Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds, and the state of Louisiana legally requires
Speaker 1: the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms. We have
Speaker 1: such a great show for you today. Congressman Jared Hoffman
Speaker 1: stops by to talk about the preemptive steps he and
Speaker 1: his committee are taking to try to stop Trump from
Speaker 1: having executive power and instituting Project twenty twenty five if
Speaker 1: he is re elected. Then we'll talk to the Opium
Speaker 1: Chronicles Simon Rosenberg about what he's seeing in the twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four election. But first we have the host of
Speaker 1: the Think Like an Economist podcast, University of Michigan, Professor
Speaker 1: Justin Wolfers. Welcome back to Fast Politics. One of my
Speaker 1: favorite personal favorite guests, despite the fact that he's having
Speaker 1: a much better time than the rest of us.
Speaker 2: Justin Wolfers, Molly, being one of your favorite economists is
Speaker 2: do you have a second favorite?
Speaker 1: I mean, I love Krugman. We've had him on He's
Speaker 1: no terrific. Yeah, you're right, walk Krugman. He's my guy.
Speaker 1: But I think we should have a Bollman here of
Speaker 1: victory lap because you were right. You were cautiously optimistic
Speaker 1: about this economy, and you turned out to be right.
Speaker 2: Do you want to spend fifteen minutes on there? So
Speaker 2: forty five?
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: Look the US economy, it's been just a relentlessly boring story,
Speaker 2: which is the economy keeps growing, wages are growing, they're
Speaker 2: ahead of prices, inequality keeps falling, unemployments near a fifty
Speaker 2: year low. It's just so dull. This is what economists want.
Speaker 2: John Maynard Kines famously said he wanted economists to be
Speaker 2: is boring as dentists. If you look at the economy
Speaker 2: out there, it is wonderfully, splendidly boring. Different families have
Speaker 2: different stories. Lots of people are struggling with the cost
Speaker 2: of living, but lots of people are finding work, lots
Speaker 2: of people are finding new jobs, lots of people are
Speaker 2: starting new businesses, lots of people are getting pay rises,
Speaker 2: and overall all across the income distribution, people are keeping
Speaker 2: up and in fact doing better than keeping up. They're
Speaker 2: getting ahead. And this little engine that could, the US
Speaker 2: economy is doing things that most economists thought it would
Speaker 2: never be able to do. So Look, it's not my
Speaker 2: victory lap, it's Joe Biden's and most importantly, it's the
Speaker 2: American people's.
Speaker 1: Infleetion is why an economy that looks good feels bad.
Speaker 1: Explain to us a little bit about that.
Speaker 2: Look, there's different ways of thinking about it. Let me
Speaker 2: start with why it feels bad, and then let me
Speaker 2: do that horrible thing that you're not allowed to do
Speaker 2: and explain why it shouldn't. So why does it feel bad?
Speaker 2: You go to the grocery store and you see the
Speaker 2: high prices and they're shocking, and it leads you to
Speaker 2: do something like call it a cost of living crisis.
Speaker 2: And if prices over the past few years have gone
Speaker 2: up by ten percent, you think yourselful if they hadn't
Speaker 2: gone up by ten percent able to buy ten percent
Speaker 2: more stuff. So it feels like inflation stole from you,
Speaker 2: just took away your purchasing power. Now, that's not actually
Speaker 2: how economies work. If we hadn't had that, and here's look,
Speaker 2: let me try and get to the core of the issue. Mollie.
Speaker 2: What I want to do is close your eyes right
Speaker 2: now and your listeners to unless they're driving, and imagine
Speaker 2: you fall asleep for ten years like sleeping beauty, and
Speaker 2: you wake up and everything in the world has an
Speaker 2: extra zero on it. Right, So the dollar store is
Speaker 2: now the ten dollar store. The ten dollar bill in
Speaker 2: your wallet is now one hundred dollar bill. The one
Speaker 2: thousand dollars in savings you had is now ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: An apple isn't a dollar, it's ten dollars. An orange
Speaker 2: isn't a dollar, it's ten dollars. And so on. Your
Speaker 2: wages went up tenfold, everything's gone up tenfold. What different
Speaker 2: choices would you make? How different is that world? And
Speaker 2: the answer is it's exactly the same as before you
Speaker 2: went asleep. There's just more zeros in it. Right, The
Speaker 2: number of hours you have to work to afford an
Speaker 2: apple hasn't changed, Right, Your wage is ten times high.
Speaker 2: It shows the price of the apple. So how hard
Speaker 2: you work, what you'll buy, and what your quality of
Speaker 2: life is would be exactly the same. Just that world
Speaker 2: would have extra zeros on the end of it. And
Speaker 2: so what we see there is that if all prices
Speaker 2: and all wages go up at the same time, nothing changes.
Speaker 2: And so that's an example of one hundred, sorry, one
Speaker 2: thousand percent inflation and no one's any worse off, and
Speaker 2: so if you want to get fancy, this is what
Speaker 2: economists call neutrality. If everything goes up at the same time,
Speaker 2: it's neutral. Nothing changes, the inflation doesn't matter at all.
Speaker 1: That's sort of what's happened in this country.
Speaker 2: It's kind of mostly what happened. If I try and
Speaker 2: look someone in the I that's exactly what happened, and
Speaker 2: they'll say not exactly, and I have to agree with them.
Speaker 2: But it's actually most of the story, which is, you know,
Speaker 2: since the pandemic, wages are roughly up twenty percent, prices
Speaker 2: are roughly up twenty percent, Housing prices are roughly up
Speaker 2: twenty percent, the price of apples are roughly up twenty percent,
Speaker 2: and so on. It just doesn't feel that way.
Speaker 1: We have been living in a country where money has been.
Speaker 2: Cheap or free. Yeah, that's such a funny expression. Money
Speaker 2: never feels cheap to me, but.
Speaker 1: With low interest rates, it means that money has been
Speaker 1: very cheap.
Speaker 2: Right, so it's been easy to borrow, to get a
Speaker 2: mortgage and so on. But I really want to focus
Speaker 2: on inflation. An earlier generation, my parents lived through much
Speaker 2: of their lives with inflation in the United States bumping
Speaker 2: around five, ten percent, fifteen percent, up and down and
Speaker 2: up and down, and they understood the deal. The deal
Speaker 2: was when prices rise, eventually your wages will rise and
Speaker 2: it will catch up, and it'll be a little bit
Speaker 2: like that dream I just described to you. So they
Speaker 2: didn't freak out. They just were used to it. They
Speaker 2: knew that when inflation happened, everything would eventually sort itself
Speaker 2: out and you'll basically be made whole. And then what
Speaker 2: happened was we had thirty, maybe even forty years of
Speaker 2: basically no inflation. We had inflation at basically two percent,
Speaker 2: which is so low you barely notice it. And so
Speaker 2: for anyone my age, I'm fifty one or less, they're
Speaker 2: not used to the deal that when inflation rises, everything
Speaker 2: will sort itself out and you won't actually get ripped off.
Speaker 2: And so they feel ripped off.
Speaker 1: And I hear you.
Speaker 2: I know that you feel ripped off, But I also
Speaker 2: know enough from studying the US economy and economies all
Speaker 2: around the world, you're not going to be ripped off.
Speaker 2: And in fact, it's pretty clear that by election day,
Speaker 2: and actually probably by today, almost across the entire income distribution,
Speaker 2: everyone's wages higher than they were before this inflationary burst.
Speaker 2: Once they've risen by more than prices have, things have
Speaker 2: mostly but not entirely sorted themselves.
Speaker 1: Out right. Talk us through how Trump is going to
Speaker 1: fix inflation. Ha ha.
