Skip to content
Trump Blasts "Third Rate Podcasts" episode artwork

Apr 10, 2026 1 hr 48 min

Trump Blasts "Third Rate Podcasts"

from Pod Save America Hosted by Pod Save America

The MAGA media revolt over Iran is in full swing and Trump posts a nearly 500-word screed declaring "I no longer care" — before attacking each critic in obsessive detail. Meanwhile, the ceasefire hangs by a thread as it becomes clear that Trump has no idea what's in it, calls to invoke the 25th Amendment grow louder, JD Vance heads to Islamabad to negotiate with the Iranians, and Melania Trump makes a baffling appearance to defend herself against Epstein allegations that no one was asking about. Then, former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel stops by to talk about Iran and his widely rumored ambitions for 2028. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.

Episode details come from the podcast's RSS feed.

Embed this episode

Ready to play

Trump Blasts "Third Rate Podcasts"

0:00 1:48:32
of matches

Transcript Auto-generated, may contain errors

Make-a-Wish Canada has been granting wishes for kids living with critical illnesses for over 40 years. Because we know, wishes are medicine. Ask your doctor if filling a Wish prescription for a Wish kid is right for you. Side effects may include thumb of parents of your favorite celebrity or royalty or Piet'll to solve your Makes. A royalty and date, the water park, helicopter ride, unicorn sightings, meeting your heroes, becoming a ship captain or pilot, fewer trips at ER and pre-tell outcomes, the strength to fight.

Eight out of 10 Wish kids said their wish gave them the strength to fight their critical illness. Wishes are medicine. Donate today. On election night, we will all be feeling a lot of feelings. Do not spend it alone. Spend it with me.

Alex Wagner for Crooked Media presents live election results. We're gonna have John Favreau, John Lovett, Tommy Vitor, Stacey Abrams, Dan Pfeiffer, Aaron Ryan, and many more special guests to be announced. And they're all gonna help us make sense of what's happening as the election results roll in. So here's what you need to do. Subscribe to PODS AVE America on YouTube and tune in on Tuesday, November 3rd at 9pm Eastern, 6pm Pacific for hot takes, catharsis, and as many results as we can possibly analyze.

On today's show, we'll talk about Trump trading genocidal threats for a chaotic ceasefire. It hasn't changed all that much in Iran. Fans heading to Pakistan for negotiations with an eye on his 2028 politics. The prominent MAGA stars calling for Trump's removal. Republican fears that they've already lost the midterms.

DNC drama over Israel and Melania Trump's bizarre attempt to distance herself from Jeffrey Epstein. What a day. Then, Rahm Emanuel sounds by the studio to talk with Tommy about Iran, Israel and his widely rumored presidential ambitions. Quite the showdown, quite the show. A quick reminder for all of you, please consider becoming a quick and media subscriber if you haven't already done so.

We don't want you to miss out on any of the great content we're putting out for our friends of the pod. Subscribers get our new extra episode of PODS AVE America called PODS AVE America, Only Friends. Tommy and I did it this week. It's great. Check it out.

Become a subscriber. We got other subscriber-only shows like Polar Coaster with the guy right here with me, Dan Feiffer. That's me. Virtually at least. Access to all of our excellent sub-stack newsletters like PODS AVE America, Open Tabs, add free episodes of all your favorite cricket pods, and you get to feel good about supporting one of the few independent, proudly, pro-democracy media outlets left in Trump's America.

So head to cricket.com and subscribe. Alright, let's get to the news. After a week where the president backed off his threat to eradicate an entire civilization based on a last-minute ceasefire agreement with Iran, we are basically back to where we were the last time you and I recorded a week ago. The Iranian regime is still in power, still controls the Strait of Hormuz, and still has its nuclear material. War is still raging in the Middle East between Israel and Lebanon.

Oil and gas prices are still high, and Trump is still declaring victory while simultaneously threatening more war. One of his latest posts says that our military is, quote, looking forward actually to its next conquest. And in the same post, said that if Iran doesn't agree to all his demands, quote, then the shootin starts, for some reason shootin starts is in quotes, bigger and better and stronger than anyone has ever seen before. And Dan, while you might be mocking Trump's decision to pull us all back from the brink of catastrophe, like some silly resistance lib, the folks at Fox News know what's up. Democrats are already saying that this is taco.

Trump always chickens out. Let me give you another acronym, Nacho. Never avoids confronting hard obstacles. It's a nacho, Dan. It's a nacho.

Is it a taco or is it a nacho? No, don't answer that question. How would you assess Donald Trump's diplomatic prowess over the last week? I think the- Would you call it a quesadilla? A shimichanga?

An enchilada? Anything in the Taco Bell menu? Okay. Supreme Court Dita? Yes, Supreme Court Dita.

Of the public- Taco Bell in here, so I don't know if I can go ahead. Um, don't brag about it. It's a political. Oh yeah? That's not- It's a railing that's right at the beginning.

Yes, okay. Let's get into the actual questions here. It has not been a stellar 36 hours or so of diplomacy for Donald Trump, I would say. It really hasn't been a very good month. It hasn't been a good decade.

But I think the Iran war has brought to bear for the public, something that we always knew to be true. I think even some of Trump's supporters suspected to be true, but suppressed that, which is that Donald Trump is an erratic, capricious idiot who is so- and so far over his head that he cannot see straight. It's just- When you go through what is happening here, one day it is- we're winning, the next day we don't need the- the straight-of-form moves at all, then we're gonna blow up- we're gonna send Iran to the Stone Age, we're gonna blow up every bridge and power plant because we need the straight-of-form moves. He agrees to his ceasefire negotiation. He has no idea what's in it.

According to the reporting, he did not even know that he thought Lebanon was in it. Turns out it was- at least Israel thought it was not, or it wasn't originally, and then Bibi Netanyahu got on the- the red phone he has directly into the White House and had it taken out. There is- Make sense- Donald Trump probably has no idea where Lebanon is and couldn't point it out. Yeah, he has no- He has no idea. He's not steeped in the details.

He has no core policy ideas. He doesn't understand how the global oil market works. He doesn't understand what the straight-of-form moves is. He doesn't understand how- your Enrich Uranium matters or where it can be, or how it's used to be. He knows nothing.

And it is- it's sort of a miracle that Donald Trump has been president for five years now, and for most of that time, he's been able to dance through the raindropss of his own incompetence to avoid things like this. Like we always would say, strictly Trump's first term, he's gonna tweet us into a war, stumble as backwards into a war. Well, he did that. And he has no way of getting out of it. Yes, we can't check.

We're off the bus. Tweet it. Yeah, we stumbled our way into a once-in-a-generation pandemic. Miss Minh- That's the other example. It's two times- It's the two times- Power.

We're incited to violent riot in the capital. Look at that. Check. Yeah, he didn't have- he didn't have- lead us into a dumb war yet, so he's- Yeah, it's just for most of the time pandemic and this war side, for most of the time, Trump's first term. His incompetence didn't end up mattering that much.

He was- he got very lucky. There weren't a lot of crisis. He's the ones he got into. He was able to- he stumbled in terms of a lot of them quickly. Now he's someone who's something he cannot get out of, and he is just truly the worst person to try to lead us out of this.

Also, the times had a sort of a TikTok of the 36 hours when the ceasefire came together. And it was interesting because- and I think this was reported at the time. But when Donald Trump posted his genocidal threat that a civilization will die tonight, the negotiations had apparently been going somewhat well. And then when he posted that, the Iranians became so enraged that they broke off the negotiations and the Pakistanis and then ultimately China had to try to put it all back together last minute to get a deal, which Donald Trump wanted because Donald Trump was looking for an exit ramp because he knew the war was unpopular.

So what he thought was going to get a deal by making a genocidal threat actually almost tanks the entire thing. I am shocked to find out that a threat of genocide did not improve diplomatic prospects. Yeah, so in that story, it's also funny that story is 36 hours because the times most famous travel feature is 36 hours in Paris, 36 hours in New York. And so when you Google, Donald Trump, 36 hours around, you get some strange results. But in there, it's kind of the opening anecdote is Trump is sitting at his desk as the clock is ticking down to his APM genocide deadline.

And he's looking at pictures and video of Iranian civilians surrounding the bridges and power plants that Trump has promised to bomb. And his basic response seems to be, well, that'll be Iran's fault. Yeah. If I have to bomb them and they die. And he was like in a bunch of meetings about other topics, just like bragging about how many bridges and power plants he was ready to bomb that night and destroy.

There had been some reporting too, and I couldn't tell if it was like a negotiating tactic or not, may have been. But that said that of all his advisors, Donald Trump has been the most bloodthirsty of any of them. He's been like the biggest warmonger, which is not something that's going to make me sleep well at night, Dan. So there he also right before we recorded, he was like, I hear that Iran might be charging now on the Strait of Hormuz. They better not be.

And it's like, that's been reported for days now. That was like, again, but part of the agreement was that the IRGC was going to run the street. So what did you think was going to happen? And then someone asked you about it yesterday and you said, we might charge tolls as well. You also talked about in a post how it's a great day for world peace after the ceasefire agreement and now everyone's going to make money.

It's going to be the golden age in the Middle East. Like what? He has no idea what the fuck's going on, clearly. Wait, yes, you were correct, John. He has no idea what the fuck's going on.

Wait until he finds out that one of the ways in which the IRGC is accepting payment is in cryptocurrency and one of the acceptable methods is the world that be financial USD1 stablecoin. Wait, is that part true, the second part? I know that that has been reported. That has actually been reported. I cannot verify that to be the case, but I think it has to be in stablecoins and that is a stablecoin.

Amazing, amazing. So there's been a lot of stellar reporting in the last week about what's been happening in the White House during this war since we can't trust the public comments of anyone who works in the White House. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan had quite a detailed story about the situation from deliberations that led to war, which apparently included an in-person presentation by Beebe Netanyahu. What'd you make of that piece? Like the diplomacy piece, just a wild exposé of incompetence.

