1111: Trump's Arctic Humiliation

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30:33All right. The war at home isn't going much better for America. Minnesota is still under siege by thousands of armed federal agents who are terrorizing citizens and non-citizens alike. Police chiefs and law enforcement officials in Minnesota held a press conference Wednesday to say that ICE officers are racially profiling U.S. citizens, including their own off-duty police officers in Minnesota. One of whom ICE officers, they boxed in her car. They held her up at gunpoint, demanded to see her papers. And then when she began to film them, they knocked the phone out of her hand. then she let them know that she is a police officer.

31:17And what did the ICE agents do? Do you think they apologized? Do you think they say, oh, sorry, we didn't? No, they ran away because they are cowards and they don't identify themselves. So that's what happened. That was a group of police chiefs, law enforcement officials that held that press conference in Minnesota. Wild. There was also an AP story about an internal ICE memo that a whistleblower sent to the Senate that claims federal immigration officers now have the power to enter our homes without a judge's warrant, a memo that has reportedly been used to train the agency's newer agents. No more judicial warrants needed.

31:53Only what they're saying is administrative warrants, which are warrants signed by ICE agents, to enforce immigration enforcement. And now they can use those to barge into a home where they suspect that an undocumented immigrant may be. There's also the story we heard on Thursday of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who ICE detained while arresting his father and then shipped them both to a detention facility in Texas, despite another member of the five-year-old boy's household pleading, begging with ICE to let the boy stay in Minnesota, which, of course, they are supposed to do. Naturally, the White House dispatched its most empathetic senior official to Minneapolis, J.D.

32:37Vance, who held an event with ICE agents where he scolded all of us for not believing the government's lies. Let's listen. The local police chiefs have said their own off-duty officers, so police officers, are being targeted because they are a person of color and asked to show their papers. Is that a concern of the administration? Look, certainly is it a concern? Absolutely. The first thing we have to figure out is whether it happened or not. And then if it happened, whether there is a good explanation or a bad explanation. And of course, if somebody violated the law, if somebody racially profiled, if somebody violated the rights of one of our fellow citizens, that is something we will take very seriously.

33:15Nobody is talking about doing immigration enforcement without a warrant. We're talking about different types of warrants that exist in our system. We're never going to enter somebody's house without some kind of a warrant, unless, of course, somebody's firing on an officer or they have to do something in order to protect themselves. No, I didn't say, and I don't think any other official within the Trump administration said that officers who engaged in wrongdoing would enjoy immunity. That's absurd. And I'm a father of a five-year-old, actually, a five-year-old little boy. And I think to myself, oh my God, this is terrible.

33:45How did we arrest a five-year-old? Well, I do a little bit more follow-up research. So the story is that ICE detained a five-year-old. Well, what are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death? Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America? If the argument is that you can't arrest people who have violated our laws because they have children, then every single parent is going to be completely given immunity from ever being the subject of law enforcement. That doesn't make any sense. No one thinks that makes any sense. I mean, why aren't we congratulating the ICE agents from saving that five-year-old boy from the freezing cold and shipping him to Texas where it's much warmer and he can hang out in a detention facility as opposed to his school or his home in Minnesota?

34:34Come on. Are you people crazy? I was so someone so someone clearly told J.D. Vance after the the performance he put on following the shooting of Renee Good in the White House press briefing room that he was a little too hot coming out there and immediately calling her a domestic terrorist and yelling at everyone and acting like a maniac and so they probably told him you gotta you gotta cool it down take it down but you can still you know lie your ass off No one's going to check any of your stories. So I guess that's what he did. What did you make of the press conference? I would like to put a blood pressure monitor on myself while I watch J.D.

35:16Vance speak. Because maybe it's because I'm just so numb to Trump after all of these years. But I find J.D. Vance to be more infuriating to watch. Just the smugness, the high school debate champ energy he gets off when he does it. The lack of charisma, the whole thing is just so infuriating. And I guess what happened here is, I don't think this was necessarily about J.D. Vance feeling, not that he would ever feel bad about anything, because he seems to be largely soulless in a lot of ways, but just feeling political pressure for his performance in the briefing room. I think this is, remember, if you and I talked about it, you guys talked about it on a Tuesday podcast, but there's that Axios story about how the White House political team had reviewed the Rice numbers, and they were starting to feel that the chaos was hurting them.

36:18They might have to take a different approach. And you can sort of sense when Trump did his one-year press conference before heading to Davos that he tried to sand the edges down on the rhetoric. He tried to – I mean, I say try with all the air quotes humanly possible around like a modicum of empathy for what's happened there, for what happened to Renee Goode, all of those things. I think J.D. Vance was there to try to lower the temperature, but he just can't. Like he's infuriating in his presence and he's so just dishonest about everything. His whole thing is to take something totally unreasonable, totally ridiculous, and then just gaslight it into a place of reasonableness for anyone who does not have the two brain cells required to understand that what he's saying is bullshit.

