1085: Trump's Ballroom Reno Derailed by Epstein

26:08But we don't get to pick the topics. We're not in the White House. We don't have the bully pulpit. Even if we did, we don't have sort of the messaging throw rate or the media machine to allow us to do this. As long as you got to talk about the things that people are talking about, and this is one of those things. It has political advantages for Democrats in two ways. One is there is a way to take this. Like you can't be incredibly awkward and be like, he's talking, he's covering up the Epstein files to cover, to distract from his high prices or anything dumb like that. And you don't need to be going like just, oh, he's Trump's a pedo.

26:44Like we just don't, just don't. The way the most. Say more than we know. Stick with what we know. It's bad enough. The most politically appealing way to talk about this is to lay out the facts in a straightforward, fact-based way as you can, and then make the point that Trump is covering this up to protect himself and his other rich friends. And this is part of the corrupt, broken political system he said he was going to fix. Those are not the words to use, but that's the gist of the story. You got to have that disclaimer now, because otherwise we'll just hear statements exactly like that. I have to just shout.

27:14These are state directions. The second way that this matters is Trump, you may remember, launched an affordability campaign like five days ago. You know when you can't talk about affordability? When you're in the middle of a roiling national scandal of relationship with America's notorious child sex trafficker. And so it does block his ability to deliver a message on anything helpful to himself. And so if we had a scandal where we found out that Trump was working with Jeffrey Epstein to personally raise egg prices, that would be better politically. but this is what we got and I think it can be useful.

27:46This entire second term also is about like Donald Trump himself personally delivering a damaging narrative about him and his presidency to us on a silver platter like every day. You know, like you don't have to think too hard about how the Epstein scandal fits in with the rest of what he's doing is that like the guy, all of the corruption that people were just angry about in Washington, not just Democrats or independents, but Republicans, people in Trump's base, like the money he's making, the crypto, the Qatari jets, the Gatsby parties, the ballroom, the like all this shit. It's all the peace.

28:24Yeah. He's the, the pardons for all of his rich friends and all the fucking violent, uh, January six people, right? Like if you're a friend of Trump's, if you're connected to Trump, if you can do this, you're, you're, you're all set. You can break the law. You're going to get rich. Trump's getting rich. The family's getting rich. Everyone else. Fuck you. Yeah. Your costs are going up. You're going to bear the brunt of the tariffs. You're going to bear the brunt of the shutdown. We don't give a shit. We're going to kidnap you off the street, whether you're undocumented or not. Like, it's a whole, it's right there.

28:53It's right there. I don't, you know. He's delivering it right to us. It's just so easy.

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31:01Let's talk about our new open government, which will stay that way until at least the end of January. What a luxury. The Departments of Veterans Affairs and Agriculture, along with some military projects, are now fully funded through all of 2026. So are SNAP benefits, which people should start getting again on Monday. Federal employees are back to work and paychecks, including back pay, will start going out in a few days. One problem that's still lingering is air travel. There were nearly 1 ,000 flight cancellations on Thursday, and the administration says it's going to keep cancellations at 6 % of total flights for the foreseeable future.

31:36I imagine this is untangling all the delays that sort of built up over the last couple weeks and the fact that we have been suffering an air traffic controller shortage for some time now. So I'm sure that former real world road rule star Sean Duffy has this under control. Also unresolved, the future of the Affordable Care Act subsidies that 20 million Americans rely on and the bitter recriminations among Democrats over the deal that eight senators struck with Republicans to end the shutdown. We'll get to the Obamacare subsidies in a second. But, Dan, you didn't get to join our our group therapy session on Tuesday's pod about the deal, though you have written about it.

32:16where's your head at now that we've all had a few days to process this? Like you guys and some of the other Democrats, I was quite pissed at the way in which the shutdown came to an end, that it was these Democrats who did this at this point in time. Like this was the point of maximum leverage for Democrats. It's very possible that the Republicans were just never going to give. And their advantage was they didn't give a shit about any person they hurt and they would starve people. They would destroy air travel. They destroy the economy, do anything to gain leverage. And we did like that. Democrats do not have the stomach for that.

32:48We have a just Obama used to call it. We have the responsibility gene. And but even knowing that, I think we had to let it play out for a couple of weeks more because there was a lot of polling that showed that people were now just at that moment in which we folded beginning to pay attention. And that's when the real political pressure would have come on the Republicans. And because Democrats, to their credit, had won the messaging war and people were blaming Trump and the Republicans, when all the pain started, particularly around air travel at Thanksgiving, they were going to blame the people they already blamed for the shutdown, Trump and the Republicans.

33:20And so we should have let that play out. And so I'm very frustrated by that. I thought the eight senators who caved here sold everyone out. And I think they did an absolutely miserable job of explaining their position. You know, Angus King saying we shouldn't stand up to Trump didn't work. People calling it a win. Angus King went from saying that we went from no chance to 50 % chance to get the Obamacare subsidies to the next morning. We're down like 20 % chance. You know, they basically caved for one vote that is really kind of bullshit. Having said that, it's happened. It's over. I don't think it's going to matter in the midterms.

33:57No one's going to remember this cave 11 months from now and people are going to vote. So I think there are lessons we should learn about how to go about these fights in the future about what it takes to actually win them and whether we have the stomach to do it collectively. But it's time to put it behind us and time to focus on making the Republicans pay the price for being so committed to raising healthcare premiums. Because I do think in the end, if we play our cards correctly, Republicans will have won the battle but lost the war here. Well, let's talk about ACA subsidies because that fight's not done yet either.

34:34Senate Democrats are supposed to, as part of the deal, get a vote on legislation of their choosing in December around extending the ACA subsidies, though there has been some talk about a compromise with Republicans in order to get it passed through the Senate. Some of the ideas that have been thrown out are, do you want to means test the subsidies? So I heard Gene Shaheen say, if you make over$200 ,000, you shouldn't be eligible for the subsidies because then that would get more Republicans on board in the Senate. It all seems a little silly to me because the big problem is the House, but that's what's going on in the Senate.

