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Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Dan Pfeiffer in studio for this momentous pod. Oh, how lovely. It's great when Dan comes to town. We're all on our best behavior. On today's show, we're going to talk about how Trump is ending 2025 in a much weaker political position than he started. And what that means is we head into a big election year. We'll also talk about the big wins Democrats scored in Tuesday's elections and look ahead to the midterms, specifically the Democratic primary for Texas Senate in March, which will pit Jasmine Crockett against James Tallarico. Then we'll answer the question that's probably been on no one's mind. Which women-hating Nazi influencer is actually a virgin?
A segment that will be followed by my conversation with a very serious member of Congress, Adam Smith, who's the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee and undoubtedly psyched that he agreed to appear on this show. But let's start with the man who wants struggling Americans to know that he sees you, he hears you, and he feels your pain. President Donald Trump, who launched a much-hyped and anticipated affordability blitz this week, where he humbly acknowledged our economic reality and pledged to fight harder for the people who sent him back to Washington. Here's Trump speaking to Politico's Dasha Burns and then at a rally in Pennsylvania. I wonder what grade you would give. A plus. A plus. A plus, plus, plus, plus, plus.
And she's fantastic. She said, we have to start campaigning, sir. I said, I won. What do I have to do already? They said, we have to win the midterm. It's a hoax. They use the word affordability. And that's their only word. They say affordability. And everyone says, oh, that must mean Trump has high prices. You know, you can give up certain products. You can give up pencils. You don't need $37 for your daughter. Two or three is nice, but you don't need $37. More Trump. Get him out on the trail, Dan.
What did you think? What did you think of that performance? I'm going to send my message directly to Suzy Wiles. This was perfect. No notes. Make no changes. The hoax thing, it works. Hoax thing works. It doesn't get enough attention, but rationing is a good political strategy. More telling people how much certain things you have. Maybe get into what they should eat or not eat. Maybe tell them to eat cake as an instance. Why do you think he keeps bringing up the dolls? He's got a real fixation with the dolls. This is like the third time he's done a ration the dolls message. I feel like he's used the number 37 before, too.
Yeah, I think he's, this originally was triggered by the report about increased toy prices for the holidays. And he just, you know, he keeps going back to the well. He's got a lot of new material here. And the pencils? We're rationing pencils? Do people use pencils still? They do, John. I know the kids don't read anymore, so I wasn't sure if they used pencils. The pencils went away a long time ago. I mean, I don't know. I mean, my second grader uses pencils. I guess Charlie and Teddy, crayons? Crayons. How many crayons do you get? Are we making those here? One per color of the rainbow. Anything we're not making here, you don't get anymore. Right. I don't think we make crayons here. It is wild that the man who just fired an architect for his ballroom because he couldn't make it big enough and fast enough.
as he's like gold leafing everything in the White House is telling people they don't need more than four dollars, three dollars, three dollars maximum. If you were trying to find the best message to lose an election, this would be it. I just it's wild. Well, clearly he's excited to be there. You can tell. Yes, he was very excited to be on this affordability tour. I wonder how many more we'll get. It's December 11th. It's like too soon. I wish the affordability tour had started in like September of 2026.
That's what I wish we could get this event there because no one's going to remember this by then. But do you think it changes? I think we'll get more. You think we'll get more? I don't think it's going to get better. I do not think he can give a compelling affordability message. I think he is psychologically, constitutionally incapable of doing that. Because it requires him to admit that prices are high. To admit prices are high means to admit fault. He has never admitted fault in his life. He's not going to start. Now, there are a lot of 80-year-olds who all of a sudden develop introspection. One other soundbite from the rally really hit home for me. Can you guys play the clip? I haven't read practically anything off the stupid teleprompter.
And then my speech writers, they're getting awards for some of the finest speeches, and I haven't even read them. And the award for the finest writer in the history of speech making. Ross, where are you, Ross? Are you here, Ross? First time I've ever introduced him. Ross, get over here. I got a very low-key guy. So shy, I can't believe it.
There's a lot to unpack there, Dan. There is. First of all, what speech writing awards are his speech writers getting? Are you just jealous because you never got one? Yeah, where was my fucking award? None of us got any award. Maybe Lovett got it. Maybe I didn't know. He didn't. Also, I cannot imagine anything worse than being at a rally with Barack Obama where he introduced me because he wanted to let everyone know that he hasn't read anything on the prompter, never does, and he doesn't understand why his speech writers are getting awards. Because that's the kind of stuff he said behind the scenes. That's right. Not publicly. That was wild.
Poor Ross, whoever you are. And you know what? I have no sympathy for Ross. No. Do we think that Ross is actually writing any of these speeches or they just go through the Stephen Miller LLM and then they get onto the teleprompter and then Trump sort of ignores the boring shit, which is the stuff that Susie Wiles wants him to say. Some of the more fashy sounding shit, which is what Stephen Miller puts in there. And then he just does the weave. Is it actually painful that Ross, whoever he may be, gets this award the same week we were snubbed for Golden Globe? Yeah. Wow. We're really getting hit hard this week. It's a tough week for us.
Back in Washington, Trump did get another, he got a little present. He got another rate cut from the Fed, but it obviously wasn't enough for him. He said the quarter point cut should have been twice that size and called his Fed chair, Jerome Powell, a stiff man he appointed. On Thursday, he posted another whiny complaint blaming the American people's dissatisfaction with the economy on the American people. Always smart politics. Here's the post quote. When will I get credit for having created with no inflation, perhaps the greatest economy in the history of our country? When will people understand what is happening? When will polls reflect the greatness of America at this point in time and how bad it was just one year ago? I'm sure it was just a coincidence that the statement came right after the release of a new AP poll that has Trump's overall approval at just 36 percent. And his approval on the economy at just 31 percent. That is the lowest it's ever been in either of his two terms as president. 67 percent disapprove of his handling of the.
economy. Obviously, we don't like to put too much stock in a single poll, but we're reading this one because it's fun. And also, it is roughly in line with most of the polls we're seeing right now. I think his average overall approval in the average of all the polls is 42%, so not much higher. What do you make of it? What do you make of this poll? And is Trump in serious trouble here, or is this just copium? This is not copium, John. It is not. Even if you were to say that this poll is a bit of an outlier, that's a little worse for Trump than the other ones, all the polls are telling the same story. Trump is losing political altitude fast. Voters are very unhappy with the economy. They are unhappy because prices are high.
They think Trump is not only not lowering the prices, they fully believe he is raising them. They correctly believe that because of tariffs. And they see him focus on everything else other than the number one issue, right? CBS had this poll a couple weeks ago, which asked people, what do you want Trump to focus on most? They said interior decorating. They said high prices. Interior decorating was a distant 900th. And they asked him, what do you think he's focused most on? What came in last there? Inflation. And so he's in a very, very bad spot here. And he is less popular than Biden was at that point. And you can be much less popular than Obama was at this point. But all of those polls keep comparing.
Trump to this point in the first term of other presidents because we keep using this as a first term. The real comparison point is second term. And the comparison point here is George W. Bush. And right about this time, George W. Bush takes a massive nosedive. It never comes back. And Trump, I think Trump's in real danger of that because he seems, has no interest in solving the problem that people care most about and really no ability to do so. And he's not going to benefit from this looming reelection campaign that will recoalesce his coalition, be out of opposition to the other side. And so like- Or re-energize him because he doesn't have his-
presidency on the line or his livelihood or like his freedom as he did last time. Nor does he fully understand clearly how bad it is, though. I don't know that Thursday post where he's like, when are people going to get it? It might be starting to creep in that he's not as popular as he was at the beginning of this year. It is also funny that the only time he does focus on the economy or talk about the economy, it's when he speaks about his most unpopular policy, which is the tariffs, which in that in that Pennsylvania rally, he once again said, it's my favorite word. I love that word. It's beautiful. The tariffs are making us rich. Like just he has become.
He's always been out of touch. But he's become more out of touch in this last year than I've ever seen him. Yeah, I think it's fair to say. He's obviously out of touch in the sense that he is a man who has a gold toilet. But he has had a gut instinct for the grievances of a subset of Americans. And that has powered his political rise. He was pressing in on immigration and people's reaction to that. He obviously understood the border. But now he is not out traveling with people. He's not talking to other politicians around the country as he travels. He really only hangs out with rich tech billionaires and a bunch of...
obsequious staffers who were just telling how great he is all the time. And a few white nationalist freaks. Yeah, that's redundant with what I just said. Like in the Venn diagram, you've got the billionaires, you've got the grifter, obsequious staffers, and there's some overlap there, yeah. And then you've got like the Stephen Miller, yeah. The white nationalists, but some of the white nationalists might be some of the tech people. Yeah, that's true. Elon Musk today did say that...
