind of resistant to it. And I was thinking this morning that it sort of reminds me of, like, if you had a dog that got hit by a car. And the person who hit your dog came over to your house and explained like, “Look, there was a bee in my car. I’m super allergic to bees and I had to hit the bee otherwise if it would’ve stung me, I would’ve died and it totally wasn’t my fault.” Or, “I got rear ended and that’s why my car hit your dog.” I don’t care. Like my dog is still dead. I don’t wanna look at you right now.

[Laughing]

ER: Like I don’t care if it wasn’t your fault. I don’t care if you, I don’t care if you like have a perfectly good excuse. Like my dog is still dead. And I know that like, I don’t think that it’s even rational to be that angry or like upset with her, but the fact that you know, this is her owning up to the mistakes that led to where we are right now, is kind of- I don’t really wanna be put back in that headspace, just yet. But I’m glad I read it, that being said I think it’s a book that people should read.

JL: Yeah. The, I’ve had a similar reaction. I, especially when she gets to the litigation of why. And she writes this case and it’s like, “Oh, right. you’re-“ It reminded me of when she was in the Benghazi hearing and just she held her own for 11 hours and it was just- you know, I worked for her and that’s the Hillary Clinton you love working for. Because first of all, she comes-. like, staff can make a mistake, she can make wrong choices about the message or all the rest, but you know that she’s gonna show up brilliant and prepared. Like, we’ve been preparing for this interview for the past couple of days and we’re all going in under the assumption that she will be fully and totally prepared for questions and for the direction we’re gonna take it. And that’s part of who she is. And, so you read this litigation of why and the different reasons, and the different causes, and her way of breaking them down and she’s one of the smartest people around. And the thing I was thinking about, too, as I’m reading the book is, all of those qualities became background radiation. The fact that she is incredibly tough, the fact that she is a brilliant person became kind of the for granted part of the election and everything was focused on negatives. And in that she is right so, I found myself having the same feeling as you. Like, I was telling these guys last night, like I pinballed back and forth like, reading this and being like so outraged on her behalf and so sympathetic and also having that same feeling that you had. Which is, I don’t know what to do with this.

ER: Um hm.

JF: It’s a bit traumatic to go through it again. Because she does do such a good job of taking you through the whole experience. In a very candid way, it’s a very candid book. Like, and we’re talking about like, we’ve all read a lot of politicians’ books. Unfortunately. [ JL: Laughs. TV: Yeah] And some of them are, like, “I’m running for office and here’s my blah, blah, blah that my speechwriter and my communications person put on paper.” You know? And then there’s more honest books and this is one of the more candid politician books. Which is good. I would also tell people, like you should read the whole thing and then if you have criticism, like offer all the criticism you want. But the excerpts that have leaked out – and they have leaked out, they haven’t been put out by the Clinton people – don’t really paint an accurate picture of what the whole book is about.

TV: The excerpts give you a unique window into her frustration because she couldn’t have more fully owned this loss in the book. But the fact that she also talks about Comey and how that influenced the election, the fact that she talks about Russia. Like, there will be people that will pluck that out and say she’s making excuses. It’s just, like, hopefully we all could be a little more adult about it and be like, “Yes, they were factors that contributed to this broader event even if she didn’t run perfectly.”

ER: Yeah, I don’t think people are really capable of being adults when it comes to Hillary Clinton, though. Like, people go insane one way or the other. Like whether or not they are crazy about her and love or whether they just are, just hate her.

JL: I’m sorry, Erin, just pause for a second. I just wanna make sure we have the Verrit authentication code on that point.

[Laughing]

ER: Oh, guys, did you see that he’s like a house DJ? He has, like he produced a bunch of, oh my god-

JL: We’re not talking about it.

ER: Okay.

JL: We’re not talking about it.

ER: Anyway, no, I think people, people are like, because like- Jon, what you said, that it, some people experience the election as like a trauma. And revisiting it causes like this extreme reaction one way or the other. And it’s really hard to go back there.