It seems very clear that Trump was persuaded to go to war by Beebe Netanyahu. It seems that Trump gave it very little thought as to what would happen next. He took the word of Beebe Netanyahu according to this report and the Israeli intelligence service. According to Beebe, he is in the sitroom and they've handed over the keys to the technology of the sitroom to the Israelis. And so on the screen is the Israeli military, the massage, had walked in through it and Trump apparently seemed dismissive of the concerns raised by General Dan Kenan and others on our side and took what the Israelis had to say as more accurate or more or better predictive.

And even though if he's Trump had half a brain, he knows that Beebe has been pushing for this war for decades. Right? And obviously it's not an unbiased presenter of information here. Yeah. What I got from that was, first of all, stunning that you had a head of state.

In the situation room, even an ally, like pressing for making the case for war in the situation room. I don't think that that has ever happened. I certainly don't remember it ever happening. That said, I also, you know, the pro-Israel folks will say, well, Donald Trump has agency and he made the decision himself and it wasn't necessarily just Beebe. And I think the piece bears that out for sure.

I think Beebe definitely made the case and definitely influenced him. But I think Donald Trump wanted to hear a pro-war case from Beebe Netanyahu. And I guess there was like, you know, there was four potential objectives for the war. And the piece says that first was decapitation killing the Ayatollah. Second was crippling Iran's capacity to project power in its neighbors.

Third was a popular uprising inside Iran. And fourth was regime change with a secular leader installed to govern the country. And basically the military, McCain, tells Trump, he thinks the military does have the capacity. He wasn't even saying he was for it. He said the military does have the capacity to do one and two killing the Ayatollah and crippling Iran's capacity to project power.

And then basically everyone in the room, except for what this was after Beebe Netanyahu left and he's really left. But all of his staff was like, all the rest of the senior officials in the White House were basically said that three and four, the popular uprising and installing a secular leader, were crazy. Ratcliffe, the CIA director, called it farcical. And then Rubio interjected. That means it's bullshit.

I assume because Trump didn't know what farcical meant. But even as General Kane said, he believes the military could achieve one and two, he also warned about the Strait of Hormuz and how it would be very difficult to reopen and how the Iranians could gain control of it, which has happened. Trump seemed to dismiss that because he thought, oh, the regime will have fallen by then. And warned about depleting munitions that we're going to use a lot of our weapons and defense weapons, offensive weapons by doing this. And Trump didn't seem to care about that.

And then there was even an anecdote in that story about Tucker Carlson, who had been calling Trump and warning him not to do this and pleading with him not to do this. He basically said he had a call with the president right before Trump said, go and Trump said to Carlson, I know you're worried about it, but it's going to be okay. And then Tucker said, well, how do you know? And Trump said, because it always is. I think there's a very, very telling anecdote.

Me too. Me too. Right. Trump assumed. Everything's going to go great.

Yeah. It always has for him. Right. Go bankrupt. Get rich again.

Right. And I think especially since he survived the assassination attempt, he does have this. He has a little bit of a little bit messiah complex here, where he thinks God has sent him to be president again. And he thinks it's, I think he saw Venezuela go off without a hitch for him at least. And he saw the in the 12-day war when they bombed Iran, that went off relatively easily without a hitch as well.

And so he just thought this would be the same. And he also sees it as a legacy item. He thinks, oh, well, no president's done this in 47 years. There's also a good piece in the Atlantic today. Jonathan Lemire wrote about how for Trump it's 1979 again.

And he stuck in the 80s and 1979. And in 1979, the popular political thing to say was, oh, Carter was too soft on Iran. And if he had just bombed Iran then, it would have been better. And because Trump's always frozen in time, he's still thinking that it's the 80s and that he's going to be the guy who couldn't do what presidents could try to do for 47 years and changed a theocracy in Iran. Yeah.

I think that's all right. He has a messiah complex. He also just has been this goes to sort of his idiocy is to not understand the difference between a handful of directed strikes at Iran as part of Midnight Hammer or sending in the Delta Force into Venezuela to abduct one person from launching a war with Iran in the Middle East with the Strait of Formals there. Like the not understand those differences is it's galling really like it's stunning to be that sort of ignorant of the whole thing. But he does all these things in the military.

They do what they're supposed to do every single time without flaw, without loss of life. And he just thought he could get away with it. It's still I think the 80s things a really interesting point because like it is his mentality about cities about crime about everything is that New York 1980s and the 1979 he sees that ended Carter's presidency the attempt to rescue the hostages the ability to rescue the hostages in the in the embassy. But it still is strange that he has picked regime change as legacy items. I know because because he also watched Iraq unfold and you know I mean he claims to be opposed to that now but what he was opposed to was when it all went south he wanted to be on the side of saying yeah this is bad and what a catastrophe and also oh you should have taken the oil.

His lesson in Iraq is like don't send in a whole bunch of ground troops and take the oil and so which I guess is why he hasn't sent in ground troops yet to Iran but who knows because the war continues. It's a very fragile ceasefire that has almost fallen apart numerous times it may yet fall apart by the time they get to Islam about this weekend. By the time you're listening to this on Friday, right right right because Israel is continues to just bomb the hell out of Lebanon in Beirut a densely populated urban area. Hundreds of civilians have died, women, children, medics and I guess finally Trump called Bibi and said like you've got to pursue some kind of diplomatic negotiations with the Lebanese government which had been trying to disarm Hezbollah before this latest war and had been also trying to negotiate since the Israel began bombing them have been trying to negotiate with the Israelis some kind of diplomatic solution because so many Lebanese who have nothing to do with Hezbollah are dying in this war and millions have been displaced.

So I guess Trump has got Bibi to agree to pursue some kind of diplomatic negotiations though Netanyahu also said there will be no ceasefire while negotiations go on and so and the Iranians are saying like absolutely not we don't want to negotiate if this is happening who knows if it'll stick with that or not but that's sort of where we are right now. It just it does show the weakness of Trump here which is Trump wants to start he wants this over. The thing preventing this from being over is Israel bombing Lebanon and he is unable to convince or force or use leverage on Netanyahu to get Israel to stop bombing Lebanon and Israel is going to keep on Lebanon because they want the war with Iran to keep going. They want the United States to keep bombing Iran so they're going to keep on Lebanon and we're just in this like it is a circular argument that Trump cannot figure out how to get out of because he does not have the guts the courage the strategic sense to figure out how to get Netanyahu to do the thing he wants even though that Israel is depending on the US for so much particularly in this moment.

And you know he also doesn't understand or maybe doesn't care like what Netanyahu's thought processes on this which is not dissimilar to his thought process in Gaza which is they're not just like taking out senior Hezbollah commanders they are taking out like mid-level Hezbollah you know operatives who are embedding themselves in civilian populations Israelis don't seem to care they're bombing the civilian populations anyway they are basically occupying southern Lebanon at this point and they may not and it doesn't seem like they want to give it up just like they are occupying Gaza and basically their view is we're just going to keep pushing the boundaries outward from Israel and we can keep calling them buffer zones but what they really are is just taking land and occupying more land thinking that somehow this is going to be enough to eradicate Hezbollah or Hamas or any of the other terrorist groups they think are threats and it's continues to be proven wrong over and over and over again and I wouldn't expect Trump to understand that but maybe someone in the government might.

So in the last few days Trump has turned his attention toward another sworn enemy of the United States NATO. The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House is considering a plan to punish NATO for not going along with Trump and Netanyahu's war by removing US troops from NATO countries. Trump has also been ranting about NATO posting quote, NATO wasn't there when we needed them and they won't be there if we need them again. Remember Greenland that big poorly run piece of ice okay. You would think all this might have made for an awkward meeting between Trump and NATO Secretary General Marc Ruta on Wednesday but not so according to Ruta.

Is the world safer today than it was before the war was started? Absolutely because and this is thanks to President Trump leadership. Do you still consider him daddy after yesterday? I was calling it my daddy but saying but of course daddy has also a special quotation and I now have to leave this to the spotlight. Dandy you still consider Trump daddy?

I don't really know how to answer that question. It's like a trap is what it seems like. That guy. Go ahead you defend Marc Ruta. As you did in our morning meeting.

I did. I mean when I was shocked by it was the language you just dismissed the importance of NATO to the global alliances. I mean here's the thing. Obviously Ruta has a strategy of a piece meant that is incredibly embarrassing. Yeah for him for NATO for those of us who even have to consume him it's embarrassing. I don't know how he sleeps tonight.

The problem for Ruta is NATO does not exist in the United States and they are staring on a face where we have Russian aggression headed towards the European continent and if the United States pulls out of NATO they lose the most important military part of NATO in the biggest threat to turn to Russia and so he like I don't applaud the way he's doing this. I'm embarrassed for him. I'm embarrassed for his family that this happens but he is trying to keep NATO together because like you love to just say fuck you and walk away but if he does that then NATO which is the thing he's in charge of collapses functionally at least. Even if Trump doesn't formally pull out of NATO which you know he would need to go to congress for anyway or who knows maybe in a true social post he'll do it. Maybe he doesn't do that. If you're Vladimir Putin and you have eyes on

potentially invading a NATO country do you really think the United States is going to come to the defense of NATO militarily or even otherwise if you go ahead and invade at this point probably not and that's the whole alliance right there. Yeah that's the whole point of NATO. Now Trump Trump seems to think in these post Trump seems to think NATO is like you because you're in NATO whatever one country wants to do in NATO and whatever wars they want to pursue and invasions and bombings they want to do then everyone else has to join too. When you're like come on we're NATO you got to help me. Yeah he thinks they're all part of the same gang and I can't go. He doesn't

realize it's a defensive alliance. Once again a basic principle learned in you know European history you know one-on-one or whatever else the Trump is this has eluded Trump till his 80s. Completely embarrassing. On election night we will all be feeling a lot of feelings. Do not spend it alone.