Speaker 2: Well, the first thing he's going to do, he said,
Speaker 2: is shift from an income tax to tariffs. Tariffs sound
Speaker 2: like a really good idea. It sounds like that's a
Speaker 2: tax on China, boy, and you know, added a little
Speaker 2: xenophobia and stir, but actually a tariff is a tax
Speaker 2: on a good that an American buys. And just because
Speaker 2: I'm a Chinese manufacturer, if I could sell my goods
Speaker 2: to Europe or the US, I'm not going to sell
Speaker 2: him any cheaper to the US. That means, if you
Speaker 2: make me pay a ten percent tax, I'm going to
Speaker 2: pass that along. And in fact, there were very careful
Speaker 2: studies of the first Trump tariffs on washing machines and
Speaker 2: things like that, and basically every extra dollar in tariffs
Speaker 2: were passed along as a dollar higher prices. And so
Speaker 2: when we moved to tariffs, that's basically saying he's going
Speaker 2: to burst sales taxes on anything you buy from abroad.
Speaker 2: Have a look at the label on the T shirt
Speaker 2: you're wearing right now. I guarantee you it's not made
Speaker 2: in the US, and so it's going to cause an
Speaker 2: enormous inflationary burst right there. Secondly, he wants to undermine
Speaker 2: the independence of the FED. This is the sort of
Speaker 2: wonky stuff that no one cares about, but is the
Speaker 2: first step to becoming Argentina. And your listeners might say,
Speaker 2: what's Argentina famous for. It's famous for great football, terrific beef,
Speaker 2: and the fact that one hundred years ago it was
Speaker 2: one of the richest countries in the world, and then
Speaker 2: its political leadership took every opportunity it could to fuck
Speaker 2: it up. And one of the ways it does that
Speaker 2: is by letting loose on inflation and creating a crisis.
Speaker 2: And one of the ways it does that is it
Speaker 2: allows politically expedient moves in important macro stuff. And so
Speaker 2: one of the things we do in the US is
Speaker 2: we give the FED J. Powell and his crew, We
Speaker 2: tell them go and solve inflation. We'll leave you alone
Speaker 2: to do it and don't hussle you around election time.
Speaker 2: And that's how, partly how we've avoided being Argentina. Now Trump,
Speaker 2: of course, thinks that's terrible. What he wants to do
Speaker 2: is centralized power in the Oval office. He wants the
Speaker 2: FED to be calling him to say what should we
Speaker 2: do about inflation. The thing that he will want to do,
Speaker 2: before any election or any moment is try and goose
Speaker 2: the economy so he looks good, and that would cause
Speaker 2: an inflationary burst, and that is the first step towards
Speaker 2: the path of becoming Argentina. I don't know where that
Speaker 2: process starts. I don't know where it ends, but I
Speaker 2: do know it's a game I don't want to play.
Speaker 2: The US has had tremendous economic success because we have
Speaker 2: politically stable economic institutions. We have nerds whose job is
Speaker 2: to be nerds and not worry about politics, and that
Speaker 2: has protected us from the sort of madness you see
Speaker 2: in other populist countries. Think about Turkey, think about Argentina,
Speaker 2: and then look at our quality of life, and you
Speaker 2: realize that being protected from populism has been marvelous for US.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I don't know. Wow, you made Trump sound worse,
Speaker 1: but you did. I don't think I had completely saw
Speaker 1: through the consequences of that. Why do you think rich
Speaker 1: people like I mean, some of these people are ideologically
Speaker 1: just have brain worms. But why do you think that
Speaker 1: Republicans are still thought of by many voters as better
Speaker 1: on the economy.
Speaker 2: This has been a puzzle my whole life. So let
Speaker 2: me just sort of lay out a few facts. It
Speaker 2: used to be that we thought of Republicans as fiscally conservative,
Speaker 2: that they take care of the budget, and this basically
Speaker 2: hasn't been true in my entire adult life. Reagan famously
Speaker 2: busted the budget more than anyone. Clinton then reined it in.
Speaker 2: Bush busted the budget, Obama did what he could. You saw,
Speaker 2: Trump busted the budget. We haven't had a fiscally conservative
Speaker 2: Republican in forty or fifty years. So it used to
Speaker 2: be that was a core tenant of conservatives that what
Speaker 2: they wanted to do was balance it's the budget that
Speaker 2: they wanted to make sure that the government was not
Speaker 2: going to create any fiscal risks, and it's simply something
Speaker 2: that they gave up. They gave up. There was a
Speaker 2: very clear political theory, which is it was behind what
Speaker 2: Reagan did, which is, if we spend all the money,
Speaker 2: there'll be less money left for Democrats to spend. If
Speaker 2: we have the big party. They have to clean up,
Speaker 2: and Democrats have played along because if they don't clean up,
Speaker 2: then we're really in a mess. So the idea that
Speaker 2: Republicans were fiscally conservative, it's an idea that persists. People
Speaker 2: still say I vote Republican because I want to balance
Speaker 2: the budget. It's simply not been something that they've done
Speaker 2: in decades and decades. Then there's this broad a question.
Speaker 2: You know, people say I trust Republicans on the economy. Well, really,
Speaker 2: if you look at the statistics on this, almost every
Speaker 2: Republican administration has ended in recession. But happened under Bush,
Speaker 2: it obviously happened under Trump, It's happened all the way back.
Speaker 2: And if you look at the statistics, in fact, the
Speaker 2: economy does slightly somewhat better, quite a bit better actually
Speaker 2: under Democrats and under Republicans. Now, I actually don't want
Speaker 2: to trumpet that too much. I know that will disappoint you.
Speaker 2: We only change leaders every four years, so we have
Speaker 2: a very small sample. But what is absolutely clears there's
Speaker 2: absolutely no evidence, none, that the economy is better under
Speaker 2: Republicans than under Democrats. Because if anything appears to in
Speaker 2: US history be the opposite. So why is it people
Speaker 2: think this is good for the economy. I'm puzzled there,
Speaker 2: Molly just puzzled.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's just sort of baffling. And we're
Speaker 1: thinking about So now, one of the inflationary aspects that
Speaker 1: Biden really can't control, and probably the one that is
Speaker 1: the most stubborn, is the FED. Talk to us about
Speaker 1: what the FED is doing here with interest rates and
Speaker 1: if they're going to have a rate cup before the election.
Speaker 2: So the first thing that's important about what you said
Speaker 2: is you said that Biden can't do anything about the FED.
Speaker 2: That's because he's a grown up and Trump would be
Speaker 2: railing against it. Trump at this point was railing against it.
Speaker 2: This is a fact that happened through twenty nineteen, screaming
Speaker 2: at the FED that despite inflation starting to show up,
Speaker 2: he's screaming at them to do nothing about it. That's
Speaker 2: an historical fact that happened. Economics nerds like me will
Speaker 2: tell you that's very, very bad because all politicians scream
Speaker 2: at the FED. And if that happened and the Fed responded,
Speaker 2: then the Fed would never do anything to keep inflation down,
Speaker 2: and inflation would run away. And so the responsible thing
Speaker 2: to do is to tell the FED go away and
Speaker 2: do your job, and I'm going to leave you alone.
Speaker 2: And that's what Biden is choosing to do. So I
Speaker 2: think that it's an investment in the future of our
Speaker 2: economy at the cost of his political There's some small
Speaker 2: political cost that he's paying now, but he's willing to
Speaker 2: make that choice and I respect him for it. Now,
Speaker 2: what the FED is trying to do is, you know,
Speaker 2: inflation's down from rates as high as nine percent there
Speaker 2: was an inflation crisis, down to roughly three percent right now.
Speaker 2: The FED wants it down to two. And so this
Speaker 2: is the last mile problem, which is we've got it
Speaker 2: from high down to almost normal. Now for most people
Speaker 2: the difference between normal and almost normal is not much
Speaker 2: and it doesn't really affect our lives very much. We
Speaker 2: have the memory of a bad inflation through twenty twenty
Speaker 2: two and twenty three, but for most of twenty four
Speaker 2: inflation's really been pretty normal. But the FED wants it
Speaker 2: from almost normal all the way down to normal. That's
Speaker 2: what it's worried about. That we're not quite there. It
Speaker 2: does look like it's on its way there. We had
Speaker 2: literally no inflation last month, none and so it's keeping
Speaker 2: interest rates high enough for long enough that it can
Speaker 2: be confident that it will get it all the way down.
