Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds and everyone was kung fu fighting in Congress. Today we have such a great show for you. White House Senior Advisor Mitch Landrew details how the Biden administration is rebuilding America's infrastructure. Then we'll talk to Boltz magazine editor Daniel Nakanian about all of the off off year elections that you might have missed. Spoiler Democrats swept the
judiciary in Pennsylvania. But first we have showtimes the Circus. John Heileman, Welcome back to Fast Politics.
John Fast, Faster, Fastest. However the politics comes, whatever velocity it comes at us here. I'm ready to go. I've had a guy put one decent night's sleep since nineteen eighty seven. I'm ready for what this podcast holds in store.
Let's go right, Well, as long as you slept in the in the eighties.
I've got my seatbelt on and my leather chaps on below the.
All right, give me the TLDR. What is happening with John, with politics, with the world.
What are you watching? What do you think you what's on your mind.
I love an interviewer who begins with I have no
real question here. The floor is yours. Back in the day when I used to do a hardball with Chris Matthews, my favorite question of Chris's was always like he would start talking about a topic like abortion in politics or the midterms, whatever it was, and he would hold forth for you know, two minutes, four minutes, you know, like a full skill Joe Scarborough rant for some period of time, and then he would say, John Heilman, your thoughts, that's what I want, matt And I was always like, I
don't know you said everything, Chris. I don't know I had any thoughts. At this point, I feel like I've been beaten with sticks. I'm in New York City. We just finished the final six episode run eighth season of Showtimes The Circus, which is now part of the history book. At least, the incarnation of this show that has lived on Showtime for eight years and one hundred and thirty episodes, is now finished. What happens next is Anyone's Guests. We'll see about that. The show may have some new life
on some other platform as we go forward. We're trying to figure that out. As we speak. That's one of the things that's on my mind right now that I'm working on. I am amazed by you guys talked about
this on TV this morning a little bit. But it's kind of an awesome world where you live in, where it's like the Republican former president United States Republican front runner can directly crib from people say echo, it's not an echo, it's a crib from mind compf you know, you're like writing down the furor's language and you're speaking it. And then when someone says, hey, I think I've heard
that vermin thing before. That's Adolf Hitler, right, And someone on the former president's staff says, anyone who says the Donald Trump sound like the furor will be consigned to hell and will never have a knife.
It will all be over for that.
They will be putting Gitmo under the auspices of Stephen Miller, Cash Patel and Tiffany Trump forever.
I can't believe you brought Tiffany into this well.
Whatever, you know. I mean, I don't like to say the other female Trump's name, So it's like yeah, and they say, literally, it's like if you're if somebody just says, Hey, that's like what Hitler said. Do you off with his head? You know, I find it's just kind of incredible.
Wait, let's talk about this for a second though. Do you and I end up at Gimo?
Yes, oh, yeah, hundred percent, one hundred percent, Molly, Well, I won't end up a Givemo because I'll be living in Portugal by then.
Yes, it will just be me and Gimmo.
I'm in the phase of Porto versus Lisbon at this point, like I'm making those contingency plans because there's no doubt. You know, it used to be like if you were on Nixon's enemies list, there was a chance they would audit you, and like, I feel like an audit in the if Trump gets re elected, you and I will be a lot worse than audits. Let's put it that way.
It's a cliche now people say, you know, you know that whatever her name was used to say, take Trump seriously but not literally, and you're just like, again, false binary, like take him seriously and take him literally because the people who are going to vote for him take him literally. And I think there's like a pattern recognition thing here. It's like, if you see enough stories where they talk
about targeting their enemies in very direct ways. You start to be like, yeah, it seems like he's got that on his mind. Seems like that's what he wants to do, right, So I don't know, I'm not gonna take any chances with it.
Yeah, I think that's probably a very depressing but good point, I will say.
By the way, just in terms of like campaign strategy, I was just talking to my friend Mark McKinnon, who you were on Warning Joe with this morning, and I'm like, you know, Mark, when you worked on the Bush campaign, you were able to destroy John Kerrey's candidacy by quoting him saying I voted for it before I voted against it. And now it's like, I wonder the Biden team can do something with that Hitler reference. You know, It's like, it's how far we've come.
How far we've come?
