Ron’s Boulevard of Broken Streams

Then House Republicans are feeling so confident about the debt ceiling negotiations that they're bragging about holding the economy hostage. And finally, we dig into one of the week's weirdest stories. Why did Marjorie Taylor Greene pay $100,000 for a used tube of Kevin McCarthy's chapstick? Just the big stories here on Pod Save America. Quick reminder Before we start that Pod Save America will be live in New York City on June 12th at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Alex Wagner will be joining us as co-host, as well as very special guests Attorney General Tish James and the hilarious Roy Wood Jr. Tickets are almost sold out. Grab yours today at Cricket.com Slash events and if you haven't heard already, check out Pod Save the UK, which hit number one on the UK charts. This hilarious, insightful new podcast is your go-to source for everything UK politics.

Hosted by comedian Nish Kumar and journalist Coco Khan. It's everything you love about crooked podcasts, but with a British twist, from strikes to scandals that cover all the topics that matter. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Dan, let's get to the news. Here's a question if a presidential campaign launches on Twitter and no one can hear it, did it really launch?

Ron DESantis He could have announced his White House bid with a big rally or a splashy primetime interview. Instead, he chose what was essentially a conference call with Elon Musk and one of his V.C. fanboys. That was meant to showcase the governor's dulcet tones and the billionaire media mogul's technological prowess. If you didn't get the chance to tune in, here's how the first 20 minutes or so went.

We're actually very excited to have Governor DESantis make this stark announcement.

Do you remember any announcements where you can't actually see the candidate or hear from them for a good half hour into the announcement?

I'm thinking back to Wes Clark after he announced, but his actual speech was okay. And then he had that famous moment on the plane, where he was asked about his Iraq war position. And he, in the middle of the question, turned around to his press person and asked what his position was.

But that, by all accounts, was a stellar performance compared to this.

Real problems? He even Ron DeSantis even lost cat turd, cat turd.

I don't know if he voluntarily left or he was forced out, like most of us were. Most of the time. There were about 500,000 listeners when Twitter Spaces crashed, only about 200,000 came back once they finally turned it off and turned it on again. Average Fox Primetime audience is about 1.5 million.

What on earth was the DESantis campaign thinking in choosing an audio-only platform with a well-known history of crashing?

The way to do that is you pick the candidate's greatest strength, then you build the strategies around highlighting that strength for everyone. And for Ron DeSantis, that is clearly his voice.

Just focus on that voice for years to come. Look, this is an idiotic strategy, campaign, announcements. All things in politics can go wrong. They go wrong one of two ways. One is a good idea that is either executed poorly or just suffers from bad luck.

Take the example of Tim Scott's microphone going out. Maybe that's some advanced person's fault, or they hired the wrong vendor. But that's not a bad idea of an announcement, and then there are just straight-up fucking terrible ideas and the idea of doing an audio announcement. Being interviewed by two Silicon billionaires on the fourth-tier feature of a third-tier social media platform.

Even if it had gone perfectly, what was the upside?

So just where do you care about Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina? What are they going to play on the news to say that? Ron DeSantis entered the race audio with a picture of Elon Musk and a picture of Ron DeSantis.

You have to think about what the voter is going to consume, the regular voter who is not on Twitter, especially not on Twitter spaces. They're going to hear your voice. It's so bizarre, and the audio thing is just so weird. And this is an example of how just old and dumb that is.

Since Reagan, for a long time. Presidents got to give a weekly radio address every Saturday, and you would record it on Friday. You pick whatever you want, and radio stations all across the country would air it at a certain time.

So Reagan did it, Bush did it, Clinton did it, Bush 43 did it.

Obama comes in sort of first internet president is like, This is dumb, why would we just do this on radio? So we videotaped it and also put it on YouTube. So in 2009, well, more than a decade ago, we were like, Audio only is dead. And Ron DESantis is bringing it back because David Sachs is probably going to give $50 million to his Super Pac.

Maybe, and Elon Musk could do the same. And so you can't use your campaign announcement to raise money from super PAC billionaires. It's just a stupid, stupid, idiotic way of doing it. Last week, I talked about how terrible, how he should fire his entire team.

This is worse. He did not fire them. He got an actual worse idea than that weird endorsing of Kelly Craft minutes before she lost by 30 points.

I can see that that's happened also, but, you know, audio only is fine, too. And again, when you're doing your presidential announcement, you don't want the stage to yourself, you want to share the stage with an erratic billionaire and his fucking flunky David Sachs.

