Joe Manchin on Trump, the Dems & the Filibuster

23:23She said, Joe, what happened to the West Virginia Democrat. That's when the state flipped totally Republican for the first time in 80 years. I says, Elizabeth, really not a whole lot. They want to know what happened to the Washington Democrats. She says, what do you mean? I says, well, the Democrats that I knew and grew up with really believe in their heart of hearts right now that the Washington Democrats treat them as if they were returning Vietnam veteran. You're not good enough, not clean enough, not green enough, not smart enough. You just don't need me anymore. Leave me behind. The war on coal, you heard about that when Obama got elected.

23:58He wanted to switch everything to renewables. There's nothing wrong with what he wanted to do because he was elected as the president of the United States. But you just can't leave a whole generation society or a state behind. There was nothing to replace what he wanted to switch. There was nothing left. There was no jobs coming. And towns were shuttered. And I'm thinking, my God, this is. You're putting unreasonable demands. You're putting targets that the technology is not there for us to meet. So it really is a war. That started it, and it went down from there. And I said— Why didn't you change your political affiliation at the time?

24:35Well, probably if I should have, if I would have thought about it. I'm thinking, well— I mean, in your campaign ad, you did shoot a copy of Obama's cap-and-trade bill. It was a horrible cap-and-trade. Let me tell you, cap-and-trade over in New York. Cap and trade basically charges you for every amount of carbon content you have in products you buy. Okay. What do they do with the proceeds? And I said, well, all you're doing is putting all your money in your social welfare reforms without fixing the problem, but you're penalizing the problem. So I said, I'm not going to be for that. I said, if you want to fix something, let's do it.

25:06Why not change your party affiliation? Why didn't you? I just thought for sure the Democrats can't be that far off the Richter scale. They've got to come back. These are people I would grow up with and knew. And one by one, they were getting just annihilated. And people started changing their registration. And I told Elizabeth, I said, Elizabeth, I can tell it to you this way. You don't want to hear what I'm going to tell you, but I'm going to tell you. The Democrats that I know and grew up with in West Virginia truly believe that the Democratic National Party in Washington, D.C. spends more resources, time, and effort on able-bodied, capable people that don't or won't work than you do on those who do.

25:44I can't tell it to you any straighter. Sure, but you say coal miners never ask for much, but federal funds make up more than half of West Virginia's budget, for example. They do get some amount of money, correct? Coal miners do? The state itself in general gets. Oh, no, the state, my goodness, we're a tremendous recipient of federal funds. Yeah. Because of the poverty that we have. Right, that's correct. And hardships and all that. So you can blame it on so many different things that you can. You know, we are a state that was basically discovered during the Civil War and taken advantage of every day after.

26:16Absentee ownerships, a lot of the gilded homes in Rhode Island were based off the backs of West Virginia land and coal and minerals, things of that sort. So we didn't get the return that other states have gotten, whether it be Detroit with the automobiles and things of that sort. Yeah, we got hit hard. Yeah. So what happened was you often then became the swing vote in the Senate. And after Trump was elected in his first term, there was talk that you were under consideration to become Secretary of Energy. So did you seriously think about joining the Trump cabinet? He called me up when they first got elected in 2016 because he's looking.

26:50Everyone says you have to have a bipartisan administration. So I went up to New York and went up and visited with him. And we sat there and we talked. And he has other people around. He had Reince Priebus and different people. And we were talking. And I said, Mr. President, if you and I are going to go down this and consider us working together, I said, what I would want to know is what you expected from that office. So let's say it's energy. What would you expect from energy? Okay. And then allow me to put a staff together that would produce. If we didn't produce, throw us out. Well, I could tell you he hadn't been acclimated to how this works.

27:29And about that time, Ryan's previous, who was the head of the RNC at one time, he saw Joe, he says, no, no, we'd have to work that out. And of course, I knew the answer. And I started laughing. I said, Ryan's, I understand. You have to have your people there to make sure that office runs the way you want it, not the way I would want to do it. And I said, Mr. President, listen, in all honesty, I says, whoever my president, and you're my president now, you just got elected. I want you to succeed, and I'll do everything I can to help you. But I will speak truth to power. and there'll be times that I just cannot vote for things that you would like, but I'll always give you a reason why.