35:11In the House, Mike Johnson still won't commit to a vote. Democrats are trying to file another discharge petition like they did with the Epstein files to force a vote in the House on a three-year extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies. I was looking to hear from some of the more establishment Republicans or the retiring Republicans on whether they'd go for that. Don Bacon, who's retiring, he said he would not sign a discharge petition on this. So that's not a very good sign. Mike Lawler is like a frontline Republican who's very vulnerable. He said he'd be maybe for a one year extension, but nothing more.

35:48So we'll see on that. But can you think of any way that this could actually get done and signed by Donald Trump? No, I really can't. I think it's highly, highly unlikely that Republicans will do this. It will split the Republican caucus. Mike Johnson does not want to split his caucus at this point. I think it's highly unlikely he brings it to a vote. I will say that I completely agree with you. And that is why in the last couple of days, the more I have thought about the shutdown, the first thing in my mind is the chances that they were ever, even with all the pressure, going to ever pass an extension of the Affordable Care I thought it was, I started off when the shutdown started by thinking it was relatively high because I know how popular it would be to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies, even with their own base, right?

36:41Something like 50%, 51 % of MAGA voters said that they are supportive of this. So I thought it was very high. And then I thought, then it was like, eh, I guess I'm like Angus King. Then I thought it was like 50%, you know, because then they lost the election over it. It's like, I don't know what other kind of pressure would have forced them to give on the subsidies as opposed to just given on getting rid of the filibuster for opening up the government. That I could still see if they held on. I just, I could not, I still cannot see a scenario where they're going to do anything on ACA because they feel, they seem so fucking dug in now.

37:20and Donald Trump and a bunch of Republicans are all talking about not just not extending the subsidies, but hey, let's take this opportunity to just like dismantle the rest of the Affordable Care Act. Give, they keep talking about, we don't want to give money to the insurance companies. We want to give money to the people. Who are then going to give it. Yeah, where are you going to fucking buy the health insurance from? Who do you think you're going to buy it from? Fucking Santa Claus? Like, what are you talking about? Just doctors who take cash. Well, and they're talking about these like health savings accounts, which by the way, it's basically like a tax-free account that you have to fund, or maybe the government will give you a few thousand bucks, and then you have to fund the rest, and it's tax-free.

37:59You can't even use it to pay for your premiums, the way a lot of them are currently written in legislation. So you can use it to pay for extra out-of-pocket costs, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, it's like fiscal therapy. It's fucking worth nothing. It would give the insurance companies so much more power to deny you coverage for pre-existing conditions. So not only now are they going after people who were relying on the Affordable Care Act subsidies, they want to go after people who would get denied preexisting conditions. So these are all their ideas right now. And you mean to tell me that this is the group of people who would be like, all right, all right, we'll extend the subsidies.

38:32I just, you know, look, we're going to go through this again in January and there's going to be another government funding deadline at the end of January. and I think Democrats should fight like hell. But at the end of the day, Republicans are on the losing end of an 80-20 issue and they don't seem to fucking care. Yeah, I mean, you're thinking about this and I thought about this way too, that through the lens of people understanding their own political self-interest. Raising people's healthcare premiums at a time in which affordability is the number one issue is a just, that is a real world personal commitment to losing the house.

39:05Like that's really what they want to do there. And it's not even like this is, you know, sometimes there are issues that are popular, but they largely benefit the other party. This benefits their voters more than anyone else because it is primarily - Which is the only reason I thought they would have done it, you know? I mean, no one has less regard for their voters than Donald Trump and the Republicans. Like, we could go through like many reasons why this happened. Part of it's negative polarization. Before the shutdown was over, there are a lot of Republicans who really wanted to solve this problem, but once it became part of the shutdown, they could never give on it.

39:37There's the fact that they are immune from political pressure because they live inside an epistemic media bubble that doesn't allow them to know how bad things are going. It's just that this is really a fundamental change in how the world worked between when we dealt with the shutdown in 2013 and now. Is in 2013, most Republican members of Congress got their news from the Wall Street Journal, Politico, New York Times even. They watched CNN. They watched Fox, of course, but they were in on the joke with Fox. And so they saw all the bad coverage. Now they live in a world where they're winning all the time.

40:09And so they don't even know when they're losing. So they just keep losing in this case. And even if they see coverage that tells them they are losing, the only person that matters is Donald Trump and keeping Donald Trump happy. Because even if their voters are pissed at them, even if they're getting bad coverage, they know that if they cross Donald Trump, they'll get a primary challenge and he'll come down hard on them. and so then they'll lose their job anyway. So they are, you know, I think they probably, some of them probably realize they don't have good options either way, but the scarier option for them is to piss off Donald Trump.

40:41And this is a fundamental change between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. In Trump 1.0, he would have wanted to sit down with, at the time, Pelosi and Schumer and to get the big four together and cut a deal. And he wanted to be in on things that seemed popular. Yeah. Here it's just like it's a presidency based entirely on owning the lips. And the way to defeat Democrats here, not to help Republicans, but to make Democrats lose was to force them to cave here and not to actually do what's in the, like the guy should, especially if you're so fucking afraid of the Epstein files coming out, the guy should really, really want the Republicans to win the House.

41:19And I know he's doing things like trying to redistrict and gerrymander the world to get it done. But one way to help them win the House is to solve this massive political problem and he just made it worse. Speaking of political problems they don't really give a shit about, there was one provision that got snuck into the final funding bill in the Senate that would let senators sue the federal government for as much as half a million dollars each if their data is accessed without notice. What is this all about? The provision benefits eight Republican senators who were recently found to have had their phone records accessed during the investigation by Jack Smith into Donald Trump's 2020 election subversion.

42:01Mike Johnson, bunch of Republicans in the House, including some pretty conservative Republicans in the House, said they had no idea the provision was in there. And now Johnson says he's planning a House vote to undo it, which is kind of wild. What the hell? It's really one of the most bizarre things because it's incredibly – it's obviously unpopular. It seems insane. It's basically just a potential cash grab for eight members of Thune's caucus where they can just – like it's already been established that this happened to them. Like they wrote the rules to ensure that the eight members of the Republican Senate caucus could sue and get up to a half a million dollars.