By the way, you I saw that Trump is now running I mean this is speaking of like campaign fuck Erray Trump is now.
Running an ad on overturning row for.
The Iowa caucauses, despite the fact that this is electoral poison.
Yeah, there's a lot of things to say about that. One of them is that he doesn't seem in the same place that he sort of doesn't seem to know who he's running against. I said to We had this in that conversation that Tim Miller and I had had with Bannon the other day for the circus.
What's amazing everyone has to watch that. It's incredible. You really, I don't know how you're able to keep her cool while losing your shit at the same time.
It's one of the great challenges of my life. There was a moment where Steve was saying, you know, if you listen to Trump's speeches, here's a lot of policy in there. I'm like, Steve, Steve, have you ever visited a memory care unit, you know, for people who have advanced to Alzheimer's or dementia. That's what listening to a Trump speech is. Like. He doesn't where he is half the time, so I don't think he knows in some
level they really are. Still his campaign is interestingly weirdly, they've proven to be very good at certain things, and you can't understand the threat if you don't acknowledge that. You know, we all said in twenty twenty, were like, he's not going to get who voted for Trump in twenty sixteen. Who's the person who did voted against Trump in twenty sixteen that they're going to turn and go to get to vote for him in twenty twenty. And they would say to us, they would say, well, we're
not doing that. Well, we're doing this. We're finding millions of people who didn't vote in all in twenty sixteen, and we're going to turn those people out and he will get more votes. And we all thought bullshit. And then they did exactly that.
They did pretty well.
They got millions more votes than they got and no one, I mean, I would say most smart strategy analysts, strategist journalists were like very dubious about their ability to locate all these hidden Trump voters. And they did. They found him,
and so you can't just say they're incompetent. There is this other thing, though, where they seem to think you can put an ad on in Iowa for the primary and that no one will remember that ad or use it against him in a general election, where indeed, you know the position of I repealed Roe v.
Wade.
I'm proud Roby Wade loved the land before me, after me gone gone. So like as if that's not going to be a thing they we'll use against him. And obviously, you know, he is electoral poison. I don't think he sort of gets that people are watching right now, you know, and that those ads are like in the are being loaded up in the cannon to be fired at him over the course of the general election. It's one of many things that should make Trump totally unelectable.
Yeah, what are the other things that should make Trump? I mean besides criminal the ninety one criminal indetmonds well, and.
The citations and the regular citations of Hitler, you know, you know those things, those you know, the small things that should make him unfit for you know, any office, let alone the highest office on the land.
One of the things that I'm struck by is that it seems to me like Republicans made a Fastian bargain in twenty fifteen with Trump, and they said, we're going to touch the fourth rail. We're going to embrace racism, We're going to embrace the things we pretended to hate before, or pretended not to embrace, but quietly dog whistled too. And one of those things is anti choice.
Right.
They always sort of kept moderated enough, right with Roe, so that there was a chance you know who even knew. And I think one of the things that worked for Trump was that he was such a roar shack. He had no voting record. You could say he was Some people could say to themselves, well, he's an evangelical now, and other people could say, well, he's a liberal because he's from New York and he used to be a Democrat.
Now they have this right word flank that is so used to being appeased and given things they want you can't backpedal.
I mean that Crew wants a federal abortion ban.
Yeah, I mean, look, I think you would add one thing to the list with Trump, which is that you know, not only was he in New Yorker, and not only had he given money to Democrats, and not only has he had he voted as a Democrat in those times, everyone you knew just assumed that he paid for at least a couple dozen abortions over the course of his life. Right, I mean that he was functionally pro choice, even if he hadn't given the matter any serious spiritual or moral consideration.
And whenever I used the word spiritual and moral consideration next to Donald Trump, it like feels like I'm talking about like my daughter Calculus. You know, It's like, I like, really, but I think people just assumed that he could project that thing. He needed to say these things to get the solid support of evangelicals. He needed to say these things in order to get this very important part of
the of the Republican coalition. You know, when they were planning the twenty sixteen campaign and Bannon was feeding him the populist, a nationalist, anti China, build a wall, all
of that nativist, populist, grievance based stuff. That was like the core of what Bannon wanted to run on and what he saw a lane for a politician who could take over the Republican Party by appealing to those parts that increasingly large part of the base that was like that the big problem was, you know, there's this giant, huge chunk of Christian conservatives who have such a dominant,
outsize role in Republican presidential nominating politics. And so I was like, well, what are we going to do about that? And I think you know Trump's attitude was, you know, I'll just tell him I'm before I'm for repealing, I'll say I'm going to repeal ruebu wad, and I'll let the Federal Society pick the judges and that all appease them.
