transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And Trump Media CEO, former Congressman Devin Nunes has stepped down after the company lost $712 million last year. We have such a great show for you today. The New Republic's Meredith Shiner stops by to talk to us about the enormous vibe shift changes in Congress. Then we'll talk to The Wrap's own Michael Calderone about the upcoming White House Correspondents' Dinner and the immense drama we may see. But first, the news.
Speaker 2:
[00:39] Somali, you and I live in Mamdani Stan, the socialist state, and we're always hearing about these giveaways. But it's funny, the place where all the corporations get the giveaways is really from the Trump administration. And we're seeing this with half a billion dollars going to Spirit Airlines to bail them out. Now, you can argue this is an essential way people get around this country, especially people.
Speaker 1:
[01:01] No, you can't.
Speaker 2:
[01:02] No, poorer people use Spirit Airlines.
Speaker 1:
[01:04] But Trump doesn't give a fuck.
Speaker 2:
[01:05] No, he doesn't care.
Speaker 1:
[01:06] And also, this is socialism. But the thing is, because it's the Trump administration, the question is, why? Is the Spirit CEO making a donation to... If we look at Trump World and we look at MAGA, we know that there's something rotten in the state of Denmark. So what is it? Is it that the Trump administration has some kind of relationship with Spirit? Why is Donald Trump using our tax dollars to bail out Spirit Airlines? Earlier in this season of Donald Trump Destroys America, we saw him use some of that money to bail out Latin American countries. We've seen him use our tax dollars for any number of sordid things. But my big question is, what is he getting back? The deal will be $500 million for Spirit, equity warrants for the government, because what better business to spend tax payer dollars in than airlines notoriously stable? Actually, Donald Trump has already lost his shirt once with airlines. You'll remember the Trump shuttle. So of course, if there's an airline on the wall in the first decade, it will go off sooner rather than later.
Speaker 2:
[02:23] Okay. So there is lots of people questioning Mr. Trump's mental health these days. So this is where we get into some very fun modern stuff. So there is this man known as AL. Yaakoby, who's been caught many times making pro-Israeli propaganda out of AI. So he today shared a meme that said, breaking the Islamic Republic is preparing to hang eight women. And people who are good at detecting AI are all dying laughing, saying this is the most AI that has ever AI imaged of all time.
Speaker 1:
[02:51] The thing that's amazing to me about this story is that this is Internet people on Axe. But the thing that they don't realize is that those of us whose son subscribed to the New York Post know that this was the cover of the New York Post today. So these women, quote unquote, if they're women, if they're not women, were on the cover of the New York Post this morning. So maybe they're AI, it certainly seems like they may be. But either way, they were on the cover of the New York Post. So I don't know what is happening here.
Speaker 2:
[03:28] Yeah, so Trump demanded that Iran not execute them. And now the White House has put out a statement saying that they've just been informed that they're not going to be killed and taking a win for saving AI lives.
Speaker 1:
[03:41] We think that they're not real anyway, I think, is the net net, right?
Speaker 2:
[03:46] It seems that the consensus on the Internet as of now is that this was made up. And because the person who initially spread this has such a bad past of making AI images and getting caught for it, it is not seeming very likely. And if that is the case, this is a real egg on the face of Mr. Trump.
Speaker 1:
[04:03] Yes, welcome to post-truth America, where who even knows what the fuck is happening?
Speaker 3:
[04:10] It's true.
Speaker 1:
[04:10] They do really look very AI-ish. One of them looks like Alina Harbaugh, one of them looks like Kai Trump, one of them looks like, none of them look like actual people.
Speaker 2:
[04:20] Yeah, like my thing would be is like, if these are people who are captured, did they go to a modeling agency and do a kidnapping?
Speaker 1:
[04:26] It is very strange. They're so attractive and they're also so blonde.
Speaker 2:
[04:31] Well, that's what Mr. Trump loves to save.
Speaker 1:
[04:34] That's right. He is very into saving blonde people.
Speaker 2:
[04:37] Okay. So we saw Congressional here yet again this week with RFK Jr. and there was noises made that I didn't know humans could make from his mouth.
Speaker 1:
[04:47] Yeah. The Darth Vader. This is, you'll remember, he zined. He did zine. We saw him zine before.
Speaker 2:
[04:57] For people who don't know what zine is, it's tobacco pouches you chew, mostly popular with 20-year-olds who have millennial perms. But the line that is really sticking out to people is that he said, I've never been anti-vaccine. That's the fucking brand.