Speaker 2: And partly it's felt okay doing that because the economy,
Speaker 2: the real economy, people getting jobs, people making stuff, has
Speaker 2: been so strong. So it's managed to this is the
Speaker 2: so called soft landing. It's managed to get inflation down
Speaker 2: without creating a recession. And so because it appears not
Speaker 2: to have inflicted that much pain, it's willing to do
Speaker 2: a little more right now.
Speaker 1: So interesting, Thank you so much, justin I hope you'll
Speaker 1: come back when you're back in Michigan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, mis week, it's fun. Australia's fun. You should all
Speaker 2: come and visit.
Speaker 1: Spring us here. And I bet you are trying to
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Speaker 1: Congressman Jared Huffman represents California's second district. Welcome to Fast Politics, Congressmen.
Speaker 2: Great to be with you, Mollie, So.
Speaker 1: Excited to have you. You know, I would love you to like,
Speaker 1: give us a little backstory on how you got involved
Speaker 1: in this. You've been in Congress for a while. Give
Speaker 1: us a sort of introduction to how you got here
Speaker 1: and what you sort of your passions in Congress are,
Speaker 1: et cetera.
Speaker 2: Absolutely well.
Speaker 3: Look, I came to Congress twelve years ago mainly to
Speaker 3: do environmental work. I'm a former our metal lawyer at
Speaker 3: the NRDC, did that work for six years in the
Speaker 3: state legislature. I find myself now kind of on the
Speaker 3: front lines of trying to hang onto our democracy against
Speaker 3: this terrible MAGA threat and Christian nationalism and all these
Speaker 3: other awful things that I couldn't have foreseen when I
Speaker 3: first ran for Congress. But that's the fight that I'm in,
Speaker 3: and I'm trying to do my part. I had a
Speaker 3: briefing maybe two months ago as part of the Progressive
Speaker 3: Caucus on Project twenty twenty five. Thought I knew generally
Speaker 3: what it was, but I have to say I was
Speaker 3: seriously alarmed after that briefing, after understanding the groups behind it,
Speaker 3: the explicitness of the extremism, the sweeping nature of this
Speaker 3: authoritarian blueprint for what the Republicans will do, not what
Speaker 3: they sort of fantasize about doing, but what they absolutely
Speaker 3: will do if they take power in this election, and
Speaker 3: I concluded that Democrats need to step up and do
Speaker 3: much more to spotlight it and fight against it while
Speaker 3: we still have time.
Speaker 1: One of the sort of key jug or not a
Speaker 1: project twenty twenty five is the same thing as this
Speaker 1: Supreme Court right is to dismantle the administrative state, to
Speaker 1: get environmentalists out of the EPA, to strip science from government.
Speaker 1: It's a larger gestault, and it really is, I think
Speaker 1: one of the few things they believe in at this
Speaker 1: point in the Republican Party. Can you say more about that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you look through the chapters, and you know,
Speaker 3: nobody's going to have time to wade through nine hundred
Speaker 3: and twenty pages of by designing manifesto, but you know
Speaker 3: our task force and you and others will help to
Speaker 3: distill this for people. But if you look through it,
Speaker 3: every aspect of government is sort of consolidated into executive power.
Speaker 3: And what do they want to do with that? Well,
Speaker 3: in almost every single agency, it's about weaponizing it to
Speaker 3: advance this authoritarian right wing agenda, including going after their
Speaker 3: political opponents. So even even some of the seemingly innocuous
Speaker 3: parts of Project twenty twenty five, like bringing the FCC
Speaker 3: under jure presidential power, ending the independence that many of
Speaker 3: these agencies have typically had.
Speaker 2: What's that about.
Speaker 3: Well, it's about President Trump having basically singular power over
Speaker 3: which corporate mergers go through and how we control immedia.
Speaker 1: This is like this Russia fantasy air dewan kind of authoritarianism,
Speaker 1: the idea that you know, you pick the winners and
Speaker 1: the losers. Right.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, this unitary executive theory is all about that, and
Speaker 3: it's all over Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1: Can you say more about unitary executive theory because that
Speaker 1: is sort of held up at the heart of the project.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So this is the theory that we've heard espoused, you know,
Speaker 3: during the first Trump administration by Bill Barr and others.
Speaker 3: It's a theory they've advanced in some of their legal
Speaker 3: arguments before the courts, where the president basically can dictate
Speaker 3: everything that the executive branch does all of these agencies,
Speaker 3: including the Department of Justice, telling them who to prosecute,
Speaker 3: how to handle cases, what the FBI should investigate. If
Speaker 3: we even have an FBI under these guys, it's just
Speaker 3: sweeping and you know, kind of terrifying.
Speaker 1: One of the things about this thesis, and I think
Speaker 1: it's Project twenty twenty five, but I also think Project
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five just puts on paper, just like Roger
Speaker 1: Stone brags about it, the things that the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: is quietly trying to do. And so I'm hoping you
Speaker 1: could talk about there is a play towards greater regulation
Speaker 1: of women's reproduction. Wow, no regulation of oil and gas,
Speaker 1: So make that make sense.
Speaker 3: So there's the paradox, right, they want to absolutely control
Speaker 3: women in their bodies. They want to tell them, you know,
Speaker 3: which babies they have to have and which ones they
Speaker 3: can't have because they're coming after IVF.
Speaker 1: When you read that IVF regulation thing, it's just I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, they say, well, it's never been regulating. All
Speaker 1: you care about is ending regulation. But somehow you're going
Speaker 1: to do it on IVF anyway, go on.
Speaker 3: Sorry, Yeah, and they're going to bring the FDA under
Speaker 3: executive control as well, so get ready for that. No,
Speaker 3: you're absolutely right. When it comes to corporate America and
Speaker 3: business in the fossil fuel industry, the regulatory state's going
Speaker 3: to be gutted. There are no regulations that they like
Speaker 3: at all. So it's sort of a libertarian dystopia in
Speaker 3: that space. But when it comes to individual liberties and
Speaker 3: individual rights, church state separation, LGBTQ, community reproductive choice, the
Speaker 3: heavy hand of government is there in a big way.
Speaker 1: Absolutely beyond we are now. One of the things that
Speaker 1: I'm hoping you could explain to us a little bit
Speaker 1: about is where you think this sort of came from.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously this comes from Trump to some extent,
Speaker 1: but this clearly has longer tentacles than Trump, and it's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine Trump cooking up anything that is more
Speaker 1: than just sort of the gut instinct.
Speaker 3: It's a codependency I think. I mean, Trump likes this
Speaker 3: because it favors authoritarianism and the kind of things that
Speaker 3: he wants. But the far right conservative movement has been
Speaker 3: pishing many of these things for a long time as well.
Speaker 3: The Christian nationalist movement wants so many of these things,
Speaker 3: the culture war elements, and so I think, you know,
Speaker 3: there's a great synergy between our aspiring dictator and these
Speaker 3: extremist right wing groups that want this agenda.
Speaker 1: I just said David Wallace Wells just interviewing him, and
Speaker 1: we're talking about how in every environmental person I talk to,
Speaker 1: not everyone, but a lot of them, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of optimism because even though the temperature is a rising
Speaker 1: too fast and we're not where we need to be
Speaker 1: with the Paris Accord, there is a sense in which
Speaker 1: renewables are so cheap that fossil fuels really is becoming
Speaker 1: so much closer to coal just price wise, that it
Speaker 1: will really take a lot of government subsidies to keep
Speaker 1: oil and gas going. I mean, I think that is
Speaker 1: still what Republicans want. I mean, it's such a paradox
Speaker 1: here because we have so many businesses like local news
Speaker 1: or even you know, newspapers in general, right, like nonprofit
Speaker 1: newsrooms that would desperately could desperately use these subsidies, and
Speaker 1: instead they're going to oil and gas, they're going to coal,
Speaker 1: They're going to things that kill the planet, and don't
Speaker 1: do anything. Talk to us about that.
