Biden’s in His Jacked-Up Joe Era
2024-03-12 00:50:00
Pod Save America is a no-bullshit conversation about politics hosted by former Obama aides Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor. It cuts through the noise to break down the week’s news and helps people figure out what matters and how they can help. They’re regularly joined by journalists, activists, politicians, entertainers, and world leaders. You can watch on YouTube or listen to new episodes every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Ad-Free Pod Save America episodes available NOW through Friends of the Pod subscription. Head to crooked.com/friends to join today! For a transcript of an episode of Pod Save America, please email [email protected] (edited)
Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitek. On today's show, Donald Trump kicks off the general election by mocking Joe Biden's stutter, hosting a concert for Victor Orban, and floating cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
Alabama Senator Katie Britt and Republicans are still dealing with the fallout from what may have been the worst ever State of the Union response. We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it. And later, Take. Appreciator is back.
So is Elijah. But first, the man Sean Hannity now calls jacked up. Joe has kicked his reelection effort into high gear. Team Biden raised $10 million in the first 24 hours after the State of the Union. That's the most they've raised all cycle and 124 hour period.
Since then, the president has been on a campaign swing that includes Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Hampshire, Michigan and Wisconsin. Biden's out there talking about his second term economic agenda, a newly released 2025 budget that's focused on lowering costs and taxing the rich. And the campaign has launched a $30 million ad buy in the battleground states. that begins with this new ad. Let's listen.
Look, I'm.
not a young guy. That's no secret. But here's the deal. I understand how to get things done for the American people. I led the country through the covert crisis.
Today, we have the strongest economy in the world. I passed a law that lowers prescription drug prices. cap sense of $35 a month for seniors. For four years, Donald Trump tried to pass an infrastructure law, and he failed. I got it done.
Now we're rebuilding America. I passed the biggest law in history to combat climate change, because our future depends on it. Donald Trump took away the freedom of women to choose. I'm determined to make Roe v. Wade the law of the land again.
Donald Trump believes the job of the president is to take care of Donald Trump. I believe the job of the president is to fight for you, the American people, and that's what I'm doing. I'm Joe Biden, and I approve this message. Can we do one more? take?
Look, I'm very young, energetic, and handsome. What am I doing this for?
Funny. It was great. I liked it. I really liked it. Also, he somehow looks younger in.
the ad. Yeah, he looks great. He looks great. Snapchat filter. Dude, you came to Middleton the ad?
He gets sandblasted and tanner, and he looks awesome. Also, I like the little.
score. It's great. Classic opening campaign ad score. right there. It feels like the campaign's begun.
What'd you guys think overall of the ad and the overall post-so-toot rollout? I?
just had this sense of relief. You and Ezra Klein. Ezra's back. Ezra's back. Got Ezra back.
Got Ezra back. That's a relief. Can't have him out there, giving us ideas. Worried.
Called himself a weak-knee pundit. Did he? Oh, yeah. I haven't caught up on the vicissitudes of Ezra's Biden affinity. Sorry, I cut you off.
Go ahead. No, that's how I felt. We've been saying it. A lot of people have been saying it. We want to see Biden out there.
The Biden campaign has been saying he will be. The campaign is about to begin, and now it has. The past 72 hours, you've seen a ton of back and forth between Trump and Biden, on his affinity for dictators, on Trump's being open to cutting Medicare and Social Security. These are all really good fights. I think four days of stories about how energetic and on top of this shit, Biden seemed was a very, very good couple of days.
Yeah, if your.
opponents go from calling you too old to saying you're using drugs, that's probably good.
For sure. Jacked up, Joe, I'd make t-shirts. Yeah, I would too. I like jacked up Joe. Also,
most people won't think that's a bad thing. It sounds like you've been lifting weights. I like that. his ad took the age issue head on, and it was funny. I think they walked through his accomplishments in a way that was not defensive, but talked about some of the bills they passed, but also contrasted Trump like, oh, he tried to get infrastructure done.
I did. The real value I think will come from these swing state visits. I imagine the White House wasn't totally thrilled with what spun out of the MSNBC interview with Jonathan Capehart, which we can get into, but other than that, pretty good. Yeah, no, I'm always.
interested in how they decide what to put in these ads, right? Because making that is extremely difficult, 30 seconds, or in this case, it was 60 seconds. I found it interesting that they chose infrastructure, and I think they did that as a proof point around effectiveness, not just because it's popular that he passed an infrastructure bill. that's creating a lot of jobs, but Biden got it done, Trump didn't. I do think they're trying to litigate the, here's what Trump did as president, here's what I did, which is good.
I think it's good for now, because memories need to be refreshed. I do hope that soon they'll pivot to what I'll do versus what he'll do, but I think at the beginning, at the campaign, you got to remind people both what Trump did and also what the year 2020 was like. since Trump continues to want us to remember what life was like four years ago, and four years ago today, everything was shutting down around the country. It was amazing. Yeah, that was my sort of, on the ad,
that it goes at age directly, then it does a little bit of record, but uses it for contrast, and then it lands on, I'm out for you, Trump's out for himself, and I'm hot. And I'm hot. And I'm super hot as hell. Super hot, and I'm funny. Yeah, I'm funny and fuckable.
Joe Biden 2024.
. Another good t-shirt. Let's get this in the crooked store before the Biden campaign. No bad ideas in a brainstorm. I also, the budget came out today, it's never going to pass, but everyone puts a budget out as their ideal, right?