These liberals are advocating a white genocide. So I think he would probably. But I will say that like the other challenge he has is there's not a lot of levers for him to pull. No, no. And he also needs an enemy and he needs a plausible villain in his story. And the problem with affordability is he doesn't have a plausible villain because he can blame Joe Biden. But like that's not working because everyone understands that Joe Biden is long gone from the White House. And no one believes that it's Joe Biden's economy anymore. Very few people. Democrats in Congress aren't stopping him from anything because we don't have power there. So he loses that enemy. And he doesn't want to go after.
corporations or rich people because they're his only friends. And so it's like, I guess Jerome Powell is his villain. Yeah. Like, what do you even do if you're Trump? I mean, you could change your message. Change your tariff policy. Change your message. You could rescind all the tariffs. Now, that is not going to immediately lower all prices. Right. I think it's just worth just focusing on the fact that it is actually a tremendous political feat that most people blame Trump for the economy right now.
Because he did not... Inflation was here before he got here. Right. But I think it's mainly because of the tariffs. It's exactly because of the tariffs, which is, you know, we've talked about this before, but voters give newly elected presidents a pretty long leash to solve the problem they were elected to solve. When Obama was running, we were in midway into a re-election campaign, and a majority of voters still blame George W. Bush for the state of the economy more than Obama. We are 10 months in, and because Trump said, thank you for electing me, I promise all your prices, my first act is I'm going to raise all your prices, and voters...
took that seriously and they immediately assigned agency to him for all of their problems. And he and the problems are paying the price for it right now. Yeah, and it did just keep getting worse because it was like, I'm going to raise all the prices. I'm going to fire tons of people. All you heard about the first couple of months was just him firing federal workers and not everyone's a federal worker, but still that's what you heard in the headlines. Then there was the tariffs. Then there was, you know, I hate the idea of stopping premium hikes so much that I'm willing to keep the government closed over it. I don't think that helped him either. There was, oh, there was passing his big legislation that was a giant tax cut for the rich paid for by cutting people's health care. Yeah. And the thing he's getting the most attention for is things like.
Demolishing the White House to build a ballroom. Right. Decorating the White House in gold. Katari Jet. Katari Jet. The crypto scams. All of this comes together. And like this is their hope and prayer. Like James Blair, who's the White House political director, I think. He did an interview the other day and he said things are going to get better because he said just because they should commit a political gap every single day that the fundamentals in the economy are strong. I heard that. Yes. Which is, for people to know, a historically famous political gap that John McCain made right as Lehman Brothers was collapsing in 2008.
But the argument is- One of the worst gaps of the 2008 general election. It's one of the worst gaps of the last 40 years of politics. It's up there with 47%. Now, I will say, giving yourself an A++ plus on the economy right here is worse than all of those combined. And that should be in 1 million ads all the time. It's a thing that people will remember because-
As you and I know, right? Like there is this idea. I'm just going to diverge here for a second. I think I know where you're going. I'm so there. Like there is this very dumb idea that really circulated a lot in the Biden presidency that people's impressions of the economy is vibe-based. And so if the president says the economy is great, voters will then believe them and like the economy more and then like the president more. And this kind of came because Trump talked about the economy in 2017 and people like the economy, but that's also because the economy was good.
And so you and I know this from looking at focus groups in 2009, 2010, that when voters who feel true economic pressure and are truly worried about their financial situation are told that the economy is better than they think it is, they want to flip the fucking table over in the focus group. And so giving yourself an A++ is just sticking your thumb in the eye of every voter. And it's not to say that people's impressions of the economy are solely based on the economic statistics as they are and that other considerations, vibes, if you will, don't play into your perception of the economy. But... When the person who's supposed to be in charge of the country is the one telling you, the person that you put into office, or at least has been elected into office, and the job it is to manage the economy, when that person tells you, no, no, no, actually everything's great, you're going to be fucking angry. For other people who said, oh, Joe Biden should have just talked up the economy, and it wasn't just that Joe Biden should have talked up the economy. All of us, all of us were supposed to pretend. Democrats in Congress, all of us pundits, we were all supposed to just talk up every day, talk about the great statistics, and that was going to make everyone think, well, Donald Trump is doing that now, and has been doing that for...
last several months and his economic approval rating has taken a dive. So I thought he was magic in the first term and Donald Trump was great at this and he was such a showman and a marketer. Why isn't it working this time? Because it's based on people's fucking perceptions of their own financial position. Now you got me going. It's also important if we find out that some families are spending too much money on milk, we should score them on Twitter. Or we can't talk about gas prices because those bad journalists, those mean journalists stood in front of a gas station that had artificially high prices. You can maybe alter how people feel about the macro economy, but...
the micro economy, how it affects your life. And the idea of a vibes-based economy where you can tell people that reality is not reality in a time of inflation is impossible because every day they go to the grocery store, they go to the gas station, they get the utility bill. They see how their bank account changes. In fact, it's harder than if there's high unemployment because inflation affects more people than unemployment. Not having a job probably affects you a lot more than having to pay a little more for groceries, but it affects more people. Even in the peak of the Great Recession, the unemployment rate under Obama was like 10-11%. So which means the vast majority of people had jobs. They had an existential fear of losing their jobs.
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So on that note, another jaw-dropping number in the AP poll is Trump's approval on immigration, where he's 22 points underwater, 38-60. 38 approved, 60 disapproved. Also a new low for him. Also not stopping him from hammering his favorite issue in the most racist way possible. Here he is again during that Pennsylvania event. We had a meeting. And I say, why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can't we have some people from Norway, Sweden? Just a few. Let's have a few. We always take people from...
Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they're good at is going after ships. It is a small point, but I think an important one that he and the White House and various Republican senators like Tom Cotton vigorously denied that story about him calling them shithole countries in the meeting for the last several years. And then he just, of course, admitted it. It's like Justice for Josh Dossie, the Washington Post reporter reported that. Right. It's like, did we did we think that the Trump people were telling the truth back then? No, no, we didn't think it. But they're liars. It's just it's nice to know that they are liars, that we're right about that. Yeah, it's an interesting dilemma. It's a difference between Trump 1.0, 2.0, which is 1.0. All this was behind closed doors and they were embarrassed to say it out loud. Yeah. Here you hold a rally to shout at the top of your lungs. Yes. Meanwhile, Kristi Noem appeared at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Thursday.
She was heckled by audience members and left early right around the same time that a federal judge ordered the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the detention facility in Pennsylvania, where he was being held while he awaits trial on very shaky human trafficking charges. There was also quite a moment in that hearing with Noam where Seth Magaziner, Democratic congressman, was like, oh, how many veterans have you deported? She's like, we haven't deported veterans. And then he pops up on a screen, has a veteran who they just recently deported, legal resident. So classic.
He really wants, and you can tell because this is the only part of the rally he got really excited about, is doing the shithole countries thing. He could tell he was losing the crowd. He could tell it was pretty boring. They even had fucking charts up. He knew the charts were boring. He was like, oh, these charts are playing so well, so I'm going to throw up another one. Then you could tell he got to the immigration stuff, which wasn't in the prompter, of course. Bad news, Ross. So he just went rogue and started doing his racist shithole countries bit. And you can tell he just really wants to make next year's elections about immigration again. Worked for him in 24. Didn't so much work for him in 18, 20.
22. You know, we just talked about how it's very hard for him to ever get to an affordability message that matches how people are feeling. And so I assume he will try to make next year about immigration, about crime, all his favorites. What do you think about his ability to do that? I think it's pretty limited because, you know, I think in the common imagination, we think he made 2024 about immigration. And immigration certainly was a part of that campaign. But I went back and looked at the exit polls and more people listed abortion as number one issue than immigration. Only 12% listed immigration. Number one issue was actually democracy at 34%, which is a little strange.
The basic point is, we didn't win that one. Well, I think democracy is, some people, they said it was a normal issue. They didn't say they liked it. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. It was an issue. The thing, I think it's going to be very hard for him to make it.
bigger than the economy affordability in the way, shape, or form. It would have to be the only... We were headed in 2022. Inflation was about to be the most important issue. And then the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June before the election. That changed the dynamics of election. It would have to be something on that level to actually change how people feel and to raise the settings of immigration. I don't think it's just something Trump can do on his own through rallies and truce. And even like White House policy proclamations have to be something like sort of a massive national galvanizing event that would change that. I also think, and he goes on to say this as he's talking about immigration. He's like, my team told me, don't talk about the border because, you know, we already fixed the border. It's fixed.