Speaker 3: Well, there's no question that we continue to subsidize the
Speaker 3: fossil fuel industry in a big way. I share your
Speaker 3: optimism about clean energy eventually winning out on the economics
Speaker 3: if nothing else, but what continues to disturb me is
Speaker 3: that we don't have time to wait for the market
Speaker 3: to realize all of that. We've got a climate crisis
Speaker 3: that is compelling us to speed up. And that's where
Speaker 3: Project twenty twenty five in the clean energy and environmental
Speaker 3: space isn't necessarily anything new. We've seen this right wing
Speaker 3: agenda for years, but the fact that they're proposing to
Speaker 3: run out the clock on another four to eight years
Speaker 3: could be the endgame for our ability to confront the
Speaker 3: climate crisis.
Speaker 1: That is for sure true. The thing that I always
Speaker 1: think about is that when the pandemic came, I had
Speaker 1: this moment where I thought, Okay, this is it. Science
Speaker 1: is going to win. Americans are going to be like
Speaker 1: the people telling us to take horse dewormer. They're wrong
Speaker 1: because it doesn't treat COVID vaccines work like this is
Speaker 1: going to be the moment, and instead none of that happened.
Speaker 1: The right just decided that Anthony Fauci needs to go
Speaker 1: to jail. I mean, you have been doing environmental law
Speaker 1: for a long time, so maybe you were less naive
Speaker 1: than I was, but I was shocked.
Speaker 3: I didn't anticipate the degree of backsliding and ignorance and
Speaker 3: self destruction really that we saw in some of that conspiracism.
Speaker 3: So it was an eye opener, But it wasn't just
Speaker 3: here in the United States. We've seen the same kind
Speaker 3: of backlash against science and liberalism in these right wing
Speaker 3: movements around Europe and in other parts of the world.
Speaker 3: So I think we've got a real reckoning here between
Speaker 3: science and our ability to live in community with common
Speaker 3: sense and this revivalism, in many cases driven and by
Speaker 3: extreme right wing Christian nationalism, not just here in the US,
Speaker 3: but in Hungary and other places. We got to choose
Speaker 3: which century we want to live in.
Speaker 1: So crazy, like when you think about how to get
Speaker 1: everybody on the same page, right like right now, we
Speaker 1: have a problem which is some percentage of the country
Speaker 1: and I'm not willing to say it's forty two percent.
Speaker 1: I think it's lower. But some percentage of the country
Speaker 1: of America doesn't share the same reality that we do.
Speaker 1: And they think that there's a child pedophile ring. They
Speaker 1: think that climate change is a hoax made up by
Speaker 1: the Chinese to sell cars. I mean, they think a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff. They think COVID isn't real, they think
Speaker 1: the Sandy Hook kids weren't murdered. These are provable facts, right,
Speaker 1: that are not true. So in your mind when you
Speaker 1: look at like, you know, part of this is fracturing
Speaker 1: of the mainstream media. Part of this is social media.
Speaker 1: But what do you think is the thing that the
Speaker 1: government can do to sort of try to provide a
Speaker 1: coherent reality of things that are true.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure the government can do it. I think
Speaker 3: all of us have a role to play. I mean,
Speaker 3: you mentioned the fracturing of the media, and I think
Speaker 3: that's just a huge part of this. I think our
Speaker 3: information ecosystem has just changed. We haven't quite figured out
Speaker 3: what to do with this plethora of junk that's out
Speaker 3: there and malicious stuff where people are monetizing conflict and
Speaker 3: ignorance and disinformation, and it's big business. So we've got
Speaker 3: a lot of work to do there. There's pieces of
Speaker 3: it that I think we can do through public policy.
Speaker 3: But I'll tell you one part of Project twenty twenty
Speaker 3: five that is taking us in the wrong direction of this.
Speaker 3: To bring it back to that, they're going to get
Speaker 3: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Speaker 4: You know, one of the few places.
Speaker 3: Where you can yeah, where you can get trusted you know,
Speaker 3: good deep politicized information is PBS, and they don't like it.
Speaker 1: One of the things that it seems to me, could
Speaker 1: be a solve Section two thirty.
Speaker 3: There's actually still some space for bipartieship when it comes
Speaker 3: to Section two thirty and some of this corporate accountability
Speaker 3: in the media space. I don't trust these folks at
Speaker 3: the Heritage Foundation and a potential Trump administration for striking
Speaker 3: the right balance and getting that right. They say some
Speaker 3: up the right things, but I don't trust them.
Speaker 1: But it is interesting to see Josh Holly, who has
Speaker 1: been on the wrong side of so many things, be
Speaker 1: on the right side of interviewing that Boeing CEO. Right,
Speaker 1: I mean there is a groundswell in America. I mean
Speaker 1: we're a country where there's such a huge wealth and equity.
Speaker 1: There is a sense here in which I think Congress
Speaker 1: has an opportunity to let people know they're listening to them.
Speaker 1: Will you go with us just for a minute about
Speaker 1: what the things you guys are doing to prepare us
Speaker 1: for Project twenty twenty five and what you can do
Speaker 1: and what that looks like.
Speaker 3: Absolutely so, by far the most important thing that Congress
Speaker 3: can do through this task force that all of us
Speaker 3: can really do is to bring Project twenty twenty five
Speaker 3: out of the shadows of this right wing fever swamp,
Speaker 3: spotlight it, make it understood. I saw some polling yesterday
Speaker 3: that only twelve percent of Americans have even heard of
Speaker 3: Project twenty twenty five. Crazy, and when they just sort
Speaker 3: of hear about it generically, you know, it doesn't seem
Speaker 3: like that big a deal to them. When we explain
Speaker 3: it to them, though, This is where this gets really interesting.
Speaker 3: The numbers are off the charts. The negative reaction to
Speaker 3: Project twenty twenty five is extreme, and it's especially strong
Speaker 3: with independence. You rarely find like overwhelming you unanimity among independents.
Speaker 3: The opposition to Project twenty twenty five just with some
Speaker 3: basic explanation of it jumps to eighty eight percent among independents.
Speaker 3: So this is a winning message for us right now,
Speaker 3: simply explaining what they're promising that they're going to do.
Speaker 3: It's that straightforward, and I think this should just be
Speaker 3: a huge part of our closing argument heading into the election.
Speaker 1: The general idea of Project twenty twenty five is this
Speaker 1: idea that you will destroy the federal government in such
Speaker 1: a way and then replace those people with cronies. Do
Speaker 1: you have ways to protect some of these federal employees.
Speaker 3: Look, if we somehow let these guys have power, you know,
Speaker 3: there's no scenario where we roll over and just let
Speaker 3: them do all these things. You will use the court system,
Speaker 3: you will litigate these things. You know, if we have
Speaker 3: one or both houses of Congress, there's oversight and per
Speaker 3: string levers that we can use. But the most definitive
Speaker 3: way to stop this is to win the election. That's
Speaker 3: the point that we're really trying to make here is
Speaker 3: the American people have an opportunity to kill this in
Speaker 3: its tracks, and we got to do that because, yeah,
Speaker 3: we'll keep fighting if we don't win, but there are
Speaker 3: no guarantees, no right.