And especially important in a re-election campaign, because it basically takes the place of, basically it doubles, as Biden's second term agenda. Heavily focused on costs. He talked about housing costs today, which I thought was great. Housing is the biggest cost people face. It comes up in every single focus group across every demographic, and yet it's not a big part of the national political debate.
And so it's great to see Biden talking about housing costs in this campaign. He's talking about giving mortgage relief to people, saving people thousands of dollars. So I thought that was great as well. Tom, you mentioned the MSNBC interview. He sat down with Jonathan Capehart.
In that interview, he doubled down on his criticism of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision. He said he wished he used a different word other than illegals to describe undocumented immigrants in his State of the Union speech. And he answered plenty of questions about Gaza. Here's what he said. What is your red line with Prime Minister Netanyahu?
Do you have a red line?
For instance, would invasion of Rafah, which you have urged him not to do, would that be a red line?
It is a red line, but I'm never going to leave Israel. The defense of Israel is still critical. There's no red line. I'm going to cut off all weapons so they don't have the Iron Dome to protect them. But there's red lines that if he crosses, he cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead as a consequence of going after.
There's other ways to deal, to get to, to deal with the trauma caused by Hamas. He has a right to defend Israel, a right to continue to pursue Hamas, but he must, he must, he must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken. He's hurting, in my view, he's hurting Israel more than helping Israel by making the rest of the world. It's contrary to what Israel stands for.
So, in response, Bibi told Politico, as one does, that he still intends to move into Rafah. He thinks Biden is wrong and rejects any attempt to, quote, ram down our throats, a Palestinian state. So what now, tell me, where does that leave Biden?
I mean, it leaves the US and Israel in totally different places, both in terms of near-term military strategy and long-term political goals. And it's very bad. I mean, they're just, couldn't be further apart. And I think, you know, any leader that faced an attack like October 7th would have responded with a military response. Rockets were still being fired.
There were hostages being held. But five months later, even Bibi Netanyahu, in that Politico interview, admits that at least 26,000 people have been killed and at least half of them are civilians. Now, I suspect the number is much higher. The number of civilians killed is much higher. I don't think we have any idea how many people are trapped in rubble, but it's this catastrophic humanitarian situation.
And now Netanyahu is threatening to go into Rafah, where 1.
4 million people are sheltering, but that's also where all the aid crosses into Gaza. So you have people starving to death because the Israeli government will not allow insufficient aid. If the rest of the trucks that are getting in, like the 100 trucks a day that are getting in, are blocked because of some big military campaign, you'll see mass starvation. Like airdrops cannot solve that. This new seaport that Biden talked about is months away from being created.
So that's the near-term challenge. Longer term, even the Israeli military thinks that Hamas survives this war. They're going to be a guerrilla group or a terrorist organization. You also cannot kill the idea of Hamas, the resistance to occupation. And that won't go away until there's a Palestinian state.
So Netanyahu is ruling out talks. He's ruling out a two-state solution. That means people are going to look to armed groups like Hamas. So they're just not aligned on anything. And I think that will continue to be the case unless the Biden administration says there will be consequences if you do these things that we don't want you to do, like invade Rafa, like reject a two-state solution.
But thus far, Biden has been very hesitant to do that. Yeah. And I saw there's a Politico story just.
before we started recording that the Biden administration has a couple of senior officials on background saying that Biden will consider conditioning aid if Bibi goes ahead and moves into Rafa. Which is too late. Right. I was going to say that. Way too late.
Yeah. And then it said like then an Israeli military sources said, oh, it's not imminent to moving into Rafa and stuff.
like that. But I don't know, man. It's also just there's a there's a strange sort of.
not complacency, but sort of like the tone of an observer of the situation. It's fatalistic. And just as look, the announcement in the State of the Union that we are going to begin the building of a pier off of Gaza. as someone who has no like, I'm not in any way expert in any of the logistics or or realities of what it is like to try to get aid into this place. But the idea that we have so few levers to gain access to this place that we are forced to build something in the waters off the coast, as if we are as if we are dealing with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War or dropping it from the sky, as if we are not trying to get around not an enemy, but supposedly one of our great allies to try to help these people, who are, by the way, committing atrocities, with weapons we supplied.
I just it makes us look weak. It makes Biden look weak. And you forget, you know, on top of the fact that he says in this interview, my red line is another 30,000 dead, which to me like sounds cavalier. And then the fact that you then hear reports that that he's saying, oh, he's going to have that. Oh, quietly, he says, you know, caught off mic.
Oh, we're going to have a come to Jesus moment. When, when the time for the time to come to Jesus was weeks ago, was months ago.
He was just asked again just now about have you scheduled to come to Jesus meeting? And he said, no, which I mean, you were saying that obviously too late to condition aid after they move into Rafa. What's the ideal outcome like? right from what Biden said right now, if Biden suddenly was like, you know what? No, I'm done.
This is bad. I'm going to actually do something and not just.
be an observer. I mean, I think what you want to get to is a negotiated ceasefire that is probably going to be longer than six weeks, which is what the Israelis want. The Israelis want a shorter ceasefire in exchange for 40 hostages and sort of a phased process. I think what President Biden should demand is a permanent ceasefire, a full hostage release. And then you go from there.
Netanyahu, the challenge here is that Netanyahu knows that he is clinging to power for as long as this military conflict is happening. He is deeply unpopular. He is facing prosecution for all kinds of corruption schemes and alleged crimes. And he knows that his coalition could fall apart at any moment and then he'll be out of power. He is very unlikely to get reelected in that case.