I didn't say his name because no one knows who David Sachs is right. He's just some random, you know? He's like the sixth guy at PayPal, and now he's rich and has some opinions. That's David Sachs, that's who. Ron DESantis wanted to moderate his announcement.

Also, you couldn't really tell the difference between when David Sachs was speaking and Ron DeSantis, because they both have terrible voices. And there were times when Ron DESantis couldn't even get a word in edgewise. Because David and Elon were like, hogging the whole thing and talking too much. I mean, I'm trying to get into the minds of the DESantis campaign, of the people of the Yahoo who proposed this idea. And all I can think of is that they are all way too online. They seem to have actually bought into this idea that Elon Musk is the new Rupert Murdoch.

This is where the media is going and the right wing media is going. And maybe somehow they're going to take it to Trump. By announcing on the platform that helped him become president, Twitter used to be Trump's platform. And now here comes Desantis. Maybe they'd get a lot of elite media attention, which it certainly did. it certainly did get a lot of media attention.

But it all seems like real Galaxy brain shit. Who was the audience? was it donors? was it Dogecoin fans? was it Elon Musk fans? Which at this point, you could fit into a small building.

What was going on?

He helped get Glenn Youngkin elected. He also owns the ad buying company that will be used to place the ads. Spent by the Super PAC and he will get a cut of every single dollar spent. And you know, who can give a lot of money to that Super Pac? Elon Musk?

David Sachs and Elon Musk. And this is the same thing we talked about this last week. This is why he endorsed Kelly Craft, who was also a Jeff Rowe client.

Who also is a billionaire who plans to give money to the DESantis effort, and so DESantis is being like. He has no great shakes as a candidate or politician, and we're going to talk about that with Tim. But his campaign is pure idiocy right now, absolute pure idiocy.

And speaking of right-wing media, just to go off desantis for a second, there were some takes floating around that Elon Musk has displaced Rupert Murdoch as the king of right-wing media. You think the coronation might be delayed now?

Having said that, let's put aside who's the king of right-wing media and who isn't. It doesn't matter, but I think there is a lesson here for progressives, which is, I don't care about the Twitter space generally. But what Elon Musk has done is. He has bought one of the major distribution mechanisms of content in the world, and he is now using that to tilt the content that's distributed.

He owns the pipes, not the media. If Twitter's not a media company, it's a media distribution company. And if you're on Twitter, Charlie Borzell wrote this. In the Atlantic, it's becoming a right-wing platform. The content choices being made by Elon Musk via their algorithm is pushing more right-wing content. He's using his ownership and his platform to highlight. No Democratic candidate's going to go on there and do it, but there will be MAGA candidates all the time.

And that is an argument. Not that we should care that much about Twitter, but the future of media is media distribution, how you get content in front of people. And Elon Musk, as a newly found red-pilled right-winger, now owns the pipes. And that matters. And as Democrats, think about how we're going to compete against that going forward. It's not going to necessarily be by buying the Atlantic or even building media companies.

But we also have to think about distribution, how you get content in front of people's eyeballs, and that does matter, and that is important. And we can make fun of it and laugh at the glitch, and that's all funny.

And the platform is dying, but between now and when it dies. It's going to have an impact, and it's going to have an impact on the terms that Elon Musk wants it to have.

And all of his engineering skills couldn't stop the thing from crashing constantly because he doesn't have enough people working for him because he sucks.

And Elon is. I'm not here to judge his overall intelligence, but he knew what he was doing. When he bought this platform, he understood that. In an age where cable TV is going away, broadcast media is going away, newspapers are dead, the internet, as we know it, is dead, people don't go to websites anymore. Owning content distribution matters a lot. And he bought it and that will have an impact. It will not be the same as Facebook or TikTok or something else, but it is a thing. And it's going to be yet another headwind that progressive messaging is going to push against in 2024..

Like, if you're going to have some fun informal chat, that's new and different than your typical stodgy campaign launch. Don't just read the speech you would have read at the rally with applause. But that's what he did for a while. Then he took about an hour of questions on voters top concerns from David Sachs, a MAGA congressman, Thomas Massey, a few MAGA pundits. Here's how it went.

The only reason these people in Washington don't like it is because they don't control it. I think this whole ESG movement is really trying to do through the financial sector what they could never achieve through the ballot box. The legacy media, these corporate journals, they're in their little bubble. And look, I'm a blue-collar kid. I grew up in the Tampa Bay area, working minimum wage to get through school.