Speaker 1: And I think that what's really important is that things
Speaker 1: have gone so much worse. I mean, these guys are
Speaker 1: ready to go on day one in a way they
Speaker 1: weren't before. And I think you know, one of the
Speaker 1: things that Trump able to do, which was really a roarchack,
Speaker 1: was he was able to say, like, I'm not as
Speaker 1: conservative as all these lunatics because i come from New
Speaker 1: York and I've been married ten million times et cetera,
Speaker 1: et cetera. But that was that ultimately wasn't true because
Speaker 1: he didn't care about policy, so we just let them
Speaker 1: do whatever he wanted, whatever they wanted, the sort of
Speaker 1: Koch brothers crew and much more conservative than the Kochs. Right,
Speaker 1: how do you explain Project twenty twenty five to people
Speaker 1: in the quickest possible way?
Speaker 3: So I think you have to start by talking about
Speaker 3: the extremism and the attack on democracy, the authoritarianism, the
Speaker 3: sweeping away of checks and balances on executive power, and
Speaker 3: then you've got to get right into the individual rights
Speaker 3: and liberties. There are other parts of Project twenty twenty
Speaker 3: five that are also alarming, but those are the ones
Speaker 3: that resonate strongest according to the polling with people, and
Speaker 3: I think we've got to lead with that.
Speaker 1: You come from environmental law. Quietly, the Biden administration has
Speaker 1: done some incredible environmental progressive policies. Can can you talk
Speaker 1: about them?
Speaker 2: Vern Minna? Well?
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: Look, I'm a climate action guy, I'm a climate hawk.
Speaker 3: I'm never going to be satisfied because we're winning slowly
Speaker 3: is losing when it comes to the climate crisis. But
Speaker 3: I've got to give this administration a lot of credit.
Speaker 3: We have taken stronger, bolder, more transformational climate actions than
Speaker 3: any presidency in history. We've still got a lot more
Speaker 3: work to do. There's still too much fossil fuel business
Speaker 3: as usual, but it is very significant, and we've built
Speaker 3: a foundation. So look, we had to choke down some
Speaker 3: terrible fossil fuel provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act from
Speaker 3: Joe Manchin, for example, Joe Mansion's got to be gone.
Speaker 3: We can go right to work undoing those Mansion pieces
Speaker 3: and continuing to make further progress on the good pieces
Speaker 3: of that. And that's the kind of work that I
Speaker 3: want to do. You can't do that in a Trump administration.
Speaker 3: You can't do that with a Republican the majority in
Speaker 3: both houses of Congress. So it brings us right back
Speaker 3: to what's at stake in this election.
Speaker 1: I can't tell what's my bubble, my media bubb all
Speaker 1: my own fantasy of how the world is and what,
Speaker 1: because you know, the reality is all the information we're
Speaker 1: getting his polls, and a lot of these polls are broken,
Speaker 1: so we really none of us really know what's going
Speaker 1: to happen. But it does seem to me that there
Speaker 1: aren't a lot of Republican policies that they're shopping here, right.
Speaker 1: I mean Trump says crazy stuff to get elected. Right,
Speaker 1: He's not going to make people pay taxes on tips.
Speaker 1: I don't know how that's going to work. You know,
Speaker 1: he's going to cut the Nevada right exactly in a
Speaker 1: place where the service industry is the big business. And
Speaker 1: then he goes and says, you know that he's going
Speaker 1: to cut taxes and just have tariffs. I mean, wildly inflationary,
Speaker 1: completely crazy. But it doesn't seem to me like the
Speaker 1: Republicans have a ton of policy. Besides this crazy dystopian stuff.
Speaker 3: Trump is an empty vessel himself. Policy for Donald Trump
Speaker 3: is just power. He just wants power. I would say
Speaker 3: it's different with these groups. And it's not just the
Speaker 3: Heritage Foundation authoring Project twenty twenty. It's one hundred and
Speaker 3: eight I think now leading right wing groups. It's groups
Speaker 3: that have been at the front line of the culture war,
Speaker 3: like you know this fake church, the Family Research Council,
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is this
Speaker 3: crazy right wing group that Mike Johnson used to work
Speaker 3: for as an attorney. I mean, they want a nationwide
Speaker 3: abortion band. They want to get women back in the
Speaker 3: kitchen and under their complete control. It is extreme and
Speaker 3: that is that's what policy means to these folks, and
Speaker 3: they're going to get their way. I am convinced if
Speaker 3: Donald Trump becomes the president and they take both houses
Speaker 3: of Congress, they're not messing around here. This is really
Speaker 3: what they want exactly.
Speaker 1: It's so I mean, it's really scary and really important
Speaker 1: to talk about. When you think about climate. Can you
Speaker 1: give me like sort of what's on your climate legislation
Speaker 1: wish list?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we've got to do more in the clean
Speaker 3: energy space. You know, the tax incentives we're great from
Speaker 3: the Inflation Reduction Act. We've got to clean up things
Speaker 3: like the incentives for fake climate solutions that we had
Speaker 3: to choke down because of Joe Manchion. So, you know,
Speaker 3: some of this blue hydrogen nonsense, the CO two pipelines,
Speaker 3: the fiction of carbon capture and sequestration. We do not
Speaker 3: have time for fake climate solutions in my opinion. So
Speaker 3: we got to undo the damage from Joe Manchion and
Speaker 3: keep pressing.
Speaker 1: And that's hydrogen is in there right.
Speaker 3: Jin if it's done wrong, can take us backward, no doubt.
Speaker 3: About it, and the fossil fuel industry has every intention
Speaker 3: of doing it wrong.
Speaker 1: The minutia of climate seems like, like should Elon Musk
Speaker 1: be building chargers? I mean it feels like there are
Speaker 1: some of this stuff has gone to people who are
Speaker 1: a little bit dicey. Clearly we need more chargers, Like
Speaker 1: where are we with that? And can you talk about that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not as troubled by that. I don't like
Speaker 3: Elon Musk, but I do like what Tesla has done
Speaker 3: for the electrification of transportation. So you know, I think
Speaker 3: that his charging network is now kind of extending out
Speaker 3: to other companies. Tesla is not going to have the
Speaker 3: kind of dominance that it once had, although it's kind
Speaker 3: of standard is going to be the one that probably prevails.
Speaker 3: So I think all of that is fine. I'm a
Speaker 3: little bit conflicted about these tariffs on Chinese eighties is
Speaker 3: I think, frankly, our American car companies are not doing
Speaker 3: as much as they should in a little competition to
Speaker 3: kick them in the butt would not hurt the bottom
Speaker 3: line that I always come back to on this, Molly's
Speaker 3: we just don't have time. So anything that moves us
Speaker 3: faster and further on decarbonization. You know, I tend to
Speaker 3: be four.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, agreed, thank you, thank you, Thank you, Congressman
Speaker 1: so important. I really appreciate you. I hope you will
Speaker 1: come back.
Speaker 3: I will, and thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it. Simon Rosenberg is a political strategist and
Speaker 1: the author of the Opium Chronicles. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Simon.
Speaker 4: Great to be here with you, Molly always.
Speaker 1: It's great to have you. So it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's funny because it's like I actually was sort of
Speaker 1: fighting with someone on the podcast, not really fighting, but
Speaker 1: a little bit, and they were saying, well, you know,
Speaker 1: it's so crazy that Republicans are doing as well as
Speaker 1: they are in the United States when in the UK
Speaker 1: the Tories are going to get decimated. And I was
Speaker 1: thinking to myself, we don't know how Republicans are doing, right,
Speaker 1: all we know are these polls.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Look, it's not really an analogous situation, right.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, like, so much of the base of
Speaker 1: knowledge that many of us are going on is because
Speaker 1: of Poles.
Speaker 4: Right, And I do want to say something now about
Speaker 4: this because it's important, because this is going to come
Speaker 4: up is that you know, the Tories have been in
Speaker 4: power for a long time and have utterly failed. And
Speaker 4: the difference between the Labor Party and the UK and
Speaker 4: the Democratic in the US is that, you know, we
Speaker 4: are the Democratic Party is the most successful center left
Speaker 4: left political party in the developed world. There has been
Speaker 4: no party that has done as well as we have,
Speaker 4: even remotely close to us in Europe, in Japan, I mean,
Speaker 4: we've won more votes that seven out of eight presidential elections.