TV: And it’s something we wanna ask her, because the Bernie-Hillary wound that opened in the primary that everyone thought that would heal for the general, did not heal. And it has not healed today. And it is certainly a fair reading, I think, of the Twitter reaction and everything else that this is exacerbating the problem. I think she has every right to tell her story and explain where she’s coming from but like, okay now as a party, how do we fix this? Because we still have this monster in the White House. Our entire message is still just attacking him. Like, what are we? What do we stand for? And like how do we fix this? Because this is a problem.

JF: And we have all experienced how difficult it is talking about it. Like you send out-

TV: Our mentions are dead already.

JF: You send out an errant tweet about the 2016 election and you are-

JL: Batten down the hatches!

JF: Poor Dillon Matthews at Vox tweeted over the weekend, “Does anyone know what she was trying to accomplish with this book?” Now, you can take the tone of that a bunch of different ways. Dillon later said he was actually wondering like, what’s she trying to do? And he’s still replying to his mentions.

JL: I was glad that he said, I was glad he was like, “Guys I’m not gonna apologize for asking what a politician’s motivations are.” Like everybody, but, it speaks to the kind of sensitivity that people have because of all these unfair dynamics that played out in the election. We’re all kind of, like, a dog that needs to be re-assimilated to other dogs.

TV: We’re all partially honest in the same way the book is like, pretty honest but not 100% candid, right.

JF: Well and it’s also, it’s- she lost an election to Trump, right? Which is what makes this whole thing different. And I was on John Kerry’s campaign. I remember the days and weeks and months after that campaign. John Kerry was destroyed. There were Newsweek books about it. And I mean, it was bad. But it wasn’t anything like this. And I sorta saw it coming though, if she was gonna lose. Like, I remember visiting headquarters in Brooklyn to say ‘hi’ to our old friends who are there. And I was talking to Jen Palmieri and talking to Kristina Schake and I was like, you know this was right after she won the primary. And I’m like, “This is gonna be so much pressure for you guys, because in addition to all the other pressure you get on a presidential campaign, it’s Trump. And if you don’t win, if you don’t beat Trump, it’s gonna be that much- like that’s so scary.” And they’re like, “Thanks, thanks, appreciate that.” But they hadn’t really, it hadn’t really hit them yet. You know, like it ultimately hit them but it hadn’t hit them at that point. And it just, it makes it a different context because it’s, he’s so, he was so scary.

ER: Yeah, I mean, and I think additionally you know, the book’s title is “What Happened” but Hillary kind of, at one point says like, “I don’t know why I’m the one that gets treated like this, I’m at a loss. Tell me what you think. Like, I’m at a loss.” And it seems like a lot of the loose ends are still loose.

Boys: Yeah.

ER: She lays out why she did what she did and takes ownership for the things that went wrong, but we’re missing the exact thing that went wrong. You know what I mean? There’s like step one, two, question mark, profit. There’s like a whole bunch of question marks still left in there.

JL: Right. I think that the part she takes responsibility for are the parts least elucidated in the book, right. And the parts that were the outside factors, which she very effectively makes the case mattered most, are laid out and fully and bare. And I think it’s quite reasonable that this book, an attempt to explain from her perspective what she thinks wrong, needs help on the parts that are specific about the failures of the campaign, specific about her failures in the campaign. So, I, you know-

JF: It’s almost because every time she takes responsibility for one of those failures, there also happens to be some mitigating outside factor that has also caused that problem.

JL: Right, right, right.

JF: So, it’s just like, you can, the whole book is a back and forth. “I was at fault, I did this wrong, I did this wrong. But, this also happened.”

JL: But it’s true! And she says this in the book, which I think is quite reasonable. Like, you know, “These things happened. And they’re not an excuse, but they happened. And we need to understand why they happened.” And she’s right about that, you know I think the excerpts that have been pulled out have kind of highlighted that aspect of it.

ER: Um hm.

JL: But, you know. She’s not wrong that we need to talk about that.

ER: Yeah, I also thought as I was reading it, that I was like, “Oh, I’m glad that this is all written down and in one place.” Because I think five years from now, ten years from now, if anybody wants a snapshot into like, this weird time in history, like, this will be a really useful volume for one side of what happened. And like I was thinking, like future college kids will probably get assigned it and like, grumble about it but then actually secretly enjoy reading it because it’s like kind of a fun book.

