Pod Save America - Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

Devastating wildfires in Los Angeles prompt a round of angry finger-pointing and disaster politics from the GOP. The most extreme reaction comes from Trump and a growing number of Republicans in Congress, who are already talking about placing conditions on disaster relief for California. Meanwhile, President Biden kicks off his final week in office with a farewell speech defending his foreign policy legacy. Jon, Lovett, and Tommy break down what he got right, and what’s at risk as Trump returns to D.C. On another front, MAGA’s messy relationship with Big Tech heats up. Zuckerberg sits down with Trump on Joe Rogan, while Steve Bannon takes aim at Elon Musk. Finally, Ken Martin, Chair the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, drops by to talk about his campaign for Chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Hey, cricket listeners, there's a new show hosted by Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov that we think you'll enjoy. It's called Raging Moderates. I was just on it a few weeks ago. It was a lot of fun. We talked about the election and what's next for Democrats and Scott and Jessica are just fantastic. It was a really fun conversation.

Raging Moderates is a podcast for those who reside somewhere between the center left and the center right. and it can be found wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. ["Pod Save America Theme Song"] Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. Cool. On today's show, Joe Biden delivers his final foreign policy address to kick off his last week as president. We'll talk about the speech and his farewell tour. I can't believe it's the last week. Don't let the door hit you with a good Lord split you I made it more of like you're gonna miss him. Oh shit Trump's coming. Yeah, it's true. It's real I know we'll also talk about the latest in the precarious marriage between MAGA and Big Tech with Mark Zuckerberg doing more Trump ass kissing on Joe Rogan and Steve Bannon making new threats to Elon Musk

Then I talked to Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota DFL, that's the state's democratic party, about his bid for chair of the DNC. But first, the fires in Los Angeles are still burning. As of this taping on Monday afternoon, the Eaton Palisades and Hearst fires have burned over 36,000 acres. To put that in context, that is a larger area

than the entire city of San Francisco. More than 12,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed. That's just so far. That number will probably go up. The fires have taken the lives of 24 Angelenos. Fortunately, that number is expected to go up as well. As we are recording this, the winds have subsided, which has allowed firefighting crews over the weekend to contain more of the blaze. But really bad, powerful new winds are expected throughout the week, especially Tuesday and

Wednesday, creating dangerous conditions and the possibility of new fires. Of course, the continued danger has not prevented Republicans from politicizing recovery efforts and spreading misinformation, such as Vice President-elect Jay DeVance's claim on Fox News Sunday that some of Los Angeles' reservoirs have been dry for decades. But the worst reaction has come from Trump and a growing number of Republicans in Congress who are already talking about placing conditions on disaster relief sent to California. Here's Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty, and Speaker Mike Johnson. Why should other states be bailing out California for choosing the wrong people to run their state?

We shouldn't be. They got 40 million people in that state and they voting these these imbeciles in office. You go to California, you run into a lot of Republicans, a lot of good people, and I hate it for them, but they are just overwhelmed by these inner-city, woke policies with the people that vote for them. They don't deserve anything, to be honest with you, unless they show us they're going to make some changes. And before we put funds into place, we've got to find out exactly how we're going to hold these leaders accountable and what sort of policy changes are required. There's going to be hearings, there's going to be requests of Congress.

There can't be a blank check on this. I think there should probably be conditions on that date. That's my personal view. Tommy Tuberville, a real expert in putting imbeciles into office from the state of Alabama, which I believe is the state that is... It's number 12 in states that are most dependent on federal aid, the small state of Alabama, compared to the 40 million people in California, which I do think contributes quite a bit to the country's gross domestic product.

And far more tax dollars leave. California go to the federal government, then come back. Also just so racist, these inner city woke DEI initiatives, like, well, what are you trying to say, Senator? I can't tell. If you really listen to the criticism, I was just listening to our good pal, Chris Christie. He was on Brian Kilmeade's radio show,

going off on Newsome and the fire response. None of these people though have any, they haven't really paid attention to any of the details. So they don't have any actual criticisms. They're just like, it's a disaster and the woke policies did it in this. It's just all sh short hand, lazy bullshit. And as we're gonna get into,

there are absolutely real critiques that you can level towards various officials about the fire thing, but they're not interested in that. So Mike Johnson, actually the next sentence that he says, cause he's walking down the Capitol, he says they're conditions and he throws out there forest management, water management. It's like, okay, this is a disaster,

an emergency right now. California needs money right now. I don't even know what it means to put conditions on California. Nor does Mike Johnson. Nor does Mike Johnson. Or any Republican. It's like, no more woke.

You gotta ban woke and you better stop doing those things we're making up about you doing. All those things that aren't happening, they better stop right now. It is. I mean, is this, we've come to expect this from Trump. I do think it's alarming that Republicans are now

just open to punishing disaster victims, unless the elected Democrats who represent them just embrace Republican politics. Is that what we're in for for the next four years? Sure, it seems like it. I mean, remember there's the story from 2018 where a bunch of Trump's national security staff had to show him vote totals from Orange County, California before he would agree to

funds for fire relief. So this is not surprising for Trump. I guess we shouldn't be surprised that Republicans are following suit, especially the worst of the worst like Tommy Tuberville. But it's a problem. You would like to think that doing something like this, exploiting people in an ongoing disaster would be seen as beyond the pale, or at least there'd be some kind of like

mutually assured destruction, lest the next Democratic president say, actually, no one should live on the coast of Florida ever again, and unless you agree to my random policy areas, we will not fund any insurance for you. Yeah, of course. When did Joe Biden ever attach political conditions to disaster relief or Barack Obama or George W. Bush or like any president

before Donald Trump? In addition to that 2018 episode, I had forgotten that in October of 2020, Trump did deny a federal aid request from California. At the time, there were 21 active wildfires in the state. Four million acres had already burned. 31 people had died. And Newsom had asked for federal aid. Trump rejected it.

And then Newsom called Trump and pleaded his case. And I think Kevin McCarthy, who at the time was, you know, Republican leadership in the House and from California, I think he got Trump to turn around and then Trump signed the disaster relief assistance. But he tried to do this before. Yeah, I mean, look, there are Republican members of Congress in California.

Nine House Republicans, they better speak up. There are, it is especially galling when you see different people like DeSantis, but a bunch of them that have called for conditioning aid to Democratic areas on either side of their state desperately needing aid after a disaster. We've had disasters in Florida, in Texas, there have been, we just went through these terrible floods in North Carolina, right? Like Republicans understand the need for aid in an emergency and

are completely for it on either side of crises that affect democratic states. And I will say, so far, the only Republican I've seen that has opposed attaching any kind of conditions is Tom Tillis, Senator, Republican Senator from North Carolina, and he said, just before we started recording, put yourself, he's like, put yourself in their shoes. We were just dealing with a hurricane here.

We wanted relief, like so would they. Which is a completely normal thing to think. He's a decent person. The other thing is, it's not just like you're punishing all the libs in California. Donald Trump got 6 million votes in the state of California. That's a lot of votes. That's probably more votes than he got

in a lot of different states that he won. Yeah, it's also like, the ideological part of it is just beside the point, obviously, but like disasters, a big disaster in California, it affects the whole country. This is a huge port. This is a huge part of the American economy. Part of it is just beside the point, obviously, but like disasters, a big disaster in California, it affects the whole country. This is a huge port. This is a huge part of the American economy.

A disaster in North Carolina affects the whole country. The whole idea is we help parts of the country rebuild because it helps all of us. We are all better off when we know that in a disaster, if there's something that happens to our town, our community, our state, that the resources will come in that come over the top of what you could do locally because that protects all of us.

Well, presumably he'd like the Republican party to do better in California going forward. So maybe don't punish him now. Right. Also, say Gavin Newsom personally went to every reservoir and drained it so he could drink all the water himself. Thirsty boy, yeah, sure. So we could keep it by his house

so he could have extra water. Why does everyone else get punished for that? It is fucking insane. It is an insane thing to do. One condition that Republicans are discussing is tying wildfire aid to the debt ceiling. On Monday morning, Politico reported that over dinner at Mar-a-Lago,

a group of House Republicans and President-elect Trump explored tying disaster relief with extending the debt limit as a way to overcome internal Republican divisions that would likely sink any bill containing a debt ceiling increase. They of course don't think that they can get the debt ceiling increase with just Republican votes because you get the Chip Roys of the world who like want trillions of dollars of cuts before they ever vote for a debt ceiling increase. Apparently, House Speaker Mike Johnson was not in attendance at the dinner,

so no final decision has been made, but wouldn't be surprised if they move forward on this. What do you guys think of the idea? Do you think Democrats, House Democrats would support it? I was relieved that we could help Donald Trump solve a political problem for himself. As I watched the flames creep closer to my home and my business and where all my friends live, I thought to myself,

I really hope there's any silver lining here. It can be that we solve this Freedom Caucus political problem for Donald Trump. So when? So it's's any silver lining here. It can be that we solve this freedom caucus political problem for Donald Trump. So when? So it's called the silver lining. So I think that's pretty galling about this too. So the reason Johnson's wasn't there is that this was a specific meeting. This was a meeting with Republicans from New York,

New Jersey, California, who are specifically interested in raising the cap on state and local tax deductions. The reason that that's interesting is that was one of the ways they helped get the cost down on state and local tax deductions. The reasons that that's interesting is that was one of the ways they helped get the cost down on the original Trump tax cuts. There's a state and local deduction that helps people from high tax states like California, New York and New Jersey.