Speaker 4: I mean, most of the developed world, the left, the
Speaker 4: center left has struggled, and here in the US we've
Speaker 4: actually been wildly successful for a long period of time.
Speaker 4: And I just want to establish that because I think
Speaker 4: that we forget sometimes, you know, we're always sort of
Speaker 4: feeling adversity as Democrats, right, And the truth is we're
Speaker 4: part of the most successful modern center left party in
Speaker 4: the developed world, and we should be proud of that.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 4: In terms of your question about the polling, yeah, look,
Speaker 4: I mean the polling right now. My view and where
Speaker 4: the election is is that you know, in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 4: what happened is that the election up until the spring
Speaker 4: of twenty twenty two was largely about inflation and low
Speaker 4: approval rating and COVID and then something changed the election.
Speaker 4: That was Uvaldi, the January sixth Committee hearings, the Dobs league,
Speaker 4: and then the Dobbs decision itself, and all of that
Speaker 4: stuff congealed into this sort of big, ugly thing reminding
Speaker 4: voters of the ugliness and the extremism of MAGA. And
Speaker 4: the question in this cycle was what we have to
Speaker 4: bring that ugliness into voters through our campaigns, as we
Speaker 4: did in twenty twenty two, you know, with this assist
Speaker 4: from events, or would events help us? And I think
Speaker 4: that part of what's happened in the last few weeks
Speaker 4: is there's some evidence that the verdict guilty, guilty, guilty
Speaker 4: thirty four times has started shifting the election. The election
Speaker 4: is changing, and I think that where we're entering now
Speaker 4: and what everyone should realize that, you know, we're going
Speaker 4: to have a debate in a few days, and the
Speaker 4: Republican convention comes, and Trump's sentencing happens, and then our
Speaker 4: convention and then another debate, and the election is now
Speaker 4: hurtling at us with incredible speed. And I think we're
Speaker 4: moving the twenty twenty four elections starting to become the
Speaker 4: twenty twenty four election. It's starting to develop its own character.
Speaker 4: And I think that in the last few weeks there
Speaker 4: have been six national polls, credible, serious polls showing Biden
Speaker 4: gaining between two and four points. I think the election
Speaker 4: has shifted a few points in our direction, but it's
Speaker 4: close and competitive, and we have a lot of work
Speaker 4: to do. But I in every way imaginable, I would
Speaker 4: much rather be less than them. I think it's far
Speaker 4: more likely that we win than they do.
Speaker 1: But with the twenty twenty two election and the twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three election and all the specials, those were all
Speaker 1: low turnet elections, so it was a different electorate, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, what's happening here is there is a different electorate.
Speaker 1: When we talk about polling, what we see is that
Speaker 1: the pollsters are trying to guess about an electorate that
Speaker 1: has shown up in twenty twenty and twenty sixteen and
Speaker 1: never before and never after. So in some ways, you know,
Speaker 1: there are certainly outside issues. But if you look at
Speaker 1: every single election since twenty sixteen, Biden and Democrats more broadly,
Speaker 1: and Biden wasn't on the ticket in the midterms, but
Speaker 1: they have won so in my mind, the question is
Speaker 1: what does a high turnout election look like in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four? And I think there's a lot of guessing
Speaker 1: going on in the polling.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let me. You raised some important things. Let me
Speaker 4: take them on sequentially, because I think this whole theory
Speaker 4: about low turnout and high turnout elections, I basically don't
Speaker 4: ascribe to that. And the reason why is because I've
Speaker 4: worked in campaigns. I've worked in politics, and every election
Speaker 4: is a competition between two teams. And the notion that
Speaker 4: somehow you could look at all these victories that we've
Speaker 4: had in all sorts of elections all across the country,
Speaker 4: ballot initiatives, state rep races, governors races, senate races, where
Speaker 4: the two teams lined up and one team kept winning
Speaker 4: and the other team kept losing, and that's somehow a
Speaker 4: group of analysts looked at all that and said that's
Speaker 4: actually bad for the winning team is absurd on its
Speaker 4: face in my view. And then I think this is
Speaker 4: almost like a Jedi mind trick that's happened to all
Speaker 4: of the political commentary, and it could only be by people,
Speaker 4: And who are the origins of this? People who haven't
Speaker 4: actually worked on campaigns because those of us who've been
Speaker 4: in campaigns recognize that every election you have no idea
Speaker 4: if you're going to win. It's like a basketball game
Speaker 4: and a tournament. You may be the favorite team, but
Speaker 4: you got to go out and win the game, right,
Speaker 4: and winning is really hard. And so first of all,
Speaker 4: I just think this notion that we can look at
Speaker 4: this extraordinary performance of the Democratic Party since Dobbs happened,
Speaker 4: where parties in power, you know, going back to your
Speaker 4: basic premise, right, we've won more votes in seven out
Speaker 4: of eight presidential elections the last eight. That's the best
Speaker 4: popular vote r out of an American political party in
Speaker 4: our history. Second is that from night the last four elections,
Speaker 4: we've averaged fifty one percent of the vote. That's the
Speaker 4: best showing of the Democratic Party since FDRs for presidency
Speaker 4: for presidential elections. Then post Dobbs, we've had the party
Speaker 4: in power always loses seats in special elections, off your elections,
Speaker 4: mid your midterm elections, and we've gained seats. And so
Speaker 4: we've not only been on this extraordinary popular vote run,
Speaker 4: we've also been in this extraordinary performance by a party
Speaker 4: in power. And I think that it is. I think
Speaker 4: it's my view and it's the view of the campaign.
Speaker 4: Frankly from listening to them talk that the likely scenario
Speaker 4: is that because the reason we've been winning is not
Speaker 4: because of low turnout and audience, is that we have
Speaker 4: better arguments than they do.
Speaker 1: I agree that they run on nothing except Trump is God.
Speaker 1: But I don't want to be like naive here, which
Speaker 1: is it is a lower, smaller group of people. That's
Speaker 1: why it's called lower turnout. The fact that Democrats have
Speaker 1: sort of become the party that goes out at every
Speaker 1: election is humongous and is a huge win for Democrats. Right,
Speaker 1: they know what the stakes are. Obviously, you can't say
Speaker 1: that the turnout is the same because it's not the
Speaker 1: turnout for the presidential elections, and the turnout for the
Speaker 1: midterms not the same. And I don't think Republicans are
Speaker 1: offering anything, right, I mean, tax cuts for billionaires, extra
Speaker 1: helping hand for oil companies. I mean, I don't think
Speaker 1: as a normal voter, the pitch that Trump is making
Speaker 1: is undoable. Right, He's going to lower inflation and he's
Speaker 1: going to cut all taxes and then put a you know,
Speaker 1: one hundred and ten percent tariff on everything. I mean,
Speaker 1: he has no policy. This party has no policy. It
Speaker 1: hasn't had a policy since twenty twenty when they got
Speaker 1: rid of all the party platform. My theory of the
Speaker 1: case is, look, you know, polls are pseudo events, they're
Speaker 1: not necessarily real, and that if the numbers are sort
Speaker 1: of moving in the right direction, that's a good sign.
Speaker 1: I also think the pollsters are so freaked out from
Speaker 1: being wrong about Trump in twenty sixteen and twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: because remember they underestimated him both times, that there's a
Speaker 1: certain kind of conservative bus stuff going on. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then they're flooding the zone with junkie polls too. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of things going on. But my question
Speaker 1: is more like, what's your take at the end of
Speaker 1: the day.
Speaker 4: What I always believe to be the case, and I
Speaker 4: think what the campaign has always believed to be the case,
Speaker 4: is that when we put the choice in front of voters, right,
Speaker 4: and we actually run ads, and we have this huge
Speaker 4: amount of money that we're raising, which are giving us
Speaker 4: the most powerful campaigns that we've ever had, both in
Speaker 4: terms of controlling the information environment and also pushing our
Speaker 4: performance on the ground. To the upper end of what's possible.