And then we'll just have to face legal accountability for all these things he's done. So he has an incentive to prolong this war, to drag this out, and to keep this sort of like emergency coalition going that is leading the war effort. And he also wants Donald Trump to be president.
Yeah. Let's just be honest about it. Right. And Donald Trump, who said, you got to let them finish the job in Gaza. Can I make one more point about this too,
which is very clearly there is, Joe Biden personally views his responsibility as what he is going to try to get done behind the scenes versus what he says publicly. Even if you accept that, which Tommy doesn't, I don't, there is still space to be, I think, more like, at least rhetorically, in defense of the rights of Palestinian people. Like when Bibi says, we will not have a Palestinian state shoved down our throat, even if you're not willing to draw red lines publicly, even if you're not willing to push Bibi harder publicly. I would like to see an American president say, a Palestinian state is not something that is bestowed by the prime minister of Israel, because we believe in the inalienable rights of these people. And that having a state, having self-determination, isn't something granted by others.
It is something that belongs to them, regardless of who is standing in the way or the.
obstacles that stand in the way. Yeah. And it's longstanding U.S. policy that we should have a negotiated solution that leads to two different, a Palestinian state. To your point about the rhetoric used and the emphasis, again, like Kamala Harris gave a speech a couple of weeks ago now, where she talked about a ceasefire and made it sound like a demand, and it was commanding and authoritative.
And she centers the humanity of the Palestinian people, and it lands differently. She got cheered at this event where Biden's getting booed.
Same policy. Great. The same policy. Cheered for just laying out the moral stakes of the same policy and what they're trying to get done.
We know Biden can get feisty and angry. We've seen it. We've heard it. And so it would be.
really great to see that with Bibi. And Bibi Netanyahu's a great person to get feisty at. I was going to say this is not- Because he's a corrupt, racist, terrible leader who's harming his country, and he's built a coalition off of people who are extremists.
And Biden draws distinction in that interview between what he views as the interest of Israel and what Benjamin Netanyahu is doing. And he should be drawing more of a distinction between the prerogatives of one terrible leader and what he believes in the best interest of that state. For everybody who believes in the right of Israel to exist.
So Trump also campaigned in Georgia over the weekend, where he attacked Biden's State of the Union as an angry, dark, hate-filled rant before delivering one of his own. Here's what you missed.
Two nights ago, we all heard Crooked Joe's angry, dark, hate-filled rant of a State of the Union address. Wasn't it? Didn't it bring us together? I'm going to bring the country together. I'm going to bring it together.
They're conquering our country. These people are conquering our country. Joe Biden went on television and apologized for calling Lincoln's murderer an illegal. He didn't want to call him illegal. He's apologizing.
It's so interesting. I watched these criminals back there, the press. Look at them. Look at how many of them. And we did nothing wrong.
Perfect phone call. Other than we challenged the honesty of this election. This election was rigged. You know, the polls are all rigged. Of course, lately they have been rigged because I'm winning by so much.
I always say disregard that statement. I love the polls very much.
Telling. Lots to unpack there from the guy whose aides told NBC a few weeks ago, they'll be pivoting to less grievance and more policy. I have one hot take here, which is, I hope Trump keeps talking about Biden's stutter, because Biden's going to be a lot better off if people think that his verbal gaffes, know, that his verbal gaffes are related to his stutter and not his age. And he sounds like a vicious, mean person. He does.
He does. Well, that's pretty much baked in with Trump at this point. But it is like, it's also a realization from Trump that much mileage out of the age thing is. maybe he had hoped after the state of the union. And so now he's got to go to the stutter.
But anyway, I'm not sure to you guys. Yeah, I'm not sure. I was.
thinking about that. I can't tell if it's Trump reacting to how strong Biden seemed. And so he doesn't think the age attack is, is as salient, or if he should just take Trump at his word from this speech, which is he views the press's focus on Biden's age as an indirect attack on him. He takes it personally because he says in the speech, they're only calling Biden old because they're trying to say I'm old. I'm actually four years younger, by the way.
And there's a lot of great 80 year olds, a lot of great 90 year olds is about incompetence. So I felt like some of it was not strategic, so much as he doesn't like the fact that he's 78 years old. And he doesn't like talking about it. It's like thinking about it. So he's trying to make it about stutter.
And he's.
trying to make it about incompetence. He did try to make it about incompetence. I mean, clearly the core message they're trying to drive is about Lake and Riley and about immigration. So if you folks don't know the story, it's this horrible incident in Georgia, where a 22 year old woman went jogging. She was murdered by a man from Venezuela, who had unlawfully crossed into the country, into the US, and was allowed to stay.
So Trump invited Lake and Riley's family to the event. Marjorie Taylor Greene was passing out Lake and Riley buttons at the State of the Union that led to that exchange. There were posters printed. So Trump spends a lot of time at every event talking about immigration policy. But then he also, you know, sort of in real time got this information about the Jonathan Capehart interview and said that Biden apologized to Lake and Riley's killer for calling the killer illegal, which did not happen in any way.
So clearly, that's their message. It's demagoguing immigration. But it was also like two hours long. It was a great hit album.
It was so fucking long. It's getting really just...
He whined about every case in detail. He's still pretending he didn't misspeak. when he keeps saying Obama's president. He continues to say that he will defund any school with a vaccine or mask mandate and never says COVID. So again, if you like polio, if you like measles, if you like diseases recently eradicated from the United States, I got a candidate for you.
And this isn't like a hypothetical. We're seeing cases of measles pop up in places where they.
haven't been in decades. 45 of them this year. There were 58 total in 2023..
Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it's also an indication that Biden, picking fights with Trump, throws him off his game and gets him to go off message. Not that he's like disciplined on message, but we have seen him in recent months. Every once in a while, the campaign gets him to be a little bit more on message.
And he was clearly.
. I think, he was, thrown off a little bit by the State of the Union. And so we got the two hour crazy fest. Speaking of throwing Trump off a little bit,
what do you think about this pitch? It's a stupid pitch. Here's my pitch. I think Joe Biden should come out to Proud to be American. Oh, he's taking a song?
I think he should come out to Trump's song. Oh, is that Trump's song now? Yeah. Proud to be an American. There's so many.
I was like, tiny dancer. That's the one. he comes out to Proud to be an American. He loves it. He walks around, he hears the whole song.
We're proud to be American. He'd be so pissed. He'd be so pissed. I like that idea. I'd love to watch Joe Biden come out to that song.
I think he should come out to the QAnon music.
Well, that's beautiful. The J6 choir.
We're taking back. Yeah. Yeah. J6 choir, a little QAnon.
Laura Trump's won't back down. Oh, yeah. There we go.
There we go. There we go.
Trump did compliment Biden. Did you guys catch that? He said Biden probably did well enough that they're not going to replace him on the ballot on the State of the Union.
He said that was good news because he wants to run against Biden. He also attacked E. Jean Carroll again, prompting yet another threat of a defamation suit from her lawyer. Really? Yeah.
Yeah. I said she was a liar and an asshole. He called her Mrs. Bergdorf Goodman, whatever the department store was called.
Not really learning his lesson, as he had to do the bond on Friday.
Yeah. No, not learning his lesson at all. Trump's also back to doing phone interviews with all his favorite cable shows. Here's what he said to conservative Squawk Box host Joe Kernan, about his plans for Medicare and Social Security.
Have you changed your your outlook on how to handle entitlement, Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid? Mr. President, it seems like something has to be done.
or else we're going to be stuck at 120 percent of debt to GDP forever.
So, first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements. Tremendous bad management of entitlements. There's tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don't necessarily agree with the statement. I know that they're going to end up weakening Social Security because the country is weak.
I mean, take a look at outside of the stock market or what we're going through. Hell, people are going through hell.
So Biden pounced on that, as did his campaign. Biden said, not on my watch. He spoke about it at his event today. There's a digital ad that's out now from the Biden campaign. that's going to be part of that $30 million buy.
Trump campaign said he was just talking about cutting waste.
Waste, fraud, and abuse.
Waste, fraud, and abuse. Though Trump did propose budgets every year of his presidency that would cut Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid. It does seem notable to me that the Trump folks want to avoid this conversation. But what do you guys think?
NASA just ran against Nikki Haley by accusing her of messing with Social Security.
Yeah. Also, what I thought was they got to stop letting Trump do these phoners with these CNBC guys. Because he's kind of old Trump. He's sort of just shooting the shit.
That's what we want. Let Trump be Trump.
I'm all for it.
Let Joe be Joe and let Trump be Trump.
Yeah, well, let the chips fall.
He also loves talking about cutting entitlements. on CNBC. It was January of 2020 that he was to CNBC from Davos, of all places, and said that at the right time he'd take a look at cutting Social Security and Medicare.
He knows the audience. He's thinking about the audience of that channel.
I was triggered by the phoners, the TV phone interview in the opposite direction. It just made me think of 2015 and 16, all these news outlets not learning their lesson. Because none of them, he never answers their question. Even like Andrew Ross Sorkin, the progressive, super smart journalist, tried to ask some good questions, and Trump just doesn't even come close to responding, evades the question. You can't interrupt him because he's just ranting away.
They're terrible.
Yeah, let him talk. Word salad, makes mistakes, says stuff that's damaging.
Yeah, no, for sure.
Unlearn all your lessons. I don't care. At this point, I was looking at his record on Social Security and Medicare. I forgot about the story from the Trump years because there were too many to keep track of. Do you know Mick Mulvaney, who ended up a very Freedom Caucus, conservative Republican congressman, who ended up becoming Trump's chief of staff, one of the many chiefs of staff.
He bragged at one point about tricking Trump into proposing cuts to Social Security disability insurance. He went into the oval right after Trump won in 16.. He said, all right, let's talk about cutting Social Security. Trump's like, I can't do that. I just said I wouldn't do it.
Talk about, let's cut Medicare. I don't think I can do that either. I just campaigned on it. Then he goes, well, what about disability insurance? We can cut that.
Trump goes, yeah, great, great. Let's cut that. Let's cut that. Didn't realize that it was part of a Social Security program. Doesn't realize that it would affect Medicare and cut Medicare as well.
It just goes to show that even on these issues, where Trump feels like he has to be more of a populist or go against the Republican Party, he's so stupid. you can trick him into anything. It goes back to the conversation about the Project 2025, the Christian nationalism. All these people, Trump gets back in the White House and he's not going to have to face re-election again. He's going to be surrounded by all these right-wing kooks.
They're going to be able to get them to do anything they want, anything they want.
Well, he tells everyone what he thinks they want to hear. Yes. He's telling a bunch of people watching financial TV that he cares about the debt and deficit and thus will manage entitlement somehow, but he doesn't get specific. I think there's some truth to it.
Look, he goes to Michigan, pretends he's a union guy and his NLRB got union protections. His judges will be the judges. if this happens, that will gut the ability of people to organize. He doesn't care about the details. He just says yes to whatever list they put in front of him.