And Trump is in this meeting with these guys and they're like, this cap affected our people. And Trump was like, I didn't know that. Nobody told me that. So this is a meeting of a group of House Republicans trying to figure out a way to make the debt problem worse. That's the goal of this meeting. And in order to make the debt problem worse,

which is what this group of people wants to do, they need either Democratic votes or they need the votes of people that have not been opposed some of the time, a group of people that have never in their time in Congress voted to raise the debt limit. They've never done it. Some of them ran for Congress voted to raise the debt limit. They've never done it. Some of them ran for Congress

just to oppose debt ceiling increases. And so fundamentally what that meeting is and what a lot of this is, is an admission that Republicans are fucking stuck, that they have to raise the debt limit, they don't have the votes to do it, and they're trying to figure out some way out of it. Mike Johnson also talked about the possibility

of the condition for California tying it to raising the debt limit, which is just a way of saying they don't think they can do it as Tommy was saying without Democratic votes. Yeah, I reached out to a couple members of Congress to see if this was gaining currency. And they were like, I'm not sure about the debt ceiling piece of this,

but they do think that conditioning aid is gaining a lot of momentum, even though no one seems to know what the conditions are. I mean, we're like half joking, but like, if you look at Twitter, it's like half of the attacks are Donald Trump Jr. saying that like DEI initiatives are the reason there were a hundred mile per hour

wins. And then there's the Trump stuff, which is like forest management and the smelt fish, which I know you and Dan talked about Thursday and I refuse to learn more about because it's so stupid. Yeah. It's all you need to listen to.

Even Gavin Newsom said, all you have to do is listen to Pod Save America to find out about the smell fish. The, uh, yeah, like it's like the, the aid is conditioned on opening up a pipe between Fresno and Laguna about the smell fish. The smell fish. Yeah, like it's like the aid is conditioned on opening up a pipe between Fresno and Laguna that doesn't exist. It's like, so, but.

There's a hope there, which is like now, so now Trump is expected to come out here next week and he's going to talk to Newsom. Like you could see a situation, we're in the stupidest timeline we have been for a long time, where all of this is bluster, Republicans go on shows, they have to sound tough, that's what they do.

Trump goes out and talks to Newsom, and he's like, oh, you know, Newsom was okay, and we came to an agreement, and they're gonna, and the condition is like, they're gonna, they're gonna study forest management, or they're gonna make some bullshitty thing to like. Gavin should make a giant faucet and do like a grand opening, like key to the city,

ribbon cutting type thing. Let this sink in kind of thing. You fixed it. Yeah, so that's the best case scenario and by no means clear that that will happen. Right, well, it's hard to even like, this is an emergency. The disaster relief needs to come quickly. And so it's like, what is the condition on California

doing some reforms? That seems impossible. How is that even gonna be enforced? So it seems more about like some kind of restriction on the money that everybody can declare victory on. That would be the hope. Yeah, they just wanna say that they punished the Libs in California.

That's what they're gonna do. Punish the woke. They now control everything. They control Washington Republicans. So they need enemies, they need villains. That's their reason for being. And so California is gonna be a big punching bag. Probably New York's gonna be a big punching bag too, right?

They just gotta find the libs wherever they can. And that's going to be. Greenland, Panama, California, California. That's about right. Yeah. All right. Let's, uh, let's talk about Los Angeles. Yesterday, the New York times resurfaced a 2021 interview with Los Angeles,

mayor Karen Bass, where she promised to quote, not travel internationally. Very specific pledge that Bass broke last week when she was in Ghana as the Eaton and Palisades fires broke out in Los Angeles. This comes after Los Angeles fire chief, Kristen Crowley told Fox 11, Los Angeles on Friday, that under Bass's leadership, the city had failed her and her department by not providing enough funding to her department. Curious what you guys think of the local response so far. Do you think the anger is warranted towards LA officials

and Mayor Bass? I think 90% of being mayor is showing up. And when you're out of town, when something like this happens, you are going to get people very angry. And I think that's pretty justifiable anger, especially when this was not totally predicted, these fires, not the scope and scale,

but the conditions that led to them were known in advance. And some of the reporting on Mayor Bass's absence notes that Mayor Hahn, who was the mayor of Los Angeles on September 11, 2001, was in DC when the 9-11 attacks happened. He got stranded there for three days and voters punished him for it and he lost reelection. I read that. I had no idea about that story because I didn't live there at the time, but he took the, he got the first flight that left the East coast back to the West coast after 9-11. He was on that first flight.

He was gone for a couple days. He says 60 hours. 60 hours. And it was still like one of the reasons it was used against him for like the rest of his career. Do you know who became, who was the acting mayor in his absence? Who?

Alex Padilla. Huh, our Senator. Look at that. Yeah, so whether or not the mayor should be Do you know who became, who was the acting mayor in his absence? Who? Alex Padilla. Huh. Our Senator. Look at that. Yeah, so whether or not the mayor should have gone on the trip, I think it's pretty clear that she should have come back once the warnings

started coming in Sunday. They were pretty grim. Yeah, she left Saturday, the extreme warnings were Sunday and there were warnings before that on Friday. There were some pretty dire ones on Saturday too, yeah. I do not think she should have been away during this time. What I think is like, what I was like trying to, it's so hard to understand what's going on now.

There's so much noise and you sort of step back from it. And there's this debate about Karen Bass. There's this, I think very reasonable and important debate to have about how we manage fires in California, water management in California, building policies in California, all valid, all important. I think there's an important debate to be had after this crisis about the way in which accountability is broken up and divided between Los Angeles as a city and Los Angeles as a county that I find quite stupid and anti-democratic and makes it very hard to figure out who is responsible

and allows a lot of people to pass the buck. But I also think like the kind of right-wing propaganda, blaming everything on woke plus some of these debates that are ultimately I think incidental to what unfolded. Also like obscure that like this has been an extraordinary response. Like there has been an amazing success of local government in the face of unprecedented wildfires to get resources there. Like these people on the lines for days without end getting in face of like climate worsening fires.

They're not responsible for people building houses on the hills. They're not responsible for 30 years of forest mismanagement. They're not responsible for long-term water policies. They're there trying to figure out how to put this out and like the utility companies getting power back in a bunch of different places all at once.

Like there's a lot of good in the response too that I feel like has been completely obscured. Like I saw on social media, people like sharing videos of a helicopter or plane dropping water and like missing a building and being like, here it is, they're a perfect example of California and why liberal government has failed, right? Here we have it once again, like these liberals can't do it.

You need private firefighters. You need a Rick Crusoe, whatever it is. And it's like, these are people doing their best. And from where we were a few days ago to where we are today, like they did an extraordinary job. I think the firefighters are some of the most courageous people in all of public life. And the fact that they do this day in and day out,

and like you said, Love it. I mean, these guys were, men and women were working 30 hour, 40 hour shifts straight, battling fires in extreme heat. In some cases they didn't have water. Now I do think- So they haven't slept in a week. Days, days. I mean, we were with Newsom at the command center,

like talking to some of the firefighters there. And they're like, this is, one guy's like, I've been doing this for 40, 50 years. This is the worst week of my life. Yeah, and that's why when you've like Don Jr. tweeting that like DEI initiatives and the firing of a couple of white male fire chiefs is the reason, like that's so insulting to all these firefighters out there doing their job.

Now I do think there is a debate that should be happening about the speed of the response, pre-deployment, why some of these fire hydrants ran out of water, and I think Nusum is trying to get to the bottom of that, but other people need to too. There's also an argument about the fire department's budget whether it should have been 800 million, 900 million, like I have no idea but it's a huge problem for Karen Bass that the fire chief is saying they needed more money and they were refused. Again, I'm also sympathetic to the idea that no fire department in the world could deal with four massive forest fires at the same time, especially in a hundred mile per hour winds.

But clearly there were some decisions made that hindered the response. And I think we need to get to the bottom of them. And also think there has been a void in terms of just local communication. Like, I don't know about you guys, but like the 700 person press conferences just don't really do it for me

when I'm looking for clear leadership. Neither did the several false emergency alerts that went off on our phone. In fact, when we were recording an episode of something on Friday or Thursday, a bunch went off and it was like terrifying people. One went off at four in the morning. Terrifying.

For people who were like in Pasadena area right near the zone. So like it could have been them evacuating. And by the way, yeah, I just done that too. Like, yes, false alarms, very scary. You do know false alarms, people aren't going to take the real one seriously. That's the huge, of course.

Here's my thing, like, of course, when a disaster strikes, there's going to be plenty to criticize about, there's going to be plenty to praise, plenty to criticize about the response. And as you guys both pointed out, there are plenty of debates to be plenty to praise, plenty to criticize about the response. And as you guys both pointed out, there are plenty of debates to be had in Los Angeles and around Los Angeles and the state of California about water, fire, all that stuff. The challenge is, like, we can't have those debates publicly in an information environment

where you're getting these bad faith attacks from the right and all this misinformation. And so it's so difficult to have like rational conversations. And look, this is, we're gonna have more, there's gonna be more disasters and they're gonna be more frequent now cause there's climate change. And if we are not able to, when the disaster hits, first focus on, okay, how do we put out the fires?

How do we take care of everyone? Then figure out, okay, what happened? What did everyone fuck up? Who's to blame? Right? Like I don't want to make the seem like we are, I'm, I'm certainly not interested in being partisan or not criticizing someone just because they're a Democrat.

I don't give a shit. Right? Like if it turns out that like Karen Bass really fucked up or Gavin Newsom fucked up, whoever it is, be the first to criticize that person, you know, but like you, you do have to figure out the information and it's hard to do in the fog of war,

which is where we're at right now. And I don't know, you just gotta like, it's just so hard to do that in this environment. Well, like I think Newsome said this to you, some version of like the truth requires some patience and requires some time. We're in the middle of it. We're in the middle of it.