Spend it with me Alex Wagner for Crooked Media presents live election results. We're gonna have John Favreau, John Lovett, Tommy Bitor, Stacey Abrams, Dan Fyper, Aaron Ryan and many more special guests to be announced and they're all gonna help us make sense of what's happening as the election results roll in. So here's what you need to do. Subscribe to POD Save America on YouTube and tune in on Tuesday November 3rd at 9 p.m. Eastern 6 p.m. Pacific for hot takes catharsis and as many results

as we can possibly analyze. On election night we will all be feeling a lot of feelings. Do not spend it alone. Spend it with me Alex Wagner for Crooked Media presents live election results. We're gonna have John Favreau, John Lovett, Tommy Bitor, Stacey Abrams, Dan Fyper, Aaron Ryan and many more special guests to be announced and they're all gonna help us make sense of what's happening as the election results roll in. So here's what you need to do. Subscribe to POD Save

America on YouTube and tune in on Tuesday November 3rd at 9 p.m. Eastern 6 p.m. Pacific for hot takes, catharsis and as many results as we can possibly analyze. So if this ceasefire doesn't completely fall apart JD Vance is headed to Islamabad this weekend for negotiations with the Iranians so I hope they're ready to say thank you. Got a lot of they gotta be meeting JD Vance with a lot of thank yous or else he's gonna be very angry. Vance's team has seemingly been leaking to every reporter

who listened that the vice president has been the senior Trump official most opposed to the war in Iran. This comes up quite a bit in the times piece we talked about when the ceasefire came together this week. Vance happened to be out in the campaign trail in Hungary. That's one does. Yes one does.

holding a rally for the country's pro-Putin authoritarian incumbent Viktor Orban where he just as a nice touch accused of the Ukrainians of election interference. JD Vance accusing the Ukrainians of election interference as he a US official was in Hungary campaigning for the authoritarian incumbent in that country and apparently lacks self-awareness. Very normal but America's best hope for peace in the Middle East did make some time for Iran questions on the tarmac and Budapest. Here's how we handle it. I think the Iranians thought that the ceasefire included Lebanon and it just didn't we never made that promise we never indicated that was going to be the case. First of all he said that there

are a few points of disagreement before the negotiation. Well that must mean that there's a lot of points of agreement because there's a 15 point plan floating around there's a 10 point plan floating around if he's frustrated about three issues that actually means that there's a lot of agreement. That's point number one. Point number two to respond to each of those issues and I read it very closely. Let me just say this. I actually wonder how good he is at understanding English because there are

things that he said that frankly didn't make sense in some of the context of the negotiations that we've had. The second thing Gollybop said which again I found fascinating is he said we refuse to give up the right to enrichment and I thought to myself you know what my wife has the right to skydive but she doesn't jump out of an airplane because she and I have an agreement that she's not going to do that because I don't want my wife jumping out of an airplane. We don't really concern ourselves with what they claim they have the right to do we concern ourselves with what they actually do and I think the president's been very clear on the enrichment question our position on that has not changed. I'll tell you the my wife really came out of nowhere did not expect him to reference his wife jumping out of a plane but it really is interesting to see how jadie van's grapples with these foreign policy issues you can tell he's really giving it thought and definitely not sort of just making it up on the fly. He is such a pedantic obnoxious high school debater. Actually I

think I think the misunderstanding it couldn't be us I think the misunderstanding is you not speaking English very well does he think their translators don't exist? What does he think this is? He's like actually it really depends on what you mean by right. Like I have an idea I have a way to get out of this because I was really thinking about ush and skydiving. Like do they have an agreement that she won't skydive or they have a mutual non-skydiving pact? I was right I'd be like

yeah I'll sure I won't do it but if you want to jump out of a plane anytime. I'm sure she probably wants to jump out of almost any movie vehicle. I will fly you myself. So if Vance does get a primary challenge in 2028 how far do you think he'll go in trying to communicate that he was always against this war and will it work? Because they are out there someone from his camp if not Vance himself did some really come to the New York Times about him in that meeting they have to political before.

It's been quite a few places now that the Vance team has been out there just making sure everyone knows how opposed to the war he is in private. If you think Joe Biden was tough on Kamala Harris for trying to find areas of disagreement how do you think Donald Trump the guy who threatened to hang his last vice president is going to be in the course of the selection? Yeah I don't know I can't tell. I mean I think he will be a complete dick but like I do wonder if on some issues he'll give him a little give him a little way I don't know. I mean it would be funny and not funny something weird sad if he's darkly funny if he's more malleable than Joe Biden was on this crucial issue of electability. Here's the thing though. Sonny Hostin get the question ready you know.

I don't think we're going to see J.D. Vance on the view at any point. A couple things here. One J.D. Vance is not going to have a lot of success running in the Republican primary away from Trump.

Like the way these things typically work when a vice president is running to succeed a president a two-term president and we have two modern examples for J.D. Bush and Al Gore is there is a regime there's a continuity candidate and there's a change candidate and J.D. Vance by definition is the continuity candidate and the continuity candidate almost always wins like George J.D. Bush and Al Gore did because even if Trump is is unpopular fading out from the scene he still will remain very popular with Republican voters and popular enough that it would push J.D. Vance and so he's going to own everything Trump does and if he's his worst strategy which is the strategy I suspect he would do because he is all short-term and vicious and not a lot of long-term strategic thinking his worst strategy would be to try to diss himself from Trump because he's going to own everything Trump did. Right. Yeah he's going to be interesting it's going to be something that I

enjoy watching. Yeah it is because he's also a bad liar. Yes he loves to lie. I'm not saying it's not his passion but he's not very good at it because he's also not very charismatic and so I don't think he can pull it off that well and I know he thinks he's clever enough to sort of split the baby on this but he's not. Yeah the gap between how clever J.D. Vance thinks he is and how clever J.D. Vance actually

is. Yeah that's massive. The gap in the with the negotiations stand between the US and around right now and he just is so politically maladroit. He's just like a lumbering oath knocking things over his he works his way through this and so he's going you just always just when you always see the cards up his sleeve when he is talking and it's going to be if he is trying to do anything other than just like be Trump 3.0 or whatever it would be it's going to be so embarrassing and so easy to poke fun at. I honestly will consider unretiring from politics if J.D. Vance is the

nominee because that would be the most fun campaign to work on. You could have like actually just. I think we probably have more fun just just doing it from here you know we don't want some fucking lame candidate being like no that's to me I'm not candidate I am on the the may fund of J.D. Vance super pack size super pack okay like I think you can do to J.D. Vance with Republicans definitely did to Gore and just make him an absolute caricature of himself in such a good pack we don't need to join one of the us just that's perfect we'll just start one here okay all right we'll get on that relaunch it right here we have a plan so you guys and tears well I'm glad that the guy who you can always see the cards up his sleeve he's our man in Islam about for the good he's there to take the fall you think so I mean it's unclear exactly why I think one reason why he's there is no one the Iranians and all the other enolocters do not trust with often Kushner because they're complete dopes who and they think all the and then they think the people who aren't those two are like bloodthirsty warmongers and they do and I think you know with some legitimacy they think that J.D. Vance is the most opposed to this war and probably

it will be easier to talk to about potential peace or some diplomatic agreement than anyone else in the administration yeah I think that's probably true you know I think they probably trust it a little bit more very mistake so one thing's for sure Vance must clearly be aware that the outrage among maga elites who opposed this war has now reached a fever pitch I know we played a lot of these clips in the last month but they just keep getting better and better so here you go a whole civilization will die tonight never to be brought back again that is the definition of genocide how do we twenty-fifth minutes ask can he just behave like a normal human I mean honestly like the president I 3D chess shut up fucking shut up about that shit his negotiation tactic is to kill an entire country full of civilians men women and children an American president so that the Strait of Hormuz will be opened I it's just wrong the American people have to open their eyes and deal with reality and deal with truth and the truth is like you may have supported president

Trump for ten years like I did like you have but this is not the same man this is not the same man that we supported those people who are in direct contact with the president need to say no I'll resign I'll do whatever I can do legally to stop this because this is insane and giving what I'm not carrying it out figure out the codes on the football yourself Dan this is breaking we do have a response from the president to all this and I'm just going to read this presidential statement and it is lengthy so I will try to go quickly and my emphasis will be only where there are all capital letters so thank you thank you for your service I know why Tucker Carlson Megan Kelly Candace Owens and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years especially by the fact that they think it is wonderful for Iran the number one state sponsor of terror to have a nuclear weapon because they have one thing in common low IQs they're stupid people they know it their families know it and everyone else knows it too look at their past look at their record they don't have what it takes and they never did they've all been thrown off television lost their shows and aren't even invited on TV because nobody cares about them they're not jobs troublemakers and will say anything necessary for some free and cheap publicity now they think they got some clicks because they have third-rate podcasts

but nobody's talking about them and their views are the opposite of MAGA or I wouldn't have won the presidential election in a landslide MAGA agrees with me and just gave CNN a hundred percent approval rating of Trump not hand flailing fools like Tucker Carlson who couldn't even finish college he was a broken man when he got fired from Fox and he's never been the same perhaps he could see a good psychiatrist or Megan Kelly who nastily asked me the now famous only Rosie O'Donnell question or crazy Candace Owens who accuses the highly respected First Lady of France of being a man when she is not and will hopefully win lots of money in the ongoing lawsuit actually to me the First Lady of France is far more beautiful than Candace in fact it's not even close or bankrupt Alex Jones who says some of the dumbest things and lost his entire fortune as he should have for his horrendous attack on the families of the sandy hook shooting victims ridiculously claiming it was a hoax these so-called pundits are losers and they always will be now fake new CNN the flailing New York Times and all of the other radical left news organizations are hailing them and giving them positive press for the first time in their lives they're not MAGA they're losers they're just trying to latch onto MAGA as president I could get them on my side anytime I want to but when they call I don't return their calls because I'm too busy on world and country affairs and after a few times they go nasty just like Marjorie Traitor Brown but I no longer care about this stuff I only care about what's

doing right for our country MAGA is about winning and strength in not allowing around to have a nuclear weapon MAGA is about making America great again and these people have no idea how to do that but I do because the United States is now the hottest country anywhere in the world president Donald J Trump okay few things there first I want all the sources to know there's no editing John did that in one take flawlessly yeah I did I didn't practice it all it was very impressive also just a couple swerves in there the debunking just the when you read it it's all kind it begins you kind of know where it's going right they're losers or not on TV which the trump is the pinnacle of success is cable television third then we sort of into a vigorous defense of Regite Macron including a testament to her beauty then he is in the no penis camp yes then then he debunks Sandy Hook conspiracy theories which was nice and then we're back on the rabbit and also you know what he doesn't return their calls because he's too busy on world and country

affairs yes he's which is definitely does not care he definitely does not care there's nothing about that that's just caring he is not mad online not everyone knows he is not mad online I no longer care about that stuff like he does not long he doesn't care about it and that's why that's why he doesn't usually talk about it and that's why he can barely speak about it just fire it off a op-ed length post about this um so in addition to um uh those people getting under his skin uh there's also a great New York Times story about the most maga of maga fans on of all places truth social which is where that lovely speech I just read was first posted and apparently um there's all these people in truth social which is got to be all the people on truth social because I don't think there's any people on there in the first place but they're all posting that they're ashamed to have voted for trump that he's gone off the deep end etc etc I think like 50 percent of the replies to his Easter Sunday I'm gonna kill you all post whatever the fuck it was um were negative from like 20 percent were supporters something like that the New York Times analyzed like 40,000 truths