37:06Just creating the false choice between detaining a five-year-old and shipping him to another state to keep him in a detention center or let him freeze to death. Those were not the two options on the table. this was not like they did not arrest the father in the tundra right so it's well this is also it's just like he he did not look into the story what he did because any of the any of the media outlets that wrote up the story and i read in the washington post you can read it anywhere else will have the family in there and the member and the people at the school that run the school and all the witnesses saying that someone in the boy's household was pleading with ICE to let them keep the boy.

37:50And instead what ICE did is they used the boy as bait to knock on the door and try to get other family members to come out to detain. And of course, they couldn't find any others to detain except for the father. And so there was no reason for ICE to keep the boy with the father when there were other members of the household that could stay with the boy. And now the boy is, no one knows where the boy, The boy's just in a detention facility in San Antonio. And we'll talk about this in a second, but the conditions in these detention centers, particularly the ones in Texas, are fucking horrific. And you can't tell me that they're going to be able to take care of a five-year-old.

38:23Imagine how scared he is. Imagine how scared this five-year-old is. And do you really think he's with his dad? Of course not. Who's been arrested and is going to be deported? Terrifying, first of all. It's just the lack of humanity from the people conducting the arrest. Like all of a sudden you find yourself like – you can see a world where you arrest someone. I'm sure this happens like outside of immigration for regular law enforcement. You arrest someone and you now have a minor child and it's like, what do you do with them? And there are plenty of options before you get to send them to a detention facility, right?

38:59And so like this – no one cared enough to try to find a solution or to let him stay with the – I'll say like JD's position. Yeah. The position that, uh, that everyone who doesn't like this position we're all taking is you must not arrest anyone with a child, particularly, especially in front of the child. That's it. The child is now a shield. Everyone can go commit crimes. And what the libs want is no one can be arrested with their child in their presence. That's what people are saying. Everything to its illogical conclusion. Like that is his rhetorical style. Well, and then there's just like straight up lying.

39:32So right before that, he said, Oh, I never said, whoever said that there was immunity for officials, for ICE agents. So here's J.D. Vance verbatim in the White House briefing room after Renee Good's murder. Quote, the precedent here is very simple. You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That's a federal issue. That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job. The unprecedented thing is the idea that a local official can actually prosecute a federal official with absolute immunity. I've never seen anything like that. It would get tossed out by a judge.

40:11So that's that. Then let's see the story about the law enforcement official, the off-duty police officer who was harassed and assaulted by ICE agents. He was like, yeah, obviously that would be a concern. And we didn't play that part of the clip. But right after that, he said, we have to figure out if the story's right. Because most of these stories over the last couple of weeks, these viral stories haven't been right, which is basically saying that all of the police chiefs in Minnesota and the local law enforcement officials who gave the press conference are fucking liars, just calling the law enforcement officers liars.

40:46And we're not going to get the ICE agent side of that story because those ICE agents, we don't know who they are because they ran away like cowards, probably with their faces masked. And then there's this broader point about the entire press conference, because the whole thing that is, I am here today because I think we can lower the chaos if we get more cooperation from state and local officials. Right. That's the problem is they are not cooperating. If they cooperate, then there would be less chaos. We'd go into fewer incorrect homes, et cetera. So the reporter's like, have you called Tim Walz?

41:17I know he's the governor of the state. Seems like somebody you'd want to speak to if you wanted additional cooperation from state officials. Like, no, I haven't called him. So he can call me. You can call me. Yeah. Oh, and maybe one reason why they may be hesitant to cooperate with you is because you've dispatched your Department of Justice to investigate them for fake crimes. I do think the biggest piece of news in all this is this ICE memo that the AP reported on that, you know, an internal whistleblower sent it to the Senate and then obviously leaked it to the Associated Press as well. And first of all, J.D.

41:50Vance's answer there was, what a fucking Yale Law School. What a fucking embarrassment. Not great for Yale Law School, no. I mean, Jesus Christ. What was he talking about? He got the whole thing wrong. Well, I don't know if he got it wrong. He intentionally used words that made it sound more reasonable to avoid getting at the actual crux of the issue, which is who is signing these quote-unquote warrants. who's signing the warrants but also like we would never we would never um we would never go into a home without a warrant it's like well yeah you would in fact like the the elderly man who you dragged out of his home in his underwear who's a u.s citizen who you thought was some criminal that it turns out has been in jail since 2024 which dhs would have known a case of mistaken an identity, they barged his door down.