And the fact, look, pre-deployment problems, surely, we will learn ways to do this better. Some of it will be personalities, individuals who made mistake. Some of it will be structural, which is much less interesting and people don't give a shit about, which will probably ultimately have been even more important.

But just the fact that these terrible fires raged is not in and of itself a sign that the government failed just because it looks bad on TV. So much of this is about what looks bad on TV. I don't want to defend Karen Bass. I found it shocking that she went to France for the Olympics three times, which I learned from that article.

Three times. That's a lot of times for Olympics. Not enough croque madame. I mean, I have been looking for this too. Like it's so far, I haven't seen anyone with experience in fighting fires or dealing with water issues make the case that extra firefighters or one more water reservoir,

one was offline at the time being repaired, would have done anything to change the fact that it was mostly severe winds and the inability to get the helicopters in the air that were primarily responsible for the devastation, the palisades and in Altadena, right? Like I'm open to, if someone can make that case, like maybe that's wrong, but I haven't seen that.

And so that's the main thing, right? That's the main problem. And then everything else is really important to figure out as we move on. But in the interim, you're seeing tweets with millions and millions of views saying, because Karen Bass was out of town, the acting mayor didn't declare an emergency declaration,

which is why Biden didn't get the water dropping Navy helicopters into the air until Wednesday. And you read that and you're like- I got many people said that to me. You sent me this tweet. And some of my friends were like, why weren't the Helos there? Why weren't the Navy dropping planes there?

And you read it and you think, okay, this is a person who seems to have had a big job in local LA politics. And then you think for five seconds to yourself and you're like, Joe Biden doesn't have access to special magic helicopters that can fly around with tons and tons of water and a hundred mile power winds. This is clearly nonsense.

And the disaster declaration stuff, like 99% of that is about getting resources or funding to an area hit by a disaster after the fact, not before it ends. It's Elon Musk who has been doing some good stuff and like setting up Starlink and helping around here with some of the clean up. But at the beginning, the beginning of this is going on,

Alex Jones, this whole video, this like 40 minute video, where he said that the fires were part of a larger globalist plot to cause the collapse of the United States. And Elon responds to him, true. It's for the most part though. What are we doing? A climate change hero, Elon Musk.

It is like sort of the mirror image of the kind of conspiratorial mindset. Like that, whatever, that's fucking nuts. And but like, no, most people do not believe that the government is responding as a conspiracy to hurt California. Right, but like, no, most people do not believe that the government is responding as a conspiracy to hurt California, right? But I think like the mirror image of people assuming

that there is some kind of conspiracy that explains everything is in a crisis like this, it can't just be bad. It has to be because people have failed us. There has to be individuals who are responsible. There has to be someone to blame right now, because I can't handle the uncertainty of just knowing that people are doing their best

and it's not working. It has to be something else. It has to be more about a human failure. Which is a very human impulse and I think it's just magnified in an age where we just see way too much information and way too many people who pretend to be experts. And just bad actors and people who should know better.

You know, Elon Musk knows better. He understands the impact of climate change. For him to reply to Alex Jones and boost that guy, it's indefensible. Pots A of America is brought to you by Haya. Typical children's vitamins are basically candy in disguise. Filled with two teaspoons of sugar, unhealthy chemicals and other gummy additives, growing

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legacy. Biden made the case that the United States has strengthened its alliances in the face of authoritarian aggression and weakened its greatest adversaries, Russia, China, and Iran. The speech marks another stop on Biden's farewell tour, which included an exclusive interview with USA Today last week and an upcoming televised address to the nation on Wednesday evening. Here's a clip of Biden's foreign policy speech. When Putin invaded Ukraine, he thought he's starting to conquer kevin matter days the truth is since that war began i'm the only one who stood in the center of keith not

him could never have my administration leaving the next administration with a very strong and the play relieving them and america more friends and stronger alliances whose adversaries are weaker and under pressure.

An America that once again is leading, uniting countries, setting the agenda, bringing others together behind our plans and visions. Tommy, what'd you make of the speech? Anything surprising or missing that was notable? So I think, I'm curious what you guys think. I think even pretty highly engaged voters are gonna remember like two to three things you did on foreign policy.

I think for Obama, it's gonna be Bin Laden operation, probably maybe the Syria red line. The more charitable version is, you know, Paris climate accords or the Iran deal, right? Like a few things, big things. I think like Bin Laden, for like most- Bin Laden's number one. From medium info voters, yeah.

Bin Laden's number one. I think, so I wish it was- Maybe Iran Deal. Different, I wish it was- Winding down the world around. New start or a Cuba normalization or some of the other stuff we did, but I think it's probably those bigger things.

And for Biden, I think the list of things that he's gonna be remembered for on foreign policy are the Afghanistan withdrawal, Gaza, and then something about Ukraine. And I think what's hard for Biden in this speech is that while I think that ending the war in Afghanistan was objectively the right thing to do and a risky political decision, it will be remembered as a failure. But the Gaza piece. Because of the withdrawal. Because of withdrawal. But the Gaza piece, the wars is an unmitigated disaster. And despite Biden's sort of bigger picture claims in the speech that we've, you know,

he's restored our standing in the world and diplomacy, I think Gaza has hurt our diplomatic standing, and it's made us less safe. Like his own NCTC director, the National Counterterrorism Center said, anti-American sentiment driven by the war in Gaza is at a level not seen since the Iraq war and groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS are recruiting on that sentiment, issuing the most specific calls

for attacks on America in years. So it's like, this speech seemed like they kind of wanted to pull out Gaza and, and make it an afterthought when I really think it's going to be the center of his foreign policy legacy, especially when, you know, there's reporting last week, the Lancet, very prestigious medical journal, they did a study of the death

toll in Gaza in the first nine months and they found it to be 40% higher than the official account from the Hamas health ministry. So I think like the story about this war is going to get worse and worse over time. And there's just the tone and tenor of how they talk about it has not changed. I think obviously you do these speeches because

you want to change that narrative. You want to talk about the investments in technology and alliances and climate change and rallying the world on Ukraine. And I think he deserves a lot of credit on Ukraine, but even that section felt a little bit divorced from the current reality, which is that Russia has gained momentum on the battlefield

and the Ukrainians have a very uncertain future with Donald Trump coming in. So I get why you do this speech, but I think, you know, it didn't, I'm not sure that it's gonna be effective. It was sort of striking that you could imagine Joe Biden giving a very, very similar version of the speech had Kamala Harris won. And like I came away from it, like he says,

overall we have reinvigorated people's faith in the United States as a true, true partner. Is that true? Have you done that? Do you think that's where people are right now? As they watch you hand the keys over to Donald Trump? Even if there is some truth to the fact that you have reestablished relationships

and had the achievements that you're describing, you live in a world where your presidency will be bookended by Donald Trump and all the damage and policy changes that that brings. And you can try to pretend otherwise and you can subtly or not so subtly kind of hint at, trying to create kind of like political leverage on Trump about the position he'll enter the office in,

the changes that Joe Biden has made, but the speech largely seems to ignore the fact that we're about to transition to someone who is gonna do great damage to our policies internationally and our reputation. I think that Joe Biden and his administration are not the first to want to hammer home their accomplishments. Every administration wants to do that. that Joe Biden and his administration are not the first to want to hammer home their

accomplishments. Every administration wants to do that. I think what they have done is a lesson for future administrations, hopefully future democratic administrations, that ignoring reality and just sort of like not wrestling with the challenges that are still there at the end of your presidency, your mistakes, your failings, your shortcomings. Some maybe, which even if you don't believe

you were at fault for them, acknowledging them, wrestling with them in a speech, talking to people about them is still the best way to either change people's minds or at least let people know like where you are on the issue. To me, it felt like there's, there's no theme, there's no story to this speech. There's no, it was like a Senate floor speech to his Senate foreign relations

committee, uh, you know, colleagues. And it just, it struck me to what you said, love it. It's like, since the election, we're all in a bit of denial that Donald Trump went. Right. We're all sort of, it's very different than in 2016. We've talked about all the reasons, but we're all in a bit of denial. We're all sort of, we haven't quite grappled with it yet, but he's the president of the United States and he hasn't grappled with it really. It's a weird, and I don't think Kamala Harris really has either, like no Democrat really has.

It's just very, it's a weird feeling to have the president of the United States give a, and maybe, maybe the speech Wednesday night, the Oval Office address will wrestle with some of this and sort of the future of democracy. But I was, I was trying to, I'm like, what, what, what would a speech have been that, uh, really would have sort of addressed some of these, these larger issues. And I think it would have been him like talking about Gaza and what happened and making his case

on Gaza and, and talking about the fact that as proud as he is of what we did with Ukraine, the future there is very uncertain. And talking about how he's so proud of making the decision on Afghanistan, but yeah, the withdrawal and the way it went, he's always gonna think about that and he's always gonna remember that. You know, like there's just, there was no nuance

or subtlety or even just like a little daylight and like, yeah, we had some problems. There's a refusal to give critics an inch and entertain their criticism as valid. And just on Gaza, like it came up first obliquely in the context of him talking about how the administration rallied a coalition to prevent attacks by the Houthis in the Red Sea.