Speaker 1:
[05:13] Yeah. Here's what's happened. Okay. Donald Trump is pulling through the floor. His polling is bad. He's not popular. Things have really gone off the rails. Now, Donald Trump has this guy, RFK. Jr. He represents Maha. He helped Donald Trump win. The anti-vax stuff, it's super unpopular. So what does Donald Trump do? He's got RFK. Jr. out there doing a sort of, was I anti-vax? Maybe I wasn't anti-vax. And he's lying. These people really like to lie. But you've heard him under oath lying before. I mean, RFK. Jr. has lied under oath. Pretty much that's sort of one of the central themes of this whole situation. So don't believe any of these people. I mean, this administration is just completely chock-a-block with people who don't tell the truth. But here's the quote, I have never been anti-vaccine. It's like when Sean Hannity says he's not a reporter, he's a talk host. He has been anti-vaccine. And later in the hearing, he denied things he said. He has spread lies. He is trying to get them to not use the, no one's going on here. This guy is a total liar.
Speaker 2:
[06:34] Yeah. And this is what he does every time, is he denies things he said on podcasts that we have tape of every time. This is just what he does because he doesn't want to actually have to answer for these things because I'll shock you here. He would not go so well on the stand if he had to defend things like what he says about Black children being raised and things like that on podcasts. You can't defend the indefensible, but mega tries. Anyway, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which many people may know as being the investigative body that goes after extremist groups has been targeted by the DOJ and Cash Patel.
Speaker 1:
[07:06] Yeah. So the Southern Poverty Law Center is a really incredible organization that has been around for a long time and works on trying to expose the KKK. Now, Donald Trump doesn't like that because I don't know why he doesn't like people who expose the KKK. It's odd, but he doesn't like... This is the guy who said good people on both sides. That guy does not want them to go after the KKK. So here's the idea. Southern Poverty Law Center has paid informants the way the FBI does. They're called field sources. They engage in their informants, and they get paid, and they inform, and thus this organization learns about the KKK and stops them from doing crimes, and also more importantly, they are able to monitor them. Now, this administration doesn't like people to monitor the KKK. Another interesting thing, and so they are going after the Southern Poverty Law Center. Again, like, this is Todd Blanch trying to keep this job. This is Todd Blanch knowing that Pam Bondi got fired because she did not do the kind of witch hunts that Donald Trump wanted. So Todd Blanch has cooked this thing up. It's never going to go, you know, he got an indictment from Alabama, from the trumpiest part of Alabama. It's not a real case. Like, they're going to go after them for wire fraud. I mean, it's just completely ridiculous. And this is what Trump World does. They twist the laws and the rules to give their guys something. So there we are. Meredith Shiner is a contributing editor at The New Republic. Welcome, Meredith.
Speaker 4:
[09:01] Thank you, Molly. It's so great to be back.
Speaker 1:
[09:03] Let's talk about Virginia yesterday. Democrats, Republicans, Virginians voted on whether or not to redistrict Democrats. One is now has to be signed off on by the court, but it looks like it's going to be a 10 to 1 map, which is really something. Republicans are very mad. Yeah.
Speaker 4:
[09:30] I mean, this is a really big deal. First and foremost, Republicans are mad because they thought they were always going to be the only ones who could do this. Republicans have been gerrymandering these maps. They've been trying to have mid-cycle redraws of maps for a very, very long time. One of the things that they banked on was that Democrats were going to be so committed to the rules and democracy and looking like they were above it, that they would continue to take state houses across the country, that they would continue to redraw house maps to shape the power in the United States Congress. And what you're seeing, I think, in Virginia, is a recognition from the electorate that that no longer serves us. It does not serve democracy. It doesn't serve the people of Virginia. And it doesn't serve people in purple states across the country. You know, it exists sort of on two levels. Even saying purple state, I had to take a pause. I think our conception of what a Republican state is, a blue state, a purple state, and a red state, is actually really informed by which states are overly gerrymandered and which aren't. States like North Carolina, where Republicans permanently tried to entrench a supermajority with the way that they drew lines. So I think this is a big step in the right direction in terms of how we think about local politics. But I also think it's really important in terms of how we think about national politics, how Democrats can act across the country, and the kinds of steps required to actually reclaim democracy that we have lost, because it no longer is beneficial to pretend like we live in an ideal world and hope that it bounces back. What you're seeing in Virginia is that 51% of voters there see the world we're living in, don't like it, and want to do something about it. And they're doing that in a world where there's been rampant misinformation, where the information ecosystem about what's even happening is completely broken. I saw a really great video from Jermell Bowie yesterday. He was talking about the kinds of mailers and ads that he was seeing to manipulate Democratic voters against this choice. And I think the overwhelming sentiment about where the country is going and that we need to actually act to do something superseded all of the other bad factors in play in order to send this message, not just to people in Virginia, but I think people across the country.