42:42Like it's already done. They wrote the rules to ensure that they could win because they already knew the evidence in this case. And then the members of the House probably pissed because where's their half a million dollars? And I mean, it's nuts. It's truly, truly nuts. There has been not – everyone is very quiet about how – like we know Thune asked for it. But who asked Thune to ask for it? What was the thinking here? Even Ron Johnson was asked about it because he was one of the senators. and he was like, well, I didn't really want it, but some other people wanted it. And he wouldn't say who.

43:16I want to, it'd be very interesting to see which of any of them actually sue. The whole, it's so fucking crazy though, when you think about it from a, again, just blatant corruption kind of standpoint, is that if the FBI and the government, if they have a target of their investigation and they're looking into that and the target of the investigation is making phone calls with a bunch of people, then they're not going to pull up your phone records. They didn't pull up their phone records and know what they were saying. They didn't know the contents of their phone calls. They knew numbers that they were calling Donald Trump and potentially Donald Trump's co-conspirators in this.

43:54So they knew the numbers that they were calling and the times that they called those numbers, right? This is like standard investigative procedure. And what these senators have decided is for anyone else in America that this happens to, that standard procedure within the confines of the law. That's how investigations are conducted. But for these eight senators, they get special treatment. Such special treatment that they get half a million dollars each, potentially, if they sue over this. But everyone else in America this happens to, including the members of the House, they don't get that special treatment.

44:28Yeah. Just wild. It's just wildly stupid corruption. And I think that the only reason that Johnson and them are willing to try to strip it out. The most obvious is because it doesn't include them. But also, this wasn't a Donald Trump thing, so they're not worried about pissing off Donald Trump. It's just like a bunch of fucking unnamed jackass Republican colleagues in the Senate.

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46:33So neither the end of the shutdown nor the latest Epstein news has taken the spotlight off Trump's single biggest vulnerability with voters right now, the economy. The White House is saying that the shutdown means they may never release the October data on jobs and inflation, so we don't exactly know how bad things are out there. But the president's gut tells him that life in America has never been better. He's reportedly planning a series of speeches on the economy in the coming weeks. Fan out across the country, take it to the people, make his case for all his accomplishments. Definitely should do the trick, right?

47:11Always does the trick. If you want a preview of how Trump's version of Bidenomics is going to land, even with his friends, take a listen to the president's interview with Laura Ingraham on Tuesday evening. Is this a voter perception issue of the economy or is there more that needs to be done by Republicans on Capitol Hill or done in terms of policy? More than anything else, it's a con job by the Democrats. So are you saying that voters are misperceiving how they feel or. So when I took over, you remember. Because you said Biden did that, too, because he was saying things are great. Let's say it's synonymous.

47:46Biden and Kamala. Your housing director has proposed something that has enraged your MAGA friends, which is this 50 year mortgage idea. Is that really a good idea? It's not even a big deal. I mean, you know, you go from 40 to 50 years and what it means is you pay. You pay something less from 30 that some people had a 40 and then now they have a 50. Why are people saying they're anxious about the economy? Why are they saying that? I don't know that they are saying I think polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we've ever had. You can't imitate gold, real gold. There's no paint that imitates gold.

48:20So these aren't like from Home Depot or something? No, this is not Home Depot stuff. No, not stuff you buy. This is not Home Depot. Could not be more perfect. It's so good. Four bites at the apple he has. She asked him four times about the economy, including one that's this fucking random proposal that the great mortgage fraud investigator over at Bill Pulte came up with about the 50-year mortgage. He dismisses that idea. And then the other three answers, nothing is wrong. Everything is great. Economy is wonderful. Laura Inger, are you sure? What about people? It's all fake, con job. Everything's great in the economy.

48:57By the way, have you seen all the gold all over the Oval Office? It's real gold that I'm putting all over the Oval Office, and everyone else is fine. It really is like he wants to lose. I mean, obviously, he's not running again. But he can't lose. That's the thing. He's not running again. He's a lame duck. and he's fine. I mean, the lame duck thing is very important here, but it's just, he's doing, if you were to just write out, here's ways in which you could end your presidency functionally, he's doing those things. Yeah, and he's probably a little surprised like, and yet here I am still. It's just, I mean, to have, at a time of great academic uncertainty, bulldoze the White House to build yourself a ballroom paid for by America's wealthiest corporations with business before the government, to throw the Gatsby party, To do this interview about the economy and then give people a tour of your gold-plated office, I mean, it's great.

49:52It's great stuff. I do think it's what you were saying earlier about the bubble has become even smaller. And he's just not getting any bad news from anyone. He's got more sycophants in this administration than the last administration, which is really saying something. And he's not. So any kind of bad news he hears, he's just dismissing as fake. doesn't believe it, doesn't believe bad polls, doesn't believe anything else. You think that maybe the results of the election might jar him a little bit, but not so much, it seems like. It did briefly. I mean, he did seem quite rattled in the immediate aftermath.

50:29He's like yelling. He does those weird events. He's yelling at the Senate. He wants the House. They want to shut down over. He's going to do affordability. But he doesn't really have the stick-to-itiveness to get it done. he you know that we we played the um the clip earlier of him not answering the question about epstein and he was signing the bill to um reopen the federal government he did like a little topper uh when he was there at the desk he was like reading something and it was all about affordability you can tell that like suzy wiles or someone in the white house was like we got to be a little bit more on message here with affordability so he tried it out there didn't seem happy he's never happy when he's forced to be on message he was at an event today with melania about foster children and he started doing a whole affordability thing there, which again, Hart wasn't in it.

51:15So they are trying to get through to him that affordability matters, but he doesn't believe it. He doesn't believe it. I think he genuinely believes things are fine. He can't, well, to say that affordability is an issue is to admit that he has failed to lower costs and he is incapable of admitting fault. He is psychologically, chemically, physically capable of admitting fault. He's been that way his whole life. It's not gonna change now. That's why this affordability push is doomed to fail. Of course it's doomed to fail. But I do wonder at some point, probably not till the summer or spring, Republicans in these races in the Senate and the House are going to start being like, hey, I'm losing and maybe you should take that affordability thing a little more seriously.