28:01He seemed to accept that, but then, you know, as you know, he's gotten more demanding a little bit than other people, but yeah. Yeah, you'd be in a different position right now. It would have been very difficult. So one of the things I noticed in the book is, you know, you said often you didn't leave the Democratic Party, it left you. You heap a lot of praise on Republicans in your book, and mostly have disdain for Democrats. For example, you... Well, let me just tell you what you're... Go ahead. I know what you're observing. No, I'm just asking because it's in the book. What's in the book? Basically, I only knew one party.

28:27I never caucused with the other party. And if I was so enamored with them, I'd have joined them. Why didn't I join them? Because I didn't think the party system, they've gotten so absolutely separated to the point where they're not representing the American people. You've got to be selling your soul to one side or the other. I don't agree. And I told him that. I said, you have to have a secured border. You have to have basically laws. And the rule of law means everything. And when you do the crime, you pay the fine, you pay the price. Democrats begin lax and lax and lax on this. And I've told them, you can't do that.

29:03They've never talked about one time, care did I ever hear 15 years I was there from the Democrat side had ever talked about the debt of the nation. When I got there, it was 13 trillion. It's growing now to 37. Largely Donald Trump, but go ahead. Go ahead. Well, no, no. It was all sides. It was George Bush. George Bush. Yes, it was. But if you actually added up, Trump is responsible for 25 % of it. But go ahead. Compared to 47 other presidents. But go ahead. No, no. It all happened. Hold on. Hold on. You're wrong. You're wrong from this standpoint. After Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton balanced the budget.

29:37Bill Clinton. It was basically Erskine Bowles and John Kasich. And you had Newt and you had the president. They worked this thing out. It started spinning off, basically, surpluses. We were going down where we were at$6 trillion. And after we had 9-11 and we had two wars that we never paid for, declared war, first time, under George W. And then we had two Bush cuts, tax cuts. She shot up like this. Yep. Under Obama, it kept going. Under Trump, it went quicker in a four-year period. I agree. And now with what you're talking about now, I was totally opposed to what they were doing. And both parties, Joe Biden won the BBB bill and Donald Trump won the BBB bill.

30:21Both of them are horrendous on the debt. No one's talking about it. But in this book, you said that Kamala Harris's position on eliminating the filibuster was the reason you didn't support a presidential campaign last year. But you also, when you write about Republican or Mitch McConnell extending the nuclear option to push through Supreme Court nominees, you also blame the Democrats for starting it. I blame the Democrats because I begged Harry Reid not to do it. Right, correct. I voted against Harry Reid when he tried to do it. Where is the responsibility for the loss of bipartisanship as someone who's dead center?

30:51Oh, it's on both sides. I don't see anyone reaching out. The only thing I felt more comfortable that the Republicans would hold on to the filibuster. But now I'm seeing, and I've talked to some of my Republican friends, they're like encroaching a little bit from here, nibbling away here, nibbling away here, trying to basically bundle people that have to be confirmed, confirmations, and all that. And I told Harry Reid back in 2013, I said, Harry, why don't you just go talk to Mitch? And Mitch, and right now, you're all upset. The Obama administration is upset because they can't get some of their people approved, which is what Trump's people are right now, to get their staff and cabinet.

31:27And I said, there's a thing called will and pleasure. If I become governor, if I become president, I want to bring a team together. They're going to come under me, and they're going to leave when I leave. Their term of office does not extend one minute longer than when I leave. Why can't they just be, after you do a vetting of them, FBI background check, and if they're all of good standing, you might not like them, you might not like their politics, I got elected representative to represent the country or my state. Let me put my team together. If not, throw us all out. That's a will and pleasure.