42:49So they did. So they, I don't know if they had, if they had a warrant, it wasn't a judicial warrant. It wasn't signed by a judge. These administrative warrants can be signed by ICE officers. Yeah. I mean, that, that is the crux here. When he says, when JD Vance says warrant, he's not talking about warrant in the way in which we commonly think of it, which is a prosecutor and the police go to a judge. They present probable cause, the probable, the judge then signs a warrant saying, yes, you can go in and find this person, arrest this person, search the premises, whatever, which is how it is laid out in the Constitution, right?

43:25These are your Fourth Amendment rights. These are warrants, essentially arrest warrants, signed by immigration officers to be enforced by other immigration department officers. And so the reason why the courts have generally said that these warrants cannot work is that the courts are supposed to be a check on the executive branch. The executive branch cannot give itself authority to execute executive branch functions, which is really interesting in this memo because the memo says they can do this everywhere other than one district in Central California because there's already been a court decision in Central California in a case called Kidd v.

44:04Mayorkas, which said you cannot do that there. Also, even these administrative warrants that ICE officers sign do not allow them to go into people's homes. Right. It's just simply saying, we are asserting this person is in this country illegally. You can go pick them up. And they are then trying to take that one step further to say that you can, because we signed that, then that is the equivalent of a judicial warrant to go into someone's home, which it is not. No court has ever said that. And presumably no court ever would. And here's why this is dangerous for every single American. So ICE comes to your home, knock on the door.

44:38You're like, ICE is outside. I'm a U.S. citizen. I'm not fucking answering that door. Now ICE raids your home, busts the door down, comes in your home, searches, takes you away. And you're like, well, how can they do that? Well, they have an administrative warrant that they signed themselves that says they thought that an undocumented immigrant who was wanted for a crime happened to be in your home. What's your proof of that? We don't care. We just, we signed our administrative warrant ourself. Yeah. The point is it can be your home. Is it the government? Like all the don't tread on me people is the government is just giving itself the power to go in anyone's home whenever it wants for any reason.

45:20And again, you might think like, well, Well, that's I mean, they're doing that now because they're trying to find undocumented immigrants. Well, yeah. But what is going to stop them from doing this to any American that they want to? And then if they do that, what do you do about it? Can you hold the ICE officer accountable? Well, no, because apparently they have immunity as well. Yeah. Do we think the Department of Justice is going to hold them accountable? The Department of Justice that decided ahead of any investigation that Renee Good is a domestic terrorist? I mean, we're just, you know, I don't like to alarm people, but we're in fucking lawless territory here.

45:56That's alarming. Just because it's only happening in these cases that we're hearing about in Minnesota doesn't mean it can't expand to the rest of the country until the fucking Supreme Court gets off his ass and actually rules on this. Which, who knows how long we'll wait for that. Also, I was talking about these conditions in these detention centers in Texas where the five-year-old is being held. Horrifying. I don't know if you saw the story about the Cuban migrant who died in the El Paso facility, which I have seen from reports is even worse. DHS, liars, had said that he died by suicide. Then the El Paso medical examiner does an autopsy and confirms that it was a homicide, which lines up with what his family heard from witnesses who said that they saw the guards strangle him to death.

46:50And then DHS, after those witnesses said that, DHS tried to deport them. The Washington Post also reported that five other people aside from this Cuban immigrant have already died in immigration detention the first two weeks of the year. including a 36-year-old man at the same facility who was swept up in the Minnesota raids. We haven't talked about the detention facilities in a while because I think we've rightly been so focused on like ice rampaging through the communities. Everyone should check out Runaway Country, Alex Wagner's podcast, because she digs into the detention centers this week.

47:24It's a really great episode. But they are, especially the ones in Texas, just fucking rotten food, rampant disease, very little medical care, very little access to medical care for people. And they're just leaving people there. You can't get phone calls. You don't know where you're going. They're just leaving people there to rot. I mean, the fundamental belief from the people responsible for these policies is that undocumented immigrants are less than human, which is why their rights don't matter, their deeds and deeds matter, and their lives don't matter to them. Undocumented. And now, people who are here legally.

48:05And frankly, anyone who doesn't look like them. Right. Or anyone who doesn't look like them. Or anyone who— Agree with them. Yeah. That's what happened to Renee Good. Yeah. Right? It is, you don't look like us, you don't think like us, you dare to question us, you dare to try to protest, you dare to try to criticize us, we will fuck with you and we can do whatever we want. That is what they're doing. You can call it whatever you want, you can debate the term, you can debate the historical parallels, whatever. This is what's happening. so you know the uh the other part of the administration's counter-offensive uh is to uh now to try to distract people with the story of the anti-ice protesters who interrupted a service at a church in saint paul um where one of the clergy is also the leader of the local ice field office so on thursday morning all the trump mega media stars inside and outside of the administration took to social media to tout three arrests in the case, as if they had just caught bin Laden.