My grandfather worked in the steel mill in western Pennsylvania. I just know instinctively, kind of what normal people think about all this stuff.

That's what's going to determine the next president.

And I know very little about crypto, but I don't think do Bitcoin is the right way it's described.

He also sounded at times like someone who has spent too much time in Washington, like the establishment figure that Trump is trying to frame him as like. At one point, he went from doing his woke, mad Libs thing to talking about omnibus spending bills and the power. Something executive power under Article 2 of the Constitution and how he would do regulations.

And I'm just like, This is so fucking boring.

One who speaks maga fluently, but a typical politician.

Is that never back down enough for you?

But there's no point in his announcement, however stupid the format for which it was, to directly go after Trump. This is not the moment for that. That moment is coming very, very quickly, and it's coming faster. I don't think his argument is a sharp enough implicit contrast to achieve what he wants.

But this isn't necessarily the day for explicit contrast.

Joining us on the pod today are never Trump pal Bulwark, extraordinaire author of Why We Did It. Tim MILLEr Welcome back guys.

Tim is the woke mob just too blinded by Twitter shouting fraud to appreciate the rhetorical power of yesterday's performance?

And so what happened yesterday is pretty noteworthy. Actually, I was prepared for this question. I didn't know it was coming. It was kind of like, remember the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? When, like, on state TV, there were a couple of anchors who were like, I don't know how well this is going, you know, before they were silenced, right? This moment happened yesterday at National Review, because Rich's own colleague, Jeff Blair, I pulled this out.

I figured I was going to bring it out later, but you started with national review, so here I am. Here's what Jeff Blair said. This isn't the bulwark, this isn't never Trump TDS. This is Jeff's take on the announcement.

DESantis would hit powerful points about his Florida record. You know, it's the national review with that throat clearing. But often only 10 to 20 minutes apart, with gormless air in between. Devoted to discussions of esoteric technical issues of interest to absolutely nobody except cryptocurrency speculators. Twitter users checking in to hear from the newest Republican candidate about his plan for America, instead got to hear VC guy David Balzac blathering 10 times as much as his hosting duties called for.

And Thomas Massey calling in to rhapsodize about how much he enjoys his Tesla. That was published in the National Review yesterday. So I think that is a pretty clear sign that we are not blinded by our wokeness. Never trump, you know, resistance, biases. And I think that it was really just a total disaster show that Rich was trying to. You know, he's just trying to polish the turd as best he could.

There is a, you know, in the concentric circles, there's some. There's some overlap between the concerns of Conservative contrarian billionaires who live in Silicon Valley and are annoyed by their liberal colleagues. And the concerns of an average mega voter that lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina, who has never heard of what an RSU is right? Like, they have a couple overlapping concerns, like they both don't like Woke Capital, you know, like they both don't love the pronoun stuff.

Right? But? But there's also a whole nother bale of concerns that these, like rich white bros. have that, like regular people have no idea what they're talking about. And they seem to have completely infected Ron DESantis's entire announcement. And, you know, I think that. The campaign required somebody who, like, didn't go to college and maybe one time attended a Trump rally as a fan. To be in their meetings, you know, to just vet, like, whether this stuff was going to land I. Just multiple times over the course of the announcement, he was mentioning things that I that regular people, mega folks we listened to in BORK focus groups, things that they never mentioned.

ESG is never volunteered by an actual voter, I guess, like the the digital currency mandate is never something that is brought up voluntarily by a voter. It's weird, it's it's a niche concern about the of these losers. And and Ron decided that that's what he was going to center his campaign announcement on which? Which seems like a miss to me.

And so, and I think there's lack of trust there, right? So I think that they're just for starters. Like this campaign, like, doesn't have a clear North Star with a candidate and staff, they're like, all working towards it.

So that's one one problem that that I think is pretty obvious at this point. Like the other, the the the thing. I was also trying to put myself in their shoes. Like, you know, as a pundit, we're all you want to like, not overreact, right? You know, you got to think to yourself. I'm like, I'm the comms person for Ron DeSantis. Like, when I'm in the room, someone proposes the Elon Musk thing. Initially, I'm like, This is stupid, but then how do I talk myself into it?

Right, and I think the answer is, you get this lift, right? Like, if the other idea is, oh, we're going to have a weekday announcement in Tallahassee, the turnout is not going to be anything like a Trump rally.