32:04That should be a 51-vote threshold. You shouldn't have to go through all this ring-a-row. and it's almost basically prevent a president or any executive from putting their team together. You want to cripple them, they can't run the government, so it'll look bad. You don't play politics that way. And I promised, I asked him to do that. He thought, well, it's because they don't talk. There's no relationships. If they'd have done that, you'd have never had all your judges. You'd have never had the Supreme Court. But when he did the circuit and district judges, you knew darn well, as soon as Mitch McConnell got a hold of it, being the iron horse that he is.

32:40He was going to go for the Supreme, and he did. So let's dig into the filibuster, which you called the Holy Grail and the soul of the Senate. The framers didn't want a supermajority requirement to pass bills. They tried that with the Continental Congress, and it failed, which is why the Constitution calls for a simple majority to pass bills in the Senate. In fact, Alexander Hamilton specifically warned against the supermajority requirement in Federalist 22. So as the filibuster was developed, it was mostly used by defenders of slavery and segregation. Robert Byrd filibustered on the Civil Rights Act for 14 hours.

33:11In the book, you repeatedly lament our political gridlock, but the filibusters are really the primary cause of that gridlock. Talk to critics who point out this isn't the system the founding fathers intended. Founding fathers, well, let's ask this. There's 13 colonies, right? 1789. Who came out of there and had to explain to the states what we have, what kind of government do we have? We've always heard the famous asking Benjamin Franklin, do you have a republic, young man, if you can keep it? But someone had to tell big old Massachusetts, which was a key factor in that period of time, economic force for our country.

33:46And then you had, of course, you had Pennsylvania, you had a big four, you had New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. someone had to tell them that we're going to have a bicameral, we'll have a house, have, you know, people's house, and represent them based on what the population is, and one person is only, you know, have equal representation. And then what about this other one called the Senate? He said, well, the Senate's going to be a little differently. He said, every state's going to have two representatives. Two? You're telling me, and I'm a senator from Massachusetts, places that basically Rhode Island and Delaware, those little teeny places that have no economy whatsoever to speak of or people, that they're going to have the same right that I have, can offset my vote?

34:28Yeah, I don't want the big guys beating up on the little guys. This is going to be the United States, not to divide it. So a senator always had the ability to speak forever. Take the time, and time is precious on the floor of the Senate. So if you tie things up, that's the filibuster. There's nothing written, but there was nothing to stop a senator from speaking until 1917. That's when the cloture votes came in, during World War I, when we had isolationists didn't want to send any goods to our troops, to our allies, and they had to get over this. I think it was a 67-vote threshold at that time.

35:02Then it went down to, I think it then went to 60. Anyway, it came down to try to get it more workable. But basically, we found out as we went through this that it kind of put us together. It didn't let you just retreat to your corner and just fight to your death. The House already did that. And I think it was George Washington that says, you know, the House is going to be like a hot cup of tea. You've heard that many times, I'm sure. And the Senate will be like a saucer. They'll cool the tea off so we can drink it. That was the whole purpose of it. So it didn't have to have any written. It was basically the decorum of the Senate, what we were supposed to and what was expected of us.

35:39They've come to a conclusion, but now that's sort of shot. Well, still, that's not shot. Just think where you'd be right today. Think where the Democrats would be if I would have voted to get rid of the filibuster, where they would be today with Donald Trump having a trifecta. Even though he's doing a lot of things with executive, he's not changing rules or putting rules and laws into place. Right. So the rules he's putting in can be undone as quickly as next. You put a law, it takes a little bit longer. That's kind of a good segue. Every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours from Representative Greg Kassar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

36:14Let's listen. Hi, Senator Manchin. I'm Congressman Greg Kassar. And my big question is not about a progressive issue. It's about an issue that should be bipartisan. And that is redistricting. In my home state of Texas, Donald Trump just rammed through radical mid-decade redistricting. We have a ballot measure now in California on redistricting. It could spread to states like Florida, Indiana, Missouri. And my question to you is, after a ban on gerrymandering passed its way through the House of Representatives, it never could make its way through the Senate. And so my question is, do you regret not carving out an exception in the filibuster or doing whatever you could to make sure that a ban on gerrymandering could make its way through the Senate and get signed into law?