And now I'm not even getting credit for it. And the truth is, however, he did it like the border crossings are almost zero. And so in the past, especially when Biden was president, people's disapproval of Biden on immigration was related to something real that was happening, which was an influx of immigrants that came to the southern border. And then because of people like Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis were transported to cities all over the country who then struggled with their own finances to try to care for a lot of these migrants. And so it was a real thing.
Now, and the reason, so you see he's like on the border, he's still plus two in the AP poll, but then immigration is negative 22. The deportation regime is a fucking flop. Politically, I mean, it's horrific. We've talked about that all year, like morally horrendous, but it is also deeply unpopular. And it is something that almost everyone is aware of because I do think that these videos that have been circulating social media and everywhere have been in people's feeds and people's phones all year. And they're horrific because it's people see US citizens, legal residents, kids, even undocumented immigrants who don't seem like they pose any threat whatsoever, just being tackled, abused, harassed, detained, tear gassed, pepper balls. I mean, it's just a fucking disaster for them. Did you see...
Kyle Tharp's newsletter, he just did a post where he went through the most viral events of 2025 political events. And ICE and immigration is sort of right smack in the middle is one of the absolute biggest ones because it is it breaks through. It travels on social. People are aware of it. And ultimately, Trump is doing a very bad job and going too far to solve a problem that people really are not as focused on as he thought they were. Yes. And I would also say, like, if I was devising a message for a Democratic candidate, you know, like 70 percent of it is 75 percent of it is cost of living, health care, like hammering on, hammering Trump on this issue's corruption, like in that bucket. But I would not forget.
to talk about what he is doing on immigration. And how would you do that? And I would talk about the deportations and I would talk about the U.S. citizens that are being rounded up and I would talk about the violence against protesters and the people who have been disappeared. And I think that it is people seeing the videos and they I think that they are scared. And also Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are not going to give that part up. And I don't think that we can be I don't think it's going to work to be only economy while they're only immigration. We're going to join that fight and we shouldn't be afraid of it. And I think these numbers bear that out. The fact that it went from one of the strongest issues and crime, by the way, was which.
For a while it was, okay, well, people don't like the deportations, but he's so strong on crime, so we shouldn't talk about the deployments and the takeover of D.C. and all that stuff. That's unpopular as well also. I'm not saying it's like the top issue, the thing we should be talking about all the time, but it's a big deal to people. I saw over, I don't know if you saw this over last week, two weeks ago, who knows, there's that story about an immigration naturalization ceremony. And it was at, it's happening all over the country, according to this report, but this one was at Faneuil Hall, of all places, in Boston. And people are lined up, and they have now become a citizen, the legal way, the right way.
part of the challenge. It takes years. You have to meet all kinds of requirements, pass all kinds of tests. And finally, these people are waiting in line to take the oath to become citizens of the United States. And federal agents come and fucking pull them out of line. And one of the clients at the WGBH talked to, which is the local affiliate in Boston, she's a Haitian woman in her 50s. And she's had a green card since the early 2000s. She has been working to get her citizenship in this country, done everything right since the early 2000s. And she gets to the fucking ceremony and they pull her out of line. You cannot tell me.
that if most people in this country heard about that story, they wouldn't be fucking outraged. I would put it at 70, 85%, maybe 70. And so I just think that those are the kind of stories that I think Democrats should be telling. Now, I think we have a lot of work to do ourselves on like, well, what would you do? What would your immigration system look like for sure? And I think that's more of a 28 issue than a 26 issue, but it's out there. But I would not run away from this issue. Yeah, I don't think you, there's this, I think, idea that you decide what the single best issue is and you only talk about that to the exclusion of all the things happening on the planet. And that just is not how.
the world works. It's not how you're going to campaign, you're going to ask questions at town halls, you're going to be in a debate, you're going to ask questions there, you're going to have to respond to things happening in your community as a candidate. A lot of people are talking about our members of Congress, they have to talk about all these things. This idea that we've figured out affordability is the issue, we're only going to talk about affordability to the exclusion of anything else. We bring up anything else, we're going to say it's a distraction from affordability. That's just not how humans talk and humans work. The longer term issue here is that Trump's numbers suck on all these issues, but still, on almost every issue except healthcare, abortion, and climate change, generically voters trust Republicans more than Democrats. Yeah, well, that's an end.
And affordability. Yeah. That one is like basically, which is crazy, but you know, I mean, there's a long conversation in there too, about Democrats being too reticent on calling for the tariffs to be repealed for a whole host of very bizarre, outdated, anachronistic political reasons. But like that, that's part of it is that we have no, like there's a simple answer to how we would lower costs right away. Um, that we're too many Democrats are not running on. And I think it's, um, it's not, uh, it's not, this isn't an ideological thing because I think the Democrat it's, I think it's a consequence of Democrats just not knowing what we stand for and what the basic universal values are that drive our party because it's like,
We on immigration, it's like people are afraid to be seen as too loose on immigration. Like we don't want to be seem like open borders. But then at the other side, we don't want to be too strict. Right. And we're afraid to say anything about enforcement. And so we're just sort of like reactive. Same thing on cost and affordability. It's like, well, are there small things that we can talk about because we don't know how far we want to go and we don't have any like big ambitious policies on affordability. And so, like, I do think that we kind of have to figure out what is the country we want? What does it look like if we take power and not just from like an individual policy perspective, but like, how do we feel about.
the economy and affordability. Like, what is the American dream that is achievable for people, that should be achievable for people, and what do we want to do about that? You know, like, we haven't had that debate in, I don't know how long. Well, I think that's what the 2020 primary is. Like, it's just, right now, it's like, what's the Democratic... Well, last time we did this, it was... I would say we did a great job last time. Yeah, let's everyone talk about how, here's Bernie's Medicare for All plan, and let's have everyone else talk about how their Medicare for All plan is not as good as Bernie's, and we'll all yell about it. Well, the thing is, we then had a process that ended up in Joe Biden becoming the nominee, and that the party's position was that we were going to strengthen the affordable care. Right. And then we had Joe Biden had a position on immigration that he ran on that was not necessarily the policy that he...
governed on when he got there. Although, you know, like there will be a process here. A nominee will merge that a nominee will have positions that will then define the party for good or for ill. The I think there's a risk of overcomplicating this for 2026. Like what we're trying to show people is that we are going to be a check on Trump. Right. And we can't we shouldn't promise too much because we can't be able to deliver. Yes. Even if we won the House and the Senate, we can't necessarily deliver anything. But the one thing we can promise is that we are going to force a vote on repealing the tariffs. Yeah. Like that's why we can have a series of ideas of like how we're going to address corruption. Like first vote is going to be get rid of to stop.
members of Congress from trading stocks. We can have a bunch of things that we're going to do. And voters aren't dumb. Like they have given Democrats, they've given the opposition party's power all the time in situations like this, knowing that the president, like they want a check. They don't necessarily want, they're not expecting Hakeem Jeffries and the Democrats to solve all their problems. They want them to stop Trump from making their problems worse. And after that entire 2020 debate on Medicare for all.
That led to simply an extension of bigger subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. Maybe we can force a vote on actually extending those subsidies. We actually went on it, which leads us to our next topic. Great transition. Yeah, of course, of course. Unsurprisingly, it's the worst issue in the poll for Trump health care. He's underwater by 40 points. I guess that's what happens when you show people that, you know, you'd rather keep the entire federal government closed than help stop premium hikes that are set to go into effect in just a few weeks for 20 million Americans. Some Republicans in Congress seem like they're belatedly coming around to the conclusion that this could be a political problem for them in the midterms, but not enough to just vote for the Senate Democrats proposal to extend the subsidies for three years. That vote.
failed on Thursday, as did all the Republican alternative proposals in the Senate. There's some momentum in the House right now on discharge petitions to force votes on various extension proposals. There's one proposal to extend the subsidies for two years. That's the Republican discharge petition. There's another proposal to extend the subsidies for one year. Both of those come with new income eligibility limits and minimum payments. Trump's basically been a passive bystander on all this, though Caroline Levitt said on Thursday we'll all be hearing from him on this quote very soon. I'm sure that will be constructive. What do you think about this? Hakeem Jeffries was asked about...
these discharge petitions and Democrats lining up behind it. I think the one-year extension one came from Josh Gottheimer, Democrat from New Jersey, and now has like 62 people that have signed on to it. But Hakeem Jeffries said he's not taking a position on these discharge petitions. What do you make of that? I think that Democrats, Republicans want a get-out-of-jail-free card here that allows them to take a vote to extend the Obamacare tax credits without ever actually having to extend the Obamacare tax credits. So if I was Hakeem Jeffries, I would say Democrats are not going to put any discharge petition over the top until the Senate passes a bill.