Speaker 1:
[11:58] And I want to talk about one of the spearheads of this legislation. A woman called, she's the president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate. She's a Democrat. Her name is Lois Lucas. She is 84 years old and has been just a powerhouse. A very tough black woman who represents Chesapeake Bay and has been in the Senate from 1992. She represents the 18th district. The reason why I want to bring her up is any number of reasons, but she's got a very good Twitter game, which again is cool. But she also just is very tough. And sometimes we criticize the older members, and we're going to talk about that in a minute, because there's a member of Congress who has died in office. But this woman is just awesome. And she did push back a lot. There was a real tension in Virginia between Democrats who wanted a gerrymander that was like the California gerrymander, where you get five seats, and not like a gerrymander, which is like a killer gerrymander, which is 10 seat, 10-1. And she pushed back and was like, no, we are going to fight back the way Republicans are fighting back here. And that gives Democrats a little bit of a buffer in case the Supreme Court does something really insane, or Florida push it and does the same stuff.
Speaker 4:
[13:33] I feel like with the Supreme Court, it's more of a when or not if.
Speaker 1:
[13:36] Right.
Speaker 4:
[13:36] Look, when we talk about the gerontocracy, I think in a lot of ways, what we're doing is using a technocratic word for out of touch. And for some members, I think the issue is not that they are old, it is that they're completely out of touch with the lived experience on the ground for the people that they are supposed to represent. And paying attention to these issues, understanding them fully, it's not necessarily a function of age. You could have a 25-year-old in Silicon Valley who doesn't really get the fall of democracy or the rise of authoritarianism. And so I think what you saw here was someone who has lived through some of the changes that we've had in this country since the 1960s, right? And the process of progress and retrenchment, and is familiar with the opposition and their tactics, and wanted to adapt in a way that was commensurate to the moment. And that is not a function of age. I think that's a function of awareness of living in some of these state legislators, like what happens in Washington. I think because we see capital buildings across the country and we see the US capital and we see politicians, there is this tendency to flatten them or to flatten what their work is or how they engage with their constituents. And I think what you saw here was an example of a politician who saw the reality, who saw what was happening across the country and who recognized her own agency and power to do something about it. And that's the second piece of I think why people are complaining about the gerontocracy or leaders in Washington, is because they're out of touch with what's happening. They're trying to pretend that they're living in a different reality than the one we live in now, because grappling with that reality is uncomfortable for them. And they're denying their own agency in any context where they could make a difference. They're not choosing to pull every arrow in their quiver in the way that some of these people in the states are, because we've been living with the collapse of the federal government for a really long time. And conversely, and I think this was embedded in your question also, Molly, we've seen what Republicans do at the state level and how that can really ladder up to national politics. Republicans forever have wanted to use the states as a petri dish to practice some of their policies or their oppression and try to export it to the rest of the country. It has been probably two decades since Gail Collins' As Goes Texas, but the entire theory of that book was how everything that happened in the Texas State House and in the governor's mansion in the 80s and 90s, ended up in some way creeping into our federal lawmaking decades later.
Speaker 1:
[16:18] Yeah.
Speaker 4:
[16:18] So we're looking at this map, we're looking at how everything has become fractured. I think the people who are going to fare the best in the eyes of history, are the people who look at reality, look at the kind of tools they have available to themselves and really carve out a space where they can fight and make a difference. That's what you saw in Virginia. I think it's what you're going to continue to see in states across the country, especially if we're not seeing as much action in Washington as we should be.
Speaker 1:
[16:47] Fox News trying to silence her, made a big graphic that's had a picture of her face, because Fox, they want you to know that she's a black woman, so they can harass her. Underneath, there was a quote that said, you all started it and we fucking finished it. They were doing this in order to get Trump to retweet it to harass her, and she just retweeted it herself, which I think is such a great example of what to do when Mag averse comes after you, which is to just, because the moment you start apologizing for yourself, the moment you start saying, oh, maybe I did something wrong, that's the moment you engage them. But the moment you are unapologetic about what pushing back looks like, about meeting Republicans where they are, that's the moment you have real power.
Speaker 4:
[17:51] Yeah. You know where my brain immediately went when you started talking about Fox News was also this week, Fox News has been attacking Elmo and Sesame Street because Rami Youssef did a bit on Sesame Street where he called Elmo Habibi. And it was just like, it was such sweet, wholesome content. And I remember the second that I saw that video post from Sesame Street and Rami, he's an Arab-American comedian, Muslim-American comedian. And I was like, oh, Fox News is going to have a field day with us because they have a formula, they have people that they're looking for, they have things that they're looking for. And their rage machine runs on just the most fabricated rage. Yeah, and black women, it turns out. People who are super cool and contribute to our society, but don't look like old white men are people that we don't want, actually, in a discourse or are us familiarized with. And I just feel like there's a natural ceiling to that kind of propaganda. And I mean, when you look at what happened in Virginia, I think that that shows it, that they have a particular base, that they are activating, whose minds they are melting. But then the rest of us are out here, and in some ways reachable. And how do we think about telling people concrete steps they can take to make change? And I think that's sort of the last part of, you know, okay, Republicans are creating this cartoon version of who a state representative is, versus thinking about the people who are looking for change. We are, you know, I would say like six, seven months away from a midterm, and wanting to know concretely what they can do to make a difference in our lives and for our democracy and to make government work again. And I think the cool thing in Virginia or California pursuing this proposition is it's something concrete, it's tangible, it's easy to explain why it is necessary, and people are voting for it. And so if there is a lesson here, it's that Republicans, sure, they're going to continue to try to find tweets or paint this reality that makes it seem like Democrats are the aggressors now, even though they're just showing up 25 years late to the table that Republicans sat. And we can't take that bait, you're right. We can't let Democrats be like, well, we don't want to be positioned as the bad guy, so we're not going to be assertive. I don't think that's the right tactic. I think the takeaway here should be voters want this. Voters want to fight, and they believe in a democracy in a country that works. And so let's give them options, and let's state it clearly, and let's see what happens. And it turns out, at least this week in Virginia, it was successful. And what kinds of ideas, platforms, messages are you going to cultivate and expand upon in the next half a year before midterm? And what kind of promises are you going to make in order to motivate people in the way that they were motivated in Virginia yesterday?