I'm just I'm hoping they use AI on that um what do you think about all this do you think uh you think it'll start showing up in polls of Republican voters because it hasn't already it is showing up in polls of Republican voters right I mean it is yeah like it's happening on the more so sorry yeah I mean Trump's approval rating among Republicans you know that round the same last year was low 90s high 80s which is kind of where he's always been now that's low 80s high 70s depending on what you look at it it's in the 70s and the PRI poll similar in the uh pupil what is notable is it's mostly from non-magical Republicans right he's providing a strong most of them that's very around war related he's getting 80 some percent of mag Republicans and polls of size 100 according to his fake carry-and-tune poll um among self-in-fying maga Republicans they run work easily almost even and he's like plus eight with non-mag Republicans and I think we tend to think of non-magical Republicans as like people just to the right of the board work that's not actually the case it could be people who are you know have pretty conservative views on some issues who supported Trump this time and didn't support him previously

who got in the process because of him they're just not they're just like probably less engaged Republicans but they're pretty conservative um and I bet the larger Taylor Greene would consider not a Republican at this point because maga doesn't negative is not we talked this forward it's not being your dear interest in philosophy it means you're a die-hard supporter of Trump and so people who are non-dired supporters of Trump can span the ideological spectrum within the Republican party um we do have a another another post from Trump around is doing a very poor job dishonorable some would say of allowing oil to go through the straight of four moves that is not the agreement we have president djt okay so we're doing this in real time things are going great it seems like um we talked about the tall one and now he's just it's like he's learning yeah he's just learning about things in real time and I guess he I guess it probably took him a while to draft uh the the post about Tucker and Megan Kelly so maybe he hasn't been paying much attention to the news yeah I mean so this is a great you know this as a former speechwriter is that you would go into your office and you just start writing you sometimes you got you got to turn the Wi-Fi offer in computer so that you can draft you got you can't be checking social media and so he finishes that he did say he's been very busy with world and country affairs

yes he came out of the world and country affairs meeting check the internet and like holy shit the straight is still closed it's like a course you take in college yes there is another thing about the Tucker Carlson Megan Kelly all these folks breaking up Trump is one it's a real problem for him politically for a couple reasons why like that has been his strength is he has had unanimous republican support among elected officials and maga media and now that we have these high profile people breaking from Trump that's just that is bad for him it's like it's lost his superpower and the other way to think of this is I think people tend to think that these are maga shows and the people who watch it are magga Trump Republicans and obviously the majority of them voted for Trump in like Trump but they are not fully maga this is not Fox this is not the Fox News audience right the Fox News audience are hardcore republicans of course of Trump mostly over the age of 70 the people who consume maga and kelly candace oh and sucker Carlson tend to be younger they tend to necessarily engage less in politics and what and but it's not also just not the audience of those shows every day people who know who matters it's that these clips are going viral everywhere

and so people who do not who may have voted for Trump to do not engage in politics they're seeing critique from in part you know like in group allies of Trump and that is very very damaging these are people these are trusted voices among a certain set of votes and now they are saying the same thing about trump they they're here on ponce in america and that is the worst possible place for donald trump today and trump aside because and you know we'll talk about them in terms in a second but like this is also going to like people who are cross pressured who might like a lot of things that trump has done don't like Iran or hearing all this criticism about him on Iran um like are these people gonna make sure they go out in the midterms and vote for republicans are these people gonna like sign up to join jd vances campaign when he announces in 2028 like it is doing damage far beyond trump what is happening right now and far beyond with the poll show right now yes um so a common thread with the alix jones tucker carlson line of critique is uh some conservative specifically calling for invoking the 25th amendments um which if you recall from earlier seasons of the trump show or the

spinoff series sleepy joe involves the uh involves involves the vice president and the cabinet deeming the president unfit to serve and removing him from office a lot of democrats have also called for invoking the 25th amendment and or impeaching trump i think it's of wednesday or at around 70 dems in the house and a handful of senators um you had a whole message box about why this isn't exactly a simple process or even a feasible one go ahead i love it organic message box plug so thank you for that um this one got me very exercised because like we've all sort of come the conclusion that trump deserves impeachment and removal but that is not a realistic way to get rid of him if the senate was not going to remove trump after he sent a mob of supporters to murder them it's hard to fathom the scenario in which they will so now people have started calling for the 25th amendment because the behavior that trump has exhibited really every day particularly in the last few weeks here particularly in these truths starting on easter is that of someone who really shouldn't is not mentally fit to be in office and so democrats are calling for it members of congress are calling for it is seeing a lot of this online and here's the problem with this is the 25th amendment is actually a more challenging to execute than impeachment removal by a large degree so first

it begins to be pointed out with the vice president a majority of the cabinet that includes p-tech seth or fk jr trump's personal defense attorney right now steve woodcoff's apparently member of the cabinet a majority of them have to send a letter to congress saying that trump is unfit if they do that jdvans becomes the acting president what happens then is trump gets a chance to tell congresses fit which you would obviously do then congress has 21 days to reconvene and then you need two thirds of the house and two thirds of the senate to vote to keep jdvans' acting president so it's like how is that going to happen that is not going to happen you get that little just getting a members of trump's cabinet of flunkies to say he's unfit and then getting two thirds of the house and the senate which is a higher bar than impeachment and here's my problem with this strategy is it puts the onus on the wrong people the people who are responsible for trump being able to act this way do execute this war act without any sort of accountability are republicans in congress the cabinet is never does not have to face the voters in a member republicans of congress do and so our focus

should be putting the blame for where we are on the people that we can vote out because the best way to range trump in is not to appeal to jdvans in the republican cabinet it's still like democratic congress and i think this is actually that and of rant i couldn't agree more i even like on impeachment like we're gonna get jdvans but first of all the idea that republicans come come this far and now they're gonna impeach don't trump when they uh when they took a fly around it after uh january six like it's just none of it's gonna happen i get that this is a stand-in for um why are democrats doing more more democrats should call for impeachment or 25th amendment we gotta do something we gotta do something just not how the system is set up right now and um the best way to uh you know end trump's presidency is to elect a democratic house in a democratic senate and elect a democratic president in 28 that's just the way it is right now and and on issues where you might be able to get just enough republicans to have a working majority in congress then maybe you can do stuff there but even then john trump has veto power like don't trump has tremendous power as president right now and he has that power mainly because the republican congress at least enough people in the republican congress most

of them 90 something percent of them go along with literally anything he tells them to do and and they need to be held accountable for that that's what the next election is for holding republican politicians accountable for never saying no to donald trump about anything the other my other beef with this is it's like a cheap stunt it is you're getting all these text messages or like sign our petition that trump should be to call the truth of the amendment is a way to get online engagement and raise grassroots dollars and when we treat our vote without telling people the true context of how this works there's a penalty for treating our voters like idiots time and time again it is one of those examples pushing this pushing democrat and look i'm all for pushing democrats to do things that they are too afraid to do a hundred percent have we have a long record of doing but like pushing democrats on this and like yelling about democrats like that is treating voters like some of the pushback you get from people is that you want to make the case that trump is unfit if you want to make the case trump is unfit you do it this way Donald trump is unfit for office i see it you see it and the republicans and congress see it the thing is they are afraid to do anything about it so if you want to reign in donald trump we have to get rid of the people who allow him to

act this way go to votecev america or even so the house somehow democrats today because they're all on recess first of all most democrats especially all the democratic leaders said it's crazy that we're on recess ill donald trump is threatening genocide um they congress should come back into session republicans are refused to bring congress back to session democrats have no power to do that but they called for it a bunch of them went to the capital today democrats and we're like all right we're going to try to force another vote on the war powers resolution republicans again blocked that that would be another thing that you know congress could do is to reign him in on the war itself and again republicans refuse to do that again like you just you can't make up the numbers right now like we just don't have we don't have the majorities right now if we have majorities and then we're not doing things with the majority then you should definitely blame democrats for sure and the one one and the one that we don't have the majority of for sure trumps cabinet yeah hence the problem yeah no kidding on election night we will all be feeling a lot of feelings do not spend it alone spend it with me alex wagner for crooked media presents live election results we're gonna have

john favro john love it tommy vtors stacey abraham stan piper erin ryan and many more special guests to be announced and they're all gonna help us make sense of what's happening as the election results a roll in so here's what you need to do subscribe to poth's ave america on youtube and tune in on tuesday november 3rd at 9 p.m. eastern six p.m pacific for hot takes catharsis and as many results as we can possibly analyze on election night we will all be feeling a lot of feelings do not spend it alone spend it with me alex wagner for crooked media presents live election results we're gonna have john favro john love it tommy vtors stacey abraham stan piper erin ryan and many more special guests to be announced and they're all gonna help us make sense of what's happening as the election results will roll in so here's what you need to do subscribe to poth's ave america on youtube and tune in on tuesday november 3rd at 9 p.m. eastern six p.m pacific for hot takes catharsis and as many results as we can possibly analyze all right here's some good news it seems like republicans who will be on the ballot

this november are starting to become as the white house likes to say pannekins i guess it's their version of bedwetters i don't know they're both kind of stupid but it's fine on wednesday political published a story with the headline we lose the midterms republicans worry around might have already cost them congress who the title of which quotes a source described as quote close to the white house it's not just the polling freaking them out earlier this week democrats notched another pair of huge over performances in two big elections the wisconsin supreme court will now have a five to liberal majority after chris taylor crushed her conservative opponent by 20 points which was a an over 20 point swing from kamala harris's 2024 performance in the state um a ten point over performance from the last time in 2025 that the liberal candidate won wisconsin supreme court election and down in georgia even though the republican candidate did win the special election to replace marjorie taylor green uh democrat chan harris beat kamala harris's performance in that district by 25 points the largest over performance in any special election by democrat since doug jones won the alabama senate seat way back a thousand years ago in 2017 um