Or, and we want Donald Trump to say he's going to sign it. Because he's the other part. They could pass the House. It's hard to imagine Donald Trump vetoing. I mean, that would be... Honestly, from a pure political perspective, that would be an A++ move. Just the thing you don't want to do is let 15 vulnerable Republicans to be able to take a vote. Because we forced the vote. Republicans, without Democratic help, cannot get a detergent petition.
Done. There aren't enough Republicans to do. So you need the vast majority. Basically, you need the DCCC's target list plus a bunch of Democrats to put it over the top. And I don't think we should do them that political favor unless we know for sure that it will result in people actually getting more affordable health care. Yeah, like if Trump came out tomorrow and said, I'm for this extension that's circulating the House and Thune's like, yeah, we can get that done too. Then the Democrats are like, sure, of course. Yeah, then Mike Johnson will bring it up, right? Then you don't need the discharge petition. Right, right, right.
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Order yours now to get it in time for the holidays. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions of life. Long Play, our docuseries exploring the people and forces shaping the South, is back. Newsflash, the South is the new political epicenter of the country. Democrats are way on their heels in this region, but Republicans are going through their own reckoning in the South, too. We're in the final stretch of the midterms, and the political map has only gotten more competitive with new states and districts emerging as potential flips. So we thought it was time to get back out on the road and take a closer look at what's actually happening on the ground. I'm Erin Haines, journalist and expert on all things Southern politics. And I'm Jennifer Palmieri, former White House Communications Director. Tune in on Mondays to Long Play Series on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
So voters are already punishing Republican politicians for all this chaos and not just in federal races anymore. On Tuesday, Eileen Higgins won the runoff in the Miami mayor's race, beating the Trump and DeSantis endorsed Republican by 18 points. She will be the first Democratic mayor in Miami in three decades. And in the Georgia legislative elections, I know you're all paying attention to that, Democrat Eric Gisler... flipped a statehouse district that Trump carried by 12 points. Now the DCCC, which is the House Democrats campaign arm, says it's adding five more Republican held seats to its target list for 2026. And a bunch of Democrats deciding it's a good year to run for office are launching primary campaigns right and left. We talked last week a little bit about how Jasmine Crockett was expected to jump into the Senate race in Texas. She is now officially in. Colin Allred has dropped out, meaning that Crockett's main opponent will be James Tallarico. Republicans are acting like they were dying to have Crockett in the race all along. The Senate Republicans campaign committee actually tried to take credit for making it happen by circulating a poll favorable to Crockett over the summer. Crockett responded to this on CNN.
Let's take a listen. I am the one that the Republicans fear. They can say that they don't. But my governor cannot stop tweeting about me. And I know that that is out of fear. Because honestly, if they really wanted me as the nominee, they would be quiet and just wait and hope to crush me. They know my ability to reach people that historically have not wanted to participate in politics or had just given up. So Crockett entered the race with a video that was just her sort of looking away from the camera as just sound of Trump attacking her played.
And she didn't say anything. And then at the end sort of turns direct to camera and smiles. And that's how she entered the race. So very, you get the idea. She also did an event. She gave a whole speech and stuff like that, like a rally with supporters. What do you make of Crockett's entry in the race and sort of that message and how she's playing it so far? Well, she has to win a Democratic primary first. That message probably plays very well in a Democratic primary. It's also a great way to raise money and get attention to things that I think she will be very, very good at in this race. I think the question for Jasmine Crockett and James Alarico, frankly, is what is your plan to actually win? Because this is a state that Trump won by 13 and a half points. There is no...
math to win this state that does not involve doing what Jasmine Crockett pledges to do, which is to turn out Democratic voters and to find pockets of Democratic voters who do not participate in the political process and bring them into it, but also winning over some number of Trump voters, people who voted for Trump last year, who have voted for Republicans most of the last decade, who are frustrated by what's happening, who are mad about high costs or mad about the ballroom, whatever else, who want to give a Democratic chance. And so what is your plan to do both of those things? Because you're going to have to do both to win. There's no other option. And simply saying you're going to expand the electorate is not enough in Texas. And it's not historically how Democrats have come close. I mean, Beto talked about it all the time in 2018. But a part of Beto's very close result, which was, I think, two and a half points, he lost two and a half points, was actually doing, making some inroads with Republican voters. And, you know, he did expanding the electorate as well. You do both. You have to do both. And you have to do, and to win in Texas, you have to do an incredible historic job at both. Yes. And I don't, I agree that it is a way to get attention that, like, Trump hates me.
And so therefore you should. I just I think it is a even in a primary. I think it's a it's an argument that is limited. And I'm not saying that's the only one she's making, but I think it's a limited argument, particularly in a midterm where, you know, it's 2026. Trump's leaving office in 2028. And, you know, the Democrats in Texas have come close over the last decade have talked a lot about this one.
Beto? Beto, yes. Well, even like, I'm sorry, the ones who've like won the House races, right? Like Colin Allred and Lizzie Fletcher and people like that. They talk about Texas, the issues in Texas, what people care about. Like, you really got to, it can't be about you, it's got to be about people. We haven't won a seat in Texas since 1988. Lloyd Benson's re-election. We haven't won statewide in a couple decades now.
And I know that some people think, oh, Democrats are always, you know, they're always thinking Texas is going to turn blue and they're out. Texas is always around the corner and it's always fool's gold for Democrats. And like, I get that. But also we don't have a choice at some point because it is one of the biggest states in the union. We've talked before about how in 2032 in the next census, it'll likely gain more electoral votes. Like there is no math for Democrats to certainly have the Senate, but also the White House without at some point playing seriously in Texas and turning Texas. In Florida. In Florida, I know. Yeah. Like Democrats have to play. I think it is a very good thing that we're going to have a vigorous primary in Texas, whether that was going to end up being.
Tallarico and Allred. Crockett, Tallarico, Allred are now Crockett and Tallarico. I think that's very important. That is good for party building. We have to really play to win there. We have to play to win there in the short term because we kind of need Texas, right? Maybe you can pull it off with Iowa or Alaska if you're lucky, but we need two of four very hard states. And so you want as many lines in the water as you possibly can. And over the long term, we cannot cede Texas and Florida forever. We absolutely have to make them at least competitive because if Republicans start with all of the upper Midwest...
all the Deep South, plus Texas and Florida, they're always going to be three states or so from winning the presidency every single time. And so we have to be able to be there. And that's going to mean investing money and time and energy, race after race after race, even when we lose. And I do think, you know, I think Crockett and Tallarico both have sort of similar positions on the issues. I think like ideologically, and I could be wrong about this and the whole, the race will play out, but they don't seem too far apart. I do think that in a state like Texas too, it is the style and approach to campaigning and to governing that is going to matter here. And, you know, Tallarico was here. I talked to him for Offline and for Pots of America.
He has, whether it works or not, remains to be seen. He does have a theory of the case of like how he wants to reach out to people who may not vote Democrat. And part of it is, you know, he's a man of faith. He speaks about it openly and he's going to all these different places that are the Democrats haven't won. And I'm interested to see and hear from Jasmine Crockett what her plan to do that is. She did say, you know, at one point she was like, I don't need Trump voters. And then later she was like, well, you know, there's always there's Trump Momdani voters, you know, in New York. And point taken, you know, the New York Trump Momdani voters are a little different than Texas, I think. But also, let's not forget Momdani, like he started his campaign.
by doing these on the street videos with Trump voters where he asked them why they voted for Donald Trump and did not scold them, was not patronizing to them, and just had a conversation with them. And even though that he didn't change his positions and he was still pretty firmly ideologically left, he tried to approach that. And so I'm interested to see if she does stuff like that. Yeah, that is going to be interesting because moderation is not always ideological. It's also temperament. Yeah.
Jasmine Crockett and James Heller are both like right in line with the media and Democratic member of Congress. Like she is like she is often grouped with AOC and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and members or Bernie or members of the squad because she is her style. But her positions are she is, you know, is not a she's not a dyed in the wool progressive like some of those other folks. So it is really going to be their approach to this. Like it truly is a fascinating test case. And I didn't realize until our meeting the other day that it's so soon. It's like the first big early voting starts sometime in February. It's in March. It's a March primary.
So that'll be one of the first big ones of the year. We also have an update on Trump's redistricting push in Indiana, which has involved the president, his administration, and Republican congressional leaders pressuring, and in Trump's case, threatening Indiana Republicans with primaries and a loss of federal funding if they don't gerrymander their maps to squeeze out a few more Republican seats in time for the midterms. Well, Trump has failed. Right before we recorded, the Republican-controlled state Senate killed the measure 31 to 19 with more Republicans voting against redistricting than for it. Were you surprised?