49:11Apparently, they also tried to bring charges against independent journalist Don Lemon, who accompanied the protesters into the church and was interviewing them. Also, by the way, Don was interviewing the church officials. But the judge wouldn't sign off on the warrant to charge Don Lemon. That apparently, according to Politico, enraged Pam Bondi that they couldn't grab Don Lemon, sweep him up in this set of arrests. As they announced the arrest, Kristi Noem called the protest, quote, the St. Paul Church riots. And Bondi called it a coordinated attack and wrote in all caps, we do not tolerate attacks on places of worship.

49:52Really, they just really wanted to arrest Don Lemon, huh? Well, you know, it's Hamid Dillon, who's in charge of the Civil Rights Division, went on Benny Johnson's podcast and basically promised to arrest Don Lemon. She was kind of goaded into it. And then Benny Johnson sent out the clip, was like, you know, Trump DOJ to charge Don Lemon. And so they had to, as has been true of most of the policymaking of this administration, is Trump administration officials say something on a right-wing podcast, it then becomes policy. This is how they try to charge Don Lemon. I mean, you can argue that the entire occupation of Minneapolis flows from fucking Nick Shirley's YouTube video where he does this ridiculously fake investigation of Somali run daycare centers in Minnesota, pretending that there was fraud there, even though there's no evidence of that in any of the places that Nick Shirley showed, even though there was, you know, plenty of fraud that had been charged years ago in Minnesota.

50:48big fraud cases. I'm sure then the administration was like, oh shit, well, this kid's video is going viral about the fraud. We've already charged the fraud. In fact, the Biden administration charged the fraud. So now we got to come up with new fraud. But until then, why don't we just send a bunch of ICE agents to Minneapolis and see what they find? And here we are. This is exactly right. Because it is fair. It's a fair question to ask, where in all the cities in America, where the Trump administration could deploy 3 ,000 ICE troops, they pick Minneapolis. And it's because of the Somali community in Minneapolis, because in the right wing telling of this story, the focus is entirely on the Somali community.

51:26Trump is I mean, he has been almost explicit that Somali, you know, Somali people are less than human. And so they're there. It's basically it is this it's it's like a snake eating itself. Sorry, with the right wing medium. We're right back there again.

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54:38All of this is weighing heavily in the debate within the Democratic Party about whether to vote to fund DHS as part of the process of avoiding yet another government shutdown. We've talked about this before. The DHS bill did pass the House on Thursday afternoon with all but It's seven Democrats voting no. But then, of course, the real test is in the Senate where the bill heads now. And it seems like as of this recording this time, Democrats or at least all the Democrats haven't totally made up their minds. What do you think they should do? I don't know how you can in good conscience vote for additional funding for ICE without real restrictions.

55:19and that's not to say like we should be very clear that if the democrats in the senate were to filibuster this bill then it was not going to stop what ice is doing in minneapolis they will they continue they have money in their bank and they will continue to get money in their bank because as we said before and i think perhaps i did not say clearly enough last time is within the big beautiful bill or whatever you want to call it was a huge plus up in funding that is mandatory funding, it is immune from the yearly appropriation cycle. So even if the government is shut down, that money comes. Democrats cannot shut the government down.

55:57Most of the governments have already been funded, so this would only be DHS. I just don't know how you can do it. We can debate the politics of it, right, and whether they are good or bad or overstated or understated. But if I was a Senate Democrat, if I was in the House, I certainly would have voted no. if I was in the Senate, I would not vote for cloture on this bill. I would not let the Republicans bring it to the floor. Are there probably enough senators, the same ones who opened the government a couple months ago to do it? That may be the case, but if it was up to me, I would not do it. Yeah, I'd be a definite no.

56:32I mean, even last time we talked about this, we talked about, okay, say they can't get a DH funding bill done and it's just a continuing resolution, right? So it's just, you know, no one wanted to give DHS more money. And so we're just going to keep funding it at current levels. And do you vote yes or no on that, knowing that it does nothing, right? Because you shut the government down. ICE has all their money. They keep going. Chris Murphy, who's going to vote against it in the Senate, you know, he was like, he, you know, had a long tweet thread about this. The DHS budget, it gives them an additional $28 billion, this bill, in addition to all the money ICE got in the big, beautiful bill.