51:59Like, do you think that happens or do you think they just grin and bear it? His solution to that is to try to change the subject. Right. This is just when everyone was saying - troops on the streets, invade Venezuela. Think about 2018, right? Where healthcare and taxes for the rich were the number one issue. Instead of trying to deal with that, what he did was he did the caravan and immigration at the end. Yeah. Yeah, maybe that's his - I don't think it's particularly good strategy. I don't think it's going to work, especially it's really hard to make it work when people are looking at their grocery bill every week.

52:30But I think that's what he's most likely to try. As bad as those Trump answers were, The one that the MAGA base is most pissed about came later in the interview when Ingram asked the president about accepting Chinese students at American universities and the H-1B visa program, which his Silicon Valley buddies love. But the MAGA base hates because it means immigrants coming to the country, whether they're high skilled, low skilled, doesn't matter. Immigrants coming to the country. MAGA base is upset about it. Here's what Donald Trump had to say, though. There's never going to be a country like what we have right now.

53:05And does that mean the Republicans have to talk about it? And does that mean the H1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration? Because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can't flood the country with with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers. You also do have to bring in talent when we have plenty of talented people. No, you don't. We don't have talented people. No, you don't have you don't have certain talents and you have to people have to learn. A lot of MAGA folks are not thrilled about this idea of hundreds of thousands of foreign students in the United States.

53:36You've said as many as 600 ,000 Chinese students could come to the United States. Why, sir, is that a pro-MAGA position when so many American kids want to go to school and there are places not for them and these universities are getting rich off Chinese money? If we were to cut that in half, which perhaps makes some people happy, you would have half the colleges in the United States go out of business. So what? we're dependent on china to keep our university system going i think it's good to have i actually think it's good to have outside uh countries don't forget maga was my idea maga was nobody else's idea i know what maga wants better than anybody else and maga wants to see our country thrive didn't think the leopards would eat my face right oh man what a what a callback there it is 2017 here's my question do you think it's still true that nobody uh knows maga better than trump Absolutely not.

54:28Like you brought up the term about trumping a lame duck and this is lame duck behavior. It is. He has lost the touch. Because I found myself in that exchange siding with Donald Trump over Laura Ingraham. And he wasn't because he's not used to answering that way. He couldn't really handle it very well. But what he was trying to say is, yeah, we need H-1B visas because we have plenty of talented people in this country. But for some jobs, in certain high-tech jobs, you need people with skills. People can't fill the jobs. And so you bring in. So immigrants come to this country and they do those jobs like they have for the last several hundred years in this country.

55:08That's what America is. It's a nation of immigrants. Same thing. International students are partly what make our university system the envy of the world. And so we like to have international students in this country. and we don't want our colleges closing down, which Laura Ingram thinks like doesn't care about because now they've attacked colleges and universities for the last 10 years in the Trump administration, tried to take down institutions of higher education, tried to attack immigration. And Donald Trump's sitting here trying to be like, well, yeah, well, there's some immigration that's good.

55:40And Laura Ingram and the MAGA base that's really pissed about that answer are like abso-fucking-lutely not. I mean, this is the all-in podcast version of Trump. We went on their podcast and said we were going to staple a visa to the diploma and do all these things and expand the H-1B visa program. And then Steve Bannon went fucking ballistic over it and it became this huge thing. What I think is going on here is twofold. One, Trump has lost his fastball. He's lost touch with the base. He doesn't have the pressure of reelection over him to force him to make certain decisions. And he now also thinks it's all about him.

56:16Like he believes the talking points. He doesn't fully understand that there is an entire political movement of which he is the head of, but it's not all about him. And you have the movement itself beginning to the organizing principle of a movement that includes people like Mike Johnson, evangelical Christian, anti-LGBTQ, anti-gay marriage groups, and full-born American nationals. The thing that kept them all together was Trump. Trump is no longer going to be on the ballot again. So now they are beginning to jockey for what a post-Trump future looks like. And that's going to lead to a lot of dissension, a lot of mess.

56:48And Trump doesn't have what it takes or even the interest to try to ride hurt over that process. He's too busy putting gold on the walls, trying to make crypto dollars and building ballrooms to actually worry about coalition management. And J.D. Vance was to do that, but he is an imperfect person to do that because it's all self-interested for him and people realize that. And he is a point of leverage for various parts of that movement to try to gain influence. So I think it's going to be very, very – it's not about just the Epstein files or other things. I think it's going to be very, very messy in the MAGA movement in the coming years.

57:20I mean it's sort of a little bit like how things ended up playing out in the Democratic primary in 2019 when Obama as the organizing principle was no longer there, right? What is the post-Trump portion of the – and ideologically, I think the MAGA movement is more conflicted than the Obama coalition was from 2009 to 2017. Yeah, I mean, I think that for the last decade, this has been a cult of personality. And we've talked a million times how there's there was no like sort of there were few guiding philosophies of the MAGA movement other than whatever Trump wanted. And whatever Trump wanted is what's good for Trump.

57:58And also whoever's like the last person in his ear. Right. You could imagine after that exchange with Laura Ingram that Steve Bannon calls him up. And the next time we hear him talk about H-1B visas and Chinese students, suddenly he sounds like Steve Bannon. Right. Like you could. So Donald Trump, you can, you know, you can sort of play him either way. But I think what he doesn't quite realize or maybe he does and he just doesn't care is how extreme that hit that faction of his movement is becoming. And that's just I mean, we just saw that was just scratching the surface with the H-1B visas and the Chinese students.

58:32I mean, we've been talking about the Nick Fuentes, Pepper Carlson shit. Yeah, that's a normal policy conversation. Right beneath that is a debate within the party about the acceptability of Nazism. I mean, I talk about this in my interview with James Tallarico, but Rod Dreher, who's like a long-time sort of post-liberal conservative J.D. Vance friend, was with J.D. Vance and Victor Orban over the weekend in D.C. and he wrote this like long sub stack afterwards where he spent a lot of time in DC talking to all these young Gen Z Republicans who are working in government, working in politics. And he's like as right wing as you get this guy, he's J.D.