Speaker 1:
[21:03] And I would add, just to go into Fox News for a minute, and its anti-Muslim racism, for lack of a better word, because that's what it is.
Speaker 4:
[21:14] Xenophobia.
Speaker 1:
[21:15] Yeah. We saw Obama this week, and Obama has not done a ton of campaigning, so I think is really notable when he gets involved in things. He went with Zoran to do some photos with these pre-K kids in the South Bronx. This is a free pre-K. It's a big thing that Zoran is highlighting, and I think it's important. I have like two things I want to say about it. One, which is that I think it's good politics, good retail politics, and seeing Obama highlight it shows that I think Obama also thinks it's good retail politics. But there was another thing that Zoran did that I'm really impressed by, and I want you to weigh in on it. He was on Meet the Press this week, and Kristen Walker, who I think does a very good job and a very tough job, because this is not... Network television is really hard, pushing these people a lot of the times very hard. But she did this question that journalists often do with Democrats, and Democrats always fall for it, which is, who is your 2028 pick? It is not the midterms yet. It is an insane question. And I think even it was worse than that. I think it was like, oh, do you support Harris running for president in 2028? Yeah. But it's a great... If you're an interviewer trying to get a viral moment, which is part... I mean, she is... That's what she's doing, right? And that's what a lot of people do when they're in this job. And he said to her, I am laser focused on affordability, which I think is the only way to answer that question because it's not up to him. It's up to the midterm... It's up to primary voters. And honestly, who cares what he thinks? What do you think about that?
Speaker 4:
[23:03] Well, to break apart the two parts of your question, I frankly thought you were going to ask me about his moment yesterday where he was asked by a reporter whether or not he'd cursed the Mets and whether he could uncurse them because they haven't won since he hugged Mr. Mett, which is my favorite Zora Mondavi moment of the week.
Speaker 1:
[23:19] Well, that's because The New York Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, had a big story yesterday about how he did curse the Mets. The Mets, which have always been a terrible team.
Speaker 4:
[23:28] The Mets are genetically cursed. That is the point of the Mets is that they are cursed, but I don't want to side rail our conversation more than I already have. With the Barack Obama visit, the thing that I took away from that was that Zora Mondavi is really good at this and he's really popular and Barack Obama actually wanted to attach some of his currency to that person. Yeah, and I think that's really notable to show up there and to be like, you are doing really good work. This is a really good opportunity and I want to be there for it. And we haven't seen Barack Obama do a lot of that with other politicians. And I think that is a little bit of game recognizing game.
Speaker 1:
[24:08] Because both Trump and Obama love Mondami because they see game.
Speaker 4:
[24:14] And that's not even really engaging with the ideological questions of where Zoran Mamdani is or where Barack Obama was in terms of their impact. But I think it's this recognition that you are doing this in a way that is compelling to people. And I want to maintain my relevance in being compelling to people. So that's the first part. The second part is that I think it's really important to not engage with questions that don't matter to other people. So this idea of who's going to be the nominee in 2028, that is a parlor game question that is more interesting to people within the beltway who want to talk about it at cocktail parties afterwards. And you're right, it doesn't say anything about what the task at hand is. It doesn't say anything about how do we win the midterm. It doesn't say anything about what kind of assurances do we need to make to voters in terms of investigations, accountability and change in order to win back the house. And aside from that, that's not even Zorro and Mom Donnie's job. He is mayor of New York and that is a big enough and busy enough and hard enough job without actually playing the role of political pundit. And so you saw in that moment that he was really capable and competent at that. There was another moment recently where Secretary Mayor Pete Buttigieg was on CNBC and he was fighting with, I forgot the token Republican.
Speaker 1:
[25:36] There are a lot of token Republicans on there, but that was the best trend of Donald Trump, Joe Kiernan, who also is often, whenever you watch him, whenever he has a Democrat on, he makes them disavow, either find a Republican to disavow or a Democrat to disavow, or someone who he thinks is the last, I've seen him berate people making them disavow, Hassan Piker, et cetera.