That's who ended up on the Supreme Court. That's Mitch McConnell's list. That's the right-wing establishment's list. That's not Trump's list. He doesn't give a fuck.
Yeah. I think it's important, because part of the fear of Trump, or part of what the right tends to say is an overblown fear of Trump is that he's some dictator and waiting with an ideology and it's like, well, it doesn't have to be that. He's just a useful idiot to a lot of people on the right who are very dangerous.
Yeah. And long before we were dealing with Trump trying to overturn elections, the logical conclusion of what Republicans wanted was the end of the EPA. It was the end of a ton of just basic consumer protections, the end of Roe, the end of organizing, the end of the National Labor Relations Board, the end of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is the conclusion that they want. They just never had somebody who was so willing to just sign off on these ideas, even though they're extremely unpopular.
Here's another totally normal thing for a presidential candidate to do. Trump threw a party at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend for right-wing Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban, who later said that Trump told him he wouldn't send a penny to Ukraine if he becomes president. Here's Trump praising Orban at the concert, which featured Beatles and Rolling Stones tribute bands, along with the Palm Beach Orchestra. Truly, a fucking hell on earth.
Tommy, every once in a while, I feel like we need a refresher on why Viktor Orban is not someone a potential US president should model himself after. Can you help us out?
Sure. So he's a dictator. He has all but killed off democracy in Hungary. The issues that he ran on will sound very familiar to you guys. He said that Hungary was getting invaded by migrants, that they had to build a wall, demagogued refugees, Muslims in particular.
He ran a bunch of ads attacking George Soros in blatantly anti-Semitic ways. And then, while in power, Orban slowly destroyed the institutions at the heart of the democracy in Hungary. He cracked down on the media. He ran outlets out of business that he didn't like, or he forced them to be sold to his friends. He rewrote the constitution, expanded the courts, then he packed the courts, then he forced old judges off of the courts so he could pack them even further, gerrymander parliamentary districts.
His political party would create fake political parties to run against, so they would split the opposition vote and just use the powers of the state to destroy his opponents and route money to his little oligarch buddies. So if you want to be rich in Hungary, you have to be on Orban's good side. And Republicans see him and they love the guy. Steve Bannon openly talks about how Orban is the kind of leader we should emulate. There's CPACs in Hungary.
Tucker Carlson goes over there, records a show for a week from Budapest. So.
this is the model. This is who they want to be. Yeah. It was good to see Biden included this in his speech over the weekend as well, sort of attack Trump for praising Orban, which is maybe a lot of voters. don't know who Viktor Orban is, but all you need to know is it's a guy who's an autocrat, who said he doesn't like democracy.
Yeah. It's a story worth telling. Also, did you.
guys just notice how hard they tried to make it look like a state visit? They had the motorcade roll up, they had the flags, he was at a greeting committee. It's so thirsty to want to be president.
Yeah. Everything is play pretend president. now. It's like everyone on the right in Fox. now also, they call him president Trump.
They don't say former president Trump. He just had a video out where the video was. this like weird fantasy, where Joe Biden is delivering the state of the union, but then they cut to Donald Trump walking into the chamber from when he was at the state of the union. And it's like him replacing Joe Biden. Joe Biden walks off the stage and it's like, Trump's tweeting this video all the time.
I'm like, what is so weird? It really is a shame.
that the media environment is so attenuated that that really is only going to reach the people that either hate it, like us, and are already on board, or absolutely fucking love it. Because the shit that Trump does, that normies don't know, would weird people out. Yeah. Did you see him playing?
with Snapchat filters? Yeah. He's very bored. Biden colors. It's just so childish.
So this
Victor Orban story, uh, this, the, the big bash at Mar-a-Lago, uh, it happened, uh, a fortuitous moment, uh, at CNN, Jim Schudo is, uh, he's got a book out this week and he talks to a lot of former Trump staff about sort of like what drove Trump. Uh, he had a conversation with, uh, John Kelly, who was one of Trump's, uh, chief, another one of the, another chief of staff for Trump. and, and Kelly recounted this conversation between, uh, he and Trump about Hitler. and Trump said, well, but Hitler did some good things. Oh, no.
And Kelly said, what? What? And Trump said, well, Hitler rebuilt the economy. And then Trump also expressed admiration for Hitler's hold on senior Nazi officers, but was dismayed when Kelly told him that actually those German generals tried to assassinate Hitler a few times. And then Trump's like, Oh, I didn't know that.
Show them.
Valkyrie. Show them, Valkyrie. There's a movie. Spoiler alert. They don't, they don't succeed.
Yeah. But still it is. He, definitely, he, it is such an autocrat impulse. He's like, and you heard him in the clip with Orba. He makes the rules.
He says what goes, no one says, you know, no one crosses him. No, that's it. That's the, what he just, he just wants to do what he wants and he doesn't want to be accountable to anyone else. That's his whole fucking story. And Biden hit it in that ad, right?
Trump wants to be president for himself. I want to be president for America.
That's it. That's the message there. There's this little kind of crew of right-wing leaders that they all like the, the Republicans of the U? S openly like. invite them to events.
Like, if you watch CPAC, you'll see Victor Orban, you'll see Bolsonaro from Brazil. You'll see Liz trusts, the former prime minister of the UK. You'll see Nigel Farage. You'll see Naeem Bukele, who's this like Bitcoin bro, dictator down in El Salvador. And it's very weird how they all work together and they gather at events and they trade notes.
It's very scary.