59:14Vance Powell. And he said that he thinks 30 to 40 percent of these young Republicans who work in politics right now are like Nick Fuentes as fans and that they are very anti-Semitic and that they are very open to fascism and they don't really have any actual policy demands. They just want to burn everything down because they're also very nihilistic. And it's just like this very dangerous movement afoot in MAGA right now. And that is where the energy of the party is going to be, or that's where the energy of the movement is going to be. The question post-Trump is, in which direction does the party itself go?

59:54And everything you just said about like J.D. Vance being an imperfect person for this. Certainly, I don't think they're going to think Marco Rubio is a true believer. But these are people who look at the more diverse multiracial coalition that Trump has built over time and wish that it didn't exist and really do just want a coalition with white people, basically, and no immigrants. not just no immigrants, but like native born white Americans. That's that's this faction of the movement. And, you know, I think people who probably ran Trump's campaign know that the the only the only way you have a Republican majority in the future is if you continue to make these gains with non-college working class black and Latino Americans.

1:00:38And if you don't have that, then you're not going to be able to win a majority. But the sort of the the Nick Fuentes faction doesn't really give a shit about that. It's going to be a real problem. One other magastar who the base is fed up with right now for different reasons, FBI director Cash Patel, who it turns out has been spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars taking the FBI jet to places like Scotland, Nashville, where his country singer girlfriend lives, to his parents' house in Florida, and during the government shutdown to a hunting lodge in Texas called, wait for it, the Boondoggle Ranch.

1:01:17You just can't make it up. Can't make it up. This is all according to records reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, which published quite a story headlined Kash Patel's effing wild ride as FBI director. With the subhead, in just one week in October, he ticked off his bosses with premature comments about a terror investigation and squeezed in a trip to the Boondoggle Ranch on the Bureau jet. Where would you like to begin, Dan? The botched terror investigation? Taking the FBI jet to a wrestling match to watch his girlfriend sing the national anthem? the amazingly named Boondoggle Ranch. I'll let you go here.

1:01:53I think I'll start with the botched terror investigation where he woke up one morning, tweeted about the arrests, except local law enforcement did not know. The investigation wasn't done yet. And two of the terrorist associates got wind and then attempted to flee the country. Yeah, that's a big no-no. And not the first time that he's been sort of live tweeting investigations. Yes. And live tweeting sort of inaccurate facts about ongoing investigations. He did this shortly after Charlie Kirk's assassination as well. So, yeah, and then people are not happy. People are not happy with the FBI said, oh, he's only taken.

1:02:28So just so people know, by law, the FBI director, when they take personal trips, still has to take the private plane that the government has for the FBI director to be, you know, to have access secure communications. and if you take it for personal reasons then you have to reimburse the government the cost of a commercial flight not necessarily a private jet which is like you know twenty thousand dollars at least if you're flying all the places that cash is flying um and then the fbi in response to the story is like he's only taken 12 personal trips this year and i'm like 12 personal trips he's the fbi director it's not the year isn't even done yet we're in the 11th month he didn't start in that office until like February, maybe March.

1:03:15So he's averaging like three trips a month here. I haven't taken 12 personal trips last year and I'm not the fucking FBI director. I'm just a podcaster. I'd like to take some more personal trips. You know what a podcaster is? A future FBI director. That's true. So maybe I can finally get some R &R and take a private jet places once I'm in the government. It's just fucking wild. And then he fired this guy on Halloween, an FBI agent, Stephen Palmer. He's a 27-year agent who ran the FBI's Critical Incident Response Group, which is the unit that responds to high-risk situations like child abductions and hostages.

1:03:51Why is he firing this guy? Also oversees the agency's use of its government planes, and Palmer tried to explain to Patel's staff that the more he used the plane for personal travel, the less it could be used for other bureau operations. And then he got fired. The FBI says, nothing to do with that, though. Nothing to do with that. I've got a lot of questions there. It seems like the guy in charge of responses to child abductions shouldn't also be managing the private plane logs. Weird overlap. Weird overlap, yeah. Yeah, it seems like you could find someone else for that task. but it is there is something gratifying about this which is a relatively dim thoroughly unqualified person was put into a position of great power and influence and has done just as poorly as you would have expected like it's like it's just helpful to know yeah that's how it goes not even not even relatively dim i think i would take issue with the relatively just dim just pretty dim just you want to go with dim i'm okay with that People are very mad about the girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins.

1:04:57And A, because Cash Patel keeps flying to Nashville where she lives, now flying to State College, Pennsylvania for a wrestling match where she's singing the national anthem. He got very mad about this criticism. And he said that she's not just a country singer. He was on Twitter saying that she's a country music sensation who has done more for this nation than most will in 10 lifetimes.

1:05:2310 lifetimes for real also she's suing everyone now because 5 million bucks I think well all these back to what we were talking about all the Groypers and the Fuentes fans and all these like right wing racist influencers anti-Semitic they think that she's like an Israeli spy that she was somehow working with Epstein and Epstein was working with the Mossad too and that this is a honeypot trap and all this like just complete bullshit conspiracy like even for them a crazy fucking conspiracy but she's she just keeps suing them all for defamation even in there's like this one guy she's suing who didn't even make a claim that she's a massad agent or whatever but just sort of like put up a picture of her in cash with the honeypot or something i don't fucking know but like then will summer wrote all about this ball work you gotta go check it out it's so good it's an amazing piece but then like because because she's suing him and and the lawyer she's using his cash patel's lawyer so they think he's behind all the lawsuits now all the right is like defending him this this this right-wing influencer he's getting sued by alexis wilkins so he's got the base mad at him over his girlfriend everyone else is wondering why he's spending twenty thousand dollars a pop flying all over the country for personal reasons tweeting out fucking investigations and screwing them up for the FBI.