Speaker 4:
[26:03] This clip was amazing because Joe Kiernan was like, oh, well, inflation is so bad, and Democrats promised to get rid of inflation, and inflation was so bad in COVID, and people just didn't take the bait. He's like, well, the president promised to do this, and he has it. You said it would be X, and it's Y. And when someone was like, well, why don't you talk about Z? He's like, I'm not here to talk about Z. We're talking about X and Y and its basic math. And it was so simple, and it was so straightforward. And I think that there has been this preference or habituation to fear from Democrats, because while there's overall a discourse that the media is biased towards liberals, part of the correction, I think, that reporters do, even if it's subconsciously, is to take some of those Republican talking points and put them towards Democrats in sort of this proof that they're not actually liberals. But what that has done is fundamentally skew our discourse towards Republican talking points and made Democrats, I think, fearful to either reject the premise at the outset or speak their piece, because all of the rules of the game are designed by people who functionally are not aligned to their outcomes.
Speaker 1:
[27:21] Right. No, I think that's a really good point. Speaking of gerontocracy, and you and I both critical of this often, but today we have a Democrat, an 80-year-old Democrat has died in office. David Scott, he is one of the many backbenchers in Congress. He is 80. It's very sad he's died, but it also means that the shift in the, Democrats do not have the majority, Republicans have the majority, but it's very tight. Let's talk for a minute about what. Last week, we saw Eric Swalwell, who has been on this podcast, and who I knew and was friendly with, and who turns out to be accused of some pretty heinous stuff. He resigned, and at the same time, they had a Republican called Tony Gonzalez resign. It was sort of a one-for-one. Gonzalez had an affair with a staffer who set herself on fire and is accused of having other affairs with staffers, and also perhaps sexual harassment too. So both resigned at the same time. There's also another member of the House, a Republican, Corey Mills, who is accused of some really heinous stuff and also has an ethics investigation against him. Plus, we have Cheryl Sherfulis McCormick who has resigned. She was, long story, but she's alleged to have taken $5 million in COVID funds and used them for campaigning. Discuss.
Speaker 4:
[28:56] So you're going to have to invite me back so we can spend more time talking about the culture of misogyny and absolute ethical morass that exists on Capitol Hill. But to your question, I actually think this relates back to what we opened with and the idea of gerrymandering and what is fairness and what undergirds our democracy. Any chamber where one person dying could upend the balance of how we function as a government is probably not a really stable system. And the idea that Tony Gonzalez could not or would not be released from Congress until Eric Swalwell also proved to be a monster in this insane sort of eye for an eye, the Hammurabi's code of bad people who need to be kept on a ledger because one vote could make the difference on whether or not the current president of the United States gets to run around completely untracked and with no congressional investigations, that's a bad system. And when we think about everything that has contributed to this moment, whether it is Gerrymandering, whether it is the electoral college to determine whether or not the president, whether it is a Congress that has pretty much self-neutered itself and stepped away from its Article 1 obligations because Republicans are in charge, but you have the quote unquote people's house where people are being held around unethical people, bad people, people who hate women, people who hate laws are being kept around because that one vote makes a difference. That is not in the service of the American people. It's not in the service of their constituents, and that's a really tough place for us to be as a country.
Speaker 1:
[30:42] Meredith, thank you, thank you, thank you. Will you please come back?
Speaker 4:
[30:46] Yes, I will come back anytime you want to have me, Molly.
Speaker 1:
[30:51] Michael Calderone is the media editor of The Wrap. Michael Calderone, welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 3:
[30:58] Thanks so much, Molly.
Speaker 1:
[30:59] I'm so happy you're here, you're my beloved editor for like five years or something.
Speaker 3:
[31:04] We had a form of this phone call like every day.
Speaker 1:
[31:07] Yeah, so it's great to have you here and you've come on to talk about the White House Correspondents Weekend, which is at best, you know, there was actually Paul Farre. Yeah. Was a really smart Washington Post media critic. Washington Post died and now he's at the Atlantic and he had a really good piece today about how even at its best, the Correspondents Dinner is highly fraught. But this is not at its best. Discuss.
Speaker 3:
[31:36] No. I mean, there has been a running critique at the Correspondents Center that it just shows the kind of coziness, the chumminess of Washington between reporters and the people that they cover, the people they're supposed to be holding accountable. And so a lot of people have criticized the dinner over the years. The New York Times stopped going in 2007 and hasn't since because of this, they just felt it's bad. The optics are bad. It's a bad look. We can just cut up a whole thing. The Correspondents Center always invites the president, whether it's a Democrat or a Republican. And they did that throughout Donald Trump's first term. He never came. The first year of his second term, he didn't come. And now they're coming. And that's where the problem is. It's not inviting a Republican president. It's inviting a president who has attacked the press mercilessly throughout the last 15 months and whose administration has clamped down on press access, has threatened news organizations, and Trump personally has sued news organizations. So you're gonna have the guest of honor, a guy giving a speech, sitting up on this platform, who has undermined the press, you know, throughout his second term. That's why it's not normal.