57:17To me, that makes it a fucking no-brainer. And if you shut the government down, I do think it is important, we should say, you shut the government down, ICE is still going to do what they're doing. They're not going to, it's not going to slow them down, which fucking sucks. And then somebody like Democrats are shutting the government down, it's like a whole thing. And like, do you win that fight politically i don't fucking know but i think it's a pretty clear message that like yeah you know why i voted no i voted no because i don't think ice which we're going to talk about the new york times poll has a 35 approval rating i don't think that fucking ice should get 28 and christy gnome should get 28 billion more dollars when everyone's health care premiums are going up and and and And costs are up and ICE is rampaging through communities, breaking the law, breaking down doors in violation of the Fourth Amendment, arresting people.

58:09Abso-fucking-lutely not. No. A couple, maybe last week or the week before, AOC was walking out of Congress. She was walking down the steps at night and she got asked about what was happening there. And she made the point, which I have not heard any other Democrat make, which is if you want to know why your health care costs are going up, why we don't have money to extend the affordable care tax credits. or all the other things you want is because all the money is going to what's happening in Minneapolis. That's where their priorities are. And I think that that is a powerful message because it is about priorities.

58:39Like this is where the focus is. This is what they are doing. They are not helping you. They are doing this. They are creating chaos in service of something that is indecent, cruel, and it's not making America any more secure. They're using your tax dollars to barge down the doors of your fellow Americans and like dragging them out into the street and sending five-year-olds to detention camps. Like what? We're paying for this. These people work for us. ICE works for us. Christine Ohm works for us. Well, theoretically, that's true. Right, but that's why you say like, no, I'm not gonna fucking fund that.

59:18I mean, just if we're being like as fair to the argument here of what would actually happen is. So here you're, you can vote for it. Right. Right. And it will pass. And most Democrats will certainly vote against it. The overwhelming majority will vote against it. Something like probably 85 % of them will vote against it. The question is, are we going to get the right numbers? So in that world where it gets stopped, probably it's pretty easy to come up with a continuing resolution which just says, you want additional money and certainty for the year. We want some guardrails. Chris Murphy listed a bunch.

59:51We talked about them last week. Masks, warrants, all these other things, really common sense things in the Constitution. We want those in writing. That's the deal. In the interim, why we negotiate that, let's just keep it at the exact level that was at last year continuing resolution. Republicans probably say no to that because they think the fight over a shutdown DHS is good for them. This is actually something they did in the run up to the 2002 midterms when the DHS was unable to be formed because of a dispute over a collective bargaining agreement for TSA agents and other DHS employees. And so you do end up in this situation.

1:00:23So like those are the outcomes. It's like not – like strategically it's not simple. You make the right point, which is the polling says – it's very clear, and it's particularly in the New York Times poll, that Democrats should not be afraid of being tough critics on ice or a fight over ice. We can debate whether that is the best issue to be talking about before the midterms, but it's not a bad issue. Yeah. And I look, I, you know, the government funding debate and the shutdown stuff, it drives me a little crazy because it part of what I think our side sometimes believes is that we have leverage and we don't have leverage because Republicans aren't going to change their behavior.

1:01:09and they have proven that. They have proven that this is the most important priority for them and they're going to find the money anywhere to keep doing it. So I don't think, you know, I think some of us even went into the healthcare shutdown thinking like, oh, maybe they'll change their mind and pass an extension of Obamacare subsidies. They did not. I don't think they would have if we kept the government shutdown. They're not now. They just don't want to do it. Certainly, at least they were considering it on ACA, at least in the last couple of weeks post shutdown. They would never back off on this.

1:01:38But the question is, this is a bigger issue now, but if we now have paramilitary squads rampaging through the country, and they're in Minneapolis now, they've been in other cities, it's not getting better, it's getting worse, it's not slowing down, it's speeding up, they're going to spend more of the money, they're going to hire more of these people. the people that they keep hiring are going to be worse, less qualified, crazier. They're giving them guns. They don't need warrants now is what they tell us. They can arrest whoever they want. They're shooting people without any kind of accountability whatsoever.

1:02:14They're going to be doing that. Then maybe you like you send a message. You say this is what we're like. The people of Minnesota, they are staging a or a lot of people in Minnesota, they're organizing a statewide pause in daily economic activity. So basically, they're trying to do a strike, one-day strike in Minnesota. They're not going to go to school. They're not going to work. At least a whole bunch of people are trying to do this. And by the way, you can check out on Vote Save America if you stand in solidarity with people in Minnesota. You can find a nonviolent event, protest event near you.