JL: The book is a metaphor. The book is being treated like and represents the way Hillary Clinton has been treated in the public eye this whole time, which is, incredibly high level of scrutiny. Much of it taken the wrong way. Much of it taken fairly. Flawed, but mostly honest and trying to understand something, but the flaws become exacerbated and the flaws make the honest part harder to talk about.

TV: Sounds like we got a book jacket blurb.

[Everyone laughing way too hard]

ER: We’ll have to add like an accordion to interject.

[Laughing more]

JF: Okay, when we come back we will talk with DeRay McKesson.

00:49:41.3

[MUSIC]

00:49:46.5

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JL: Helix!

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JL: I have a question.

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TV: Ye., I do and I think it’s a stupid dynamic.

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00:51:26.4

JF: Pod Save America is brought to you by the Cash app!

TV and JL: [in unison] The Cash app.

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JL: We’re gonna get their new debit card thing where you can personalize it. We’re gonna use it. There’s gonna be money for you – 5 dollars, 5 dollars for hurricane relief. It’s the simplest easiest way to pay people back. We’re not using the other apps anymore. You know, that’s the end of it. That’s all there is to it. The Cash app. The Cash app.

JF: I would like to know why those of you who haven’t downloaded the Cash app yet, have not done so.

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TV: Yeah, answer, answer for yourself.

JF: We will-

JL: I appreciate all the people tweeting at us your admonitions to your friends that you’re only paying them back via the Cash app. We like that, we think that’s fun.

JF: We do.

TV: Yeah.

JL: And we like that you CC the advertiser on it, because it lets them know that this shit works.

JF: [Laughing]

TV: You know what else we like that we haven’t done in a while? We also like really like if people accidentally borrow their friend’s phone and they accidentally subscribe them to Pod Save America, then film it and then tweet it at us.

JL: Yeah, we haven’t done that.

TV: It’s not something we are asking you to do. But we think it’s fun. It’s fun.

JL: But if it happens we won’t mind.

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JL: And also, you know add Lovett or Leave It and Pod Save the World because what are you- you have their phone. They seem to be taking a long time in the bathroom, so use the phone.

JF: Maybe, maybe Pod Save the People and With Friends like These.

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[Laughing]

JF: The Cash app.

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00:52:46.0

JF: Pod Save America is also brought to you by Postmates.

JL: Postmates.

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JL: Honestly it has left me.

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TV: Who are you competing with?

JF: I hope you solve, I hope you solve your issue with Matt Lauer. [Laughing]

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JF: Postmates! Code ‘CROOKED.’

JL: I may go Trump on the whole thing.

00:54:01.1

[MUSIC]

00:54:04.4

JF: And we’re joined by the host of Crooked Media’s Pod Save the People, DeRay McKesson. DeRay, how’s it going?

DeRay McKesson: It’s good, it’s good. How’re you guys doing? You guys have a big interview coming up.

JF: We have a big interview.

JL: We do. We do.

JF: Do you have anything you wanna ask Hillary? Or you want us to ask Hillary?

DM: Hm. I’m always interested on her about race. So, anything that you ask her about race injustice. You know, she had a lot of stuff in her policy platform that never made the light of day. Like you didn’t hear about it, so I’d be interested to hear about that. And then, what does she think is gonna happen moving forward? Like she’s been an insider for so long. And, you know, she was First Lady and Secretary of State, like what’s her thought about how we organize to respond this administration and just those things.

JF: That’s good. Yeah, we asked people on Twitter and Facebook for questions and I think the most common one we got was, what’s gonna happen moving forward? Don’t try to re-litigate too much of the past. Which I think is probably wise.

JL: Which I probably won’t do, too.

[Laughing]

JF: Lovett’s just gonna ignore. So, DeRay, you were in Houston this weekend, I believe. What were you doing there? How’s everyone doing?