A little bit. I think the natural assumption over the last year is that everyone bows, all these people bow to Trump, particularly Republicans, right? They can talk, whether it's the Freedom Caucus, it's the moderates, they can talk a good game, but when push comes to shove, they do what Trump wants. And here you have a bunch of local state senators from Indiana, a deeply red state, just telling Trump no. And it really should be a moment of great shame for the law firms, the universities, the corporations, the folks at Warner Brothers, Discovery, or wherever else you were thinking about doing what Trump wants, because you can stand up to him. And if these folks can do it, you certainly can. Yeah, I think it is.
I mean, it's obviously a big deal for the map, but I think that for this White House and for Trump, like they cannot handle any defection, any defeat, particularly, you know, from Republicans. Right. And you're not supposed to be disloyal. It's the worst thing. And now that this is out there and this has happened, the cracks are showing. And like this combined with Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Epstein files. And it's like it's all of a piece here. And it's starting to become a real problem for them. There is an emperor has no close moment where people like Trump has been punching above his weight when he came to his actual political influence. He was elected with an incredibly narrow margin. He.
was started as the least popular newly elected president history. He dropped faster than any other president. But yet Republicans kept following him based sort of on the fumes of his previous political strength. And now people recognize that here he is, a guy less popular than Joe Biden at the same time, with George W. Bush style numbers, who's getting weaker, who's never going to be on the ballot again. And they have to chart their own course. And it's not necessarily going to be the course that he dictates. And that's a real that is a change in both American politics, the Republican Party and Trump, because what has kept him afloat all this time through every scandal, every controversy, everything else has been.
party fidelity to trump and when that falls apart he really loses a lot of his juice yes now the the one caution here is i do think he gets more dangerous oh yeah and this is not about no i know you have to keep saying that because i think that's as he gets politically weaker that's the good news but i think he gets cornered and he gets dangerous and he still has quite a bit of power he does where it limits him is in some of the more extreme like steal the election sort of things yeah that's true that's true all right last thing before we get to my very serious conversation with congressman adam smith about trump's illegal strikes in the caribbean We've been talking a lot on the show about Nick Fuentes, the dedicated white nationalist anti-Semite misogynist who famously had dinner with Trump and more recently was invited on Tucker Carlson's show for a softball interview, setting off an intramagic debate about how nice they should be to white nationalists. Fuentes appeared this week on Piers Morgan's show on Monday night, and it yielded this exchange. Just to clear up one of the many theories about you, I've no idea what the answer is and you haven't got to answer, but are you actually attracted to women? I am attracted to women. You're not gay? No, but I will say that women are very difficult to be around. So there's that. And do you think they should have the right to vote?
I do not, no, absolutely not. They should stay at home? Well, yeah, absolutely. See, basically, you're just a misogynist old dinosaur, aren't you? Have you ever had sex? No, absolutely not. Wow, since the guy's never got laid. It's like a turn there. There's so much about that. Have you ever had sex? And it wasn't like, no, it was, no, absolutely not.
with the Christmas decorations behind him. That was bizarre. It was very strange. What did you make of that? I don't know what to make of that, John. I really don't. That's the right. I guess that's the hard right. That's where the energy is. That's right. That's where the new masculinity is right there.
That is what the whole party's fighting over. For some reason, they can't bring themselves to just be like, no, that guy, not welcome into the fold. It's actually helpful to see this clip because most people, people who say this, people like us, don't ever consume Nick Fuentes. We just hear about the fight within the party over the Tucker Carlson area, which they probably didn't watch or see clips of or anything else. Then you recognize that this is the guy lording over the Republican Party as this dweeb. And I also think people hear, oh, he's racist, white nationalist. And they think, oh, is it like when we hear Donald Trump say shithole countries? And it's like, no, no, no, no, it's not that. It is like pure, uncut, doesn't care, just says it and believes it. And is a virgin. And is a virgin.
Just a white nationalist incel who has a massively popular radio program. Radio program? What did I say? You said radio program. I just transported myself back to the 50s where women stayed home like they should. How's his leaflet business going? YouTube, whatever, I don't know. He's out there. Millions of people following him. It's crazy. On some platform you don't know what it is. Speaking of toxic mandatory influencers, you see the Times story about the Tate brothers? How Andrew Tate and his brother were freed from Romania after getting close to Don Jr. and Barron Trump?
Andrew Tate holds Zooms with Barron, but certainly to give him dating advice. They held the Zoom, the third Tate brother, one of the Tate brother's friends, not real Tate brother, but he's known as... He's like a Tate bro. Yeah, he's like friends with Barron dating advice. But the Times, it's quite a story. The Times got a hold of text messages that Andrew Tate sent. And this is from the story. In a January 14th text message, Mr. Tate indicated, so basically we should say before I read it, what happened was the Tate brothers who have been accused over the years of...
rape, assault, sex trafficking, just horrific stuff. And finally, they were charged in Romania. And the Romanian government said that while the prosecutor was building the case there, they couldn't leave the country. They desperately wanted to leave the country. To avoid prosecution. To avoid prosecution. They wanted to come to the United States. So this is from the Times story. In a January 14th text message, Mr. Tate indicated that help was on the way. And this is January 14th of 2025. I had word from the Trump administration that they're on top of things, Mr. Tate wrote to someone close to him in a message reviewed by the New York Times. Quote, I've been told I'll be free soon, but Trump needs to see me in Miami, he added. And then the whole story is about how they got close to the Trumps.
And so basically Trump, like obviously there's like this political element to the Tates and the manosphere and all of that, but it's also like he freed his son's idol. I just, how many just disgusting, bad human beings are we going to find out the Donald Trump part? It's like a variety of everyone that you could imagine. It's like, do you not like sex traffickers? Well, he freed one of those. What about the people who stormed the Capitol? He freed them. What about just a, your, your standard issue fraudster who just like, you know, defrauded hundreds of thousands of people and senior citizens freed them too. What about the murder we brought back in Venezuela next per prisoner exchange? Yeah, there's one. There's one. Oh, what about the, uh, the drug kingpin from Hunter was the, they are the, the hundred and president that was in league with the drug kingpins that was in sitting in federal prison here. Pardon him as well. You see that Silk Road guy, another drug deal. Pardon him as well. Guys, did you see that Trump?
The Trump department justice dropped the investigation against the FIFA corruption. Oh, yeah. Right after Trump got his peace prize. He doesn't want to. He doesn't. Anyone connected to the FIFA peace prize. We don't want to. We don't want to see them, you know, get in any trouble. It's weird. His numbers on crime aren't doing so great. If you have money, if you have connections, you get pardoned. You can do whatever crimes you want. But if you are just a regular American citizen who looks brown and happens to be near an ice raid, you could go away for days and no one would ever find out where you are.
Cool country. Yeah, well, we should change it in 26. All right. When we get back from the break, you'll hear my conversation with Adam Smith. But two things before we get to that. In case you missed it, Pod Save America is coming to New Zealand and Australia. What do you think, Dan? You ever been to Australia before? No, have you? I have. Okay. I went to Barack Obama in 2014. I didn't go on that track. You were gone. Really one of the all-time great trips. I'll tell you the story later. Okay. Well, we're calling this one the hopefully just visiting tour. And we said that's a little too close to home. She's a little worried about that. As Hallie had the same response. Anyway, I think it's like hanging a lantern. It's like we're being this public about it. So it would be.
I guess it would just be ironic. Look at those yachts who flew too close to the sun in Australia. They did say it might happen and there it is happening. Anyway, we landed in Auckland on February 11th. That is the 11th of February down there. We had some issues with the dates. God, we can't do anything right. Then there's three cities in Australia after that. Melbourne on the 13th of February. Brisbane on the 14th of February. And Sydney on the 16th of February. Tickets are on sale right now. For more details and to grab tickets, head to cricket.com slash events. Also...
If you haven't checked out Runaway Country with Alex Wagner yet, what are you doing? It's great. This week, she's been joined by three incredible guests to dig into the chaos of the Pentagon. She talks to Senator Alyssa Slokin. She talks to Ben Rhodes. Heard of him? No. Yeah. And she talks to Nancy Youssef, one of the journalists who gave up her Pentagon press pass rather than, you know, deal with Pete Hexeth's new rules. And so she talks about what it's like reporting outside of the Pentagon walls. It's a fantastic episode. I just listened to it this morning. It's so good. So tune into Runaway Country now on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Long Play, our docu-series exploring the people and forces shaping the South, is back. Newsflash, the South is the new political epicenter of the country. Democrats are way on their heels in this region, but Republicans are going through their own reckoning in the South, too. We're in the final stretch of the midterms, and the political map has only gotten more competitive with new states and districts emerging as potential flips. So we thought it was time to get back out on the road and take a closer look at what's actually happening on the ground. I'm Erin Haines, journalist and expert on all things Southern politics. And I'm Jennifer Palmieri, former White House Communications Director. Tune in on Mondays to Long Play series on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
Congressman Adam Smith, welcome back to Pod Save America. Well, thanks for having me. A lot going on in the world. There's a lot going on. I want to get into some of the bigger questions around the Trump administration's military actions in the Southern Hemisphere and in his broader foreign policy. But since you're one of the few members of Congress who's actually seen the video of the second U.S. strike that killed two survivors of the first boat strike, I wonder what you can tell us about what you saw without getting into anything classified, of course.