37:01Do you regret that decision? Good question. Do I regret not getting rid of the filibuster? Absolutely not. it's the holy grail. Okay. We have to work through it. And the bottom line is these gerrymandering, what goes around comes around. It's horrible what the president has asked Texas to do, now what California is in retaliation is doing, and all this. I think there's some states that basically use nonpartisan commissions. There's some states that even use computers. There has to be a way forward on this thing here. I mean, if you're asking about the biggest problems that we have right now, it's basically the amount of money in campaigning, the amount of money that people can put in.

37:39Citizens United was horrible, horrible, horrible. And also basically it's primaries. You know, right now you have a strong president with you have a trifecta, if you will, the House, the Senate, and the executive branch. And you have all that going for you and you have no checks and balances to where you can say, wait a minute, that's not what pushed this through. I understand where he's coming from. But if you had open primaries, you wouldn't be able, the president couldn't target or the party couldn't target someone who's not a good enough Republican or Democrat and primary him. The open primary or ranked choice voting, which my dear friends Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins would never get elected as Republicans if it wasn't for that.

38:24So do you regret not figuring a way though to ban gerrymandering by making an exemption to the filibuster or not? You can't make exemptions like a little bit of pregnancy. We tried. We looked at everything we could. What I like to see the filibuster is you have to have talking filibuster. You have to go down the floor and explain. You have to have maybe 10 other senators that will agree with you that they think it's a serious problem. That would make it more concrete. It would give more credence to it and credibility. And just you can do reform like that, but you say, well, I can't carve this out.

38:55That's like, okay, Harry Reid tried to carve it out. He carved out the U.S. Supreme Court, right? How long did that work? So how would you deal with banning gerrymandering at this point? Like everybody has a nuclear weapon, essentially, depending on the states. Well, the states, you know, there's still states' rights. The 10th Amendment gives states their rights. They're not going to be basically forced to run their government like the federal does. I think that's the whole purpose of it, you know, keeping a government to where the states do have some rights. As a former governor, I was very, very concerned about how we ran our elections.

39:27I had to answer to the people. So the people of Texas, the people of California, all of them should be speaking out. This is wrong because what happens today will be worse tomorrow. It's not going to be any better. But just saying that we're going to outlaw and ban it, you know, I wish you could. I think it's wrong. I think you have to have the independent commissions. But that's for the states to decide. The states are responsible for the elections, not the federal government. So in an interview with The New York Times opinion writer Michelle Kyle before Trump took office, you sounded optimistic that Senate Republicans wouldn't just fall in line with the president, but they've greenlit almost every nominee, no matter how underqualified.

40:05Based on these first eight months or so, Republicans in Congress weren't acting like they represent an independent branch of government, which they are. Do you think you got it wrong? And if they aren't willing to— Which one? The idea that they would be a counter, they wouldn't just fall in line, that they would make the right decisions. Do you think Congress remains an independent body? I worry about the independency of the three branches, judicial, executive, and legislative. I thought there was an awful lot of people that I know are very strong-willed and very smart in the Republican side that I was hoping for would have been able to speak respectfully truth to power.

40:45Okay? And that's why I've come to the conclusion you almost need term limits anymore. Yes, I would agree. Term limits, I had a lady one time, Kara, that told me in southern West Virginia, there'd be 200 people to town hall. And I was speaking and she asked me a question. Do I wish you were for term limits? So I tried to explain to her. Had to be 10 or more years, 15 years ago when I was governor. And I told her why I was not for term limits at that time, thinking what I'd kind of always thought and heard. You have people with expertise. Now, here I was as a governor. I'm term limit out in two terms, eight years, two fours.