You also see the kind of the, like, the, the, the, the gradient that leads from kind of the, like the Republican talking points that, like Democrats, buy voters votes with their programs and their social programs. And once you give people an entitlement, you can't take it back. Mitt Romney saying the 47% thing that slowly leads them towards like this place at which they just believe democracy is inherently illegitimate. And the only way you can rule, uh, is with, without having to deal with the, the, the frustrations that come along with a democratic.
process. I called it Christian democracy. Well, it's a very old story, old playbook from, uh, autocrats for decades and decades, not centuries. And that's the thing about these populists. So
you don't need to be smart and savvy or coherent. Even there's a lot of buffoonish dictators who gain a lot of power, like a Mussolini, for example. Yeah. Uh, speaking of Mar-a-Lago,
we're still waiting to hear whether Trump will stay in trial before the election for refusing to give back the classified information he hid in his beach club. But already Politico has reported that Intel officials are preparing to brief Trump on national security matters. Once he officially becomes the Republican nominee for president, Adam Schiff was on meet. the press over the weekend said that he hopes the Intel community will quote, dumbed down the briefings for Trump.
I think they already were doing that for many years.
So can they, can they do that, Tommy? Like, can they, can they refuse to give him Intel briefings at all, since he's facing criminal charges on the issue? I know they do that for every nominee of a.
major party for a long time, but I do think it's worth just pausing and saying, I can't believe this is happening. I know I, I did have, yeah. Like, how is this possible? I mean, I think he shouldn't have a security, basically a coin flip away from being president. Yeah.
I think so. the, the briefings that the candidates get are all already a lot less detailed than what a president gets. I think they just get like high level assessments of things like the threat from ISIS, you know, Russia's nuclear arsenal thing, how it's going in Ukraine. And it's derived from classified information. When you're the president, you get the highly compartmented, the so-called code word level stuff that tells you how we got that information.
Like, Oh, we paid off the top Intel guy in X country for the following information. Or we have a source deep within the Russian military that told us X about their plan to invade Ukraine. So he won't get any of that. Uh, maybe they'll dumb it down even further. I hope he just gets, sir, it's sunny in Keefe.
today. Let's get the clips. He's got a New York times, BB net and Yahoo this morning had breakfast.
Yeah. We're not, we're not sure what's going on with Middleton. It's the photo was hinky.
That's it. That's all they're giving him. All right. Finally, it turns out the biggest problem with Katie Brit, state of the union response. Wasn't the bizarrely overdramatic delivery.
It's that she was full of shit. Uh, here's Scarlett Johansson alluding to the mishap when she played Brit on the SNL cold open. First and foremost, I'm a mom and, like any mom,
I'm going to do a pivot out of nowhere into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking.
and rest assured. every detail about it is a real, except the year where it took place and who was president when it happened. for Pinocchio's says the Washington post for Katie. Can't come back from that. That's it for you.
As, as Scarlett Johansson said, the woman's story didn't take place in Joe Biden's America. It took place in Mexico when George W. Bush was president. It's just completely full of shit from beginning to end. You know, the Katie Brits, uh, people maintains that it was like technically truthful, because she, just like, she, she said the story and she wedged it in between saying, and Joe, Joe Biden's policies are bad.
Also, here's a story about this woman who was sex trafficked in, a woman who like fuck these people. I know a horrible.
story. A woman went through a fucking horrific ordeal, went public with it and then is exploited in this way. Like, fuck you, for pretending to said any business being in that speech. It is disgusting. It is disgusting in a kitchen with your cross, pretending you're a good person.
Fucking gross. So would you say this was the worst state of the union response ever? No.
Why? Oh, cause I, I went and looked and I was thinking, well, this, this is surely up there. First of all, you forget how bad Bobby Jindal was. So much worse than Bobby Jindal. I agree.
But then I went digging further and in the early 1980s, let's go. In the early 1980s, Democrats decided they were no longer going to do a standard state of the union speech. They were going to do focus group infomercials. It is opportunity, but it's really a freedom.
It's a freedom to be able to express as a freedom, to be able to compete. It's a freedom to be able to fail. And it's a freedom to, that allows us this will, you know, this ability to dream.
And I think that's the thing that the democratic party can offer. It can offer hope. Is that a bunch of them together? Is that Bill Richardson? Yes.
Here's what they did.
They had governors fan out across the country doing focus groups in which people talked about why they didn't like Democrats. And then Bill Clinton stood in front of this map.
In the past few weeks, democratic leaders have gone all across America talking to all kinds of people. They spoke with people in what are called focus groups.
Back. then it was, it was all the rage, you know, it was pretty, pretty bad.
It's not great. Still, still. All right. I'm, I'm, I'm back on board. Worst ever.
I was looking at this list of who would deliver the response every year to see if there are any good ones. There's a few, but yeah, there's some times where there's like 10 people.
Yes. In the early eighties, in the early eighties, they did these strange infomercials.
that were very poorly received. God, that's weird. I thought, I thought the reigning champion before this was Rubio in the water, but when you go back and look at that one, it's still, it's fun to watch, because it's pretty awful. But this was just the delivery, the made up story, the made up story really just puts it, it brings it to another level.
I have questioned every political opinion I've had about this country since 2016 or so. So I was watching and being like, this is terrible, right? Like, this is crazy to go from that high to that low, to go from, you know, like kind of smiley, friendly face of fascism to telling this lurid story about this incident in Mexico. Like, but then for that, for that story, which, for the purposes of her rebuttal speech, was totally unnecessary. You know, like, if she wanted to talk about sort of some sort of crime that was associated with migration, there's a lot of examples out there, the Lake and Riley story.