Yeah, and by the way, this video should be released. There's nothing classified about this strike. I mean, they've released videos on almost 20 strikes now, and they should release this one. I think the reason they're not is because it doesn't paint a picture that they want people to see. Now, look, I mean, you've got two people clinging to a capsized boat. It's the bow of the boat that's still above water. How much of the boat remains underwater, can't tell because it's underwater. It's possible the boat is actually split in half at this point. Early on in the video, they're like pulling at it. I mean, whether or not they're trying to get it to flip over or whether or not they're just trying to get a solid hold so they don't fall into the water, I don't know. But by the end of it, it's clear. There's no tipping this back over. So they're clinging to the side of a boat.
They have, they're clearly unarmed. They do not have any communications devices on them. And then about 40 minutes after the first strike, the second strike hits, kills them and sinks the remainder of the boat. And at one point they were waving maybe or? Yeah, near the end they were waving and there's a lot of speculation about what that might mean. To me, it's pretty obvious. We had an asset in the air over the top of them. It kind of looks like they saw the asset and just like two people in a desert island when they see something fly over, what do you do? Right. That seems the most likely interpretation of that.
So the Republicans who've seen the video have seemed largely satisfied with the administration's explanation, at least in their public comments. Does that track with what you've heard privately? And do you think they genuinely believe the strike was legal and right? Or are they worried about pissing off Trump? They're clearly worried about pissing off Trump. As for the second part, they don't talk about that. Certainly don't talk about it with me. I have not heard that. Now, I will say that if you want to look at the video and say – and there is an explanation, which we can get into, that I've gotten from Adam O'Bradley on a couple of occasions now. If you want to say you buy that explanation, that's fine. But Senator Cotton in particular has really been saying things that either his ability to perceive events is severely limited or he's not being honest. This notion that I saw two people trying to flip the boat and continue their mission. They were trying to communicate.
Yeah, no, that was absolutely not happening. And then he had this line during his Meet the Press interview. I forget the exact words he used. He said something like, they didn't look like they had been impaired in any way. I'm like, well, their boat got blown up, set on fire. Nine of the 11 of them got killed. And they're now clinging to a capsized small piece of the boat hundreds of miles from anywhere with no help. I don't know. I think you could interpret that as somewhat impaired. So just the lack of honesty. Now, I mean, I suppose they could come out and say, look, this is what we saw. This is what it was. We still think it's legitimate. But for the most part, they've avoided getting into specifics and just said, no, we're good. Because if you ask them about specifics, that's very difficult to defend.
And what was Admiral Bradley's explanation that you found plausible, even though you disagree with it? Yeah. And this is where we get into the policy and what is a real huge problem. Something that's really important for. we Democrats, as we look to 26 and hopefully to 28 and getting back into power, how are we going to govern? Obviously, cost of living, healthcare, domestic issues, but national security policy matters. And I know on this podcast, you've got a lot of people who are really concerned about US national security policy. So you start out with the post 9-11 world, which basically was we got surprised by Al-Qaeda in a big negative way. And I think there's a lot of people who weren't alive for that. If you weren't alive for that, you have a different perspective on it. That was a terrifying moment. I was at the US Capitol when it happened. And so how did this happen? How can we prevent it going forward?
armed, organized groups that are trying to kill us. So let's figure out who they are and let's get them first, basically, was the philosophy. And I'm not going to say I was in no way opposed to that philosophy at the time. Now, what happened, though, was, OK, so it's al-Qaeda. It's Osama bin Laden. He's coming for us. He's hanging out in caves in Afghanistan. Let's go get it. But then they've got affiliates. They've got AQAP in Yemen. They've got al-Shabaab in Somalia. They've got al-Qaeda in the land of the Islamic Maghreb, which is basically West Africa. And then you've got ISIS. And then you've got subgroups. And it metastasized into this mission where
an incredibly large number of people could be categorized as an enemy combatant, just like a division of armed troops coming across you on the battlefield. And that expansion got us into trouble. And we didn't basically get the read on that soon enough. And it metastasized into the mission in Iraq, an endless mission in Afghanistan, trying to think that we'd always kill just one more person, then we'd absolutely be safe. And that was a mistake, all right? Now, let's not underestimate that.
Post 9-11, we did stop al-Qaeda and we did stop any more attacks in the US, but it went too far. Now Trump is taking that and just expanding it even further with this designation of 24 narco-terrorist groups. Because once you call somebody a terrorist, then you can do whatever you want to them. But really, anyone trying to traffic drugs is a terrorist in the same sense as Osama bin Laden, who was trying to kill as many Americans as possible. I mean, drug dealers are awful, horrible, terrible people. We have a massive drug problem in this country. How to deal with it is a policy we need to get after. It seems to be as much of a demand problem as a supply problem, which lays out a whole bunch of different approaches. But if you say that anyone trying to traffic drugs, anyone affiliated...
with a group trying to traffic drugs is now as legitimate a target as Osama bin Laden when he was trying to kill as many Americans as possible. You've just dramatically expanded the power. And also, let's make clear, there's no congressional authorization for this. Say what you want about the global war on terror. It had congressional authorization. The president's doing this completely on his own, for the most part, without informing Congress, which brings us to the next interesting part of this. Why? What's he trying to accomplish? Is he really just hell-bent to stop the scourge of drugs in America? Well, while he's...
pardoning the former convicted, or sorry, the convicted, former president, convicted drug dealer from Honduras, also pardoning Ross Albrecht, the Silk Road crypto guy who was convicted of laundering billions of dollars in drug money, it doesn't seem consistent. So what I think he's trying to do is assert power, dominance, go outside the law, what he's trying to do with the tariffs, what he's trying to do with ICE, terrorizing all of our communities, sending troops into our cities to engage in domestic law enforcement, all the programs that he canceled against the law. He's trying to say, law didn't apply to me, and I'm going to assert dominance, certainly over the law in the country, but also over the Western Hemisphere. Let's not forget the plans to invade Greenland and Panama and annex Canada. This is the complete detonation of any principled foreign policy by the United States of America. And I think there's plenty of people going to be listening to this podcast who are going to say, well, when did we ever have principles? We did. We haven't upheld them as well as we should have. It's gotten complicated and difficult. We need to do better. But Trump is taking us to a place that we haven't been since the end of World War II, which is the U.S. doesn't have principles. It just has interests. We're going to use our power to grab as much of the world as we can. And the law doesn't really matter. To me, that's what this is about much more than any desire to stop drugs coming into the United States of America.
So there's a lot there and I want to I want to get to a lot of it. But just to start in the more narrow sense of these, you know, labels, these organizations, narco terrorists, has a bunch of individuals labeled as narco terrorists. Have you got any answers as to why the administration can't just do what the Coast Guard has done for the last forever and just interdict these boats, particularly since I guess we just seized a Venezuelan oil tanker, an oil tanker off the off the coast of Venezuela? Like, why can't you just do that with the drug boats? We haven't gotten much of an answer. I mean, to the extent I've heard an answer, it's like, well, that just wasn't effective enough. And it's easier to blow a boat up than it is to seize it. But that's what's particularly disturbing going back to the second strike. And these two guys are sitting on top of a boat that is not operative, drifting with the current. Clearly, in that instance, interdiction seemed like a pretty simple option that wasn't chosen. So now I haven't gotten a good answer. And again, I keep coming back to this thing. And I don't want to sound too like a conspiracy theorist or Trump is evil, bent on the destruction of the world. But I do think a lot of it has to do with trying to expand his power.
so that it won't be questioned. You know, kill these people, then I'm free to go from there. I think that's a lot of it. He wants to be unbound by norms and laws and constitutions and all of that to do what he wants. So to the explanation that you guys got from Admiral Bradley, was that more about, well, if the boat strikes themselves are legal, then it follows that the second strike was the right thing to do because the order was to blow up the boats. Yeah, there's a couple of problems with that. But yes, and interestingly, as I literally just talked to him like an hour ago,
He's a SOCOM commander, so it was not directly related, but we did talk about it. And it's like, so first of all, is it the drugs that are the legitimate target or is it the individuals that are the legitimate target? You know, much has been made of, oh, the Washington Post saying that Hexeth gave an order to kill everybody and that was clearly not true. It actually was pretty accurate. There were 11 people on this boat and the order was kill all 11, destroy the drugs. Now, when you say kill everybody, it conjures up images of, you know, just blow up the apartment building, who cares? You know, in this case, the 11 people who had been designated were in a pretty confined area. You weren't going to, there wasn't going to be collateral damage, but he gave the order, kill them all.