And it's like, Mr. President, why are the Houthis attacking ships in the Red Sea? It's because of the war in Gaza. And Then when we finally get to the Gaza section, 20 minutes into the speech, he says Palestinians suffer terribly in this war. They've been through hell. So many innocent people have been killed. And there's just no effort to sort of contend with the fact that they were killed mostly by American weapons that we gave the Netanyahu administration. And while you could defend a military intelligence

response to the war in the very early months, 15 months later, we're still just hoping for a ceasefire that has been eluded his grasp over and over and over again. So yeah, I think there's a divorce from kind of the horrors of what people see. Yeah, it's also, okay, you're describing your accomplishments, but we're seeing Donald Trump take office here,

we're seeing right-wing movements rising around the world. What have you learned about that? Like, I don't need you to take on your critics. I understand not wanting to engage with them, but like, what have you learned about being president? What have you learned about America? You could have done, and even if you wanted to not get into the Gaza of it all,

you could have done a speech about sort of the rising authoritarian movements around the world, what you learned over the last few years, bring in Trump, talk about, like you could have done a whole, there could have been a number of interesting speeches that weren't just like, here's all the amazing things we did, you're all wrong. We did the best we could, we did great stuff and that's it.

And maybe, you know, you don't go to the hardware store for milk and like, I guess I'm not gonna get anything from Joe Biden beyond America's best days are ahead. And maybe that's all we can really expect from him at this point, but it's like, this is a dark moment for this country. It will be a dark few years for this country pretending otherwise just makes you irrelevant.

Yeah, and just look, any sort of conversation about legacy or accomplishments is impossible to really have right now. The end of the story is unwritten. Donald Trump might unwind some things. He might not. I mean, a lot of this happened to Obama. The Iran deal went away.

The Cuba opening went away. But there's a lot of things that we're really proud of that Donald Trump fucked up and that could happen again. And so I understand taking a swing, but I agree with you, I just, I don't think it's convincing to talk about sort of AUKUS and, you know, alliances in the face of, Yeah, in the face of, you know, handing the keys over to

Donald Trump. It's a lot of talk about alliances, but alliances are a means to an end. And it's not just like we have alliances and alliances are great for that reason, right? And so like, what are the larger goals? And I was thinking about, as he prepares to deliver this final farewell address,

like how he could do that in a way that I would find inspiring or at least comforting, you know, I do think that like, he could frame it as like, here are the fights that I took on, here's where we made some progress, here's where we weren't able to, right. And then here's a path forward for everyone. Here's why I'm still hopeful and some humility, some recognition of where we are now. You know, like you could imagine, and look, it is a, like you said,

he's just, he's in a tough, tough situation right now because Donald Trump won and it was a fucking mess and so I get that. Yeah, I'm being very harsh. I also think that's like, this is not a moment where we, like no speech can resolve our frustrations, hoe anger, fear for what's about to come. And that's an impossible position.

There's also just, there's some things that we all know are kind of stump speech lines though. And the conclusion about how he's never been more optimistic about the future for the United States and the kind of whispering and the yelling about how there's nothing beyond our capacity as a country. Like he must believe that in his bones, which is why he says it all the time,

but boy, it could not have felt more hollow in this moment given what we're about to go through. I'm a pretty hopeful, optimistic person. I can tell you, I've definitely felt more optimistic. Many, many times. Yeah, and that's okay. At several points. 43 years on this earth, I could tell it,

most of the years I felt more optimistic than this one. It's just like, yeah, it's just sort of like, we're going backwards, man. That's, you're gonna have to, we have to, we're gonna face it whether you can or not. And part of the reason, this is not just to beat up on Joe Biden, we do that a lot now, but like, this is for other Democrats, by the way,

who are gonna run for president again next time. Like, we cannot just do the happy talk here. And that's not to like, we don't wanna bring everyone down, but in order to inspire people and to get everyone to be hopeful again, you have to acknowledge the reality. You have to grapple with what we're dealing with right now. Can I make the nerdiest analogy I've ever made in this show? We're gonna have to debate that, but sure.

You just set the bar pretty high. So in Star Trek Next Generation. Good start. Every once in a while, and every once in a while there's an episode where they go to the Battle Bridge. And basically the bridge is where they have their kind of highfalutin conversations.

There's a conference room off the bridge where you sit and you talk about the nature of, of life and, and what it means to be a space fairing people, but that every once in a while, the ship gets so fucked up and so many people are dead and something is so broken that they gotta go to the battle bridge. I just think we need a battle bridge.

Okay. Mindset. That's all I get now. Yeah. We've been defeated every which way. A bridge direction. People have blown. Yeah, exactly. A bridge direction. We're in. A bridge surrection? People have blown, yeah, exactly.

A bridge surrection. We're in the Battle Bridge, the shit has hit the fan, the saucer is separated, that's the energy. ["Spring Day"] Pods of America brought to you by Helix. I love my Helix mattress. I have a Dawn Lux, veryix. I love my Helix mattress. I have a Dawn Lux, very comfortable. I took the Helix Sleep Quiz.

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Before we jump to the interview, some quick news about our new MAGA oligarchs. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg followed up his announcement that the company would abandon fact checking, content moderation, and DEI initiatives by sitting down with, who else, Joe Rogan. It was a wide-ranging two-hour interview that included plenty of Trump ass-kissing and complaints that content moderation is just too difficult. Let's listen. I think you start one of these if you care about giving people a voice. You know, I wasn't too deep on our content policies for like the first 10 years of the company. It was just kind of well known across the company

that we were trying to give people the ability to share as much as possible. I kind of think in 2016 in the aftermath, I gave too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying, okay, there's no way that this guy could have gotten elected except for misinformation. People just felt like the fact checkers were too biased.

I don't know, it's something out of like, you know, 1984, one of these books where it's just like, it really is a slippery slope. And it just got to a point where it's just, okay, this is destroying so much trust, especially in the United States, to have this program. If the U.S. tech industry is going to continue being really strong,

I do think that the U.S. government has a role in basically defending it abroad. And that's one of the things that I'm optimistic about will happen in this administration. Tommy, you listened to the interview over the weekend. First, why, and second, what's the story to you? Long drive. Time to kill.

My takeaways were this was an interview for an audience of two, Joe Rogan and Donald Trump. And I think in that sense, it was a very effective one in terms of his spin. But it was just so fundamentally dishonest. I mean, Zuckerberg acts like he is a brand new CEO who just took charge at Facebook and is mopping up all the Slop created by his predecessor not the guy who founded the company, right?

He's like a newborn baby viewing everything with fresh eyes and his new stylist and it's just but this idea that he was not involved in Content moderation decisions for the first decade. I'm sorry. What were you doing then? That is such bullshit or the idea that Facebook was founded on free speech. No, you were ranking hot girls in your dorm, and then you wanted to get rich. Well, we can't stop with these fairy tales. But mostly, he's mad about government regulation, and he points to two inflection points as really being kind of like learning moments.

One is the 2016 election and Facebook's role in the way they got criticized for Russian disinformation on the platform, and then COVID. And on the 2016 election, it was instructive because he talks about, he says, upon reflection, I gave too much deference to people in the media who said there was misinformation because, you know, and I wish I hadn't done that.

The point being that he believed the media when they said that only through misinformation could Trump have been elected. But those of us who were paying attention at the time, remember, that's not how it all went down. His response two days after the election was to call it crazy to suggest that Russia could have influenced the election.

And then fast forward to October of 2017, Facebook then says that the Russian posts could have reached up to 126 million Americans. And just to be clear, I don't think Russia is why Hillary lost, but the strongest data point that they were a factor came from Facebook. So his whole narrative there is total bullshit. He's obviously very mad about whatever the Biden team did during COVID. He's very mad about Biden saying that people

were getting killed because of information on Facebook that was leading to vaccine hesitancy or whatever. But the whole thing is just a naked attempt to position the company for the Trump era. And like more broadly, he says zero self-awareness. Like he criticizes Apple for not innovating since the iPhone. This is a company that just steals features from Snapchat and then buys Instagram.

If you wanna count the goggles, whatever. Yeah, yeah, those are going to get the Oculus. And then at one point he's complaining about like trust in the media and influential people. And he says, quote, the whole cultural elite class needs to get repopulated with people we actually trust. We agree, Mark. That's why we want you to go away.

So it's a very frustrating listen, but he wins over Rogan like that. He also had some interesting things to say about masculinity, a subject on which he is, of course, the foremost authority. Let's listen. Just, I think a lot of the corporate world is, is like pretty culturally neutered. There's something, the, the, the kind of masculine energy I think is, is good. I think having a culture that like celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive Just like having a thing that I can just like do with my guy friends and like yeah

And it's just like we're just like beat each other a bit. It's good It is good. I agree. I just wish we could beat each other more Keep beating it. Just getary, you'll never believe it. We were just in the studio and it felt like a normal day. Maybe it was what was happening in our city. Just nice that we can beat each other. Whoa, what is that? It strikes me as like so obvious and transparent

that it's just, it's like sloppy. So yeah, no, first of all, love, love advice on masculinity. From Bart Zuckerberg. From someone dressed by a stylish to look like East Brunswick's coolest bar mitzvah DJ. Yeah, I mean, I was trying to figure out what this even really means,

like the corporate culture has been neutered. And I think it means yelling at employees is actually, I think it's a lot like less like, cause there's a sort of, I think, like kind of corporate idea, right? That like feminine structures are more flat and collaborative and male structures are more hierarchical and aggressive, right?

And I think they feel like, this is like all me too, post, this is like post me too, post BLM language backlash. Part of it. Mark Andreessen, Peter Thiel, sort of like techno authoritarianism, like the strong must survive and a few really smart people must run the strong must survive. And we, and we, a few really smart people must run the world and they have to be strong

and masculine and smart. Yeah. It's also like, it's such a silly thing, but like, you know, it's, it really reminds you of 1984 in the slippery slope. No slippery slope in 1984. You're right there in it. In 1984 in books, in other books. The clock strikes 13.

Books like that. Yeah. Books like that. Books like 1984. 1984, you're never, there's no before you're in it. You're just in it. You actually never get the slope. You're at the bottom of it. Who set the corporate culture at Facebook, Mark? Who decided that Facebook- Who's in charge of neutering?