I was just going to say, why didn't she go? But for her to have included that and for it to just be so unbelievably false and misleading. And the fact that it was Jonathan Katz, a former AP reporter, who dug it up and got it out there via a TikTok video, first of all, credit to him, but boy, did everybody else fall down on the job.
Also, it wasn't like she had this speech looked at just by, like her small Senate staff from Alabama. Like when you give the response, like the RNC had to be involved. Yeah. Everyone had to have looked at that and no, no one in the party, no one in the party gave a shit about that.
If you watch her TV ads from her campaign, she does a similar delivery style of like.
performing the hell out of it. Some media consultants fucking sucks.
I can't believe someone didn't tell her. this is super off-putting.
The reaction to right-wing pundits watching it was fantastic. Megan Kelly, a few others, just like, went ham on this thing. Good stuff.
Yeah. All right. Before we go to break, a big announcement, Pod Save America and Love It or Leave It are going on tour. The Pod Save America, Democracy or Else tour will be heading to Brooklyn, Madison, Phoenix, Philadelphia, and more. Love It or Leave It will also be on tour, heading to cities like Austin, Charlotte, Asheville, Chicago, and more.
Friends of the Pod subscribers get early access to pre-sale tickets. The pre-sale starts today at 10 a.m. local and ends Friday the 15th at 9 a.m. local. To get access to the best tickets, subscribe at crooked.com slash friends, and we will send you the pre-sale code, see all the tour dates, and learn more at crooked.com slash events.
Okay. When we come back, Take Appreciator is back, and so is Elijah right after this.
All right. We're back with our chief. take officer, Elijah Cohn. Elijah,
take it away. Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Take Appreciators. I'm going to be sharing some takes with you all. The producers have seen these takes.
John, John, and Tommy have not. They will react and then rate them on a scale of one to four politicos, with four politicos being the worst. Are you guys ready? Sure am. Yeah, we're ready.
Hell yeah. All right. Let's stick with Katie Britt. I thought you guys were spot on, but apparently y'all just don't get it. Here's an alternative.
take from a pundit. you must always fade, Clay Travis. Quote, Katie Britt is killing it. Her speech isn't for dudes. They're all already voting for Trump.
It's for suburban women, the kind of people who buy into the idea that Republicans are all old, rich, white guys. I don't get the pyramid scheme facial cream party scene either, but it's real. What do you guys think?
Wow. That was just swerved off at the.
end there. The facial cream party scene. What is that? Is that like MLM stuff? Yes.
What are we?
talking about? That was like Tommy Tuberville's reaction, which was, um, she was picked because.
she was a suburban housewife.
Trump did something really strange in his speech, where he like called out these women that have been traveling around the country. And he's like, their husbands can't.
be excited that they're out of the house. I was like, what the fuck? Clay is an idiot. As a Travis, he seems to be doing what he says he hates there, which is identity politics, and suggesting that because Katie Britt's a women, all women who are watching must have liked it. Uh, I think that is undercut by reality and, like the 2016 election.
I like the, the, the, the.
nonsensical take by Mr. Travis. Suburban women are like, uh, they're really into these lurid stories about, uh, sex trafficked women in Mexico and overacting, just, just weird. Oh, that gets a four.
from me. That's a four. All right. Unanimous four. across the board.
I'll hit him with a three. I.
think it's a, I think it's a three. Cause. I think it's just sort of like, uh, uh, yeah, I'm on a.
three. All right. So, Clay Travis, we'll, we'll say a, three and a half. All right. Moving on, take number two.
Let's do some presidential primary cleanup. This is a little old. It's a deep cut, though, that we have to look at. It's from billionaire and terminally online person, Bill Ackman. Uh, here he is talking about Dean Phillips's chances to take off after the Michigan.
primary. Biden in Michigan, Biden's doing very poorly in Michigan. His polls are terrible. The Muslim community is not happy with him. Uh, and, uh, he really has spent no time there.
And so if he's embarrassed in Michigan, it could be a catalyst for him withdrawing. Then Dean will get funding if he wins Michigan or shows well in Michigan. And people say he's viable. He's the only choice we have. He'll attract from the center.
He'll attract from people, Republicans who won't vote for Trump, which they're a big percentage could be 60% or more. It could be 70% won't vote for Trump and also from, uh, the Democrats. So I think he's a really interesting candidate,
uh, but we've got to get the word out. Oh, 400, 400.. The reason that one is so great is because Bill Ackman, just an insufferable billionaire, not only came out and endorsed Dean Phillips,
but he gave him $1 million, a million dollars, a million dollars. He gave him a million dollars.
Dean Phillips got 20,605 votes in Michigan, less than Marianne Williams and uncommitted and Joe.
Biden, stick to playing around with money. These people, like if you go back and look at every prediction, political prediction or political analysis from Elon Musk or Bill Ackman or the all-in pot, or is there, they are just so incredibly wrong about everything. It just nothing pans out for them. None of their predictions pan out. You love to see it.
Vivek Ramaswamy, Ron DeSantis, Dean Phillips, just RFK. over and over again. They just keep getting it wrong. Also, 70% of Republicans might not vote for Trump. What are you talking about?
That was a, that was a good one in there too, that he just sort of sandwiched in that, uh,
that terrible take. There are layers to that one. So what do you guys want to rate it?
What's the max? Off the charts. Yeah, it's just not a, not, a, not, a, not, a good. take. A billion.
4,000.