1:06:46What the fuck? He's not good at his job. Just it's pretty clear. Seems like one that at some point Donald Trump might be like, I don't know if I need this. Once again, require him to admit fault. Yeah, he would have to care about anything that's going on. Well, that's all we got for now. When we come back, you'll hear my conversation with James Tallarico about the increasingly competitive primary for the U.S. Senate in Texas. Two quick things before we get to that. Message box. We got another message box pitch right here. Dan? Here. I encourage everyone to sign up. Here's what we've been covering on message box in the last couple of weeks here.

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1:10:14James Tallarico, welcome. Thanks for having me. Good to be with you in person. It's so nice to meet you. You too. You too. I've heard so much about you. I've been following you for a long time now. Same. Start with some news of the day. You said the deal to end the government shutdown wasn't a compromise. It was surrender. I certainly wasn't a fan either. But I guess my question is, if you were in the Senate, how much longer would you have held out knowing that Donald Trump clearly has a higher tolerance for inflicting cruelty on people than we do? Well, I'm a proud Texas Democrat, but I already have a religion and I already have a sports team.

1:10:52So I have no problem sharing hard truths about our party. And as a Texas Democrat, I'm always working with a losing hand. You know, I'm in a Republican dominated legislature and my job tends to be losing in the best way possible. But national Democrats in this situation had a lot of leverage to fight for the people of this country. And I felt that they gave up that leverage far too easily. And, you know, Donald Trump certainly has a higher tolerance for inflicting pain on people. I agree. But he's also very sensitive to other people's opinions about him. We know that's true. about Donald Trump.

1:11:31And we saw that he had hit a record low in his approval ratings because of his actions in this government shutdown, literally taking food out of the mouths of hungry children to fund tax breaks for his billionaire donors. And so the fact that national Democrats let him off the hook and didn't get anything in return, to me, just feels like a political and legislative malpractice. Do you think maybe they should have held up for like another couple of weeks, another month. I think we should have held out till we got what we wanted, which was not only reinstating the snap cuts and making sure that hungry kids and working parents had enough to eat, but also making sure that healthcare premiums weren't going to skyrocket for millions of Texans and millions of Americans.

1:12:17That's our job as Democrats is to fight for working people. And if we're not doing that, then we shouldn't wonder why voters don't trust us at the ballot box. So, you know, I very much look at these positions as jobs. We're being hired to be the people's voice and the people's champion in the halls of power. And if we're not doing that, then we should find work elsewhere. So a grown number of House Democrats have called on Chuck Schumer to step down as leader. A number of your fellow Democratic Senate candidates have said they won't support Schumer as leader if they win. Would you? I think this problem is a lot bigger than Chuck Schumer.

1:12:55I think it's a lot bigger than any one senator. And if we want to just try to put the blame all on one person, I think we're missing the bigger picture, which is that our party has forgotten how to fight at the national level. I do think that national Democrats could learn a thing or two from red state Democrats, because we have to figure out how to use every tool in our toolbox to fight for our people, to fight for our values. And we develop a thick skin and we develop certain muscles in the halls of power. I think you're going to see in 2026, red state Democrats, Texas Democrats, starting to step up into these leadership positions and hopefully steering our party in a direction where we can fight effectively and actually win for working people all over this country.

1:13:42And I honestly think that's the discussion we need to be having. There's a temptation to find one person and say, that's the problem. Let's get rid of that. That senator or that minority leader and all of this will be solved. I don't think that's true. And I do think we've got to have a conversation about how the party as a whole at the national level has to change if we're going to transform this country so it works for regular people again. One thing that every Democrat, even some Republicans, even some people in the White House seemed to agree on coming out of last week's election is that life in America isn't affordable and the government needs to do something about it.

1:14:19What ideas do you have on this issue that you'd want to fight for if you get to Washington? Yeah, I do agree. That was the big lesson across all these different races, all these different kinds of candidates too. It's that affordability is the primary pain point for Americans and for Texans. So I've served for four terms in the state legislature, I've actually passed a lot of bills as a Democrat in a Republican dominated legislature. And a lot of those bills have been focused on bringing down costs. Obviously, grocery store prices are a real pain point for people, but I don't think we're talking enough about the structural aspects of our economy that prevent working class, middle class people from getting ahead.

1:15:02So the cost of housing, the cost of healthcare, the cost of childcare in Texas, I don't know what it is in the rest of the country, but in Texas, childcare is now more expensive than college. So for young working families with young kids, this is pricing them out of the American dream. And so I've passed bills to bring down costs in all of those areas. I want to do that at the federal level. There's even more that we could do in Washington to start to restructure the economy so that working people, middle-class people can finally build a life, build wealth for themselves and their families. Housing seems like one of the biggest costs that has been a pain point for people now for almost a decade, whether you're not able to buy a home, whether you can't afford your rent, young people thinking they're never going to be able to buy a home.

1:15:50Right. And they're not wrong. I mean, I saw a stat that 90 % of baby boomers went on to earn more money than their parents. For millennials like me, it's 50%. It's even lower for Gen Z. And owning your first home is such a key part of that dream. And there's kind of a sequence because if you can't buy a house, then it's hard to start a family, hard to have kids, hard to get rooted in a community, hard to build wealth. So these things build on each other. And if we're robbing young people from the ability to afford their first home, you're really locking them out of the American dream. And I don't think older generations is understand the damage and the harm that that's doing to young people all over this country.

1:16:30What have you guys been doing in Texas about that? Because I do know that it's easier to build homes in Texas than it is at least here in California. Yeah. Well, a few things. I actually just passed a bill a few months ago in the Texas legislature to allow for single stair housing. This is kind of wonky, but this is a form of housing, many times condos, that's very popular in other countries. But for some reason, And we have this outdated building code in Texas and a lot of other states that doesn't allow for these smaller housing units with just one staircase. It's usually the blame is put on fire safety, but all these other countries have figured out how to keep people safe and also build these smaller units.

1:17:13And so we just repealed that part of the code. And Democrats were excited because it was going to allow for more young people to afford a home, either whether they're renting or whether they're buying a condo. And then Republicans loved it because we were repealing regulations. And so it was kind of this match made in heaven where we had bipartisan buy-in on a housing bill in Texas. And then in the Austin area, in central Texas, we went through some dramatic zoning reform, which makes it easier to build housing in the urban core. And Austin is one of the few metro areas in the whole country that's seen rents decline in recent months.