1:02:47You can call on Congress to rain in ICE. You can demand different corporations stand up to ICE, maybe have contracts with them. I do wonder if, and this is, it's politics, but it's a bit outside just, you know, electoral politics and congressional politics inside D.C., that it's time to sort of organize a much more nationwide response to what ICE is doing. that is because it's the midterms are nine months away. And, you know, we have three more years of the Trump administration. And at some point, when do you decide that, like, you know, we got to step up and get out to the streets and defend our neighbors here because they could be coming for any of us.

1:03:31So it's sort of like what I thought originally about the first shutdown, but it would be more that than some kind of strategy to assume that that our leverage would be used to kind of get the administration to get ICE to back down just by virtue of a little bit of shutdown. You're using it as an intentional moment, is what you're doing. Because you made this point, I want to say it again. There is almost no chance that they are going to agree to take the masks off because we shut down the agency, because they don't need the money in the short term. They don't need the money. Yeah. But it's time to maybe organize nationwide against ICE here.

1:04:05The other big focus on Capitol Hill Thursday Thursday was former special counsel Jack Smith's appearance in front of the House Judiciary Committee as part of their investigation into Smith's old investigations of Donald Trump. Both the criminal charges brought against the president related to January 6th and the criminal charges he faced over hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and refusing to give them back. Smith had already agreed to a deposition for the committee, but asked for an open hearing as well so that the country could hear him defend his actions. Here's some of what it sounded like.

1:04:35President Trump was charged because the evidence established that he willfully broke the law. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power. Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity. This is all a show. And Mr. Smith, you're just the latest act that they've brought in. Fault does not lie with Donald Trump. It lies with Yogananda Pittman and the U.S. Capitol leadership team. We know, we know they had the intelligence.

1:05:17That was Michael Fanone, one of the Capitol Police officers, saying, go fuck yourself. Good for him. What is this? We were like, Jack Smith's testifying? What's happening? How much does this matter? It's just this is going to go. I guess they're trying to investigate Jack Smith, the Congresses. Donald Trump was like responded by being like, you know, Pam Bondi should do something, of course. So this is a product of the effort to investigate the weaponization of government by the alleged weaponization of government by the Biden administration. They're looking at all sorts of things. I had the mispleasure of, I think that's a word, of listening to Jim Jordan's opening remarks this morning, very early in the morning.

1:06:05And it's insanity. It's like he talked about the Steele dossier, funny Wilson, Nathan Way, like it's all over the map. It's insane. It is like you have to be so embedded in right wing conspiracy theories. You know what's happening here. It is just so. like, I guess it's funny that they're having this hearing about the opposition of government at the same time that in the Trump's list of accomplishment a day for his first term, he includes weaponizing government in there and holding his political opponents accountable. Like they are doing it every single day and without any self-awareness, they're holding these hearings.

1:06:40All the other hearings and depositions have been taken privately. Jack Smith demanded his be done in public because all the people who worked for him have been fired from their jobs, the career prosecutors, FBI agents. So he wants to defend their work and have a moment. Watching it is just so surreal because it just, it takes you back to - It's a rerun from a few seasons ago. It is, but just, it takes you back to sitting in our homes during the pandemic on January 6th, just watching that horror scene take place. Takes you back to a couple of years later when when the January 6th committee hearings happened and all that incredibly compelling evidence and testimony and videos were released.

1:07:22And you were brought back to that day. These things that felt like moments that would forever change American politics, or at least the trajectory of Donald Trump's life, how we felt when and the reaction when Donald Trump was charged by, in the classified documents case, which isn't even brought up here, which is like the most obvious crime he committed, when he was charged in the January 6th case. And it's just this, it's all been just sort of whitewashed from, not from history, because I think it'll be in the history books, but from the political conversation, we've just, because Trump won reelection after having done all of these things, being indicted, having fomented the riot itself, and the Republicans have all decided that it's cool if someone sends a mob to murder you as long as that person's within your party.

1:08:10It's just, we've just like the sort of, it's just been all pushed to the side as if it doesn't matter anymore. And it's like kind of almost, it's surreal, but nice or important to maybe to hear, talk about that again, to be reminded that this was this giant fucking deal. That was this incredibly dark moment in history. And that even if we're not caring about it now, like over the course of time, if we were lucky enough to make it into the future, that it will be remembered for what it is, which is this very deeply dangerous, horrific thing that Donald Trump did. did i uh i saw that hank johnson democrat on the committee asked at one point um since the charges were dismissed without prejudice after trump won they asked smith uh could could he be charged again uh after he leaves office and you know smith didn't really take the bait but did say that they were dismissed without prejudice which means yes they can be charged again yeah i mean the problem in this is the president is the immunity ruling that's right but i mean it's Well, remember, the immunity ruling sort of lopped off a big part of the indictment, but some of it still remained.