41:20But I thought, well, you know, you lose expertise in the legislative process and all the knowledge and everything. And she looked at me and she said, just think, Joe, if there were term limits, maybe we'd get one good term out of you. Carrie, I didn't get any better than that. You know what? I says, I'm sorry. I agree with you. And I've been for term limits ever since. because it would give that legislature the courage to be independent for that last two-year term or the last six-year term if you're a senator. You could Tom Tillis right now. Yeah. Okay. You'd have that. You get that courage a little bit earlier knowing this is your last.

41:54I really truly believe it's needed probably as much as anything. And it might cure some of the problems of gerrymandering and all these other things. So another thing is the unitary executive theory, the idea that the president has a soul power over the executive branch has become a huge talking point. President Trump has an expansive interpretation of presidential power. Has that surprised you based on your previous experience with him? It concerns me from the standpoint thinking that one person is above the law. Yeah. And I think if you go back to our founding fathers or the Federalist Papers and this and that, they looked at everything they hated about King George.

42:26They looked at everything they hated about a monarch. We'll make sure we didn't do anything. They'll lead us down that path. They were pretty good for about 200 years. The last 40 have been pretty rough. We're testing it. You asked about something a little bit earlier about the Republican Party. If you recall, you remember how soured the relationship between Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump was the first? It's because they had, I think it was 54 or 53 Republicans, I'm not sure, during that term. And Donald Trump kept saying, hey, listen, we've got a majority of Republicans, just pass what I want.

43:03And Mitch McConnell says, no, it doesn't work that way. And the Republican senators almost to a T said, absolutely not. We're not getting rid of the filibuster for that. No, we're not going to. And it just basically made just open warfare. I was up there and the Brady that they received from the White House at that time was unbelievable. But after the second term, I was hoping for the first pushback. Let's put it that way. And hopefully, well, they haven't gotten rid of the filibuster, but they're allowing some of these things. Do you think Trump is acting like a king? You mentioned King George with all these executive orders.

43:37I think he knows there's still guardrails. He can't. He can't. There's certain things. The checks and balances are still there. The judicial branch, basically, OK, is still there. I still think there's some people that you're going to see that could be surprising. And this midterm election could change everything in a demeanor of what we're doing and how much get up and go they got. So West Virginians seem to be all in on Trump still. In a recent poll, a third of them said President Trump had done the best job as president in their lifetime. It's clear he's been a big supporter of revitalizing the coal industry.

44:07In April, he passed four executive orders, basically gave the industry what it asked for. But West Virginia has more issues than coal. Infrastructure in the state is crumbling. Your state is ranked as third most dependent on federal dollars in the nation, as we talked about. Earlier this year, Doge cuts halted millions of dollars in deliveries to food banks and Trump's tax and spending bill, including big cuts to education and Medicare, Medicaid. All this could really hurt the state. Is there going to be a shift in West Virginia? Do you see that happening? You just talked about the midterms. Well, we'll see.

44:38You would like to think that people usually vote to pocketbooks or vote to services, one of the two. And with that being said, these changes, it amazed me that if you're going to do a piece of legislation when President Biden wanted to do BBB and I thought was an overreach and expansion that we could never, ever afford. He and I spoke one time, and I told Mr. President, I says, you know, you and I are about the same vintage. You're a little bit older, but we're not that far apart. And I'm from the school John Kennedy asked not what your country can do for you, what you can do for your country.

45:11To me, that's what's called me to public service. I think I can do something, and I wanted to. You passed this piece of legislation, Mr. President. You're going to change the psychic of the nation. How much more can my country do for me? I couldn't buy into that, okay? Then you come along and they want to do the BBB, the other big, big, beautiful bill, and not looking at basically what it's going to affect and how. But also, it doesn't take effect until after 2026 election, until 2027. Well, wait a minute. If you're passing a piece of legislation that's so needed, don't you want to take effect immediately to help all the people?

45:49They were afraid of the pushback. So I don't know if that's going to resonate with people that what's going to hit you in 2027 happened because it was voted on in 2025. I've never seen anything like it, but people haven't comprehended that yet, I don't believe.