Speaker 1:
[32:41] Yes, he has undermined the press. Again, like one of the big problems, one of the big themes we see in Trump world is like norms versus laws. So there are a lot of things like smashing the East Wing. That is not illegal, technically, but nobody ever tried to do it until now. So talk us through the sort of, there are a lot of, when you look at the Washington Press Corps, they are governed by a lot of norms.
Speaker 3:
[33:11] Yeah, you know, there's no law that reporters have to be in the West Wing, that they get to ask the press secretary questions on a given day. These are all built out of relationships between the Press Corps and the White House. Regardless of who's in power, these are the negotiations that happen in terms of access, in terms of getting questions of the president. And so, for instance, the White House Correspondents Association has long been able to determine which reporters covered a president as part of the pool. This is like, you know, if he's in a small setting in the Oval Office, he's traveling, he's at Mar-a-Lago, it's very important to have small group of reporters that can cover it for the wider press corps, for hundreds of other journalists. And one of the first things this administration did in the second term was take that away. They put it under the control of the White House. One of the other first things they did was barred the Associated Press from covering the president up close because they refused to call the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. And it was these types of restrictions that started in the beginning. And it's not just at the White House, we saw this at the Pentagon, where the Pentagon put forth restrictions last fall that drove dozens of news organizations to leave, including CBS News, which is invited Pete Hegseth to sit at one of their tables at the correspondence. And I think that's why it feels different than past years, in that you have administration officials like Pete Hegseth and even Brendan Carr, the FCC chair, who has targeted broadcasters, was invited by Paramount. And of course, Donald Trump is going to be sitting up on the top of the stage.
Speaker 1:
[34:43] I want you to talk about what's happening right now with Paramount, CBS. Barry Weiss is a favorite of the right-wing billionaire class, is very involved in this Paramount merger. CBS is about to be part of this enormous engine that is both TikTok and CNN, if it passes. She has not increased viewership at CBS, but she has undermined a lot of the really good reputation that CBS had as being nonpartisan. A lot of people have theories about her, like why she was brought in or what she's doing. What's yours?
Speaker 3:
[35:23] I think David Ellison, who his company Skydance merged with Paramount, now he's trying to merge and take over Warner Brothers Discovery, which is even bigger. It means that not only will he control CBS, but would control CNN potentially by the end of this year or early next year. Ellison then bought the free press for $150 million and installed Barry Weiss. I think he's given her a lot of leeway. She has a lot of latitude to make changes, and she is. I think one of the issues with her early on was she abruptly pulled a CBS 60 Minutes segment, which was extremely unusual. It was hours before it was going to broadcast. It was after it was being promoted. I think one of the questions with her is she making some of these moves for political reasons, and certainly some people inside CBS think so, or is it just that she's a novice? She's never worked in TV news. She hasn't even worked very much in reporting or investigative reporting. Primarily, she's been a commentator, and she's somebody who started a website that is largely around her worldview, a more right-leaning, anti-woke point of view. That's fine, but she has never done the type of journalism that you see at a place like 60 Minutes. The big fear now at 60 Minutes is that their season is over in May, and there's an expectation that she's going to really shake up that broadcast. Now, she already shook up the CBS evening news, put Tony DeCople there. She's made changes elsewhere, but the issue at 60 Minutes, this is their highest rated TV.
Speaker 1:
[36:49] Crazy numbers, right? What are the numbers on 60 Minutes?
Speaker 3:
[36:52] This is a show that brings in 10 million people.
Speaker 1:
[36:54] It's crazy. By the way, there's nothing that brings in 10 million people.
Speaker 3:
[36:58] It's an anomaly. If you have a show that's doing really strong journalism and is popular and you want to break it up, so that's the issue right now inside 60 Minutes. Then so you have Barry Weiss is going to be at the dinner, David Ellison presumably will be at the dinner. They're reportedly throwing some kind of private function that said it was not even in honor of just 60. It was not even just in honor of CBS journalists, but in honor of the Trump White House. This is playing out as they need regulatory. They need a regulatory approval to finish the Warner Brothers discovery merger, and that's the big one down the line.
Speaker 1:
[37:32] It's funny because there is another Fed governor who I've talked to before, and she is constantly talking about, she's the one Democrat still on the committee, and she talks about how a lot of stuff Brendan Carr is threatening, he can't actually do. So much of what we've seen is that the right has threatened things, and people have just rolled over. I'm thinking of like Sherry Redstone canceling Colbert, like things that just, they're just doing it because they're like, whatever is more than obeying in advance, obeying plus plus plus in advance. Where else do you see that?