DM: I volunteered at Houston, you know, it’s a city rebuilding. I volunteered at a Harvey relief, which is like an incredible warehouse of volunteers donating stuff and then people who needed stuff in Houston could come and just pick up whatever they needed. So, it was great to be there. And then I came back to New York City and I’m off to Philadelphia, so good to be there. And then, you know on the pod coming up, we talked to Congressman Yarmouth from Kentucky, about the debt ceiling, which I didn’t know very much about. So yeah, it’s been a full week.

JF: We were talking about this earlier on the pod, what are your thoughts about this budget deal?

DM: It’s interesting. I realized how little I knew about sort of the budget making process until, you know, the government started to collapse before our eyes and I was like, “I should learn about this.” So you know, I’m interested in the debt ceiling. And like, you know Trump says we don’t even need a debt ceiling, which some people agree with in some ways. So that’ll be interesting how it plays out. The DACA decision is still fascinating to see if DACA, like immigration reform is actually used as the lever by which people get tax cuts. Cause they’re so like, I’m interested to see how that actually plays out and hopeful that the immigration rights, sort of, space doesn’t get screwed over as a swap for some, like really bad tax deal, you know.

JL: On the other hand, a billionaire DACA recipient would come out pretty well.

DM: [Laughing] Yes.

JF: Well, I’m sort of worried, DeRay, about what they’re gonna trade for legalizing these undocumented young Americans. Which is, like there’s a lot of thought that maybe it’s the wall, right? They’ll get wall funding and some Democrats will say, “Okay, we’ll give you the wall funding if we get DACA recipients legalized.” What- did Yarmouth have a thought on that? Or- what did he say?

DM: You know, he didn’t, we talked about the debt ceiling and sort of the process. We didn’t talk about, in all the people I’ve talked to people haven’t had much comments on what they think, or many comments on what they think the swaps will be. I personally think that the wall is being used as like the shock value that’s gonna open up space for them to do the crazy tax stuff that we’re not even, like we don’t even know. And as you probably have seen is that the ACA repeal is like back on the table in some parts of Congress, so like making sure that people aren’t too fatigued to keep this fight up I think is really important on our end. And I think that, you know, the Trump folks are being really consistently dramatic. That is, like fatiguing people, so.

JF: Yeah.

DM: Yeah, I think that they are gonna really consciously- and did you see that Omarosa is being locked out of the Oval office? That was interesting.

TV: I love that.

JF: We didn’t talk about that.

JL: I think that is terrific.

TV: So funny. I love that she triggers him. That’s like, the accusation from Kelly’s team.

DM: And Lovett, I didn’t know that you, you used to work for Hillary?

JL: I did. I did. I worked for her for three years. I was her speechwriter.

DM: I didn’t know that.

JL: Yeah. After Hillary lost in 2008, Jon hired me at the White House.

DM: So this’ll be like a homecoming of sorts. This interview.

JL: Yeah, yeah, that’s sure.

JF: Lovett gave her all of her funny lines.

JL: For a while.

[Laughing]

JF: DeRay, you’re also, she, you’re mentioned in the book as well and she talks about a very, great meeting that she had with you and Brittany. But again, it’s a question you asked, which is, she talks in the book about like she has all these policies and it was hard for all these policies to break through. And I think one thing we probably wanna ask her is, you know, what did Democrats do- what do we do in the future to make sure that you know everything isn’t just the Trump show? And that a lot of really good policy actually gets out there as message. Which is, you know, I think probably every movement struggles with, right?

DM: Yeah, she was, you know we met her previously before she did a big event in some swing states and she was incredible. Like, very thoughtful, all the right things about the police and race like in ways that people, I hadn’t anticipated she’d be. And you never got to see that, and that was a real- I think that like, the campaign really just made the wrong calculations about, like, not allowing the videotapes of those conferences to be released, or like those meetings to be released. She didn’t do much media with anyone who knew content. She did a lot of culture media.

JF: Hm.