what was your reaction to the elections this week great great i mean good great next all good no these are all small sample sizes but the margins in elections since the warren around started are better than the average so democratic performance both in 2025 and earlier in 26 yeah now we're getting into the 20s but we talked you and i talked about this a couple episodes ago and it was like teens high teens to low 20s now we're in 20s to mid 20s it was about i think it was 12 and a half points uh through early 26 and the last couple have been very impressive democratic supreme court seats in wisconsin we've run for in a row now which is a credit to the wisconsin party in the way they train democratic voters to understand the value of these um winning the wakasha mayor's race for democratic mayor for tears incredible the turnout in georgia but we're just seeing it all over the place which is democrats are fired up republicans are unenthused and swing voters are moving to democrats and you're seeing in wisconsin in small sample size again and in georgia you're seeing huge swings among hispanic voters and hispanic precincts like massive swings that's all very positive news i know i'm i'm trying not to um get too high on our own supply here but some of these results are just

it is it is it's the perfect storm of like all the things that go wrong for republicans with voters right which is that they in higher turnout elections they are losing because voters are switching people who voted republican or voting democrat and and then in other elections their the gop turned out as collapsing so you have republican voters either not showing up they're both not showing up and switching their vote and and in like deep red places blue blue places all over the place different all different types of districts the dark linings are the things to watch out or just be aware of is there are caps on how well democrats can do because the house map is so gerrymander we talked about this before there are only four republicans and districts that um the calleheris one i think there was something like 19 or 20 of them republicans and districts that uh hillard clinton won and we had seven of them in california alone in in 2018 so but the this environment is actually much better for democrats than 2018 was at this point um and like you can see there's a world in which a lot of seats that would otherwise be in play or in play i mean the cook political report moved the iowa governor's race to a toss-up today i know go rubs hand um and again and this is this matters a lot for the house which we were

talking about but it starts to get me thinking about the senate even more yeah this is this is this is really important this senate is in play with a margin like this it's like if it really is like 1213 you really have to nail it exactly because trump won a lot of these states that we need by 1112 nearly 13 points but we're we're in the game right now and that's something that seems impossible six months ago uh not to get ahead of ourselves but it doesn't seem like the 2028 democratic primary has already begun a bunch of potential candidates showed up to speak at l sharpdens national action network event in new york city this week uh in down in orlands the dnc spring meeting kicked off on thursday where one of the first headlines was about how a non-binding resolution criticizing apex influence was voted down while two other relevant uh resolutions were kicked to the something called the middle east working group uh dnc chair can martin explain that the apex resolution was merely shelved in favor of a quote blanket repudiation quote condemning the corrosive influence of all dark money in democratic primaries um which so then the idea is that that resolution included a pack among other organizations or other you know dark money organizations um this is all in the heels of new pew polling this week that shows roughly six in ten americans now have unfavorable views of israel including an all

time high of roughly eight in ten democrats which is up from 69 just last year and 53 in 2022 interesting detail on the on the dnc thing in a political story before the vote an anonymous dnc member said that they received direct calls from two quote presidential aspirants who would have to answer for the dnc's positions on israel and apac if they run now i read a couple times i'm still curious if those uh presidential candidates wanted the resolution to pass or not pass um but they called about it um what's your guess and how do you think this issue of israel plays out in the twenty twenty eight primary is i maybe one one on other side of the issue oh maybe yes or no but i just if you were thinking of running for president twenty eight and in april of twenty six you were calling dnc members about a resolution a non-binding dnc resolution you are focused on the wrong things also not for nothing but i'd like to hear a comment for why we need non-binding dnc resolutions uh it seems like it's the same reason for why we need questionnaires from interest groups

that presidential candidates feel that yeah it's just that at least that at least has in cause ourselves in trouble well that one at least you are has a purpose from the groups perspective which is to get the group perspective yes from the group perspective to get candidates to lay out a position on things because they're gonna make endorsements and so you want to you should have to answer questions when i get dressed we can go long on the on the roller groups i know you've got thoughts on it um we don't agree on all of them so it'll be fun to bait one day but um the here i don't even know this is a purpose for anyone the dnc or anyone else so it's a good question look i do think that when it comes time for the twenty twenty eight democratic platform we should also do that i know i know but at least there you can say yeah that's a different thing what is the party stance on israel party stance on any number of controversial issues and everyone can fight it is like what is the non-binding resolution of the dnc going to do right now it's going to give you political stories like that is that's its sole purpose is whether to be political sort political stories about it the other two resolutions by the way were um wrecking one recognizing a Palestinian state and the other conditioning military aid to israel and i think the middle east working group is a place where these resolutions are supposed to go die

yeah i think that's what you have you have you heard a lot about the middle east middle east working group at the end see no i i i assume that i mean this is it's like uh it's not an unclever solution to the problem of just like this is a place that we're not killing them you're not enacting them you're sending them to some other place right you're you're referring they're simply being referred uh building is building is dumb it's not across with the voters in the party you know it's well also the path to establishing a better democratic party policy on israel is not through the dnc committee process that is correct it is through the candidates who may be coming up with the position as opposed to calling the yes yes it's just a bizarre use of time and energy from that candidate uh or those two candidates and look it's hard you know you have eight and ten democratic voters who have enough people who have israel you have even fewer who trust net yahoo it is you have you know majority huge majority is who sympathies are with the palisidians as opposed over the israelis and gallop polling just there's been a dramatic shift on this issue among democrats since 2022 just massive i cannot imagine um the next democratic nominee um winning the primary um

with a position that says we should continue um giving the military and other aid to israel that we give right now no no one would run on that that wouldn't even be i feel like even conditioning aid at this point is the um like the moderate position that's that's i think i imagine that most of them will get to ending aid to israel i don't know i don't know i don't know i mean i think there's arguments we made right which is like we we should treat israel from a perspective of the taxpayer funding that we are providing the same way we treat any other ally any other country and i mean it's to me it's a question whether um it's a real alliance right now because i think that the government there is a authoritarian government which yeah we have one too uh but i think that the government there is is not one that i certainly want to support with my tax dollars um as they have what they did to gaza are still doing to gaza are doing what they are to the west bank or doing what they are to let it on right now um and so and it is a wealthy enough nation that they should be able to provide for their own uh defense and like i don't i think that to me and look these are treated as

like fringe lefty positions for some reason still but you know over 60 percent of americans support getting rid of all aid to israel um and you just saw that it's at 80 percent of democrats at this point you go to 18 to 49 year old democrats it's even higher 18 to 49 year old republicans it's like 57 60 percent i mean i think that people who really care about israel and who are much more pro israel should really think long and hard about why it is that they have lost the um the public battle over this the public opinion war over this so badly and why it has shifted so dramatically over the last couple years and the answer is not because of tick-tock i was just saying yes you know it's just not and it's it's at this point it's insulting um to tell people that and i think if you really care about israel then you need to think long and hard about like why this has happened and whether fighting so hard um to continue the u.s. relationship with israel as it is right now with the aid that we're giving it is really um worth what has happened to public opinion because of it one thing i'm confident of

is that this is going to be a point of great discussion during the democratic primary the a lot during the debates will be on this issue for sure it's going to come up in town halls and interviews i'll come up with interviews on this podcast and everywhere else so we're going to get to know how all the candidates feel about it i imagine that apac will through its super PACs uh try to influence the process in some way i'm quite confident that their desire to do so will be counterproductive to their aims in the canada support and it will backfire um as it did in illinois as we saw recently just one other thing that i think is just something people should flag in their head as they listen to the carstation on this is the way in which the dnc switched from uh not taking apac contributions to not taking any contributions from dark money groups is a rhetorical device a lot of democrats are using right now to not answer the apac question where they'll say well yeah i'm not gonna take it from anyone but without getting to the heart of the question about apac in the role that apac specifically plays you can ask that about other special interest groups and you should ai right we have these ai super PACs who are putting their thumb on the scale for some democrats and primaries use all the crypto super PACs come in and try to influence the illinois senate primary so

we should not talk about all those interest groups but people who do not want to take a specific don't want to specifically answer the apac question because they feel like it's fraught we'll then turn to this while while we shouldn't have any dark money in politics as opposed to dealing with this specific question and what i would say is don't avoid this question because it's fraught and that's good advice generally yes just you know and it's like if if if you don't know enough about it learn more about it and decide first you know always decide forget about the polls decide what you believe about this issue just as you should decide and have a real thoughtful response and ideas on you just mentioned artificial intelligence or any number of controversial issues that will be or non-controversial issues that will be debated in 2028 figure out what your position is figure out where you would go figure out how you would answer these questions that's the most important thing from like a what do you believe moral perspective but i should just say and we went through this in 2020 there are some positions that in a primary are argued about and democratic candidates worry because they're like oh well i'm pushed to the left in a primary and i'm taking these little lefty positions then i got to worry about what happens in general and this this whole issue about israel and apac this is not one of those issues because this is not only

like the views on israel are very clear within the democratic party is overwhelming we're talking 80 percent same with military aid to israel same with apac and it's also a like 60 percent issue in the general election so now if you genuinely care like just are very pro-israel then like you know don't take the position just because it's you're looking at the polls like you know go and fight position and say if you don't agree with me you don't agree with me but this is where i am and this is what i believe but like don't pretend no one should pretend this is some lefty issue that people are getting pushed on in the primaries they're just gonna then cause them trouble in general because that's just bullshit all right one last thing before we get to time these conversations with rama as we were getting ready for today's show we looked up at the tv and suddenly melania trump was making a statement at the white house um denying that she had any substantive relationship with jeffrey apstein let's take a listen i have never had any knowledge of apstein abuse of his victims i was not a participant was never on apstein's plane and never visited his private island my email