Speaker 3:
[38:10] Yeah, I mean, we saw this last year when Paramount was trying to merge with Skydance, and within weeks before they finally got that approval, you know, Paramount negotiated this multi-million dollar settlement with Donald Trump over his lawsuit in minutes. We've seen this before. Disney also settled with Donald Trump just as he won the presidency over him suing because of something George Stephanopoulos said. Donald Trump has sued a lot of news organizations, and usually these news organizations fight back. The Wall Street Journal has, the New York Times is, the BBC is. But we saw Paramount settle as they were trying to complete this merger. And so, you know, you're talking about Brendan Carr can't control everything. And in some ways, the FCC is, they largely control even broadcast and radio. They can't control cable and other sort of platforms. So he is limited in what he can do, but the threats he can make, if a company has a merger down the line, that's obviously going to make them think twice.
Speaker 1:
[39:06] But it is funny because it's like you think about Elon and the way in which Elon has really done illegal stuff with his companies. And even we've seen him, he'll say things like, if Democrats really investigate this, I'm going to jail, that kind of thing. That's not verbatim, but he's definitely intubated that he's done stuff that is at best flouted the laws and at worst is illegal. But Democrats don't seem to threaten that same way. They don't seem to, yeah.
Speaker 3:
[39:35] They've never done what Brendan Carter did, which is an FCC chair saying that the president is, quote, winning against the fake news media. I mean, he's taking a victory lap for Colbert, for other instances in which the media has seemed to cave. That has never happened before. And we can play this game a million times of, could you imagine if Obama's FCC chair was going after Fox News day in and day out? Coverage was looked like. It's something we've never seen this kind of brazenness before, or, you know, trying to take a win for the president. It comes as Trump is attacking that. So to have the FCC chair kind of echoing that the president is winning is a whole new ball game. And it's why all of this is now a particularly normal moment to invite the president and his cabinet and other officials to the Correspondence Center.
Speaker 1:
[40:21] When you talk about the media, a lot of times we end up talking about, because the media is sort of owned by a lot of rich, powerful people like Jeff Bezos, like Loreen Powell Jobs. Now, Loreen has been a really good stalwart, right? She owns the Atlantic.
Speaker 3:
[40:38] They've been hiring, they're building up, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[40:40] Right. Bezos has tried to crush the Washington Post and has made it as small as possible and has undermined the editorial page, any which way. So when we have this conversation about media, it often just goes up to billionaires because billionaires own media, a lot of billionaires own media. Do you think, as we're watching this, that we're a year and a half into this Trump administration, what we've seen is that billionaires have just signed off on everything, and it's the normal people who have been the brave ones. Are you surprised by that? Because remember, we all lived through that news cycle where Jeff Bezos was going to save democracy.
Speaker 3:
[41:17] Yes. I think it was the most telling moment was on day one of this whole second term, when we saw Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, all standing there with other captains of industry in the tech world, in the media world. And I think the relationships between media owners has come under more scrutiny in this term, because we're seeing how is Patrick Shushon, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, engaging, interacting with both Trump and with Mago World. Or what about Jeff Bezos? I mean, and, you know, Jeff Bezos, Amazon, MGM, you know, bought the Melania Trump documentary. Now, Jeff Bezos has said that he wasn't involved in that decision, but clearly his company spent a tremendous amount of money to buy and market a documentary, a flattering documentary about Melania Trump, at the same time that he's cutting 300 jobs from the Washington Post. And so, yeah, I think it's imperative to look at ownership and what is there other business before government? And the thing is, Amazon has other business for government. So does Apple and Metta. But some other media companies, you do have some individual owners who don't have that. They don't have broadcasting license that could be threatened, and they don't have other regulatory hurdles that they have to get over. If you're just an independent, rich person and you own a publication news site, you might end up in a different place than a bigger media apparatus that has to worry about the broadcast license for TV and radio.
Speaker 1:
[42:43] I want to talk about Trump. He's been doing this thing where he, when he gets into trouble, he calls reporters. So he's been calling around reporters. Now, Maggie Haberman, who's been covering him for a million years and who covered him when he was just a New York real estate guy, said that this is kind of what he's always done, where he calls around reporters. The New York Press Corps is a very sort of tough group where you, like this is sort of the tabloid culture of calling up reporters and giving them scoops. And by giving them scoops, you can shape the way that they cover you and also that you can make news by saying lies. Explain to us what you see there and why he seems to be able to use it to such great success.