It's not going to look like Springfield when you guys did your announcement 20 years ago, however long that was now, like, it's. It's going to look, you know, it'll be a nice crowd. I mean, Jeb's announcement was really nice. It was the best day of our campaign.

So having a good announcement doesn't mean it's going to be a good campaign. And the inverse is true. That's worth marking. But you know, we had 4,000 people in a small basketball gym, it was full.

It was nice. The news cycle lasted six hours, you know, Donald Trump announced the next day and it was over, right? So so, I think that they were, they were considering, well, we could just do this sort of average Florida thing, not make a lot of buzz. Or Elon Musk is like one of the most famous people in the world.

We can kind of get some residual glow and boost off of this and make it seem bigger. And I think that was their, I assume that was their thinking, and that just utterly backfired in every possible way because the opposite happened. He looked smaller, it felt like the Elon show, not the Ron DeSantis show.

Right, and he didn't get any boost in coverage, I guess, unless you count people making fun of him, right? Like, the numbers didn't look. It was smaller than it would have been had he just announced on Laura Ingraham's show.

They will give you the headline you want. Even if you're a loser candidate, the press will treat you somewhat seriously. I mean, just listen to the conversation you Tommy and Lovett had on Tuesday about Tim Scott. I was like, you treated him as if he was like a front runner for the race, he was like such a serious individual.

But there's an opportunity cost to screen up your announcement. Because that's the day you should have your best coverage, the day you should be your best fundraising day for probably almost a year. Should be the day that you're on the phone with all the folks in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina trying to get them to endorse you. And when you fuck it up you, it has an opportunity cost.

And that part matters. And so there's no logic to this. Do the normal announcement and then do the quote unquote. And I know this word triggers Favreau, the buzzy thing with Elon Musk the next day, right?

Do your announcement, get your on-message coverage, and then later on do the thing that will get you additional attention. The Fox Primetime Interview, The Morning Show interview.

The Elon Musk, Twitter space or whatever.

The images you have, the visuals you take, the three best delivered lines, you package them, you can put them in an ad.

People see them on their Instagrams where they are engaging with stuff. DeSantis didn't have that, it was just his voice, and this man has a voice for news.

That's not his strength.

And so it's just his voice. And so they put out, Did you see that? I know John did, Dan. Did you see the video they put out? like with from the it was a clip?

With the Elon Musk picture.

There have been people with I don't remember what Joe Biden's announcement was, he became president. So, you know, I'm sure it wasn't a 10 out of 10, whatever it was, but it's noteworthy that it was this bad. Especially when, purportedly, the Desantis contrast with Trump is like, he's normal, he's competent, you know, he can get the MAGA stuff done.

He's a donor.

David Sachs was just like their butt boy, and he got a billion dollars out of it. Anyway. I'm sorry, that's the end of my David Sachs rant. Back to DESANTIS I did.

I went to see him at the villages. Actually, I saw it in 3D, in the Republican, in the core Republican, where the base voters are. These older, mixed between rich folks that moved down to Florida, that are sunbirds, and Floridians who moved to the villages. His speech was really long, it was like 80 minutes, but there were 20 really good minutes. This is the thing.

When I said earlier about how they seem confused, like they don't have a North Star, they aren't aligned. DeSantis is lying about having the same enemies as the Republican base voters. The media hates me, Fauci hates me. I fought them and won.

We were in a state that used to be a swing state and we won by 20 points. And that's why these guys lie and complain about me all the time. There's some material there that I think really does resonate with the base. And there's a reason why DeSantis and Trump were tied around Christmas. In these polls. There were people who were like, I like Trump, but this guy won. He showed that you can do it and he didn't shut down schools like these woke Libs did.

There are a few areas in the macro where DeSantis, I think, can really resonate with these base voters. The problem is when he gets down into the micro, it has been off, also, his personality has been off, and he seemed to be a bit of a beta. If I was on his campaign team, I'd be thinking, how can we put him in a position to just maximize the sense that he's a winner? He took on the big fights and avoid all the other stuff that have weakened his candidacy. They have done the opposite.

They've leaned into all of his weird piccadillos.

DESantis has two problems. The first is Trump marries culture war stuff with economic populism. DeSantis marries culture war. With either no economic message or Paul Ryan economic messaging, which is an anathema to everyone, particularly the Republican base. The message is only as good as the messenger delivering it. Desantis, as of right now, is a shitty messenger.