1:17:49And so some of these solutions are right there in front of us. It's just going to require building the political will to actually get them done. So being from Texas, spending a lot of time in South Texas, you've seen both the successes and failures of our immigration system up close. Of the many injustices committed by the Trump administration, what has been most horrifying and enraging to me are the mass detentions and deportations and outright violence targeted at people who merely look like they might be immigrants or are peacefully protesting or are just bystanders. I also think that the one reason Trump was put in a position to do this is because of our collective failure as a country and as a party over decades to actually fix our immigration system.

1:18:34What did that failure look like to you in Texas during the Biden years? Yeah. And if you become a senator who's in a position to do something about it, what would you do? So I'm an eighth generation Texan. My family's been in the state since it was Mexico. In fact, my family's from South Texas. My mom grew up in Laredo right there on the Texas-Mexico border. I feel like Texans understand immigration better than other folks across the country, both its challenges and its benefits. What I've said is that our southern border should be like our front porch. There should be a giant welcome mat out front and there should be a lock on the door.

1:19:09You can do both of those things at the same time. Most people in this country, most people in Texas are pro-immigrant and pro-security. but they really feel like they've been failed by both parties because they've had one party, particularly in the Biden era, that was pro-immigrant and seemed to not be very concerned about security and seemed to have a high tolerance for chaos. I remember talking to my colleagues who served border communities, and they were talking about just the incredible toll that that policy on our southern border was taking on people in South Texas and all along the Texas-Mexico border.

1:19:45And it was unsafe, both for native-born Americans, but also for migrants and for immigrants. People also see from the Republican Party, folks who seem to be pro-security, but very anti-immigrant, right? Donald Trump is literally sending masked men in unmarked vehicles to kidnap people off our streets, tearing parents from their children, waiting in school pickup lines, lurking in hospital waiting rooms. I mean, so what I think what we need is finally a political party, and I hope it's ours, that can both welcome immigrants who are coming here to contribute, to live the American dream, to make us richer and stronger, and also keep folks out who mean to do us harm and ensure that there is an orderly process.

1:20:31I really believe the Democratic Party should be the anti-chaos party. We should be the ones trying to make government work for people. And immigration is a classic example where we have failed as a party. And if we hope to earn people's trust and their respect going forward, we've got to rethink how we approach this issue. So you've become something of a national figure because you've impressed a lot of people outside of Texas, a lot of Democrats, based on your ability to speak about faith and how it informs your politics. You went on Joe Rogan, something that not many Democrats have done. He tells you to run for president.

1:21:02Barack Obama says he's impressed with you. You've got a New York Times headline asking if you're the savior the Democrats have been waiting for. Meanwhile, you're just trying to win a Senate primary in Texas. Does all that national attention make it easier, harder? Like, how are you processing it all? Well, I already have a savior. And I think this is a problem in our politics where we hope that one candidate or one politician is going to fix all of our problems. And it's a terrible way to approach politics. One, because it robs you of agency, right? If you can put all your hopes and dreams into one person, then you don't have to do much.

1:21:36When in reality, I am one small part of a solution, but it's going to take all of us, whether we are candidates, whether we're podcasters, whether we are ordinary citizens, it's going to take all of us transforming this broken political system and making it work for all of us again. But I will say that I'm thankful we've got folks interested in Texas because Because Texas, I think, will flip in this upcoming election. And once we do that, both with the help of everyone in Texas and our honorary Texans in other states, it will fundamentally change the politics of this country forever. And so I think this is the most high stakes Senate race in the country.

1:22:17Not only does it hold the key for winning a Senate majority, but it does hold the key, I think, for saving this American experiment. And if we can figure out how to win in Texas, it'll mean that the Democratic Party has figured out how to win America. And I am so thankful and so proud to be part of that effort. And I'm really excited that people around the country want to help. Yeah, I think a lot of people had hope for Texas. And then over the last couple cycles, it seemed like it was slipping away. I think, look, people don't quite get the national election, like presidential election. The electorate's different than a midterm election.

1:22:55Beto came, what, within like two and a half. Yeah. Two and a half points, a couple hundred thousand votes. That's right. How are you looking at the strategy? I know you're in a primary right now, but everyone in Texas right now, obviously, you know, it's like I said, it's become tougher in presidential elections the last couple of cycles, but how are you looking at the state strategically on how to flip it this time around? Yeah. I think people are sleeping on Texas. I really do. When you zoom out over the last 15 years, competitive statewide elections have gotten more competitive. I remember when I was growing up in Texas, Republicans would win statewide elections by 25, 30 points.

1:23:29Now they consistently win by single digits. You mentioned Beto O 'Rourke coming within two and a half points in the last Trump midterm. We're about to have the second Trump midterm. Feels like we've been in the Trump era forever, right? My whole life. But this is only the second Trump midterm we've ever had. People also forget that in the next election in 2020, Joe Biden only lost Texas by five points. It feels like we've memory hold that stat. If Republicans were five points away from winning California, they would break the bank, right? They would go all in, right? They have that killer instinct that the Democratic Party doesn't always have.

1:24:03But I think it's going to require a couple things to win in 2026 in Texas. It's going to require a candidate who can inspire and energize people. That's what I'm trying to do all over the state. But it's also going to require a grassroots army to meet voters where they're at, whether it's on their phones or at their doors or on the phone or writing postcards. It's going to take thousands of Texans stepping up and doing their part to win the state and engaging with their neighbors who aren't with us yet, which is not always easy to do. but I am so excited that we've already had 8 ,000 Texans go to our website and sign up to volunteer.

1:24:45This is without us asking. These are just folks who are so fired up about winning Texas that they are taking the initiative to sign up, to knock doors and make phone calls and write postcards. And then some of them have already started their own volunteer meetups all over the state. In fact, something I'm really proud of is during this snap crisis where we have families in Texas going hungry. Our volunteer teams have taken it upon themselves to go to food banks all over the state. And they're organizing not just to win an election, but to serve people, which is, I mean, we forget that's what politics is supposed to be about.