. Yeah. A million dollars to Dean Phillips.
Yeah. Even Dean Phillips was like, are you sure? Yeah. What are you doing, man?
I don't think that's a good idea. I just said, at least if you set it on fire, you might keep somebody warm for a bit.
All right. So that's rare. That's,
that's the worst take of the primary. Let's move on to the last take. Sunday night was the Oscars. Here's a take on the host from Donald Trump. It's a long one.
Get ready. Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars? His opening was that of a less than average person trying too hard to be something which he is not and can never be. Get rid of Kimmel and perhaps replace him with another washed up but cheap ABC talent, George Slopinopoulos. He would make everybody on stage look bigger, stronger, and more glamorous.
Also a really bad, politically correct show tonight and for years, disjointed, boring, and very unfair. Why don't they just give the Oscars to those that deserve them? Maybe that way their audience and TV ratings will come back from the depths, make America great again. Kimmel responded to the Republican nominee. live on stage, I believe we have that clip here.
Well, thank you, President Trump.
Thank you for watching. I'm surprised you're still, isn't it past your jail time?
Good for Jimmy. Also, what is, what is Donald Trump doing? He is, that, that truth reveals so much knowledge of everything that happened on Sunday online at the Oscars. The Stephanopoulos thing was because of the Nancy Mace interview on Stephanopoulos' show. So he knows about that controversy, which we didn't even talk about.
Is Slopinopoulos new material? I haven't heard Slopinopoulos. But he had to hit George for the Nancy Mace thing. And then he was clear, he was watching the Oscars. It's the guy running for president.
What's he doing? He's got free time. He's, he's, he's got trials coming up. He's running for president. What's he doing?
What was his best picture pick? Was it Oppenheimer is too woke? I didn't, I didn't think.
You think he thinks Oppenheimer is too woke? Well, I just, I didn't, what did he prefer?
Was he more of a past lives guy? What was he, who do you think, who does he think got robbed? The holdovers? Like, what are we doing here? Anatomy of a fall.
Yeah. He does not like a movie about, no, I don't think he likes a movie about wives killing their husbands. I don't think that's his favorite topic, but yeah. So I, first of all, also. the Oscars were great.
The Oscars were, it was a great, great show. It was like my favorite, it was my favorite, uh, award show. My favorite version of the Oscars. in like a, very, in, like a living memory. I did not watch any of it.
The jokes were good. It was tight. There were funny moments. The production looked great. I just.
moved. The thing moved. Shout out Josh Holloway and Louis Fertel. Yeah. There's a CBS this morning.
piece on the Oscars and Louis and Josh, Josh, who wrote our book with us. We're both on the show. They did a good job. Yeah. Donald Trump.
He's just go touch grass, man. He, he can't help himself.
watching these events that he despises, wishing that the people in that room liked him, and then.
tweeting mean things at them. And I, yeah, I don't, I don't know. He can't love that. an event that was watched by that many people, that everyone's laughing at him. Jimmy does the joke and then the whole crowd's laughing.
And then he knows that millions of people are watching. That's.
probably not what he intended. It was awesome. It was Jimmy reading that and making a joke, which was fucking awesome. It was great. It was a great little coda to the whole thing.
And, uh, I think that, um, Trump has not seen a movie in a long time. Yeah. He can't have the.
attention span for that. So I would give that a, I'll give that a four, but a Slopinopoulos is funny. Yeah. That's good. I mean, I love George Stephanopoulos, but also there's just a funny, funny name.
Every once in a while we get some humor from him, but yeah, that's three and a half.
maybe. And, uh, you know, George Stephanopoulos, a short King, and, uh, he can take it, you know, he can take being deprecated for being small.
Stephanopoulos, polish those jokes up. I'm trying.
to think, is there anything better we could do here? Stephanopoulos.
Stephanopoulos. It's just.
so bad. Slopinopoulos. Except you say it and you fucking laugh. We can't intellectually defend it, but you say Slopinopoulos, you say Slopinopoulos, there's a smile on your face.
There's a feral genius to it. Just like when you say Desanctus. Actually, it's funny. He,
at the event in Georgia, he said, like, he said Ron Desanctimonious. And he was like,
I don't say that anymore. I just say Ron Desanctus. No, he said, he said, uh, Ron Desanctimonious. Sorry. Sorry.
That's insulting. Ron Desanctus. It was like, he came back in to fucking punch him twice. It was awesome. Awesome.
Great job, Ron. Great job. Great job standing up for yourself.
Unbelievable. Anyway, that's our show for today. Is that it? That's it. We will, uh, we'll have another Pod Save America for you on Wednesday afternoon.
Until then, have a good one.
Maybe Trump likes Zone of Interest. You know what? But he doesn't get it. I meant,
I meant Zone of Interest and I said Anatomy of the Fall. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, not your fault. Bye everyone.
If you want to get ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and more, consider joining our Friends of the Pod subscription community at crooked.
com slash friends. And if you're already doom scrolling, don't forget to follow us at Pod Save America on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and more. Plus, if you're as opinionated as we are, consider dropping us a review. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Olivia Martinez and David Toledo.
Our associate producers are Saul Rubin and Farrah Safari. Kira Joaquim is our senior producer. Reid Cherlin is our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer, with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis.
Writing support by Hallie Kiefer. Madeline Herringer is our head of news and programming. Matt DeGroat is our head of production. Andy Taft is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Mia Kelman, David Toles, Kiril Pelaviv, and Molly Lobel.
v1.0.0.260408-1-a910ba6_os