applied to mexwell cannot be catarized as anything more than casual correspondence several individuals and companies have been legally obligated to publicly apologize and retract their lives about me such as daily beast james carville and harper collins uk not harper collins uk you really you end was magical everyone in the office was like what the fuck is happening right now do you have any idea no one seems to i have maybe we'll get an answer between this an answer is coming recording this or we'll come between now and tomorrow but none of the reporters can have any idea why she did it what the context was some a lot of times you know there will be rumors going through dc or politics about a pending story that i've been i've been looking everywhere for everyone knows it's coming even if it hasn't been printed it has but everyone pops is coming and then you will see politicians do things and they make sense if you know that story is coming

this is not one of those times it doesn't seem like anyone knows what she is talking about or why she picked today to offer this out of context statement of protesting way too much about relationship with Epstein also apparently trump told cnn he knew that she'd be making a statement and then jackie almighty from ms now called him and he told her he um he had no idea she'd be making the statement and that's also what jackie hindrick from fox heard as well um that he had no idea so like there's conflicting reports of whether trumpet i did notice in um in one of the playbooks either in the morning or p.m at the bottom there was a new art post story before the announcement where an associate of melania trump said she'd be making a quote big announcement today that would quote spread internationally well congrats for people who don't know the email she was referencing um was in the Epstein files it was tickling maxwell she said dear g how are you nice story about je in new york mag you look great on the picture you look great on the picture as her words i know you were very busy flying all over the world how was pom beach i cannot wait to go down give me a call when

you're back in new york have a great time love melania that was from october of 2002 the new york magazine uh piece about jeffree Epstein she was referencing was the piece where her husband is quoted as saying he likes the girls really young so that's cool um i don't know man i don't know is that your advice you would have given melania trump as a white house communications director to randomly go out to the cameras on a thursday afternoon in the middle of a war in ron to just say hey i don't know what you're talking about i don't know jeffree Epstein bye yes i think that's the exact right thing to do to go out there and deny no questions i will take no questions about this i do not know jeffree Epstein yeah while i am while i have your time i just wanted to briefly deny involved in any illegality that you did not ask me about okay bye and and if you think that you can connect to me to jeffree just ask james carvel or harper colons how that went for them how harper collons you i will see you at the next premiere of melania yes just amazing she is a weird one okay when we come back from the break you will hear tommy's conversation with the former mayor ambassador and white house chief of staff rama manual on election night we will all be feeling a lot of feelings do not spend it alone

spend it with me alex wagner for crooked media presents live election results we're gonna have john favro john love it tommy be towards stacey abraham stan fight for erin ryan and many more special guests to be announced and they're all gonna help us make sense of what's happening as the election results a role in so here's what you need to do subscribe to podsave america on youtube and tune in on tuesday november 3rd at nine p.m. eastern six p.m pacific for hot takes catharsis and as many results as we can possibly analyze on election night we will all be feeling a lot of feelings do not spend it alone spend it with me alex wagner for crooked media presents live election results we're gonna have john favro john love it tommy be towards stacey abraham stan fight for erin ryan and many more special guests to be announced and they're all gonna help us make sense of what's happening as the election results a role in so here's what you need to do subscribe to podsave america on youtube and tune in on tuesday november 3rd at nine p.m. eastern six p.m pacific for hot takes catharsis and as many results as we can possibly analyze my guest today is a former member of congress

wadascheva staff mayor chicago ambassador sure seems like he's running for president in twenty eight raman manual great sega nice to see you tonight welcome to los angeles you have more of a casual l.a chic i see yeah like glauvall's only thing clean so let's rip it off your brothers about the off the bathe's closet too bad he's too big yeah yeah yeah just yeah we all saw the um shirtless photos of him and he won muskies and work out uh or the meds are working either way or both he's sh hell of a drug all right we're joking because we're breathing sigh of relief this week because our president decided not to go through with his threat uh to destroy the entire ronian civilization so that's nice that's what counts as a win the trump 2.0 era um but the debate over why the war started is raging have you had a chance to read maggie hayburn and john if it's wands long piece in york times okay so they report that on february 11th prime srinet nyahoo met with trump in the situation room the head of the massaged zooms in they make this part of the game yeah yeah um and they give this presentation about the case for war it includes a bunch of assumptions about how easy it'll be that are now catastrophically wrong um we're probably you could tell they were at the time but now we know they were um can you remember a foreign leader meeting with the president in

the sit room during your time is that weird yeah i think well two things i want to one thing about last week your i want to go back to these i was thinking about this more you have the president united states the president of the united states this is not a speech in which you do the arsenal democracy we're going to destroy civilization the persian civilization at the same time the vice president is in buddapas saying we're going to save the christian civilization and then you have a secretary of defense who's calling this a christian crusade what could go wrong when you have those kind of brain power working elison and i feel better i got that off my chest and the president tweeted uh you know we're saving it all off whatever right we're destroying which is which is the cry of a terrorist uh so we're both destroying and saving to one civilization and the other so nobody i'm thinking of both my clinton time six years an obama time i do not remember a single not only a single foreign leader in the situation anybody themselves or their staffs ever even given access to that room so or any one of those rooms or etc so i don't ever remember that happening

and i don't think it would ever happen is very weird so what happens in that room is also weird not only that they're in that room but what happens in that room so obviously trump decides to go to war he and he alone is responsible for his decision there is this debate and a ton of reporting out about the pressure campaign by nanyahuas with lobbying trump to go to war with ron um what is the appropriate way to talk about that in vervio um because i'm sure you've seen the folks i've seen who argue that it can veer into a conversation this is anti-semitic but it means entropes about israel controlling the united states or foreign policy like what's the right way to talk about it it's going to lead into that and also given what the secretary of state said six weeks ago it's only going to kind of layer that i think depending on how conversations go in his lama bahd you're going to go from that conversation to i think this president may scapegoat now you know i've both worked for uh president obama but i want to say this is the prime minister has been shopping this to four possibly five i can't remember clinton but bush president obama 43 president obama president trump 40 uh you know the first term president uh by everybody rejected

this and because when you look at it the equities versus the liabilities just in pan out right so i don't give the president united states who has agency here any pass but this will go into a very bad place and a very i think in the sense of the prime minister uh not made an argument to the president i don't absolve the president and anybody on his team but i also read the story the flip side of this timing which is also nobody in the uh president's administration they're all they don't have their hands on the blood they're all leaking on each other i was saying they opposed it yeah they opposed it uh you know this is all crap you know other words that they use to describe their position so everybody's trying to make sure that they were not seen at the scene of the crime and i'm sorry so i don't absolve any of them uh the prime minister said what he said to the president but this argument is going to given the context also in america and given the context of anti-israel or anti-israel is going to lead to a very bad place and i do think though and i will say this i i mean president obama was presented a similar plan that's how the olympic uh gained i think that was the term that was used for the cyber attacks uh iran's capacity nobody took kinetic the decision to go into the

deep end on the kinetic effort this president did and it's on him yeah no pass it certainly on him but it also just seems like self-evident based on this reporting based on what nen yahoo himself says when he back in his real work he's been there was a tape release in 2001 where he was kind of bragging about his ability to manipulate leaders in washington or move them i think was the term he used but it was like lobby them do politics well look i mean let's go back he runs for reelection with the message oh i think i'm getting the exact word i'm getting the sentiment right which is a leader at a different class that was the message and had pictures of him with Putin which is right in the term so that was actually what he campaigned on publicly so you don't have to kind of we don't have to be archaeologists or you know anthropologists here that's what he campaigned on that he could play at a level that nobody else played so it's in his own words yeah but again i you know only the president of the united states can order american servicemen women only president united states can order resources that are pulled out of the end of pacific pulled out of different theaters to that theater pulled fad weapons out of south korea pulled patriots that were supposed to go to ukraine only the commander in chief can do that and so you know the prime minister made his case doesn't mean you have

to buy it yeah exactly um tucker karlson's who you think is only the president can do tucker karlson is very worried about trump using a nuclear weapon in iran has that fear occurred to you and if you ask you talk a little bit about the process and how that actually works and how you i don't i i don't i don't leave look i mean it's a theoretical discussion and we're hypothetical i don't think the president united states um would do that and while i have zero confidence in the people around him and i mean that from the cabinet to the white house i actually think they would hit the pause button even they would find some nerve of character to step up and say what they didn't do here meaning here being the lead into the iran war they would know that this this would have to be stopped for some way the pause button would mean convincing him though yes there's no like you can't take the nuclear button and throw into the ocean so we can press it right no no technical there's no way look head of the joint chiefs there's the rest of the military i think there would be a meh i'm just betting on human character there'd be a massive pushback on this i don't know what got tucker karlson it's not like a horse whisperer or the great whisper to

donald trump to say that but this would be uh well i don't mean this cavalier so i want to be very clear you can definitely take the nobel piece prize off the table that's not happening so i don't mean to i said that is you this i don't believe that would happen okay i'm glad i just think there's a lot of other things that i think uh that are worth spending intellectual energy on to analyze what are the repercussions things that they never do even an impulsive person like this would not do that so um gd advanced the vice president is now going to pax dan to lead these talks on saturday he'll be joined by steve wickoff and jared kushner oh i'm so comforted i will jump son in law he's golf buddy is this just a real estate deal is this just real estate yeah so look i i'm not a big fan of um dumb and dumb eric cushioner and wickoff i think they're just like it's a very technical negotiation right the jcpo negotiation took 18 months that's how long it took to cut a nuclear deal the wishlist on the iranian side that they're demanding from the u.s is far more vast than that it's like get all your troops out of the billies of things of that nature disvanced getting involved give you any more confidence or hope that they can get some deal or maybe another ceasefire i was this is reading t-lays only in the sense that the iranians think he is uh was negative about the war if they believe

that they may be having a slightly better confidence to deal with him obviously any credibility and i believe zero for wickoff and kushner the idea that you had no experts said it's very clear from the u.k. who was in the room in janeva they didn't even know what they were being offered pre-the war from the iranians zero confidence so i have some sense that maybe vance will have a different level of respect it gives you somebody knew they can interact but remember they've been burned twice once in june this time in negotiations so they're going to come in with appropriately heavy heavy cynicism let me say one other thing which is and take a slightly different sense of vans one you can't unring this belt but you can say okay how do you kind of make lemonade out of this lemon that we've created that's a b as i the iranians went in we went into this war trying to degrade iran's nuclear capacity they discovered they had the nuclear option destroy hermose the other thing c iran's in 79 has wanted to get the united states out of the gulf and they become the persian empire again that is their task so how do you