Speaker 3:
[43:33] Yeah, I mean, I have to, I back up Maggie. I mean, she's covered him closer than anyone. But I say this, when I was very young, before I was a media reporter, I was a real estate reporter in New York. And one of the interesting things was probably the easiest famous person to get on the phone was Donald Trump, which as a very young reporter was surprising. This is somebody who seemed larger than life, big in New York real estate, was on TV. But if he called his office, they would often put you through to him because he wanted to give quotes. He wanted to be out there publicly. He's always lived that way. That's why when the Iran War starts, most of what we've heard from Donald Trump especially early on and even throughout the past month or so, is little bits of pieces that he tells reporters on the phone. There was a period where he must have called a dozen or two dozen reporters over a week period. Oftentimes, saying things that conflict from one call to the next, but each one is treated as a headline, it's treated as big news. You see the White House reporters often going on X and saying, just got off the phone with the president, he tells me such and such about Iran. That can have an impact. That can move markets. He's the president. That can also generate other headlines. We created especially early on this fog of war where Trump was talking so much to reporters in bits and pieces. That's just how he operates. Even reporters like Maggie Haberman, he attacks on true social. He reportedly will have her to the White House because she's writing a book on Trump. He does. It was all sorts of, I think almost every reporter who's been close to him has probably been attacked publicly. But he still takes their calls and he often calls them up when he has something to say.
Speaker 1:
[45:09] He clearly is able to, a lot of times, win the news cycle. One of the dynamics that I think is really interesting about the Iranians is that Trump will say things about Iran and the Iranians will be like, it's not true. How unusual is it to have an American president who's being debunked by the Iranians?
Speaker 3:
[45:30] Yeah, I mean, but this is the challenge with this administration at war. You would think being at war, you would have kind of very sober press conferences daily at the Pentagon. We haven't had any of that. Pentagon press conferences are few and far between. They're certainly not today. And when we do have them, half the time is Pete Hegseth derating the press corps, even though half the people in that room now are from conservative, right-wing outlets, right-wing influencers, because most of the traditional press corps is gone. Sometimes they let some of the major news outlets in there. That's the thing, that it's attacking the news media, saying they're against Trump, saying they're unsupported or the Pharisees or whatever he's saying. That's one of the biggest problems with the administration getting just accurate, basic information. It's hard to trust when we've seen time and time again Trump say things that are not true or the Pentagon attack reporters instead of just giving the basic information at the start of a press conference.
Speaker 1:
[46:31] Yeah. And it is also just nutso. One last question for you, Cash Patel is going to sue the Atlantic for writing that he was an alcoholic. Is he going to win?
Speaker 3:
[46:42] Is he going to win? I mean, I think it would be really hard. Anyone can sue for defamation. He's suing for $250 million. Trump has sued outlets for $10 billion. I mean, you can put any number you want on it. But he's going to have to prove that the Atlantic acted with blatant disregard for the facts. They acted with actual malice. And I think that's going to be our just knowing the Atlantic and knowing the type of reporters. And there's no doubt that lawyers vetted this story before it was published. There's no, but probably multiple editors read this story. And the thing about, you know, anonymous sources, they're not anonymous to the reporter. So the reporter and their editors know who these sources are, and they have trust in these confidential sources. So no, I think, I think it'll be very hard. Like a lot of defamation suits, it's very hard to prove that an outlet, especially like the Atlantic is doing this to get him versus they're trying to put something out there in the public. But it's within his right to sue. And it just goes across with this whole thing we've been talking about, which is like Trump and his allies in the administration, either attacking journalists, suing journalists, threatening journalists, and this is all playing out as we're going to celebrate the First Amendment on Saturday.
Speaker 1:
[47:51] Unbelievable. Michael Calderone, I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 3:
[47:54] Definitely. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:
[47:57] And now, your moment of suffering.
Speaker 1:
[48:00] Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 2:
[48:01] Molly Jong-Fast, so one of the things that we always thank our lucky stars for is the incompetence in the Trump administration. But rarely do you hear from a voice inside the House, just how bad it was, and a ex-Pam Bondi aide, in a profile on Todd Blanch, is saying what we all know, which is these people are so incompetent and bad at their jobs, that they can barely make it happen.
Speaker 1:
[48:25] Yeah, thank God. So the career prosecutors, the smart people don't want to do the job, only the dumb people and also the alcoholics. I mean, that's what we're seeing. So right now, the people fighting for the Pam Bondi job are Arnita Dhillon and Judge Boxa Wine, a crew that is like they can't even shoot straight, period, paragraph. But this is Chad Mitzal. He is Pam Bondi's former chief of staff, so he knows what goes on in that office, and he thinks she was too dumb to ever get anything done. Something that all of us have long suspected about Magelworld, their dumbness, and it's nice to see they are just as dumb as we thought they were. Bondi's biggest failures in the eyes of the public were her handling of the Epstein files, her incredible stupidity, and Donald Trump felt she did not move fast enough for him. So this is something we say all the time on this podcast, which is thank God they're stupid, because otherwise we would all be in even more trouble.
Speaker 2:
[49:31] This makes me think of one of Ashley St. Claire's recent videos where she talked about how she'd go to these right-wing conferences, and it'd be like party, party, party, everybody's fucking each other doing drugs and drinking. Then she'd go to the Democrat ones. They're like, all right, I'm going to leave now. My family is at the hotel. See you later, everyone.
Speaker 1:
[49:48] Yeah, they're all that substance abuse problem. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.