That Facebook was going to do content moderation and monitor COVID and COVID vaccine misinformation. They said they were gonna do it. And then when the government reached out, the government was saying, hey, you have a policy on this. So we wanted to point out things that are violating your policy. They came up with the policy.

Yeah, there's a freedom that comes from being like Trump or wanting to be in Trump's good graces. And people talk about the ways in which it's sort of, like that you just have to kind of basically, you know, agree with Trump and then you're in his favor. But there's a subtle way in which I think what you also get to do is pretend that there are no hard choices in life. And Zuckerberg does that a bit in this interview

where he acknowledges that there are difficult decisions and some filters have more false positives and more false negatives. But what he's doing here when he talks about COVID, he talks about misinformation in 2016, he's not acknowledging the trade-off. There was a ton of misinformation on Facebook, whether it helped or hurt or mattered, I don't know. There was a ton of dangerous misinformation on COVID, right?

Maybe some things got swept up in that net that now in hindsight they think maybe went too far and maybe was not correct but didn't need to be taken down, whatever. But there was dangerous misinformation. That was a very real issue. And if you're gonna do less of that, as you said in your own video, that there will be worse and terrible things you now see on Facebook as a result.

There are trade-offs here. You built this platform. And Tommy, to your point about him not thinking about content moderation, I think it actually is like a kind of more damning thing to believe him. Because I do think whether it was Twitter, Twitter did not start as a platform

for people to share their political views. It wasn't about what you thought, it was about what was happening. It was supposed to be about sharing where you are. Facebook was about a post, I mean, obviously it was about ranking hot faces, but like it was not about politics. It was about posting about your life and your community.

They have all been continuously over and over again caught off guard by what happens when politics and celebrity intercede into their platforms. And then they built something so big, they couldn't control it. If you build a building and you're like, sorry, it's too big to make sure it's safe. Nobody gives you a credit for it,

but they built something too big to be made safe. Also, he's getting rid of content moderation at the time that they also announced that they're bringing back politics on Facebook. Right. They're turning the politics knob on again. And they're getting rid of all their DEI initiatives and stuff. I mean, what's so frustrating about this, if you've been paying attention to Mark Zuckerberg

on Facebook over the last 20 years, like every few years he does something like this, he apologizes for something and he has a new revelation. And basically they turn like happy to glad and some corporate governance policies and kind of like bend whichever way the political winds shift them. But we also know that, you know, there were, most of the moderation was done in the United States. There were other countries where there was no moderation,

like in Myanmar, where Facebook was used to foment a genocide and played a pretty key role in horrible ethnic violence. So the idea that there's some revelation that they should just do less. I mean, I wasted a lot of time today in my prep and I read his 6,000 word letter to the community of Mark Zuckerbergs from 2017,

where they talked about how accuracy of information is very important, our approach will focus less on banning misinformation and more on surfacing additional perspectives and information including the fact checkers, disputing items, accuracy, blah, blah. It's like. Guess he wasn't really involved in that. Yeah, we're just relearning the same things over and over.

But that was interesting too because I remember he was criticized from the left because he wasn't taking posts down. He was just gonna demonetize them or lower them in the rankings. I can't remember what it was. Yeah, they algorithmically made it so they were less shared but they also got yelled at

for taking down newsworthy videos related to Black Lives Matter. They took down a famous photo of a little girl who had been hit with napalm in Vietnam, remember? So they overcorrected in some ways. And so I have sympathy for just how hard this problem is, but I just have no sympathy for how transparent this is an attempt at getting just in Trump's good graces.

To our previous conversation about Biden acknowledging reality. This is, this is also happening right here, right? Like content moderation is difficult. Like you just said, like we talk about this on offline all the time. If he had come out and said, Hey, we've tried

all these different ways to moderate content. None of them please anyone. It's too hard. We're going to try this. Would it like acknowledge that you just couldn't do it, that the problem is too hard? Probably would have still gotten criticism from all sides to get that.

But like, this is all just bullshit. This is just like, uh, Donald Trump, don't throw me in jail, but also like, maybe I've been red-pilled. Uh, and, uh, you know, Kevin Roos in the New York times, his piece on this suggested that maybe like Zuckerberg's views have changed. Maybe he has been radicalized since 2020,

which, you know, good for him. I think there's some evidence in Kevin's piece from sources he talked to that maybe Mark Zuckerberg is becoming a Republican, but there's also just a wave of tech giants. Like The Daily had a great piece on Mark Andreessen today in Silicon Valley generally and how they shifted away from Democrats to Republicans. And the gist of it is like you're

saying before, love it, to be a part of the MAGA movement, you have to jump through one hoop, which is to say you support Donald Trump in everything he does and says. The Democratic party, we set up an infinite number of hoops that you also have to jump through. And if you screw one up, we'll slap the shit out of you. And all these guys got the shit slapped out of them multiple times publicly for things they said, things they did. Uh, there's this piece in the Andreessen, uh, story about when Zuckerberg and his wife announced that they were giving away 99% of their money to charity and they

were criticized for doing it through, I think it was like a for-profit entity or something, I don't even remember all the details but they all feel like I remember thinking that was bullshit that criticism yeah right within you know they all feel like you know we want to be called geniuses we did the right thing we played by your rules we used your language and we did your training initiatives and you know you still hate us and so okay now we're gonna try something new there's a part in the interview where he said that, that they felt in some way kind of attacked

by the Biden administration. And he thought that like, hey, like, you know, we're America, you're supposed to be on our team. We're in a world here and we're supposed to be fighting other countries and other countries tech platforms and that at least Donald Trump wants America to win, right? Which it feel like a kind of something, it reminded me of what I heard over the years from various,

like kind of high up tech people, which is that like, yeah, our companies are making mistakes, but you don't want to regulate them. You don't want to break them up because we're actually in a fight with China. We're actually in a fight with these other countries. And I think that that is sincerely, sincerely. Yeah. And he doesn't like content moderation policies from other countries. Yeah, like in some cases, obviously there's a competition with China.

I don't like the Chinese Communist Party. I do think they lean on that as a cudgel. Like Mark Andreessen isn't as worried about, you know, the AI race with China as he is about making a lot of money off of Bitcoin, right? Yeah. And I think with Zuckerberg, I do think there is a lesson

in this story, in this broader flight of tech people to the Republican Party that Democrats should learn and about maybe about how we talk to people we disagree with. So I was talking to another tech person back in the day, and I remember this person telling me that he had been protested during COVID. And I said, why did they protest you?

He's a pretty big low profile tech guy. And he's like, oh, well, billionaires shouldn't exist or something. And I think that that moment where a bunch of people came to this person's house who founded a pretty prominent tech company that I knew kind of tangentially radicalized him. And this guy ended up giving tens and tens of millions of dollars to the Republican Party.

And I think there's probably a pretty direct line between his perception of how he was treated by Democrats and where he ended up. Yeah, again, there's a difference between what might be the morally right or feel like the right thing to do and what is the most effective thing to do for the larger cause. All right, before we jump to the interview, some housekeeping, Crooked's friends at Vote Save America Action and Crooked Ideas

have set up a disaster relief fund to benefit those impacted by the horrific wildfires here in LA. It's super easy for you to make one donation that's split among incredible charities doing really important work for our neighbors and our first responders. If you donate to the fund,

it gets split between the Latino Community Foundation, offers financial assistance, housing assistance, emergency translation for people in heavily Latino communities here in Los Angeles affected by the fires. There's the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, there's the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation, there's the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, there's the California Community Foundation Wildfire Relief Fund. Those are the five organizations we have now. Usually in these relief funds, sometimes we change out the organizations we're working with.

Or add. Or add, right? We talk to the local partners on the ground. Thanks to all of you, we have raised nearly $100,000 for these groups so far, nearly $100,000. We've done relief funds just like this before. Most recently for Hurricane Helene Relief. We also did it during the pandemic. We've done relief funds just like this before, most recently for Hurricane Helene relief. We also did it during the pandemic.

We've done it many times. For some reason, a bunch of right-wing media people and Republican operatives spent the weekend accusing us and VoteSave America of running a scam and stealing money from fire victims in our own city and soliciting people's contact info so we can do political fundraising, all of which has made me angrier and more upset

than anything in a really long time, and that's saying a lot. Their claim is that because the Relief Fund is run through ActBlue, which is also a democratic fundraising platform, that ActBlue takes 4% of the donations for themselves and then uses your contact info to spam you for candidate fundraising, this is complete bullshit.

And anyone who bothered to do even the most cursory Googling would have found that out. The Relief Fund is run through ActBlue Charities, which is a tax-deductible charitable organization that has a 97% rating on Charity Navigator, by the way. The 4% fee goes to the banks and credit card companies for processing your online donation, a type of fee that every charitable organization has to pay banks and credit card companies if processing your online donation, a type of fee that every charitable organization has to pay banks and credit card companies if they accept online donations. The only way to avoid that fee is by dropping off cash

at the organization yourself or writing a personal check. And your contact info, which you obviously have to provide if you're making a donation, is never used by us to like solicit donations for candidates. We don't add you to the vote, save America list. You opt into vote, save America or you sign up for vote, save America, that's it. Could you donate directly to the organizations I just read

by going right to their websites? Absolutely, you're free to if you want. They would by the way, still be paying the processing fee. Yeah, somebody's gotta pay the credit card fee. This was like over the weekend. It was just a, we were just facing this tiny insignificant example of like how anything that is happening in the world gets fed into this like meat grinder

of information because it's just like, everyone asks us, where should we donate? How should we help? And so the team vets organizations puts them in an easy place and you can donate the money and the money gets sent to those groups. And we don't take a cut, we don't take any money from it. And we take, we talk to the groups,

the reason the groups like it is because we have a big platform and big reach and a lot of times for local orgs, not for like the Red Cross or something like that, but for local organizations, whether it's in North Carolina, for Helene or here, they appreciate that we have this big reach in this big community, right?