46:07We'll be back in a minute.

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47:00I want to finish up talking about third parties because that's really where you're going because the centrism hasn't really worked. Everyone's gotten even more partisan, I would say. So in 2024, you'd already announced you're running for a third term. You decided to drop the D and register as an independent. You joined Kyrsten Sinema, Angus King and, of course, Bernie Sanders. All of you are very different politically, right? You and Bernie Sanders seem to agree on one thing, that more people should run as independents. Now, third-party runs for presidents have never been easy or successful for that matter, but the hurdles have only gotten bigger.

47:30We spoke earlier about the increasing number of closed primaries and gerrymandering. You had been toying with the idea of running for president as independent in 2024 with the no-labels movement. Is there any way you could see an independent party rise? New parties of form during partisan times, that's for sure. But could you see yourself doing that? Well, let's look right now what's happening, okay? What's the largest denomination of people that are participating in voting? What do they belong to? The Democrat Party, Republican Party. Right now, it's about 23, 24 percent registered Democrats, maybe 26 percent, 27 Republican.

48:07The largest is no party affiliation, which is what I belong to. So you have people that want to belong to the grand old party that's not so grand anymore. People like to be with the Democrat party used to be responsible and compassionate. They don't seem to be as responsible as they were before. So you have that mixture in the middle. Is it right? Yeah, I think it's right. I'd like to see an American independent party. They're scared of the bejesus out of the two for the gone so far. We never went to the extremes. We've always kind of governed between the 40-yard line. 40 and 40. Now we're clear down to the 10 yard.

48:44And basically, it's just way out. I mean, it's gotten to the point where the yin and the yang are, you know, driving it. But that said, dead center seems dead at this point. Dead center from the standpoint, I tell you one thing. There's more people that believe like I think, like I do, more of a centrist looking at what's the best idea. I want people that will put their country before the party. If you're going into the political official being a fame and fortune, then you're chasing for your own personal goal. You're not chasing it for helping basically the country. And so term limits maybe give us more of a clarity to that.

49:20Maybe we can fix some of the other problems. But you throw away all the guardrails. And I know they keep going back to the filibuster. You start throwing away what few guardrails we have. You've got nothing. You've got nothing that'll be flip-flopping back and forth, no different than countries around the world who have no standing. We don't care about the finances of our country anymore. If we lose the reserve currency of the world being the U.S. dollar, we've got serious problems, serious, serious financial problems. Playing with crypto the way they're playing with is wrong, I think dead wrong for our country and for the world.

49:56So how do you solve that? I mean, I could quote Yates to you. I mean, things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood dim tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. How do you get to the center then? If you're in the dead center and it feels dead. Let me ask this. Do you think that, I mean, what I was looking at and what I saw a couple, two, three years ago, and we kept seeing all the way up until we really got hot and heavy into this past 2024 election year, that every poll showed that people were ripe for a centrist. They were ripe for that.

50:30They were ripe for, let's say, a person who had been associated as a Democrat, one who had been associated as a Republican to put a team together and basically commit to one four-year term. we're going to bring our country back together and look at both sides, the best of both sides, trying to bring that back to the middle. Okay, would that have worked? It looked like it could, in theory. It looked like it could when polling was done. But when you start trying to get on the ballot, the way the system has been weaponized, the duopoly that we have right now, the Democrat model and the Republican model is based on fair natured.

51:03So trying to get in on the ballots was something that was almost impossible when it came down to it, closer and closer to making the decision to run or not. Could we put a team together? Who would that team be? We were looking at different people that have interest and had the ability to do it. But then saying, wait a minute, I don't want to be part of a team that's going to be looked as basically a spoiler. I don't want to be going down in history that because of you being involved or me being involved or anyone else, that this party basically, through the election one way or the other, you get blamed for it.