Speaker 4: That the reason we keep winning is not because it's
Speaker 4: a big electorate or a small electorate. Is that when
Speaker 4: we take this this choice of pragmatic, good Democrats who've
Speaker 4: made things better in people's lives and then this extremist,
Speaker 4: freakish Maga party, that we overperform and win and they
Speaker 4: underperform and struggle, And that this has happened again and
Speaker 4: again and again, and that it is the likely scenario
Speaker 4: for what's going to happen in this election when we
Speaker 4: take the choice of the good Democratic Party and the
Speaker 4: crazy Republican Party and we put it in front of voters,
Speaker 4: funded backed up by all this money that we've been raising.
Speaker 4: In the intensity I mean, this intensity that we at
Speaker 4: in the Democratic Party, this sort of what has been
Speaker 4: described as by analysts as sort of us doing really
Speaker 4: well in these low turnout elections. That intensity is not
Speaker 4: just translating into electoral victories because of voters. It's because
Speaker 4: that intensity is driving unprecedent amounts of money, unprecedented numbers
Speaker 4: of volunteers, and it's allowing us to build the most
Speaker 4: powerful democratic political machine that we've ever had. And that's
Speaker 4: part of the story that is being left out of
Speaker 4: this analysis about the high turnout vote out election is
Speaker 4: that that intensity and the money is allowing us to
Speaker 4: continue to overperform in these elections. And I think it's
Speaker 4: the general view that that's the likely scenario election. And yes,
Speaker 4: I think that job we have a better candidate, we
Speaker 4: have better arguments, we have a far better campaign apparatus,
Speaker 4: and we are going to have the biggest political machine
Speaker 4: that the Democratic Party has ever built in this election.
Speaker 4: And so all of that leads me to be optimistic.
Speaker 4: And you're right, no one I never said a good
Speaker 4: accuse of saying that playing poll trutherism or saying the
Speaker 4: polls were wrong. I never said that. What I said
Speaker 4: was that I believe that the polls weren't determinative, and
Speaker 4: that when we began our campaign started talking to voters,
Speaker 4: that we had confidence that when we had talked to
Speaker 4: voters and all of these other elections, we had seen
Speaker 4: our numbers improved once the campaign has began, and because
Speaker 4: we have a better argument, better candidate, better campaigns, and
Speaker 4: that that is the likely scenario this time. And so
Speaker 4: I remain deeply optimistic about where we are. And I
Speaker 4: also think that what has happened in the last few
Speaker 4: weeks is there is evidence that the verdict is acting
Speaker 4: like a Dobbs like event in this election, where it
Speaker 4: became in your based reminder of the ugliness of Trump
Speaker 4: and MAGA that become unavoidable if the whole premise is
Speaker 4: that people are starting to check into the election now
Speaker 4: and that what they're checking into is that one party
Speaker 4: as a serial criminal running and the other party has
Speaker 4: a very successful president who's made people's lives better. You know,
Speaker 4: I'll take that if that's going to be the way
Speaker 4: we can frame this thing. And obviously the Biden campaign
Speaker 4: right now is running a very very hard hitting ad
Speaker 4: with a huge amount of money behind it, going right
Speaker 4: into the felony convictions stuff and a sexual assault, the
Speaker 4: fraud that he committed. You know that stuff is going
Speaker 4: to hurt Trump. We already know this. I mean, the
Speaker 4: political poll out this week showed that twenty one percent
Speaker 4: of independent voters view the verdict as something that would
Speaker 4: cause them to be less likely to vote for Trump,
Speaker 4: and it's a voting issue for them, right and seven
Speaker 4: percent of Republicans. I mean, if you add that up,
Speaker 4: that's like five percent of the electorate is now saying
Speaker 4: openly they're much less likely to vote for Trump, and
Speaker 4: it's and it's so significant that it may alter their vote.
Speaker 4: That's a lot of voters who have all of a
Speaker 4: sudden become loosened from Trump in a very short period
Speaker 4: of time, by the way, without any paid advertising or
Speaker 4: paid communication to reinforce this, without the kind of what's
Speaker 4: going to happen to Trump at the debate if he
Speaker 4: shows up, you know, he's clearly going to get a
Speaker 4: question at this debate about his misdeeds, and you know
Speaker 4: it's going to be a really critical moment in the election.
Speaker 4: I think because they're going to be a hell of
Speaker 4: a lot of people watching. I think in this debate,
Speaker 4: we don't really know. They don't know if it was
Speaker 4: a real case and everything else, And you're going to
Speaker 4: have credible CNN anchors talking about sexual assault, fraud, thirty
Speaker 4: four felon accounts, right, And I think that you know,
Speaker 4: we've never seen a politician have to survive something like this,
Speaker 4: and I think it just if I can just finish,
Speaker 4: is that I think that it reminds all of us
Speaker 4: that we've been told that the Democrats took a big
Speaker 4: risk backing Joe Biden. The big the far bigger risk
Speaker 4: was getting behind a rapist, a fraud stir, you know,
Speaker 4: a trader at a felon. No one's ever had to
Speaker 4: try to sell a candidate like Trump to the public
Speaker 4: and be successful with it. I still think it's unlikely
Speaker 4: they will be this time.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I'm struck by when we
Speaker 1: talk about Trump, and you know, Biden is old, but
Speaker 1: he is the incumbent. Incumbency is an enormous advantage. So
Speaker 1: when there was so much, you know, they should kick
Speaker 1: him out, drop him off the ticket, replace him with
Speaker 1: I mean, the crazy takes that we heard coming out
Speaker 1: of that. But I do think it is interesting how
Speaker 1: skewed right the media is that that was the conversation
Speaker 1: and not should Trump be on the ticket.
Speaker 4: Part of the reason I began a substack and started
Speaker 4: writing and sort of moved my work to this kind
Speaker 4: of new media environment that we're all operating in. As
Speaker 4: somebody who's a former journalist myself and been in this
Speaker 4: business for a long time, I became very alarmed by
Speaker 4: what happened in twenty twenty two at the Red Wave.
Speaker 4: Because the Red Wave, the way that I described it
Speaker 4: was that we had two sets of data in the
Speaker 4: election in twenty twenty two. We had if you wanted
Speaker 4: to see a Republican victory, there was data showing that.
Speaker 4: If you wanted to see a close competitive election, there
Speaker 4: was data showing that too. And instead of there being
Speaker 4: a conversation about the tension in the data and that
Speaker 4: there's you know that we don't really know where this
Speaker 4: election is going to go. It's got conflicting data. Basically,
Speaker 4: everybody sort of defaulted into the Republican narrative in the
Speaker 4: final few weeks of the election, even though there was
Speaker 4: an enormous amount of data suggesting that was not going
Speaker 4: to happen, and ease in which the national media conversation
Speaker 4: became red wave when alarmed me into some ways. It
Speaker 4: demonstrated the power, I think of the ability of the
Speaker 4: right wing media machine to sort of bully their stuff
Speaker 4: into the system and overwhelm the resistance right of traditional journalists.
Speaker 4: And I think we're in a dangerous place as a country.
Speaker 4: I mean, I do think that we are facing an
Speaker 4: unprecedented propaganda opparatus on the right that has the ability
Speaker 4: to bully and dictate and push narratives into the mainstream
Speaker 4: that don't deserve to be there. The challenge is can
Speaker 4: the media resist it? And I think this time, going
Speaker 4: back to that question you asked me at the very beginning,
Speaker 4: like twenty twenty two, right now, the data is not
Speaker 4: all pointing in the same direction. Right there's a lot
Speaker 4: of data showing Biden being healthy and strong in winning
Speaker 4: the election, and there's other data showing Trump. And instead
Speaker 4: of us talking about the tension in data, we've defaulted
Speaker 4: to the Republican narrative again, which is that Trump is
Speaker 4: winning the election.