Millions of people listen to this podcast every week. And so they're like, oh, this is great. Yeah, this helps us. And then it's like, no, you're stealing the money. No, we're not. We're not taking a cent from donations. But then it's like, you're actually doing it to get the email addresses. Like, hey, guys, we ask people for their email addresses when we want people's email addresses. You think we like we watched our city catch fire. We're like, this is a great opportunity to set up a charitable fund so that we can harvest email addresses for future political campaigns.

I said that was what I thought as I was loading my two small children into the car and escaping Los Angeles because I was worried that we might burn. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. What scam could we set up? But it's just, we use ActBlue because our audience is used to using ActBlue and like reducing friction in these things and making it easy for people to donate

is a great way to get them to actually donate. If you're sending people to a bunch of different websites, they're just gonna tap out and not end up completing it. And I just want to say, the reason we're even bringing this up, it's not a bunch of like random mega trolls online. Like this, the number of accounts, right? Like National Review, the Free Beacon, the Washington Exam, all the right-wing rags were

all over this. Republican operatives who should know better because they've been in politics were attacking, it was insane. It made me actually think is like a longer conversation, but just Twitter has really become like something that it was not before with the right-wing accounts there. And when they jump onto something, it like goes so far and so fast

that it's like, it suddenly goes beyond your control. Here's the good news on all this, is that most of the money, I just said almost $100,000 was raised, most of the money came in after Saturday, which is when this whole thing got kicked up online. Yeah, that was what I was hoping. That was how I reassured myself.

I was unfolding, I was like, oh, this is generating attention for the fund. And maybe people in our audience or outside of our audience that would understand that this is fucking bullshit, will see this. It's like, oh, these are great organizations that are helping on the ground. They're great organizations.

And so please donate, votesaveamerica.com slash relief. Or if you're scared off by that, you can go to the individual organizations. Just write down the names and go to their website. Just donate because people need the help here. That's all. Don't care how you donate, just if you can do. But you should feel very happy to do it

through votesaveamerica.com slash relief. Yeah, all right, when we come back, Chair of the Minnesota DFL, Ken Martin. Potsave America is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. It's a big new year, a lot has changed, a lot is the same, but it's also changed. Pod Save America is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. It's a big new year. A lot has changed. A lot is the same, but it's also changed. But we went back in time.

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That's ziprecruiter.com slash crooked. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash crooked, C-R-O-O-K-E-D. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Ken Martin, welcome to Pod Save America. Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here. So people who listen to this show know that we're all longtime friends and fans of one of your opponents, Ben Wickler,

but we really want to get to know you and make sure our listeners get to know you and know why you want this extremely challenging and thankless job as DNC chair, where everyone seems to blame you when things go wrong and credit someone else when things go right. So what made you decide, that's the job for me. I want that job.

Well, let me just start by saying thanks for having me. And isn't it a little crazy that this race is coming down to two middle-aged white guys from the Midwest with three-letter first names, Ken and Ben. Who would have thunk it? Who would have thunk it? Yeah. Who would have thunk it? No, it's great. And Ben's a wonderful friend. He's doing great things in Wisconsin for sure. Look, for me, I've always said being a party chair is the political equivalency of being a fire hydrant, right? You get pissed on by everyone,

like you said. You get none of the credit when you win, all the blame when you lose. And of course, if you're doing your job the right way, you're saying no more than you're saying yes. So by the time it's over, you have far fewer friends. So I'm eyes wide open about this. I've been the chair of the Minnesota DFL the last 14 years, came in to this job right after the disastrous midterm elections in 2010, where we suffered throughout the country, as you remember, John, one of the worst shellac ins we faced as a party in years.

And that was true in Minnesota. We lost a 40-year Senate majority. We lost the state house. We lost the longest held congressional seat in Congress in the Eighth District with Jim Overstarr and many races up and down the ballot. I happened to help run a campaign for governor that year where we were successful in getting Mark Dayton elected by just 8,750 votes. And so to your point, I mean we had to at that point, the morale was low, the finger pointing was high, the name calling, the

blaming, people, the morale was so low and people were fleeing the party, right? All of our stakeholders, donors, progressive partners and allies, candidates, no one wanted anything to do with the party. And what it took is, when I came in as party chair, it took someone to be able to bring all those groups back to the table and realize if we're going to build power again, we had to figure out a plan to win. And we did that.

And we got back in power within two years, and we haven't lost since. And we're in a similar moment right now, right? Where there's low morale, a lot of finger pointing, a lot of people trying to place blame. I'm, by the way, not here to win the argument. I want us to win elections again, and that's what we've done in Minnesota. And so there's a lot of reasons why I'm running. I'm very clear-eyed about what this job isn't. It's not a pathway to glory for people thinking that this is a pathway to relevancy. It really isn't that either.

The next DNC chair has to focus relentlessly on building the infrastructure throughout this country to put us on a path to win again. And so that's why I'm running. So there's a story you can tell about 2024 that Trump's win was narrow. Kamala Harris came close in the battleground states, Democrats in the Senate and House and down ballot did better than you might think given how

most people say they feel about the economy and the direction of the country. And then there's a story about how Democrats lost ground with nearly every demographic group in nearly every state, especially Latino voters and voters who didn't go to college, and because of that lost for the second time to a convicted felon who tried to steal the last election. Which of those stories sounds more right to you? I think both are accurate, right? They're both accurate. It was a close election, right? And we think about the presidential race, a hundred and fourteen thousand vote swing of three battleground states, and we'd be talking about a Kamala Harris

presidency right now. Same with the House races, right? Seven thousand votes between three battleground districts. We'd be talking about Speaker Jeffries. So it was a close election. But there's no doubt that what you said, the second part of that is absolutely accurate. We lost ground with big parts of our coalition. And there's a whole host of reasons for that. Many of them we don't know at this point.

Of course we know we lost ground with Latino voters. We lost ground with younger voters. We lost ground with working class households, with women. We lost ground with every demographic group with just a couple, and I'll get to that in a moment. But the reality is that we have to figure out the how and why we lost ground. We have to look at ad spend.

We have to look at messaging. We have to look at our organizing tactics, right? Before we're too prescriptive with the solutions, we have to really dig into why those groups left us. And I would say one of the big lessons from this last election was the spring of 2024, there was research that came out that showed for the first time in American history, the perceptions of the two political parties have actually changed. The majority of Americans now feel that the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor,

and the Democratic Party is a party of the wealthy and the elites. And the only two groups, by the way, just to prove the point that we actually overperformed with, were wealthy households and college-educated voters. That is a damning indictment, John, on who we are. That's not who we are as a party. We have always been the party that's fought for the working class and the poor. We've always been the party that's fought for the working class and the poor. We've always been the party that's fought for the oppressed and marginalized.

And so we have a lot of work to do, right? And it's not gonna change overnight. And the other thing we need to acknowledge, and you know this, you've been involved for a long time, this wasn't a singular occurrence, all those groups leaving us. This has been happening underneath our nose for some time. And we have to stem the tide and reverse the tide.

We need to get those groups to come back to us. Well, obviously, we need to wait for more data to sort of dive into the national picture. From your perspective as someone who's been on the ground in Minnesota for the last decade, obviously these trends have happened in every state in the country. Minnesota is no exception.

You guys have, I think, a little better. You have probably higher percentage of college-educated voters than some Midwestern states, so you would imagine Minnesota does a little better. But you've probably seen the attrition with voters without a college degree in your state. What do you think has caused it, just from your perspective in Minnesota? Well, I'll use some personal examples of that. My brother, who's a union carpenter, he voted for Obama in eight and 12,

and Trump in 16, 20, and 24, right? My father-in-law is a beef cattle farmer in southern Minnesota. Same thing, voted for Obama and then voted for Trump. So we know that there are people who are moving away from our party, and I think part of the challenge again- Did you ask them why? Why? What was the change?

Well, you know, each of them had different reasons, right? And I'm happy to get into them but I think the larger point you're making is is that we have continued to lose ground with with non-college-educated voters and part of that is I believe we've allowed our party to Essentially devolve into smaller and smaller messages, right? To appeal to different parts of our really big tent coalition. And as a result, we've lost the narrative, right?

We've lost the thing that connects all of the disparate parts of our coalition. And what is that? Well, I'll tell you, Paul Wellstone, my first boss in politics, understood this. He understood that what connected a corn farmer in southern Minnesota with a steel worker on the iron range and a new refugee in the Twin Cities was economics, right? Kitchen table issues, bread and butter issues that at the end of the day people are worried

about. And let me just give you an example of this. For me, you know, when we talk about working people and labor as an example, we just talked about this the other night, too many people feel like we only show up when we're asking them for their vote. And then we never deliver on the promises we make to actually make a difference in their lives.

I think we, last year, we were defending the Biden economy, of course, and it was a great economy, one of the best economies we've seen in years, right? From a GDP perspective, a job growth perspective, from unemployment and real wage growth. But the reality is, as we were trying to defend Joe Biden and talk about all these things, we were ignoring the pain that average, everyday working people in this country were facing, right? By working class, by the way, I'm not, it's not code for white people. For me, we know that the working class in this country is black, brown, and white people who are working their

asses off, working harder than they ever have, can barely afford their lives, right? And when gas prices are high and grocery prices are high and we're talking to them about the GDP, we've already lost them because we're not acknowledging the economic pain that they're facing. So for me, part of this is getting back to the narrative that connects all parts of our Big Ten coalition, right? And that is a working-class agenda that unites everyone, whether you're a corn farmer or you're a new refugee in the Twin Cities. whether you're a corn farmer or you're a new refugee in the Twin Cities. I know you've talked a lot about how the Democratic Party has a brand problem. You're just explaining some of what it is. How do you go about fixing a party's brand problem?