He's got a weird personality, he has no charisma, he has no ability to deliver it dynamically, he is not good at actually getting his message heard. In the way that Trump is, Trump is out there, just kicking his ass, because Trump is a weirdly compelling, bizarrely charismatic messenger, particularly among the Republican base.

Trump has one more advantage that DESantis does not have Trump has an absolute thirst for the jugular when he finds a candidate's weakness. And Tim knows this, unfortunately, all too well. He hammers it and hammers it and hammers it. He's been doing it to DESantis for months now. DESantis has not shown enough inclination to fight back.

Regardless of what his message is, it's not getting heard because Donald Trump is dominating the space.

Trump went into the Lion's den, people are cheering for him, and the other thing is, Trump is so weird.

You've spent seven years on this podcast talking about how dangerous and awful he is, so you can sometimes ignore that. When you're getting down into analyzing the campaigns, the Trump attacks feel like Trump. They might be lies, they might be exaggerations, but you're kind of like, this is what this guy really, really believes.

And did you see his insane attacks on DESantis on Truth? Yesterday, they put up this video that no real campaign would ever put up. It's like a fake Twitter space. And Hitler's in there and the Devil's in there, and George Soros is in there, and DESantis is in there. And Trump comes in. And he's like, You guys are all terrible.

And Trump is great, Trump should win this thing. If any staffer had ever pitched it in any other campaign, Republican or Democrat, they would be like, never walk into the office again, whoever pitched this thing.

That is fucking deranged. I didn't know what it meant. And then I was like, one, How is this guy the frontrunner again? How is this the guy the frontrunner again? And two, like, I want to ask you guys this.

Do you guys feel at all guilty about how much you're enjoying the Trump-Desantis content?

I was like, He's an asshole, okay, and I keep trying to put myself in that mental space like he is. He's dangerous, he's an asshole.

Don't laugh at him, that said, it's like, real, and it is, he's funny in his weird way. Sometimes you're laughing at him.

And sometimes he does a good neg, you know? I remember one time I did laugh, just unwillingly, during a debate, when he, like, made fun of Rand Paul's size in the middle of a debate. And I was, like, in the war room and I just couldn't help myself and I laughed.

And I was like, Oh, don't do that to him, bad to him, don't laugh, but it's real. Then you have the desantis.

Like, the flip side of that is, it's just like it's so like these. It's poorly packaged campaigns, like the vibe is, oh, this is a traditional campaign done poorly. Like is what DeSantis is putting out. And like, what Trump is putting out is like, this is weird and crazy, but it's real. It's Trump, right?

And that is what the Republican voters like about Trump. He doesn't seem like that, he's running a real campaign. And so every time DeSantis puts out one of these limp pushback attacks, it only helps Trump more, it ricochets back.

It's like, Oh yeah, this guy is just another Jeb, you know, this guy is just another Marco, right? It's the same old, same old.

I don't want the guy doing the weird, you know, like going for the jugular, as Dan said with the weird devil George Soros memes.

You think it's possible for Trump's opponents to persuade voters that maybe multiple criminal charges make the guy less than an ideal candidate to send on to the general?

It is simply to be the other person standing when Trump collapses under the combination of his own crimes, his own looming electability problems because of those crimes. And possibly a billion dollars in ads spent against him by anti-Trump forces on both sides of the aisle. Now, that's the same strategy that everyone put in place in 2016 that resulted in Trump ending up in the White House. But it's a Trump is now lost, right? And there is a different world, so maybe that's what happens.

And it's going to be incredibly weird that there can be all these pre-trial motions happening. Dominating the news as Trump is trying to lock up the nomination in a battle for all the Marbles with Ron DESantis in Florida on March 19th.

I said, 2012..

Doesn't Donald Trump have to?

Don't I have to have responsibility for Trump? Don't you have to be responsible for your enabling of him? The Capitol was stormed and you did nothing, you said it wasn't Trump's fault.

So, you know, these traditional conservative themes start to ring a little bit hollow in the context of the Donald Trump presidency. But, like on paper, I liked it. It's obvious he's running for VP.

And how do you get inside Donald Trump's deranged mind to think about, like, what kind of VP he might want in March, right? Like, some days he's probably like, I want Carrie Lake, I want a loyalist, you know? And then other days you might have someone in his ear that's like, No, you need. A black person might help you do better than you did last time in the suburbs.