1:09:16Like before Trump won, we still thought there was going to – remember, there was still going to be a case. And the Fulton County case could be brought back because that is a local case and not relevant to this. My thing is like, you know, good for Jack Smith. There's things he couldn't talk about based on sort of evidence. Like what I'm interested in someday is, you know, evidence that Jack Smith had that he was going to bring it to trial that we haven't heard yet. And, you know, same in the in the documents case, if Eileen Cannon ever. I mean, she won't. But if anyone can ever get that evidence, that would interest me.

1:09:49I think the Justice Department, that's one thing. It won't be the most important thing. But I hope that this is what imagine this Democratic president wins. our attorney general goes out, promises full disclosure of the Jack Smith files, brings in a bunch of content creators' influencers. Not us, because we wouldn't get invited. You don't know who the president's going to be. We might get invited. We might get invited this time. We get handed a binder and it's filled with all the stuff. It can happen. It'll be Brian. You might not be invited. I might be invited. You might get invited. Definitely not love it.

1:10:29maybe you and Tommy

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1:11:59All right, let's get to some good news. A New York Times Sienna poll dropped on Thursday morning. That's it. That's the good news. For me and you, it doesn't matter what's in it. It's just exciting. I have to say I've been having trouble sleeping this week and I had a late meeting last night and I didn't get home till late and I so I slept till I saw the clock and it was 4 15 a.m. for the first time and that to me was a win it wasn't it wasn't 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. and then I like grabbed my phone and I looked and I fucking saw the New York Times news alert on my phone which is the only news alert I get from the Times and it said like Times Siena poll and I was like oh boy Oh, we got a time, see, and a poll.

1:12:41And so I, of course, texted it to the group. And you know what the sad thing is? When you texted it, I was already reading it. Because I also woke up at 4 this morning. Then I opened our office Slack. And right before, you had already sent it to the office Slack. And all of our East Coast employees, like Reed, were like, how did you send that before me? It was 4 in the morning. You got to wake up earlier, Reed. I have to tell you that all the time. I'm telling you that for 20 years. Okay. Here are the top lines. and then we can dig into the details. Trump's approval rating is 40 % with 56 % disapproving.

1:13:1464 % of voters don't like how he's handling the cost of living. 58 % don't like how he's handling the economy. 58%, same number, don't like how he's handling immigration. 39 % don't like how he's handling our relationships with other countries. So, other countries, rest of the world, you know, only 39 % of us think that all that's going well. So, just so you all know. And only 32 % of voters think the country is better off than when Trump took office a year ago. 42 % of voters say he's on track to be one of the worst presidents in history. Only 19 % say he'll be one of the best. And that includes only 45 % of Republicans, which is interesting.

1:13:54Meanwhile, in the 2026 midterms, voters would favor a Democratic candidate over a Republican by five points, 48 % to 43%. Trump himself is not only aware of this poll. he has announced that he'll be adding it to his lawsuit against the New York Times and will demand to learn how the Times computed these fake results must preserve all records Nate Cohn he then added two more posts saying that fake polls are out of control and quote dangerous and that publishing polling he doesn't like should be a crime are you worried that he might come for Polar Coaster with Dan Pfeiffer or the message box perhaps maybe the message box I can see that Polar Coaster, he wouldn't dare touch Caroline Rustin, so it's fine.

1:14:37He's not behind the paywall anyway. But you should be, if you want to listen to Polar Coaster, the one pod that Trump doesn't want you to hear, Polar Coaster. Support independent. He's too scared to sue. Polar Coaster. Support independent progressive media. Sign up to be a friends of the pod. Crooked.com slash friends. How is that for an organic push? Elijah is just, he is, he's swelling with pride right now. Okay. What are your thoughts on the poll? I have not had time to read your message box yet on the poll. So this is just fresh for me. Let me give you the most important top line from this, which is Donald Trump's 2024 winning coalition that included obviously his MAGA base and core Republican voters, but also Latinos, working class men of color, and young voters, particularly young men, has collapsed.

1:15:26And his coalition right now in this poll looks almost exactly like his coalition. in 2020 when he lost the election. All the people that he, like what it looks like right now, and this is one poll, it's the best poll, but it is one poll. But it's also, it is consistent with the narrative of all the other polls we've seen over the last year, is the 2024 election was not a realignment. It was more likely to be an aberration born of the lethal combination of inflation plus Joe Biden's age. Those two things led us there. And so what that means for the midterms, which is really interesting, is now the lesser engaged voters who are targets for Democrats again.