You know, I've heard you say you reject the idea that Democrats need a wholesale change in our message. It feels like the different levers you have to pull in changing a party's brand are message candidates, sort of messaging infrastructure. What do you think, how do you begin to fix a branding problem? Well, first, you need to figure out what that brand is. And I think that should be a working class, focusing on a working class agenda, right? But we need to spend a lot of time and energy of thinking about specifically what that looks like

as it relates to the policy prescription. But let me tell you why I don't think it's an abandonment of our message or our policy agenda, right? Think about Missouri. They passed a minimum wage increase, paid family leave, and abortion protections all by wide margins, yet those same voters went down the ballot and voted for Trump and the Republicans. It seems to me that we see these

issues, they're very popular throughout the country, passing in ballot initiative and referenda by wide margins. They're very popular, right? Yet those same voters aren't necessarily connecting the dots between the issues that they support that will actually make a difference in their lives and our Democratic candidates. So that's not a message problem, it's a messaging problem. We're clearly not connecting the dots for voters. And so let me back up to one of the other lessons we've learned in this election is that the Republicans have done a much better job than Democrats on competing in this new

information environment, right? And this is the other challenge we have. We allowed the Republican Party to define us ever before we ever started to define ourselves. Think about this. They started right after the 20 election, John, as you know, the Republican Party started beating the hell out of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in all of these non-traditional information spaces, right? And you've heard a lot of folks talk about it, gaming platforms, podcasts, streaming services, right? Biden and the Democratic Party in all of these non-traditional information spaces. Right. And you've heard a lot of folks talk about it, gaming platforms, podcasts, streaming services, right. Even online dating apps, for God's sake, anywhere there's an online community.

The Republicans were paying micro influencers to essentially spew out their misinformation and disinformation. And we didn't start in any real way our communications infrastructure until the election year. We have to realize we need a permanent campaign. Not only a permanent organizing campaign that's talking to voters year-round, but also a permanent communications infrastructure that is not waiting until we get to an election cycle to start communicating with voters.

We got beat to the punch by the Republicans who realized that we live in a new information environment where it's 24-7-365. And that's where we got our Budskit. So for us, part of this is, of course, the brand. The other part is how we're messaging. The other part of it is making sure we realize 40% of Americans say they avoid the news at all costs, right? Yet they're getting barraged by information, and you know this better than probably anyone, John. They're getting barraged by information all the time on their phones. So we have to be more sophisticated in how we message and when we stand up all of our

operations. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem as well, because I do think the Harris campaign told us this, that they had a lot of influencers and influential people who were privately for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, but didn't wanna come out publicly or have them on their platforms or host them on their podcasts. And the reason that they don't is it's a brand issue, right? And I wonder how you get more,

you basically gotta get the you basically got to get the party's brand to be more popular more accessible and cool really for a broader array of people in order to get on these platforms and I wonder how you think about that and also like part of this is you know the debate about Joe Rogan could go forever and it can be very annoying but do you think it was a mistake for Democrats to when Bernie Sanders went on Joe Rogan could go forever and it can be very annoying. But do you think it was a mistake for Democrats to, uh, when Bernie Sanders went on Joe Rogan to criticize him for going on Joe Rogan and to, to not send people on Fox news and to criticize people for going on Fox news?

Like, do you, do you, would you like to see, do you think that was a mistake? Uh, what I would say is I agree with you that we should be in all those spaces, right? And we shouldn't be afraid to go on Joe Rogan's show or on Fox. We should be confident enough in both our values and of course our message that we go wherever we need to. You know, people ask me, I'm a hunter. They ask me where I'm going to go hunt, right? And they think I'm going to give them my favorite hunting spot or, you know, say I'm going to the woods. No, I go where the deer are, right? And you know this, we need to go where voters are. And you know, this idea that, you know, we have

consultants in DC still spending or steering so much of our ad spend to broadcast TV. I mean, shoot, I'm 51 years old, John, right? I'm an old man. I still read a hard copy of a newspaper. But the one thing I don't do is watch broadcast TV. I don't know anyone my age that watches broadcast TV, yet we still keep spending so much money on outdated tactics, right? Of course I know why, because people make all their money there, but that's wrong. If we want to win again, we need to realize we need to go where voters are getting their

information. And so that's half the battle, right? And I think that also means we can't be afraid to go to spaces. We're not going, by the way, you're not going on Fox News to appeal to Republican voters, right? You're going on Fox News to appeal to independent voters, right? You're going on Joe Rogan to appeal to nonpartisans and independents, not to just, you know, talk to Republicans that happen to be on there. So I understand people when they try to criticize someone for saying, well why would you go on Fox News? You're just

going there to try to win over Republican voters? No, that's not the point. There's a lot of people who listen to Fox News that aren't Republicans that we should, you know, give them the countervailing opinion. I think part of the challenge with social media right now is given your algorithm you're only fed the information that you want to see. And so, so many Americans are in this information bubble that they're only getting fed the information they want. And we have to try to find ways to break through that.

And that means appearing on environments and in platforms that might not make sense to the Democratic party, but make sense to cut through the noise and give people a sense of what the other side actually believes. You're not just a state party chair yourself. You're the president of the Association of State Democratic Committees. What can state party chairs teach national Democrats about winning elections that they're currently missing?

Well, here's what I would say. State party chairs don't have the luxury to just focus on one race, right? We can't just focus on the governor's race or the top of the ticket. We have to focus on the state legislature as well, as well as other down ballot races for city council, school boards, county boards, et cetera. And so one of my critiques of the Democratic Party,

especially the DNC, is that they focus way too much on federal races. Of course, we've got a win back Congress, the, and the presidency. It's not an either-or, but we can't be a national party that just focuses on seven battleground states right and and some federal races. We've got to be more prescriptive and holistic about how to build power around this nation. That's one thing again that the conservative movement in this country realizes. They're not just focused on federal races. They're also focused on school boards, right?

And we've seen the dangerous result of our indifference of actually investing in trying to compete in every race in this country as a national party. When the conservative movement has taken over school boards and they're banning books and whitewashing history and attacking our children, we cannot afford as a national party to ignore these public policy arenas anymore. So one thing state party chairs can teach the national party is that you have to compete everywhere. The second piece is you have to make sure that you're actually building coalitions and bringing partners into that conversation.

Part of that, to me, state parties don't have the luxury to do this work alone because they're some of the most under-resourced entities in politics. We don't get enough funding from either the national party or from others. We are usually the last people getting funding. So that means we actually have to be smart in how we spend our money and then build coalitions with allies and organizations on the ground who are

working in electoral spaces to elect people who share our values. And so the third thing I would say that state parties do that the National Party doesn't do, which drives me crazy, is state parties don't just focus on one election cycle. We have to build infrastructure that is beyond just the upcoming election cycle. We have to look to 26, 28, 30 and beyond, right? And, you know, this is one of the things that I have in my plan. I want to write a 10-year plan for the DNC.

People think I'm crazy to say that, but the reality is, is we have to not be biopically focused on just this election cycle, because what that means is then we're recreating the infrastructure every two or four years as a national party. Look, we are part of a movement, of course, of people who are fighting for social justice and economic justice, but political parties have one very clear role, right? It is our only role and it is to win elections. But to do that you have to build long-lasting and durable infrastructure that sees beyond just one election cycle. And if you'll allow me

to use a hockey analogy because I'm from Minnesota, and Wayne Gretzky, the great one right there in LA, said once that you have to skate to where the puck will be, not where the puck is, right? Yet our party just keeps skating to where the puck is. Who's looking at the fact that in 2030 our map is going to completely change underneath of us as all the power shifts to the south and the southwest? And who's preparing for that moment right now as we go into 25 and 26? It should be the National Party that has a longer-term lens for this work and a longer-term arc on how we do that. So I guess those are the three things that state parties are doing that the national party's not doing.

Why do you think Minnesota got bluer since you became state party chair and how much of that do you take credit for? I take no credit for it. Let me say this, we've had wonderful candidates on the ballot. I mean I will never claim credit for their victory. But what I do claim some amount of credit for is building infrastructure that they've relied on, right? We've built probably the strongest state party in the nation. I'm sure there's others that would disagree, but both from fundraising and building the infrastructure on the ground. Our candidates, for instance, all of them from Governor Walz to Senator

Klobuchar to local candidates, they rely on our party's infrastructure. Our turnout machine is second to none, right? We, in terms of IDing and persuading, mobilizing voters, we always have the top voter turnout in the nation. If not, we're number two or number three. Most importantly is that our candidates don't have to build that infrastructure themselves. They can rely on the state party to actually run the most importantly is that our candidates don't have to build that infrastructure themselves. They can rely on the state party to actually run the field program so they don't have to do that. And I think that's why we've been winning, right? I mean there's a lot of reasons. I mean but the other part of that winning is

the fact that our party and our elected officials are delivering on the promises they made to voters, right? And you know there's no greater example of that than what Tim Walz and our legislative leaders did with the are delivering on the promises they made to voters, right? And there's no greater example of that than what Tim Walz and our legislative leaders did with the trifecta the last two years, to actually focus on an agenda that will help work in people that are struggling in this state, and then using the power they had when they had it

to make a difference for those folks. And I think part of the disillusionment, John, with American politics right now, as I mentioned earlier, is that folks hear people say one thing and then do another. You know, not to keep quoting Paul, but Paul used to say, you should never separate the life you lead from the words you speak. And people see too many politicians in both parties who stand up, right, say one thing just to get your vote and then get into office and forget about them. That's why it was remarkable, I think, you know, see what we've done in Minnesota and in states like Michigan, two very purple states in the Midwest who both had slim majorities

and they led in a very aggressive way to deliver on those promises. What specifically would you do differently than Jamie Harrison over the last four years? How do you want to change the way that the DNC operates? Well first is to focus on year-round organizing a permanent campaign We you know part of the challenge and why we keep losing ground with folks as I mentioned earlier is we're only showing up three months before an election and asking for a vote. So the first is a year-round organizing Standing up organizing all the time. So we never is a year-round organizing, standing up organizing all the time so we never stopped having conversations with voters at their door.