And so maybe Tim Scott is in the mix. Why Tim Scott would want to be Donald Trump's VP, and why Prod to Save America would praise him for his good and skilled effort to do that. Those are two open questions for another day to me. Look, Sarah Longwell wrote for The Bulwark. A really good thing about how everything like Trump's going down the escalator is like 00 BC ad in the Republican Party, right?

And anything that feels like it's from the old Testament is not going to happen, right? And so, if someone else could emerge that could beat Ron DeSantis, it would have to be somebody that feels like they're from the MAGA era. And that's nobody else in the field except for, I guess, this Vivek man, which doesn't seem legit, right? So could Tucker, You know what I mean? Now we're getting into fantasy politics, right?

Could someone else come off the sidelines? Who's more from the last eight years, doesn't have the stench of the pre-trump party on them? Could somebody like that emerge? maybe, but the clock is ticking on that. And I do think that I agree with Dan that, in theory, this thing could just fall on DESantis lap against all odds if the Trump thing totally implodes.

But it's just the longer we go, the less and less likely that seems. It's not as if he hasn't already been indicted once. One other just really quick thing, if you don't mind me taking over the show.

What of data? More of an alpha way? That was like, when I'm president, I might consider pardoning Donald Trump if he asks me for it. Okay, then maybe now you're sort of good. But that doesn't seem to be the path that he decided to take. So, you know again, how do you contrast yourself if it's like, Hey, Trump has all these legal baggage?

And so, like, we should go to me, who's going to carry vicariously all Trump's legal baggage with me into the general election? But not have the charisma that he does, you know, just he's really like, he's putting himself in a pretty small box as far as where his, where his lioness.

I was impressed with what they did yesterday.

I'm going to try to raise money off of this. Nobody thinks it's really Joe Biden behind the, you know, pressing click on the tweet, right? It's like, here's our campaign's message to this, and we're going to use Joe Biden's platforms to do that. That's like, the best DESantis could do, right? you would want DESantis to have that type of rollout, right?

He's never going to be Donald Trump, he's not going to do a weird. I'm coming down the escalator and saying strange things, right? It's like, Okay, this is a competent person that can execute an announcement well, deliver a contrast against his opponent, deliver a clear message. And he totally failed to do that, and Biden did it, you know, just perfectly adequately yesterday.

And I think that that's, you know, how they should continue to position him, you know, for the next year and a half.

Again, this is BC, this is when politics was normal.

This was this was fun as always, and when we come back, Dan and I will finally get to the fun stuff. Debt ceiling negotiation?

All right, we all had a few laughs at Rob DeSantis is expense. But now it's time to turn those smiles upside down and talk about the debt ceiling. With just seven days to go until Treasury thinks the U.S will default on its debt.

Democrats are sounding anxious, and Republicans are sounding cocky, so cocky, that they're openly admitting to holding the economy hostage. Here's Kevin McCarthy and then Matt Gaetz.

Why do you think Republicans are so confident right now? And just openly bragging about this shit?

We just go, well, let's get back to our discussion of the very serious negotiations. It's not a negotiation. When a bank robber puts a gun in the face of a bank teller and asks for them to empty the safe. That is not a negotiation about how much money they give. It is armed robbery, and it's fucking insane.

And I do think the press has done an absolutely miserable fucking job covering this. They have normalized a deeply dangerous behavior. Because the question for Kevin McCarthy is not, what is your concession? or what deal are you going to get? It's what happens if there is no deal on the X Date. Are you going to let the country default or are you going to pass a short-term extension?

On behalf of the vast majority of the reporters covering this okay rant over sorry.

But at the end of the day, the dynamic driving the negotiations is the Republicans threatening default. This is not the negotiations over the shape of the budget, it's not a budget negotiation if it is a budget negotiation if everyone has truly agreed. They're not going to let the country default. But Kevin McCarthy's statement is implying that they are going to let the country default if they don't get the deal they want.

And that should change it. And did the Bidens that first meeting between Biden and McCarthy and the negotiators, and all of that, give them permission to do that? Yes, but that does not excuse your jobs to portray what is happening accurately, not portray what you wish was happening.

And if even the Americans who are paying attention to it, you look at some of this polling, they think that, yeah, it's reasonable to ask for spending cuts. They think that's a reasonable thing because people are predisposed to believe that the government spends too much money. And then, of course, when you ask them whether they favor cutting specific programs, then they take the Democrat side and say, no. I don't want to cut that program, that program or that program. We've talked about this before, but it certainly seems like that's why Republicans have the upper hand, or appear to have the upper hand in these negotiations. Because they're willing to shoot the hostage.