kill them all and destroy the drugs. And yes, this decision on the second strike flows from that. And is it really lawful without congressional authorization to just, and these are affiliates. I mean, how directly linked, they're not the drug lords. They're not, you know, the famous third person in charge of Al-Qaeda who we were targeting constantly. No, they're 11 guys who were, you know, foot soldiers in the effort. But yes, they targeted the drugs and that definitely flowed into the decision to say, well, and this is one part that I'm...
have my serious questions about, but they claimed that it was possible that the drugs were still there underneath that portion of the boat that still remained. I find that not terribly plausible and something I want to investigate further. But, you know, if it's not clear either, well, what if the drugs weren't there? Are these two people legitimate targets? They say no, because this is the two people who survived a month later in October and they were just floating in the water apart from the drugs. But why? I mean, why if they're legitimate targets, you know, as humans, regardless of the drugs, why? And that's why we need a lot more investigation and explanation of what this policy is. Well, speaking of those other two survivors from
another strike in October. Clearly, the policy had changed. Something changed because they didn't blow them out of the water. They didn't kill them. But I'm sure you saw the New York Times story from this week that said when they rescued those survivors, the Pentagon lawyers reached out to the State Department lawyers and asked if they could send them to Seacott in El Salvador or basically anywhere but the United States, where if they entered the United States and entered the U.S. judicial system, then the administration would have to prove in court, might have to prove in court, that there was evidence for the legal justification for the strikes writ large.
What did you make of that story? Yeah, no, I think it really underscores the point. They don't know exactly what they're doing or the legalities behind it. And as I asked in one briefing about a month ago, so basically you need less evidence to kill them than you do to capture them. And what sense does that make? But also they would say, and they have said, that the policy didn't change, that the difference is that these two were afloat in the ocean, clearly away from the drugs. There were no more drugs involved, as opposed to these two who were on a boat that conceivably could have had the drugs still underneath the damaged boat. Yeah, I mean.
It's like, it's funny. That's not funny because it's really serious business, but I'm a big sports fan. So as he was explaining this to me, it reminded me of listening to people in a replay official trying to figure out if an NFL receiver had, quote, completed the catch, end quote. You know, and when you're getting down into that level, there is one thing that I think should come up over the top of it. We're talking about killing people. So let's err on the side of not.
All right. And I understand. All right. You know, if you're out in the field in Iraq with roadside bombs going off, with people showing up with suicide vests, and does that guy have a vest? Does he not have a – those are much tougher calls. And I mean, we're talking about two guys clearly unarmed in the middle of the freaking ocean. All right. Clinging to the remains of a boat. Make the decision. No. These guys are clearly not a threat to anybody. Let's not kill them.
So you've been demanding answers. You've been trying to slow this down. I know the annual National Defense Authorization Act passed the House yesterday with a provision that would cut Pete Hegseth's travel budget if he doesn't turn over the footage of the second strike. Do you think that'll work? Do you think you'll get the footage? Probably not. The good thing about that is we got something in there that says the United States Congress doesn't approve of what you're not doing, of the fact that you're not releasing this. That, to me.
is a significant victory in this Congress with these Republicans. Now, I mean, fencing his travel budget means it'll make it a little bit inconvenient for him. I don't think he'll change. Sorry, I know this is serious business, but jokes occur to me. I've been joking that we should have fenced his hair and makeup budget. I would have hit home. I would have hit home. No, I mean, but I think that the point really is important. The Congress said, look, you are not complying with the law. And that's the other aspect, okay? Not complying with the law in terms of when you have the authority to kill somebody, but it goes beyond that. This Department of Defense, I mean, Hackseth didn't even keep secret information secret in SignalGate.
Then he acts like it's fine. Of course we release, you know, the targeting information and the timing of strikes before they happen. Who doesn't? You know, it's just there is a lack of accountability and a lostness about this group. And the one thing that sticks in my crawl more than anything is this whole Department of War nonsense. He is not the Secretary of War. He is the Secretary of Defense because that's what the law says. And you don't get to just decide to ignore the law. And yet he is. You know, I was out at the Reagan Defense Forum. Oh, he's the Secretary of War. He's the Undersecretary of War. No, he's not. That's illegal.
We want the leaders of the highest level of our government to at least care with the lawyers. I mean, you've worked in this area before. You know, I mean, there's arguments about what can the executive branch really do. But here, it's not a matter of argument. They're like, we do what we want. Don't talk to me about the law. And I think that should alarm every single American, regardless of your partisan affiliation. Do your options for dealing with this administration get better if Democrats retake Congress in the midterms? Like what additional powers would you have to either try to get answers from them on what's happening in the Southern Hemisphere, whether it's the strikes, whether it's...
whatever they're doing in Venezuela or anything else. It gets better 1,000%. There are so many things we can do, but it requires the majority. There are a majority of the House. I mean, we're seeing the Republican majority fracture as we're passing repeated discharge petitions, which overcome the will of the current majority. But we need a majority of members to say, yes, we want that to happen. And if we have the majority, we can do that. I would also have subpoena power to get after these. I would have considerable more authority to fence larger chunks of their funds. It's not a panacea. Don't get me wrong. It's not like they make me king for the day if I become chairman again. We still have the Senate to deal with. I mean, hopefully we can pick up the Senate. That's a more complicated thing, as you know. But yeah, if we got-
one body or the other, we would have a lot more power to demand accountability. We'd still be a long way from it. Look, you know, George Will wrote a column a couple of days ago that I thought was pretty good, which was it's hard to constrain the military powers of the president. That's why you have to be really careful about who you give the job to. And so certainly Trump being back in the White House is a huge problem. But yes, if we had the majority, we would have considerably more power to hold him accountable.
What's your latest thinking on what they're trying to do in Venezuela? Obviously, you know, got stepped up a little bit with the seizure of the tanker. So they decided to levy some sanctions on Maduro's three nephews I saw today. Are you getting any more answers on this on Venezuela? Are they getting briefed on it? No, we're not getting clear answers on this. And when we ask about it, and I was briefed by Secretary Rubio and Secretary Hegseth a couple of weeks ago. Oh, no, no, no, no. Gosh, Venezuela is all about the drugs. We don't like Maduro. But you can see from what the president has said and the actions he's taken that he wants to drive Maduro from power. And he mentioned Petro in Colombia yesterday. Look.
Part of the pressure, Trump said what he was going to do. And he's been very clear about this. And it's this 19th century way of looking at the world where he wants to control and dominate the Western Hemisphere. And I'm going to tie this into Ukraine in just one second in a very troubling way. And he thinks this is our area of control. And he wants to assert that control. And Maduro is not playing ball.
And you can see, you know, I can't pronounce the guy's name in Argentina, but, you know, he's a Trump guy. So here, $40 billion. We love you. In Honduras, you know, he's got an election. So he wants to influence that election to go his way. So he pardons, you know, the, it's all about, do you pledge allegiance to Trump? And right now Maduro and Petro are not. So he wants to try to force them out in the same way that he'd like to grab Greenland, that he wants to control the Panama Canal, that he wants to annex Canada.
He has this vision of the world that it's 19th century all over again. It's really important. I read something that was sort of the history of international law. And prior to World War II, we had international law. And it basically was big, powerful countries were free to grab whatever territory they could. They had to talk to the other big, powerful countries before they did it. And there had to be some kind of like little understanding here. And after World War II, we said, yeah, that's not working out very well. World War after World War after World War, the last one killed like 75 million people, damn near exterminated the planet. Let's try a different approach.