kind of undo this not in some way my one view is on this on the short term on this right of her moves either all ships are out or no ships are out and you're going to cut off iranians money and china's energy everybody's out or nobody's out and it's easy to close something as to the iranians improvement then for us to try to open it so reverse the score second medium term the iranians want a fee i think we go to the internet at the u.n.s international maritime entity they run it there is a fee charge but it goes to iran by rain oman kawait everybody who got suffered in this not just iran and that much the dollars or the resources are split that way among all the countries and it's managed by the united nations maritime association third long-term use the arabam courts beyond what it is is a peace agreement that we're party to it now finances i would it finances a pipeline for kawait for the ua for barrein etc either to the gulf of oman or to the red sea so

there's alternative to the straight armos i would in addition say to anybody who's part of the arabam has zero tariffs and i'd also anybody in the arabam courts gets uh... front of the line on u.s military equipment he would double down on america being a trusted ally to our gulf partners but that to me short term medium term long term is the best way to navigate what is a big giant lemon yeah it's a it's a nightmare let me offer you i think might be some pushback to the plan sure you know if we i'm open to anything that's just my idea yeah if we join this is more sophisticated than the situation the first meeting between the prime minister and the president much more sophisticated and i think that's a better way to be a candidate if we jointly close the street or moves with the ronians would make a sort of a party to all the you know potential famine that could happen if no fertilizers no doubt about it but here's the other thing you're trying to they are their economy is devastated the only lifeline they have or uh... international the ivy they have rather is the what they're selling to china right we do know now you and i say here today china was a party to pushing iran to say yes right there are elements

like that then ruled okay we're gonna do that for the ceasefire so if you shut off we're trying to get into major energy you say it will be i'm not saying this is pretty no but we have never ever the united states of two hundred fifty years gone to war and allow the other country financial security where our allies suffer and i say enemies or opponents or whatever turn to one of those both iran and russia this is insane yeah and so you're literally keeping whatever prop you have iran and china people are trying to hurt you you're actually giving them economic benefit so to me yes it would be choppin is no perfect here right but we're gonna shut it we're not gonna shut it with you we're gonna shut you down you shut everybody else down we're shutting you down yeah at least i was a bling field i mean i was a word for leverage here right we mean we currently clearly run in such no i mean i think that's why talkers where do we get to nuclear option because there's no a conventional military way to open the straight up or moves from the air you can't bomb it open if they're laying mines or just firing off on this all i mean the other thing going forward we look at like trumps goals here like first of all the highly rich area is still sitting in iran doesn't sound like we're gonna get it back or get it out unless there's some deal cut to um

the big concern they clearly degraded iran's military they bombed the shit out of a lot of stuff um the other consideration was cutting off their support for proxy groups like hezballah hamas etc my concern is um if they are now able to charge this toll at the straight up or moves that is going to be a massive that cannot stand that will go back to rebuilding the military funding has a lot of funding all these proxy groups right i mean it's like again this is trumps problem he created it just seems like there was always an implied pressure that implied that iran could do this on the straight up but it's never was tested it's not been tested and they discovered look i got an 800 on my sa case okay they've never before did they and everybody believe this it was always an international order the second thing i mean i want to go to the class at the arm uh war college ukraine and iran have no navy and they've controlled the waterways i want to go to the class i want to study this i'm serious about that i think you know you know you know i've sat there but we have a doctrine to fight two wars on two fronts simultaneously capacity to do that we're gonna have to change the doctrine to be able to say we're gonna fight two wars one conventional

and one unconventional and we're not set up that way either our military our industrial base or the capacity both of these theaters i mean what's happened in the iran war and what's happened in ukraine russia's war on ukraine has taught us an exponential lesson that we are not ready for the unconventional asymmetric war and we better that's the second war now a march of 2025 a year ago i wrote a piece for the post which is don't ask for ukraine's minerals as for their drone technology that's where their experts act now not only did we not ask for it we rejected what they offered to help the president doesn't know friend from faux and we are now stuck where our golf allies are buying weapons from ukraine but we stiffed our them and they have no navy and they've destroyed the russian navy in the black sea you we can claim which appropriate we have destroyed the navy of iran but they control the straight arm of us no navies and they control waterways that tells you where the future is a lot of tactical victories and strategic losses there somebody said the other day i read this i can't remember who america's won every war every battle but has lost each war

sounds about right since world war two yeah for sure um let me shift gears so you've been criss crossing the country uh you did a recent stop in new hampshire you're still not ruling out a 2028 presidential run and more definitive answer today no but always exploring no okay i went there i went three places recently which is lacrosse wisconsin into uh franklin uh new hampshire and then i've been in spartanburg uh the corridor of shame in abbyville piedmont area of the black uh counties and then columbia and then charleston and if that was all about looking at community colleges and what uh both all three cities are doing which i think incredibly innovative things that we also did in chicago between community colleges but you know leading into the future economy but also linking up with high schools something that i think is the fundamental thing we have to flip the switch up in the top issues i assume are whether democrats should talk to left is twitch streamers is kind of like up here and it's like the economy and education let me well i won't go down there but i would just say that was a joke i understand that i'm just i always say i've done a town hall in lacrosse wisconsin and a podcast there let's not go get it in a met with ten teachers educators parents 10 kids up in franklin

i did a inmanchester of the ex-em politics thing i did a at wafford college uh kreg martin interviewed me there in front of the college we went to a community college i did 400 people in charleston nobody asked me about is not bigger nobody nobody asked me about how do they get ahead they asked me how they get an education now you know i'm the ticket to the middle class and getting ahead is through education and you know we live in a period where you earn what you learn nobody's asked me that question and i've had close to about 50 questions for people yeah it's you know the billionth reminder that the conversation in dc and the media sometimes does not show up with the country actually sometimes yeah i would say close to nine years not as a parallel university yeah it is it so you did a recent appearance on the view you said dc needs a power washing because of all the corruption uh you also wrote a wall street journal column uh talking about how democrats can use a majority use of the democrats to your clear of the gacha politics and excessive focus on trumpians slime is there a tension between those two things no so i appreciate this um maybe this is on me from not writing clear i think i wrote in that piece not i think i know there's a difference between corruption and him being untruthful

or a liar i go 100 i've said this as soon as i came back from uh japan 2024 december i said go after the corruption i built when i was chair of the g triple c the house that time delayed bill the corruption what's going on with the prediction markets what's going on with wickoffs kids lotnecks kids them and people and the presence kids 100 when one gnomes done at the dhs and the contracts they provided a hundred percent there is a difference between that corruption which matters to your wallet and our playing to type which is a retribution vindictive politics that then they say uh washington and they break the sound and they turn it on mute right when we should be turning to our agenda there is a two-sided here hit him on the corruption and offer a proactive agenda i actually think given where i've been not only the states i just talking about but other states washington does need a good power washing absolutely not just trading stocks in congress did you ever think you would ever see uh investor day in the oval office or yeah or bets on you know

invasions of the country or did you ever think a member of the court not just supreme court be taking gifts from people who have cases in front of them or trips okay so the whole place needs to be cleaned what does that reform agenda look like what do we like what do we propose i think one i would raise the minimum wage so that's number one two well over september twenty twenty five wrote august i wrote and i believe there should be a rate payer biller rights three i would do x on health care cost control specifically around the insurance companies gouging people breaking them up four i would do uh abandon on social media for kids under sixteen i've called for this before first on uh prediction markets no federal employee or their family can participate yeah i mean like reforming for washing so like you something like that banning calcium banning stock trading banning all that but also stocks companies that you've been in if you have an x of let's say your net value is north of jenniferhood number out million dollars has to go into blind trust that's true for all federal employees second not just a supreme court record you're not allowed to take gifts and be very specific on the ethics package that robert stinks he has but doesn't enforce make it codified and that's also

true for the president united states and family members and the cabinet now the other thing i said for and when you hit the age of 75 get pre tsa because you're out of here don't finish basta you're not hitting your prime at 78 i like that a lot um i'm trying to annoy you now so you bought some blind souls men's digital stocks when you're ambassador japan i know the american prospect wrote a piece criticizing the timing of one of those purchases because it came before a government announcement that they said could benefit the stock was that a mistake if you do differently if i did it is it's definitely a mistake i don't know what that is but definitely but you know i look i did a blind trust when i was chief staff when i was mayor when i was congressmen also did there when it is a massive so if anybody did it i have no i thought i was blind trust why doesn't everyone just do blind trust it seems that's what i just said i'll give you a funny stuff i guess to trade on inside i get elected congress and i'm gonna set up i'm getting on financial services set up a blind trust chairman oxley comes to see me says i don't want you to do this i said well i'm doing it because i'm a bare knuckle politician if something's gonna happen one day on a hearing that we're gonna do a financial service i don't know what they're gonna do so forget about it and i get i did it also normalizing to tell you did it when i was chief staff and i did it when i was mayor

a hundred percent it seems like a dope rainer i don't know why it's not law i mean i like wasn't david argue in 2007 i was a sponsor of legislation as related to exactly this which is stocks traded in front of committees in front of your committee you can't have be involved or investor or trade stocks in committees other interests that have any company that has interest in front of the committee it's insane yeah i mean i think this is an issue but it's all washington that's also includes the executive branch well yeah and i think this is an issue that kind of drives people crazy because like it's it's a no brainer of course members of congress or the president's family or cabinet shouldn't be buying and selling individual stocks everyone should put their stuff in the blind trust but it's in like the president united states will go before the state of the union and say that and say we're gonna pass legislation van der Waals time is getting talked about the executive branch and he didn't talk about the judiciary of course i guess what i'm getting at is he says that but then people are also well aware that you know Nancy Pelosi's husband has made a shitload of money trading individual stocks and there's a lot of people that track that index and feel like you know that's why the whole washington you can look there's no individual or no one of the three branches of government that you're gonna get without a