And Joe Biden isn't.

But even if you just want to focus on the politics of it, even, let's say we default. Joe Biden. And every Democrat uses every available outlet to hammer the Republicans. You convince them that it's the Republicans fault when people actually vote again in November of 2024. Who do you think they're going to blame the largely anonymous groups of fucking weirdos who made this happen in the summer of 2023? Or the guy sitting in the White House? While unemployment has doubled and we're in a recession and the stock market's at half of what it is. Whatever they're going to blame.

Joe Biden and Republicans know that.

Let's start with just the message. Republicans have been talking to a lot to reporters about the negotiations, they've been available to any reporter who asked them a question about these negotiations. The White House has not said much at all about the negotiations. Why do you think that is?

And should the White House and Biden be out there more? I mean, at this point, we're a couple of days away.

If we default, it's obviously a disaster for everyone involved. And if they get a deal, it's going to be a deal that most Democrats are not happy about. Some of them are going to be forced to vote for it, who don't want to vote for it. It is going to the Republican and Biden is going to be limited in what he can say about it. Because if he says it's a victory for himself, that he's going to need to deliver more Democratic votes, because more Republicans will peel off.

It is this is a shitty situation. They made a decision and I can't say whether that's the right decision or the wrong decision. We won't know until we see a deal. That the best way to get the best possible deal was to stay quiet and try to avoid poisoning the well.

And basically, they all pledge to figure out all the spending bills and the budget by the end of the year. And if they don't pass all the spending bills and pass a budget, then there'll be like an automatic, automatic budget. Caps, which means like a cut, a big spending cut, and like a CR continuing resolution. That would just basically fund the government for another year with just one big cut on a whole bunch of programs.

And if that fails, then a CR will go into place automatically and they won't have to vote on it. I'm not sure how that fits with House and Senate procedure, but that's what would happen anyway. When you don't have appropriations, bills, you have two choices shut the government down or pass a CR. So this is basically, I think, just taking one step out of it. And what matters here is what those caps are, not the fact they're going to be caps under all scenarios.

Any sort of budget agreement would have caps, and so I think this is the Republicans want to keep putting out information that suggests a deal is eminent. Because what they want is for the markets to not react yet. Because if the markets start reacting, then pressure will be put on them by their donors, by the Chamber of Commerce and others to move more quickly, and it erodes some of their leverage. The White House would also like that. Because what really hurts the economy is not just default, it's all the turbulence in the run-up to potential default. And even when you avert default, you still pay a price.

In 2011, we set the economy back a while because we came so close to default. And so it's also in the White House interest to make it seem like a deal is right around the corner. Because it keeps the economy moving apace as opposed to getting hit.

S credit rating on watch, on negative watch, meaning like, we could downgrade you careful. So, I think that and the fact that even if a deal is reached today Thursday, probably one is going to be reached in the middle of this podcast. Because that's always what happens.

Yeah, exactly. And then I feel like both Republicans and Democrats and the White House at that point are like, we're going to figure it out later. Let's just, you know. And the bet there is that it's not going to have a huge political impact either way.

Or 2022 23 plus 23 24 because of how the fiscal year lays out. The Republicans want to get this done by Friday because they have a 72-hour rule as part of their House procedures. And they would really like that 72 hours to be Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Memorial Day weekend, or Saturday, Sunday, Monday. As opposed to everyone running around the Capitol, ginning each other up about it.

And if they have a deal, two things will happen one, there are ways to figure out how to extend things for 24 hours or whatever to get there. That happened a little bit in 2011, and Jake Sherman responded to a somewhat trolly tweet of mine with great earnestness to say that. His understanding from the Republican House is that if a deal is being drafted or they're very, very close, the Republican House would agree to a short-term extension. Just to get to pass the X date and not have any speed bumps.

So she's donating $100,000 to the NRCC that elects House Republicans. I don't know where the chapstick came in. She got interviewed about this. Here's a clip.

Come in, why? The chapstick? Who used chapstick?

It's really weird, these people are really weird, Dan.

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Com Slash friends, come join our Friend of the Pod community. So everyone check that out. And then Dan and I will be back next Thursday. Have a good weekend bye everyone.

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