Speaker 1: Well, I would like to say that I don't think
Speaker 1: I've done that.
Speaker 3: No, you have.
Speaker 4: I'm saying the family.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that the right has really worked the refs.
Speaker 1: I wonder how much when we talk about polls, we
Speaker 1: don't have a lot of great information. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: the other thing is like, so I think a lot
Speaker 1: of these polls are you know, I just said this,
Speaker 1: do you see you know fifty to fifty there. I
Speaker 1: think there's over corrections on some sides. I think there's
Speaker 1: undercryptions on other sides. Here's a question for you and
Speaker 1: what we don't know? Right, Like, there are so many
Speaker 1: of these doctored videos of Biden going out from even
Speaker 1: I mean, we shouldn't be surprised by this, but the
Speaker 1: RNC is releasing these doctored videos. You know, they're desperately
Speaker 1: trying to paint him as having some kind of problem.
Speaker 1: Even Biden's supporters are anxious, you know, that he has
Speaker 1: something wrong with him. That really pumped this narrative so
Speaker 1: hard that New York Times has run a gazillion pieces
Speaker 1: about how he's old and da da dah, da dah.
Speaker 1: But I'm curious, do you think, I mean, this is
Speaker 1: a enormous country, and you know, we don't really know
Speaker 1: where any of these people get their news.
Speaker 4: Well, I think we do know that a couple of things,
Speaker 4: And what you just said one is they have made
Speaker 4: an enormous investment over many, many years in painting Biden
Speaker 4: as old.
Speaker 1: And infirmed, right, because it's all they have.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is not a new ploy, This is not
Speaker 4: a new play in the playbook. This is something they've
Speaker 4: been doing to Biden from day one of.
Speaker 1: His presidency Tailory's emails.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's had an impact. I mean, I don't
Speaker 4: think we can deny that. You know, I have three
Speaker 4: gen z kids, and it's amazing how and talking to them,
Speaker 4: despite having grown up in Washington and been in a
Speaker 4: political family, how much this kind of stuff reaches them.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: And I do think though that going forward, you said
Speaker 4: something that's really important, right, which is that it's all
Speaker 4: they have. Donald Trump has one play in this election,
Speaker 4: and the play is I'm winning in the polls, I'm strong.
Speaker 4: Joe Biden is losing the polls. He's weak, and then
Speaker 4: they use that weakness to go into this age infirmity thing.
Speaker 4: The way that we have to understand this and in
Speaker 4: the polling and the political business is called strong Leader
Speaker 4: week Leader, Right, that they're living entirely in the strong
Speaker 4: Leader week leader dimension of the brand architecture here of
Speaker 4: the two campaigns, and we need to take that away
Speaker 4: from them.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: There's an urgency to us understanding that this is how
Speaker 4: they're fighting. It's the only thing they have, right, because
Speaker 4: he's a diminished candidate. He's crazier as agendas far and
Speaker 4: more extreme. He's now a serial criminal. I mean, he's
Speaker 4: a far more damaged piece of goods than he was
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty, far harder to sell to the public.
Speaker 4: And so they're just going to go to this one place,
Speaker 4: and we have to get ahead of that and understand that,
Speaker 4: which is why I spend so much in my time
Speaker 4: communicating about why Joe Biden's been a successful president and
Speaker 4: that he's a good president and that because then if
Speaker 4: he's a successful president, we can say he's successful because
Speaker 4: of his age and his wisdom and experience. Right, we
Speaker 4: can turn the age issue into an asset of not
Speaker 4: a liability. It's a way of getting ahead of their narrative.
Speaker 4: The second thing is one of the reasons I've been
Speaker 4: litigating the all stuff so much is that I don't
Speaker 4: think Trump has actually been ahead in this election for
Speaker 4: a very long time, and that he's been getting away
Speaker 4: with murder. And I think this idea that he's winning
Speaker 4: is allowing him to force donors into giving him money.
Speaker 4: I think this is having a material impact on his
Speaker 4: fundraising and that is affecting the election, and it's not correct.
Speaker 4: And so we need to take away this idea that
Speaker 4: is something other than a close competitive election. I mean,
Speaker 4: we know from twenty twenty two that the return of
Speaker 4: the red wave scared off millions and millions of dollars
Speaker 4: from the d tripleC in the final few weeks, money
Speaker 4: that was supposed to go to them that ended up
Speaker 4: going to governor's races and state legislative races, and that
Speaker 4: we lost the House because of this. They already had
Speaker 4: success in manufacturing this kind of strong man Weekman thing,
Speaker 4: the Red Wave, which was a version of strongman Weekman, right,
Speaker 4: and it worked for them, and they're doing it again
Speaker 4: using different terms, the strategies, the saying, the tactics are
Speaker 4: a little different, and we need to very much understand
Speaker 4: that Trump is literally running as a strong man and
Speaker 4: that he's trying to make it seem that it's inevitable
Speaker 4: that he's in the White House using whatever tactics he's
Speaker 4: going to use to get there, and that it's just
Speaker 4: time for people to line up and get on board.
Speaker 4: And what you're doing, Molly, and what I'm doing and
Speaker 4: what our family is doing, were saying no f and
Speaker 4: way to that right, like, we are not obeying in advance,
Speaker 4: we're not getting in line, We're fighting with everything we
Speaker 4: have and that we have to understand that this is
Speaker 4: like a sciops going on with them, and to be
Speaker 4: smart about this. I do think they're not running a
Speaker 4: traditional campaign to your point. Their agenda's wildly unpopular. Their
Speaker 4: candidate is the ugliest political thing we've ever seen. Right,
Speaker 4: They're going after Biden everything they're going to do now.
Speaker 4: The reason they're faking these videos is that you only
Speaker 4: cheat if you're losing, right, And the intensity in which
Speaker 4: these media organizations are debasing themselves shows how much pressure
Speaker 4: they're under from the Trump campaign to help them. And
Speaker 4: it's a sign I think to me reading backwards, is
Speaker 4: that I think the Trump campaign was deeply aware that
Speaker 4: if a guilty verdict came, it was going to be
Speaker 4: very damaging to him. And they are acting like a
Speaker 4: campaign that is worried and concerned and like throwing a
Speaker 4: lot of shit against the wall because they know that
Speaker 4: his brand, the core Trump brand, has been eroded and
Speaker 4: damaged by what's happened over the last few weeks. Otherwise,
Speaker 4: you know, the Murdoch Empire wouldn't be going into such
Speaker 4: hyperdrives right now in defending him. You know, from everything
Speaker 4: from those fake videos to the ridiculous polling that Fox
Speaker 4: released ten days ago, which was absurd. They are rallying
Speaker 4: for their guy, but they rally for their guy because
Speaker 4: he's weak, not because he's strong.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Simon.
Speaker 4: Molly, It's always a pleasure.
Speaker 2: They're no moment o.
Speaker 1: Jesse Canon Mai Junk Fast.
Speaker 2: Do you smell something rotten? Because I do. And it's
Speaker 2: the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: So they have still like seven thousand opinions to go.
Speaker 2: They had to schedule another day.
Speaker 1: It's the twentieth of June. They're supposed to release the
Speaker 1: opinions thround June. But what they're doing here in this
Speaker 1: six three super majority, very right wing craziness, is they
Speaker 1: are trying to run out the clock so they can
Speaker 1: release as many of these very explosive country shaping opinions
Speaker 1: as close to vacation as possible and then go on
Speaker 1: vacation and not have to deal with people freaking out
Speaker 1: or protesting. This is not what a Supreme Court is
Speaker 1: supposed to do. Again, like I've said this before and
Speaker 1: I unfortunately I think I will say it again. None
Speaker 1: of this is normal. That's it for this episode of
Speaker 1: Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to
Speaker 1: hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all
Speaker 1: this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send
Speaker 1: it to a friend and keep the conversation going, and
Speaker 1: again thanks for listening.