the only way to do it everybody do it for that um she's gonna ask you a couple more issues i think progressives will push you on if you do decide to run for design in twenty-two so you don't different than me pushing myself good so your mayor of chicago when a young man named mccwan mcdonald was shot sixteen times by a police officer your administration had a video of that uh of his killing for over a year until a court ordered it released you have to release it until the court order what do you say to people who are angry not just about you know the chicago pd killing this kid but also what they feel like was a cover up to a day in the calendar so there's not a day or week that goes by that i don't think about this what i could have done different number one okay young man lost his life innocently third is i thought i had a year earlier two years earlier fix the system and i acknowledged when i said it to this whole city spoke i thought i fix them and the problems were much deeper than i appreciated might have wanted to think i thought i fixed it when the gulf between the community and the police department and the culture in the

police department was much deeper and i said that's not me i have to fix this i own that now you know this chicago's not alone no cities alone given what's happened at police departments across the country and i did go about fixing it but as the inspector general said i've actually the problem is i followed the rules because of the last thing you want is a mayor involved in making a political decision when the fbi the what's a bro which is the police department's independent body everybody's investigating you don't want them mayor involving themselves then you say you're politicizing a criminal investigation the fbi was involved as u s attorneys was involved the states of drag there were four entities investigating so if you don't involve yourself as your part of covering up if you do involve you politicize an investigation into the prosecution in chicago the police officer actually was prosecuted and evicted that doesn't change anything that's on me i own it as you know one thing the difference between a legislator and somebody who's a mayor it's lessons learned going forward and so you have to make it you have to make changes i did it and in this process

kali his uncle who's a pastor on the west side lakuan he and i have become really good at self-exerts not a week that goes by that we don't talk or communicate in one way but did i screw up if you're looking for a person i'm not that guy if you're looking for a person that knows how to learn from mistakes 100 percent um another sort of big fight within the party has been generational i mean you said a minute ago you i think want to get your psa pre-check is getting out here at 78 right um 75 75 sorry so i love that i think we need a new generation i think what i first said you texted me and said great yeah i thought yeah but for you um i don't think that people in dc are internalizing your message right i mean there's this this fight is playing out most clearly in nane where it's really thumb and scale on behalf of former governor jennett mills um the grassroots seem to be behind grandplattner god knows who will win but you know this it doesn't seem like shumars concerned about the whole conversation we just had about joe biden's age um how do we fix that and what do you say to like you know young activists who you might need in iowa or namshor whatever who are like well look

you know that you worked in the clinton administration what is like what does the next generation look like right are we paying lip service to this or are we really so the way i look at it is a couple things uh one is there is a generational piece of that but as you know all your strengths are your weaknesses after dal trump i'm not sure who you can afford is a country on your job training i say joklyn but i'm serious you got to be good uh in the family room you better be good in the classroom you better know the boardroom the break room the situation room and not just the bathroom which is something we really get experts as a party now i always think also one piece of change with a party that's known as weak there's nothing as you know when it came to fighting the insurance companies get 10 million kids health care one person got that assignment when it came to making sure we got health care for people with pre-existing condition one person had to leave that effort when it came to making sure we took on the financial industry in the baking industry make new fundamental reform one person got that call to leave that effort and take on the gun lobby and nra nobody's ever gotten in the ring with me didn't walk out without a bloody nose or broken nose ask the republicans when they saw Nancy Pelosi become the first female speaker so i make no more and i will say this otherwise i don't need

another title yo i got i got 20 i got y'all saw you one for cheap i got 20,000 kids i got free community college because i was only to take on a failed system i got kids that used to have a 56 percent graduation rate and 84 percent of them now graduate high school with a degree in college credit and have a mandatory letter of acceptance from either college community college branch of the armed forces of vocational school 98 percent of our kids in chicago achieved that i have took on a bureaucracy where we didn't have to garner pre-k throughout the city and i made a republican finally increased the funding to the city of chicago which had been every mayor's desire got something done that i had before do i take on failure damn right because i'm a lucky guy i had grew up in a family that an immigrant family that had love and education the question is are you willing to sit there and husband your political capital or spend it and take it on so nobody who's walked in the arena with me did not walk out without without having a broken nose more than willing to say that and if you want just generational change i'm not you want somebody that will take on a fight and win that's a different bet that bitch last question for you so i was just getting kind of into this is fun oh uh two thousand six think really well for

democrats in the midterms you noticed you were leading that effort in the house i was sent on my ass in the center working for a kabama you know i was watching what you're doing um so you were the scheduling problem yes sorry he's got a ready book um so chapter one democrats keep overperforming in these special elections the most recent one and the biggest overperformance or biggest swing to democrats just happened in georgia georgia jorja jorja jorja jorja jorja jorja jorja green's district i mean win i'll give you a different view okay well that that would be literally wrapped up uh bachar al-asad numbers in uh in in madison in this most recent supreme court i'll tell you why no just something different i'll let you know the question is just like i i feel better i feel increasingly bullish i think the question is how do you close the deal is it about democrats getting out and making a affirmative case fighting or you know you see some other people that say crouch up hide under the table until the day after the election no no no i don't neither one is right first of all 90 percent of this race is referred to by the president and the reverse stand for publicness that was true in 1994 it was true in 2006 about push it was true in 2010 about president obama and the democrats history in 2018 about battle trump the republicans this is a referendum election

and i can tell you it hasn't gone all over this country it's built in ahead of steam this is going to be level five typericat two let's side note why i think wisconsin one of the last three supreme court biggest one was just the other day monster second second we've now 14 for 14 state white elections haven't lost one third we picked up the suburban county outside of mawakah where the republicans used to balance against mawakah we picked up the county except c third fourth in the third district which is a southwest corner where the cross is where i went in for uh rebecca cook where the republican congresser the supreme court canate arcanne took 57 percent of the vote there down trump won that county overwhelming it used to be around congress congress the wisconsin numbers in the battle ground state were not just good on the supreme court you go two three layers down or unbelievable yeah and i think uh what i would say is keep the focus on the republicans keep the focus on the fact that they've been complicit with donald trump i do have argued as before i present a six in 2026 not because anybody remembers the six and oh six or the contract with america you should have it

a it helps you focus on 2027 what your priorities are it creates a discipline dialogue inside the party what we're going to stand for because and it will not just help in 2026 2027 will be the seminal year that will decide for us who we are and what we're defined for in 2028 and when we ran health care children's health care the renewal help negotiate for president clinton led the effort in the house with speaker plosie force bush to uh veto it 60 republicans were the democrats it sets up obama no way when george mitchell in 1990 gets bush 41 to sign a tax increase it breaks up the republican party papi can and challenges a sitting republican president and it sets up bill clinton 1992 so i believe do the work now both not only for 2026 but for the discipline of 2027 one of those is going to break through and get to the president's desk if he signs it you want it to be something that divides the republicans from him if he vetoes it you want to make sure it also divides the republicans from him the goal there then says who we are and who they are yeah i i i think running against

trump is important and we should continue to do it i still think we have a massive problem as a party of people not knowing who we are or or not we stand for and maybe not like you do tell me there's three or four layers here not knowing what we who we stand for not knowing whether we'll fight for who he thinks the reason i'm going around these community colleges 40 percent of people in america go to community colleges to go to higher education these are the unseen unheard unexpected folks i know what i did to reform the community colleges of chicago and what we did to make sure that people that went there can walk in and say i went to malcomx and get that nursing job at rush Presbyterian hospital or the guy i met in spartenberg who's working on mechanical skills and he has a 33 buck an hour plus benefits job waiting at ge for him i made a lot of them to me you can't just say these things that sound great in faculty lounges or papers you gotta under you actually have to feel the people that are under the intense pressure not only have an agenda for them willing to take on and break some eggs to get it done and our party hasn't just hasn't it's not just about clicks it's about calculus it's not just about social media posts

it's actually about social studies and we haven't prioritized the right things we just have it and we have to be acknowledged about that and we got ourselves caught i've said this before and i'll say it again in a cultural cul-de-sac going around in circles we were off the american people when they're back against the wall they expect democrats to show up they don't think republicans are showing because they know they're in the boardroom caught up the pot they expect us to show up and we did not show up for them we deserved to spank it and we got one yeah ron manual great to see again thanks for coming yeah we saw both of them we got it almost wide open all right that's our show for today thanks to ron for stopping by and i'll be back in the feed on sunday with a conversation with none other than his son piker that's right ron a manual was here today his son piker will be here tomorrow and then i will be closing all of my apps for the weekend yeah i'm gonna be closely monitoring your usage starting sunday at six a.m. yep nope you can complain all you want because i'm sure the the clips can be everywhere much like melania will not be taking any questions about my relationship with the sun piker who is this a sun piker fellow everything about it recently i don't know i think

he's a twitch twitch twitch twitch twitch anyway have a good weekend everyone bye everyone if you want to listen to piedayamerica ad-free and get access to exclusive podcast go to cricket.com slash friends to subscribe on supercast sub-stack youtube or apple podcast also please consider leaving us a review that helps boost this episode and everything we do here at cricket piedayamerica is a cricket media production our producer is all rumin our associate producer is ferris safari austin fissure is our senior producer re-churnland is our executive editor adrian hill is our head of news and politics jordan canter is our sound engineer with audio support from kyle segland and charlotte landis matt to grow is our head of production may only single is our executive assistant thanks to our digital team alijacone haley johns ben heilman kirrell pellevieve david tools and ryan young our production staff is proudly unionized with the writers gill of america east on election night we will all be feeling a lot of feelings do not spend it alone spend it with me alex wagner for cricket media presents live election results we're gonna have john favro john love it tommy

vtors stacey abraham stan piper erin ryan and many more special guests to be announced and they're all gonna help us make sense of what's happening as the election results will roll in so here's what you need to do subscribe to pods a vamerica on youtube and tune in on tuesday november third at nine p.m. eastern six p.m. pacific for hot takes catharsis and as many results as we can possibly analyze

Frequently asked questions

How long is this episode of Pod Save America?

This episode is 1 hour and 48 minutes long.

When was this Pod Save America episode published?

This episode was published on April 10, 2026.

Is there a transcript available for this episode?

Yes, a full transcript is available for this episode. You can read the complete transcript on the episode page.

Can I download this Pod Save America episode?

Yes. Use the download control on the episode player to save the publisher-provided media file.