1:25:18It's supposed to be about helping others and loving our neighbors. And I'm so thankful that we are building that team together. And I will just say, anybody who's listening, if they want to join, they can sign up at jamestalerico.com and join this volunteer army because it's going to take all of us to pull off this feat of winning Texas. So I worked for someone whose career in national politics began in a similar way, suddenly got like launched out of a rocket there, a national scene. And the strategy that opponents used against Obama once he was put on a pedestal was to knock him off the pedestal.

1:25:50Sure. Saying he's not what you think he is. Yeah, yeah. You're already getting some of this. There was an Axios story this week about you following back some women who followed on Instagram and happened to be OnlyFans models and escorts, even though you wouldn't really know that from their accounts. My reaction was, so who cares? Like, what's wrong with that? Of course, the intended suggestion is that this is somehow inconsistent with your Christian faith. From a campaign perspective, how have you thought about handling this and just this kind of stuff that's certainly coming? Well, I very much believe in fighting back when you feel like your neighbors are under attack.

1:26:32And we welcome the support of all Texans, regardless of how they make their money. And I didn't know what these women did on their own time, but I'm not going to judge them for it. I'm also not going to participate in an effort to smear them for clickbait. And that's exactly the kind of senator I'm going to be if I'm elected. And I will just tell you, I feel like Texans are not interested in this kind of media junk. They want a Senator who's going to bring down costs, who's going to clean up government, who's going to take on this broken political system. And I think they're going to see right through these media games.

1:27:06Yeah. And I didn't realize that your campaign was saying this, that it's like you go on Joe Rogan, uh, suddenly a whole bunch of new people know who you are. They then follow you on Instagram. You're a nice person. You follow them back and say, thanks. Well, it's not even that not being a nice person. It's, it's how new media works. Right. Yeah, exactly. You engage. Well, we, again, as a state rep in Texas, we have built one of the largest Instagram followings of any national Democrat. And we've done that by collaborating with big accounts and working with them to get our message out. And so we follow back all kinds of people.

1:27:38I mean, actors and musicians and athletes. I even follow back like a really popular bulldog, which I don't know much about. But you know what? They share our content and they're helping to get the message out. So I think this is also an example of how legacy media is just kind of clueless on what new media looks like and what it takes to win in this current environment. So you've talked about people wanting politics of love. Yeah. You've also talked about a few times in this conversation, people wanting Democrats to fight. Yes. What does fighting with love look like and sound like? Yeah. I feel like people think that these are two different things.

1:28:13I was born to a single mom who was working at a hotel in Austin. She met my birth father, a 21-year-old high school dropout who had a drinking problem. And that drinking problem sometimes led to violence. And one night he became abusive again. But that night, my mother's love rose to meet it. And she packed all our stuff into her little Ford Escort. She drove me to the hotel where she worked. She begged the manager to let us stay in one of the rooms until we found this little apartment in East Austin. And there wasn't room for a nursery. So I slept in a crib in her closet. And she was so proud of that closet.

1:28:53She decorated it with toys and pictures. No one was going to tell her it wasn't a nursery. And to me, that's what love looks like. It is sometimes confrontational. It is sometimes aggressive. It does whatever it takes to stand up for the vulnerable. And so this idea that love is passive or love is weak or love is neutral doesn't align with what I've seen in my own life. It also doesn't align with what my faith teaches me. I started off this campaign with the Bible story of Jesus flipping over the tables in the temple. Because we oftentimes, whether you're Christian or not, or whether you're religious or not, we all think of Jesus as this very gentle, nice guy, right?

1:29:33Which he certainly was. But when his neighbors were under attack, when there were powerful people picking on vulnerable people, he didn't stay in his room and pray. He walked into the seat of power and he flipped over the tables of injustice. To me, I started off the campaign with that story because it exemplifies what love demands of us in these moments. And it doesn't demand passivity. It demands action. It demands fighting back. And you can do that without dehumanizing your opponents. That is the critical line you can't cross over. In my faith, we're called to love our enemies. One, that acknowledges that you're going to have enemies, right?

1:30:09If you speak truth to power, if you stand up for vulnerable people, you're going to run into opposition. You're going to run into opponents. But we're also called to love those opponents too, which is so hard to do. Again, as a Democrat in the Texas legislature, I struggle with this. I'm not saying it's easy. But if we can get to that point where we're not just fighting for our neighbors, we're also fighting for our enemies, I think that's when you see true transformation. It's what I try to do. And it's what I want this campaign to be about too, is fighting back, but rooting that in a deep love for our neighbors, for our communities, and also for our enemies too.

1:30:43James, thanks for sitting down with me and good luck out there. It's exciting to hear what you're doing. I appreciate you. Thanks.

1:30:55That's our show for today. Thanks to James Tallarico for coming on. A longer, more extended interview with James Tallarico you can find on offline Saturday. So I did double duty. An excellent podcast. A must listen, I would say. Yeah, he came into the studio. We did a little bit for PSA and then we did a longer interview for offline and talked about his faith, talked about social media, algorithms, companies. We did all. We covered the whole landscape. So check it out. Love it. And Tommy and I will be back with a new show on Tuesday. But before then, we're going to have some more cuts from Crooked Con coming your way on Sunday.

1:31:30Dan's great panel on what the polling is telling us about next year's races. I went myself in person. It was the one panel I saw that I didn't moderate myself. Loved it. Great panel. Great, great, great group of guests for this panel. And you'll hear, well, also on that episode, you'll hear Alex Wagner's conversation with Governor Andy Beshear. So lots more CrookedCon content coming out on your feed. Check it out. Everyone have a great weekend. Bye everyone. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad-free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to crooked.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts.

1:32:05Also, please consider leaving us a review. That helps boost this episode and everything we do here at Crooked. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our producers are David Toledo, Emma Ilk Frank and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farrah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Reid Churlin is our executive editor. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Matt DeGroat is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant.

1:32:36Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Ben Hefcoat, Mia Kelman, Carol Pellaviv, David Tolles, and Ryan Young. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

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