Let's try sovereignty. Let's try some international rule of law, the rules-based system. And I know it's not perfect. And I know we violated it from time to time. But there was a general notion that that's what you're trying. Trump wants to get rid of all that. And that's why he's more on Putin's side in Eastern Europe than he is on Ukraine's. Putin wants to grab Eastern Europe. That's fine. I got my thing. He's got his thing. That's OK. I mean, it's the only explanation for why he's undermining Zelensky at every turn. I mentioned I was at the Reagan Defense Forum the whole time.
peace through strength thing. You know, if we are, in fact, on Ukraine's side in that war, which we should be, then what Trump is doing is he's showing surrender through weakness. I mean, who the hell goes into a negotiation and says, yeah, we'll lose it. We're getting our asses kicked over here. Ukraine can barely hold on. So if he's on Ukraine's side, he's an idiot. But I suspect that he's really not. You know, he's more in the sovereignty, shmoverty. We big, powerful men get to do what we want. It also explains sort of his interactions with President Xi in China as well and why they're not, they don't seem to be taking China as seriously.
as a national security potential threat or at least competitor. And I'd probably be worried if I was Taiwan with Trump in power. But these aren't just, people should know, these aren't just like your guesses on what they're up to. Like they released their national security strategy, Trump and Hegseth, at the Pentagon this week. And it's very explicit by talking about a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, in which he does see, they do see themselves as sort of like, we get to run the Western Hemisphere. And, you know, it tracks with all of Trump's weird respect for all of the other...
powerful dictators who happen to be right-wing dictators, right? If you're more left-wing authoritarian, then he wants to oust you. But if you're more right-wing authoritarian, then he's your pal. How are you thinking about a democratic alternative to this worldview that both gives people a different vision than Trump's, but also demonstrates to people that our party has learned from our own past mistakes when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world? The two big things for me is, well, two, maybe three. Let me get started here. I'll see how many I come up with. But number one, let's get rid of the idea of dominance altogether. I think this is where we made a mistake. And at the end of the Cold War, the end of the Cold War corresponding with the first Gulf War was really unfortunate timing. You know, the Soviet Union collapsed and then we showed up and, you know, took care of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait like that. And so we got into this, into our head, the idea that, oh.
We can fix all of the world's problems. And, you know, there were some who had malevolent reasons for that. A lot of neocons just wanted to dominate for the sake of putting more money in their pocket for the sake of having power. But there were a lot of people on the left that said, you know, we can stop hunger, famine, civil war. We can go into a place like Libya or Rwanda or Somalia and fix things. We need to bury that idea. We can influence events and the U.S. should play a role. But we need to get rid of the no pure competitor we must dominate because it's just not going to happen.
I mean, we live in a multipolar world. It's not post-World War II when the entire rest of the industrialized world had just been blown off the face of the map. We have competition. How do we manage that competition? So get rid of dominance, number one. Number two, partners and allies. We're not going to do this alone. We're not going to meet our national security interests on our own. And Trump, of course, is busily undermining that as well. But also, I think, understand that the US should play a role in the world. And this is where I disagree with some of my friends on the left who have a very harshly critical assessment of what the US has been doing over the course of the last 80 years. I think the record is more mixed. But by and large, the US being engaged in the world in the right way is a positive thing.
If we disengage, then brutal, aggressive autocrats like Putin, like what Iran has done in the least, they're going to prosper. So I think we need to be engaged from a place of humility, cooperation, and working together. And then the final piece of this is when this rules-based international order was set up, the world was an entirely different place than it is right now. I think we need to recognize that. You know, Brazil, India, even China. These are countries that have a bigger play and a bigger stake. I don't want a confrontation with China, by the way.
Now, I think Trump's doing this for all the wrong reasons, but the idea that we should tone it down and try to find some way to get along with China. I took one of the first congressional trip to China two months ago and had high-level meetings over there. We had a long way to go. But the world is a better place in the next 50 years if the US and China can figure out some way to peacefully coexist than if we're constantly bumping into each other. And I think that's a pretty decent framework is we got work to do, but let's try to have a rules-based international order. Now, when it comes to human rights, when it comes to liberal democracy, we want to promote that. And this is where I think Hagseth fundamentally understands what a realist is.
A realist basically believes that liberal democracy, pluralism, greater freedom and opportunity for all is a better way to live, but understands that we're not in a position to force the entire world to do that. And we occasionally have to work with people who aren't going to meet that ideal. So we're going to be realistic about that. What Hegseth and Trump are doing, it's not realism. It's nihilism. It's power. It's no principles. Only, well, the phrase, I forget who used it, was, you know, that the strong do take what they can and the weak suffer what they must. That's the way the world was. That's not the way we want the world to be. So I think we need to work off of that framework. There's all kinds of different little pieces of it. But that's something I'm working on.
Because we got to win in 26. We got to win in 28. There's a whole lot of issues. Like I said, I want to have a plausible national security strategy for our coalition, which our coalition is pretty much at each other's throats right now. I want to try to have that conversation, get that figured out. So we're in a stronger position in 26 and 28. I mean, it is.
It does seem like zero sum, a view of the world that is zero sum politics, both abroad and, you know, it matches what they're doing here and the policies they have here, which is just this, you know, the strong survive, survival of the fittest and the weak can just, you know, deal with it. There was one more thing. But before I let you go in the national security strategy, clearly this, you know, Western hemisphere, we're going to run the Western hemisphere. It's in our sphere of influence thing. You know, it's power for power's sake. They also mentioned quite a few times mass migration. And I do think that.
Some of what they're doing in the Caribbean and Venezuela, like, you know, they want to say it's about drugs. But really, I mean, you know, Stephen Miller was talking about blowing up boats back in 2018, reportedly. And so I do wonder if some of this is meant as like a deterrent, like we are going to stop the rest of the world from even attempting to come to the United States. And partly in the national security strategy, they lay out like the era of mass migration is over, which seems. sort of ludicrous to me and that like you can't really stop people from trying to migrate places, particularly as we're, you know, we have conflicts all over the world and climate change is going to start pushing people, you know, towards other countries as well. And so I wonder how you think about dealing with mass migration, the reality of mass migration, knowing that, you know, we just went through four years of Joe Biden where we had some real border challenges that in some ways led to another Donald Trump term. And now we have this national security strategy and a domestic policy that is focused primarily on keeping immigrants up.
Yeah, that's a really good point. I hadn't thought about it quite that starkly. Thanks for mentioning that because that factors into the thinking as well. Several different pieces to that. I mean, first of all, and this is something I left out in National Security Strategy, development matters. If you don't want people to migrate, help make sure that all the wealth and opportunity isn't concentrated in just a few places. Let's stop some of these. Don't get rid of USAID. Don't starve hungry children to death across the world. Actually engage in trying to create a more prosperous world for them so that they don't have to migrate to survive is number one. Number two, I do think we as Democrats,
we do have to have some control on our borders. And I think that hurt us. We can't take everyone who's desperate. We need to have a rational asylum system, a rational immigration system. And certainly part of that is a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented population that we have invited into this country and depended upon their labor for decades to now cast them out into the world as cruel, wrong, and bad for the country. But we do have to have a border security plan. But the other part of this that I think is really important that just screams out in that national security strategy is it's really racist.
Okay. Tip of the hat to Trump, you know, sort of like pulling off the mask in Pennsylvania yesterday. Yeah, we want people from Sweden and Norway, not from those shithole countries. You know, he just said the quiet part out loud as the cliche goes. And I think that racism is a huge problem because what does it mean to be an American? Well, you're an American if you believe in the basic liberal democracy values here. It doesn't matter what religion you have. That was sort of our principle. And now what Trump and these people are trying to say, no, American, you better be a straight white guy. Well, we need some women too, but certain designated roles in that regard. You know, I don't think that's a message that's going to be unifying in the world if we pit.
you know, you know, races and religions against each other in a death struggle to the end. I think, you know, migration shouldn't be based on religion and race and all of that. You know, we do have to control it, like I said, but understanding this white Christian nationalist thing, that's another connection between Trump and Putin. We got to nip that in the bud because that fundamentally undercuts both our principles and our values, and it leads to a lot more conflict. You know, if you tell the rest of the world, if you don't have the right religion, you don't look the right way, then you're not going to be allowed to live. Well, they're going to fight. So we better have a more inclusive world going forward.
Congressman, thank you as always for joining Pod Save America. Appreciate you coming on. Yeah, I love what you guys do. I appreciate you giving me the chance and got a lot of work to do. Got to win next year and got to win in 28. For sure. For sure. Well, good luck out there. Take care. Thank you.
That's our show for today. Thanks to Adam Smith for coming on. Love when we'll be back in the feed on Sunday with a conversation with J.B. Pritzker about the Ice Madness in Chicago redistricting and the best and worst Star Wars movies. I'm excited for this. That was very important to him to love it. Yes. When he found out that J.B. Pritzker is a Star Wars guy. I've never seen him more aggressively to interview than after that. Yeah, well, it's also like because J.B. Pritzker likes gambling and goes to Vegas and his big steakhouse guy. But like he's hitting all the stuff for Lovett. Lovett's very excited about this. When he was on the podcast in Chicago during the convention, he told Tommy and I that he and his buddies do a steakhouse crawl. Yeah.
I don't know whether he's going to be the best president or the best presidential candidate. He might be the best hang. Yeah, well, we'll see. Tune in Sunday for that, and then we'll have a new Pod Save America episode for you again on Tuesday. Bye, everyone. Bye, everyone.
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