DM: Which is great, but they could’ve said anything about the content or policies and like they just, they weren’t experts on it. So, they wouldn’t have pushed. So, I think that was like a real flaw. And you think about the surrogates. It’s like people, like a lot of people didn’t know who Killer Mike was, but they knew him because of Bernie. Like he was an incredible surrogate. People had no clue who Katrina Pearson was, but Katrina was out there for Trump. It’s like, who was actually a surrogate for Hillary? I don’t know, you know. Like I don’t know who was delivering her message in any media. And I think that they just like played that game wrong.

JF: It’s a good point. I don’t really know. Like, I remember like Karen Finney being on MSNBC a lot for her.

JL: There was no one person who became the face of the campaign on television.

DM: Yeah, Podesta was on one or two times but you know, like who was, even Benghazi, you know? It’s like, the Benghazi story got so far without there being, like, a person being like, “Okay, here’s actually what happened.” It was like, 60 people. It was like, I don’t really know. The right was just so awful about it, the same faces just beating her up over and over and over.

TV: Yeah. And I think that’s also true for the Russia investigation. I mean when they sort of tried to amp up their messaging on the fact that the big story was the fact that Russia was interfering with the election. I think they set out Robbie Mook, who is seen as a political staffer, not a national security expert or someone they sort of credentialed along the way to talk about these specific issues.

JF: Yeah, I mean, you learn in a campaign that message discipline is everything. And you have to be saying the same thing every single day, even when it gets boring. And when you look at the coverage of the race — some of this is the fault of the press — but you know, it was all about her emails and, and the Trump people and the Republicans and the right-wing media hammered emails and corruption every single day for the entire race. And that’s what they got. And I think because Trump offends so many different kinds of people and does so many things wrong and is such a disaster, there’s like 50 targets a day on how you hit Trump. You know?

JL: Yeah, I mean, one thing I was thinking about too, from all this is, we need, it’s almost as if we needed a first part of the sentence to attach what Trump was doing. Like, instead of attacking for what he said about the Khans on its own, like “Trump is a selfish plutocrat, which is why he attacked the Khans.” Or, “Trump is a racist billionaire who doesn’t care about people, which is why he did this.” Like we needed one phrase about Trump that we all said over and over again until it stuck. And he was so erratic and so undisciplined and said so many crazy things, that never happened.

JF: Yeah, and look like this matters for the future cause we’re gonna face this again in 2018 and 2020.

DM: Hopefully he doesn’t last until 2020. Let’s not even speak that way.

JF: [Laughing] Alright I like that. I like that optimism. Alright, DeRay, we’re taking off. We’re gonna head up to Chappaqua now.

JL: We’re going to the woods, DeRay. I got some GORP, I have some kind bars, I have, I have a canteen filled with water, I have bug spray. We’re going to talk to Hillary Clinton.

[Laughing]

DM: Cool, talk to you later.

JF: Everyone go download Pod Save the People this week. DeRay’s talking to John Yarmouth and a lot more. So, DeRay, take care. We’ll talk to you later.

TV: Thanks, DeRay.

DM: Cool, talk to you later.

JF: Bye. Alright, that’s all the time we have for today. We are headed north…to this interview.

TV: I’ve never been in New York City on 9/11.

JF: Yeah.

TV: It was a strange realization. I know a lot of people never move on, but it does feel like the city’s, it feels like we’re in a different place than we were.

JF: I know.

TV: Like, when we were in the White House and we would, such a focus on the attacks and the anniversary.

JF: Every 9/11 in the White House was a big-

TV: I know. I don’t know if that’s a healing, it it’s just culture moving, I don’t know.

JL: I think the 10-year marked the end of marking it every year in the same way as we did before. We still mark it, but it’s different.

JF: Yeah, it’s interesting. Alright, everyone.

JL: Oh, that brought the outro down.

TV: Well, that’s my role here.

JL: Usually the outro’s a chance for comradery. There’s a fun, videogame-like music song that plays right now.

01:02:39.2

[MUSIC starts]

JF: Is there?

JL: Yep. It’s just started

JF: Okay. Well, we’ll talk to you guys later. Don’t forget to download the bonus episode!

JL: Download the bonus episode. It’s gonna be great. Probably.

[Laughing]

JF: Bye, everyone.

TV: Bye

1:03:09.9

#podsa #September 2017 #cm transcripts

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