1:16:12The way this poll looks is higher turnout would benefit Democrats. We are actually winning people on the generic ballot. We are crushing the generic ballot with Latinos, younger voters, non-college, non-white voters, independent voters. Among people who did not vote in 2024, Democrats are up by 15 points on the generic count. Wow. Wow. And so, and this is because, and the second part of this is, like you read this, Trump is underwater on every single issue except border security, where he has a net approval of three, I think. Just hugely underwater, everything. Economy, immigration, you went through all these things.

1:16:52But, and I think they all add up. You know, ICE, Greenland, all these things add up to this level of sort of chaos and dysfunction and distraction that is driving Trump down. But the poll is pretty clear that the economy is the main reason that his coalition has collapsed. The voters who have left Trump are twice as likely to cite an economic issue as their top issue as the rest of the electorate. And so it's like, this is part of the explanation for 2024. We had a bunch of people who did not love Trump. They were very skeptical of him. They were very cost conscious. They were economically prioritized voters.

1:17:27They will and take a risk on him. He has now not only failed to lower the prices, he has raised their prices and they've started to look elsewhere. Now, the challenge for Democrats here is this is not redounded to the Democratic Party's benefit. You know, this poll actually is more Republican than you would expect. Republicans still have a registration advantage. So we have a lot of work to do. But the opportunity - What do you think that's all about? But because that was my one I have I had one other point that I liked and this is from Nate Cohn's analysis of it. One other point I liked and one other point that was like, which is, yeah, as you said, party identification, self-identified Democrats had outnumbered Republicans for decades before Republicans edged ahead in 2024.

1:18:07And now Republicans continue to lead by three points in today's poll about for party registration. I think that like they're pissed about Trump, but they're like, maybe we still want to be Republicans, but we just want. No, I think it's two things. One, we know from 2025 registration data that Republicans are still continuing to out-register Democrats, a trend which is the exact opposite of how it has been for many years up until the Biden years began. But the other thing is that these younger voters, these particularly 18, 29-year-olds, are much more likely to register as independents. And so the independent pool is bigger, but looking more Democratic right now than it did in 2024, which allows Republicans to have a registration advantage yet still trail.

1:18:52That makes sense. Because for a while, the independent pool – yeah. So in 2024, the independent pool was looking a little more right-leaning. Yes. And this often happens after – this is why when you win a first term, you almost always win independence. And even when you win re-election, you lose independence. And it's because who makes up an independent shifts. So a bunch of people who were independents who were like huge Obama supporters in 2008 just became Democrats the next time around. And so the independent pool moved a little more, right? It was not surprising. There was like the natural sort of shift within the pool that happens after election.

1:19:30And then there was the true trend that Gen Z voters are much less likely to register with a party than previous generations have been. One other point, and then we can stop on your point on the economy. You know, and Cohn says, Cohn, who's I'm sure awaiting a subpoena or knock on the door, lawsuit at least. So about half of the defectors from Trump, so people who voted for Trump in 2024, and then in this poll said, yeah, I voted for Trump in 2024. Now I'm going to vote for a Democrat. Half of them cited the economy as the reason. But the other half cited democracy, Mr. Trump himself, immigration, other things, which I think it sort of argues for the point that I haven't really articulated well, which is like economy is the number one issue, cost of living for sure.

1:20:19But it's not economy, cost of living at the expense of everything else. It should be prioritized over other things. But the people who go so extreme and say like, oh, it's just the economy, possibly you can't talk about anything else. Like that is clearly not right because some of the defections from Trump are coming – at least half the defections from Trump are coming from other issues. Well, even if it's right, it's impossible. It's just not a practical solution. You can decide all of our ads should be on the economy. You can make that decision. I probably wouldn't recommend that. But you could do that.

1:20:50I mean that's what Zoran did. You can't run it. you can't as a party you cannot exist in a world in which you don't talk about all the other things that are happening you only you only wait till there's an affordability moment right right right um all right well that's our show for today and uh just a reminder still tickets left for our um australia and new zealand shows but they are uh they're selling out fast dan very fast um it's the uh it's the hopefully just visiting tour who knows if it'll still be a joke uh but uh again We're in Auckland, New Zealand on February 11th. And then we're in Melbourne and Australia on February 13th.

1:21:28Brisbane on the 14th and Sydney on the 16th. Getting some good guests. We'd love to see you there. Head to crooked.com slash events and you can get your tickets before they're gone. That's our show for today. Dan's going to be back on Sunday with a conversation with our old friend, David Pluff. I mean, you know, I'm going to tune in. That's my, it's an audience of one here. It's just me for sure. I mean, we can just call you. I want to talk to Pluff. Yeah. and so everyone check that out and then we'll be back with a new episode for all of you on Tuesday. Tune in. 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.

1:22:10Also, 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 Illich Frank, and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farrah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Reid Cherlin 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.

1:22:40Thanks 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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