51:37I mean, if there could have been a way to have truly a legitimate way to get on the platform and debate and said, does this make sense to you, what we're doing? So what for 2028? Now it seems like don't worry about spoilers, right? It's spoiled. Oh, yeah. I think from that standpoint now, 2028 will be a whole different. So it seems to me most people in the center are just giving up. That's the problem. That's all I can tell you now. No. I'm not going to change. I know you were asking, Kara, why did I leave the Democratic Party or why I thought it left me? I just couldn't go home to the people I represented and having a D, a Washington D on my name and saying, I'm representing you, when they don't believe that the National Democratic Party is representing a rural poor state.

52:30I just got to be honest with you. It's kind of hard to have that conversation. You also didn't put an R on there. No, I couldn't do that. Because you know what? I didn't like what you're seeing now. I didn't like a lot of that. I think I can work better from the center than I could having a D or an R because I think there's some things that both sides do. I want the Democrats to be that compassion they've always been, but responsible. You can't put roadblocks in front of me, put so many restrictions on me, I can't even breathe. The Constitution says you have the right to the pursuit of happiness.

53:03Me taking the oath to the Constitution is going to protect you have that right for your pursuit of happiness. You find your happiness anyway, and I'll do it. Even if it's something I don't believe in, just don't make me believe I'm wrong if I don't believe in what you want. So is there anyone you see out there? Oh, I see a lot of good people, I think. Name one from every party. What do you mean from every party? From two parties right now. You can name other people. I wish we had four parties. I know you're a secret mom, Donnie fan, but go ahead. Oh, yeah. Talking to people about affordability.

53:36You talk about affordability. That's an interesting one there, but we'll see what happens. The thing of it is, is that, you know, you have good people. You have a Josh Shapiro who's been able to govern in a kind of a split state. You got Annie Beshear in a state that really leans more Republican. I've got a little bit of preference towards governors, whether they be Republican or Democrat, because they've been able to function. Gretchen Woodmar seems to be like a very rational person. I don't know Gretchen that well. I know Josh and I know Andy better than I know her. And a Republican you would pick?

54:10The Republican, there's some really interesting people out there in the Republican. I'm not in that circle as much as I was in the Democrats before. But some of the governors they have out there have been very rational, reasonable. Mitt Romney was always a person I could work with very closely. Lisa Murkowski. Some of these people here are unbelievable to work with. And Susan Collins, who's up right now. I pray for the sake of the Senate, Susan Collins wins again. I don't think anyone's going to be able to replace a Susan Collins, the way she approaches the problems and willing to look at the facts.

54:44And that's why she's so good. So final question, would you say you're optimistic in the middle or pessimistic right now? Boy, I've always been an optimistic person. I'm a realist also, and I understand how difficult it is. But I'm optimistic that basically we've been able to reach and pull ourselves out every time we've had challenges. And again, we'll go back to how we started about the angels, you know, the special angels that we all have in us. I think everyone has good in them. I don't think you go through the process of getting elected in the public eye today and not have the desire to serve.

55:18Or, you know, in West Virginia, I've always said, a person can shake your hand, look in your eye, and see your soul. So it's hard to BS them. And I'm hoping they still have that gut instinct now. We've got to get people with character, good people that really want to be there for the right reason. And if they won't self-govern themselves, then put the term limits on them. That would be the best way. All right. I really appreciate it, Senator Manchin. Do you call yourself Senator Manchin? I'm Joe. Joe. Let me give you, I'll give you one little tidbit. All right, sure. A little tidbit to everybody.

55:49When you meet a person who's had a title or still has a title because of their position being elected, appointed, whatever they may be, if they introduce themselves by their title but for their name, 99 % of the time you're going to have a problem. They think more about the power of the job than the person they've become or the person they were. Yeah, that's a very good tip. All right, thank you so much. Thank you.

56:16Hi, everyone. Just a reminder, from now on, our full shows will also be available on YouTube. So check out our channel On with Kara Swisher. Sorry if I'm wearing t-shirts, but that's what you're going to get. Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Bussell, Kateri Yoakum, Michelle Alloy, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer podcasts. Special thanks to Catherine Barner. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you know all the words to take me home, country roads.

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