You know the first conversation we have with the voter should not be asking them to vote for us but rather what are your hopes and dreams, your aspirations for your community, right? And then you know and over time build trust and earn their trust so we can actually ask them for their vote. Second thing I would do is really contest every race up and down the ballot, right? We can't be a party just focused on federal races, right? And I get why Jamie had to do it.

And they did a lot of great work over the four years he was there. And the infrastructure is much stronger than it was after the 16 election as an example. But I would say this, for me, we need a permanent campaign, we need to start our organizing and our communications infrastructure much earlier than we ever have, and we have to make sure that we are competing up and down the ballot in partnership with all of our 57 state parties all throughout the country. So you know the other thing I would do

differently, and I just rolled this out this week is build a national coordinated campaign table, right? We haven't had a national coordinated campaign at the DNC since the mid 90s and that's a shame because we're not tapping into what does that look like? Could you well for me it looks like yeah coordinated campaign is really bringing just like we do in Minnesota bringing our electoral partners and elected officials together at a table that would include allies and partners like labor and reproductive rights groups and environmental groups.

And we have all of these great organizations that are working in electoral spaces, spending time, energy, and money, right? Fighting for economic and social justice, fighting for our party and our candidates who are never engaged in that conversation, right? They're siloed off, and they should be brought into the conversation,

and we should build one plan together where we coordinate our resources and really focus like a laser on how we build power together, right? Unfortunately, right now we have all these disparate groups out there doing their own things. It results in a lot of duplication of effort. And frankly, it does not result in us being strategically aligned in a way that helps us all accomplish the same goals, which is to elect people who share our values to office so we can actually move our agenda forward.

What is the permanent campaign and the year-round organizing? Can you give an example of like what it looks like structurally in practice and also like where the money comes from? Because I feel like I've heard a lot of DNC chairs come into the job saying like we need a 50-state campaign, we need to focus not just on national races and federal races, we need a 50 state campaign. We need to focus not just on national races and federal races. We need to do down ballot. And then when the time comes, understandably, the money ends up going to the biggest, most competitive races in the most important states. And that's just the way it is.

So how do you, is that, do we need to more money? Is it just where you put the money? And then how does that year round organizing actually look in practice? Yeah. I mean, I think this is a very good question, right? And the reality is that you have to be intentional about this. And you have to make sure that your donors know that we are, for us to actually turn the page here and build power, we have to have a more holistic approach on it.

You can't just focus on seven battleground states, right? What will help us win the presidency is actually winning local races and winning state legislatures and winning gubernatorial races, right? So the reality is it's all connected. And the second piece is, yeah, we do have to grow the pie, right? And part of building a coordinated campaign where we're building a permanent campaign is realizing that we're stronger together and we should actually have shared resources where we're focused collectively on a plan to achieve the same goals. And so when you're so disjointed and you're spending

money on the left when the left hand and the right hand aren't talking and coordinating you're just duplicating effort and wasting resource. So for me it's just being more holistic about it and is it going to be a challenge? For sure. Because it won't be the way the DC consultants and others want it to be. We're going to flip the script. We're going to break up this cabal in DC, and we're going to do things differently, right?

And the model is states like Minnesota, states like Wisconsin, states like Michigan, right? States that are building here in the Midwest and winning, right, in very purple states by actually bringing people together and focusing more holistically. Look, if you want to keep losing, keep doing things the way they are, right? Now, as it relates to raising money, you know, there's no state that's raised as much money as I have, you know, in addition to raising 220 million dollars for my state party. I served on the Harris-Walls Finance Committee,

raised over $6 million for the presidential campaign, did the same thing in 2016. Raising money is not going to be a challenge for me. The most important thing is how we spend it. And if we're not spending it on winning, then we shouldn't be spending it. So here's to all those consultants in D.C. I hope they're listening to me because if you bring me a plan that doesn't help us win elections, you're going to have to go pound sand because you're not going to get a contract from the DNC. And that's how we built it here. And it's important not just to help us win, but it's important for those donors who are giving us money to have a sense on how the DNC chair is going to approach this.

We're not going to invest in things that don't help us win elections. No more contracts to just line consultants' pockets. As I've said, I'm here to win the U.S. House back, not help a consultant build a new house. How do you feel about the ban on corporate PACs and lobbyist donations to the DNC? Well, look, I mean, this is a little bit of a challenging one because I do want to get dark money This is a little bit of a challenging one because I do want to get dark money out of politics. I've long supported Ending Citizens United and making sure that we find a way to actually overhaul the campaign finance system so these campaigns and elections aren't as expensive. I mean, we've spent two and a half billion dollars on a presidential campaign. Over 10 billion dollars, by the way, John, just in 2024 spent on the

Democratic side alone. It's obscene, right? And that's got it. We've got to reverse course somehow. And part of that, of course, is getting money out of politics generally. But when we say corporations, right, it's a very large term. And this is where I start to get the devil's in the details because technically by the IRS, our labor partners and some of our reproductive rights groups and others are corporations, right? So what are we actually using to define corporations? And what I would say is bad corporate actors who don't share our values,

the DNC should not be taking their money. I've been very clear on that. And we don't take that type, the DNC should not be taking their money. I've been very clear on that. We don't take that type of money here in Minnesota, and we won't. And I think at the DNC, the DNC has to live its values. Where there are bad corporate actors who, again, who don't share the Democratic Party's values, the Democratic Party should not only not take their money, they should be calling out people who do. So who are some elected Democrats, local, state, national, who impress you right now? Who should we be

keeping an eye on? You know I think there's a lot, you know Maxwell Frost down in Florida, I think Peggy Flanagan here in Minnesota, you know our lieutenant governor. There's a great guy who was just elected as the mayor of Tulsa, Monroe Nichols, who's a former state who was just elected as the mayor of Tulsa, Monroe Nichols, who's a former state representative, right? First African-American mayor. I think Sarah McBride in Delaware, who's a great friend. And, you know, there's a lot of wonderful leaders

that I think there's an amazing bench we have in the Democratic Party, right? We've got these great governors like Andy Beshear and Wes Moore and Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer, right? We've got these great governors like Andy Beshear and Wes Moore and Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer, right? We've got, and your governor, of course, Gavin Newsom, we've got an amazing bench. But, you know, as I look at this, we've got wonderful Democratic electeds throughout this country that are serving in office right now that don't get the attention they deserve because, again, we're focused on all the big names, you know, the big governors, and of course, the members of Congress. But there

are some amazing leaders serving in local offices that we should be paying attention to. Last question, there's been sort of two models for this job. There's a like someone who's going to focus on organizing and being behind the scenes and fix a lot of the structural issues, which you have talked a lot about. There's also the need for a party spokesman, particularly in this moment where we don't necessarily have a leader of the party right now as president Biden gets ready to exit. Would, do you think that if you get this job, you'll be doing TV and podcasts and everything and be out there all the time being a messenger? I do them all the time.

And it's part of your role as a state party chair, right? And certainly in my role at the ASDC as a vice chair of the DNC, I've done lots of national media. That's, but it's not an either or, right? And frankly, I would say we've got this great bench of elected officials, many of them I just talked about, that we should be showcasing and using more, frankly. And if folks think that the Democratic,

the next chair of the Democratic Party is a savior, that there's someone riding in to save the party, that's the wrong mentality, right? I have a plaque in my office that says, "'None of us are as smart as all of us.'" Mark Dayton gave that to me, I believe it. At the end of the day, no one has all the answers, right? But the reality is, is we have this amazingly rich party of people with great professional

experiences and lived experiences that we should be tapping into. And that includes spokespeople, right? I believe we've got mayors. Who better to talk about public safety than mayors throughout the country, right? Who better to talk about, you know, natural disasters like what we're seeing in LA right now than county commissioners and leaders who have to deal with that? Who better to talk about transportation funding and education funding than governors? And so I think we have many spokespeople, and the DNC is not the only person who should be the spokesperson for our party. So I but I do think what we need is someone that's

going to be really focused on organizing. Right now what this moment needs is someone who can both get the message out but frankly focusing on building the foundation we need and the infrastructure we need to win because that's one of the lessons from this last election is clearly our comms infrastructure and our organizing infrastructure is not Being utilized the way it should and it's not being built in a way where it's permanent and it's part of actually moving and persuading voters Ken Martin, thank you so much for joining pod save America and and good luck to you in the race. Thank you so much I really appreciate it John Good luck to you in the race. Thank you so much.

I really appreciate it, John. That's our show for today. Thanks to Ken Martin for stopping by. Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday. Stay safe, everyone out there in Los Angeles. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad free or get access to our subscriber discord and exclusive podcasts, consider joining our friends of the Pod community at Crooked.com slash friends, or subscribe on Apple podcasts directly from the Pod Save America feed.

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