It's worth a shot. And I can very vividly remember being with him in Iowa three or four days before the caucus in sixteen, up in Sioux City, the most conservative part of Iowa, sitting there watching him sit on on stage in a beautiful old theater with Franklin Graham, you know who he had roped in and it was like the ultimate evangelical impromature. And you're like, hey, I can't believe this worked. Are these people stupid or what?
And I think they again, And one of the times when we smart ass pundits were like, oh it turned out, they were like, yeah, we don't really believe he cares about this issue, but we think he will do what he said he would do, which is like the Federal Society picked the judges and lo and behold, you know
that's what happened. The thing about the Iowa thing, this is the thing I forgot that I meant to say a second ago, is it is the state where he is the only I mean stated Trump is so full of false confidence and exaggerated brio about everything you know, he's like, I understand the people wh knew Hampshire. You know, I understand the people Mississippi. They're just like me. But
he really does. He looks around the country and you know, whether it's the northeast or the southeast, you know, the Florida part of the world, or the Deep South or the Mountain West, and a place is like, you know the plan, you know, in the place like Nevada or Arizona, he's very confident that he understands those people. And the one place in the country where he never you always
then the industrial Midwest. You know that the working class is of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Ohio, the place where he doesn't really have a feel for it, has never had a fingertip feel for it, and he knows it, and you can see it because he doesn't express the same kind of confidence. Is that part of the Midwest that's just full of nice people, you know, right like Iowa nice and Donald Trump don't just He's like, who the fuck are these people? Like I don't understand them at all?
And so he and he lost there, as we all remember to Ted Cruz, right, and I think it makes him crazy that it's this place where he never is really understood Iowa. Side note the other major national politician who feels the same way as Hillary Clinton. They're like, I just don't get this state, you know. And so when he's been in Iowa more in this run than any other place, he goes keeps going back again and again, and he's putting money into it, and he's advertising there.
And I think that's part of the thing you see with those abortion adds is a desperation. He really wants to win Iowa and be able to say to people, I now understand that I understand the people of Iowa. You know, those those people out there, I understand that what do they called the Cornhuskers, no weight, that's Nebraska. It's like he just really needs Iowa to feel like
psychically complete, like he has full dominance of America. So he's just willing to do whatever, even if it makes no strategic sense whatsoever.
Right, And I think that's right because the truth is there's no one even close to him in the polls.
That's right, you know. But you know, like I said, you know, this is the thing with politicians is that they get a thing in their craw. He is just he looks at Iowa and thinks, you know, I am not going to let that happen again. I'm not going to let this campaign start with the loss. And you know, maybe all the numbers you see, like, what's going to happen if any one of these people drop out. He's the thing with Trump is in Iowa, he is the second choice of almost everybody who is not with him
on the first choice. So it's like if Santa drops out, what happens most of the Santa supporters moved to Trump. If Haley drops out, same thing. I don't think he's going to lose in Iowa, but he's haunted clearly by the fact that Fad Dracula beat him in twenty sixteen.
Yeah, de.
Fat Draculus will always be my favorite thing for him if it's the only place where I mean, Lion Ted was really good, but Fat Dracula is better.
Yeah, that's incredible.
I mean I was sort of him as fat Wolverine, but Fat Dracula is one hundred times batter because ultimately he really is Dracula.
He does want to suck your blood. He wants to he loves to site. If I could do a Ted cruz accent.
I want to suck your blood.
That's what it's all about.
And he leaves the dog alone, which is unforgivable. So, by the way, you have a lot of.
Experience with this. Notice how I'm not saying you're old because you're not.
Oh I'm old, Molly, I'm old. I'm ancient, but barely ambulatory at this.
Point in the house we have it's very religious.
I was a lot as the Speaker of the House now, Mike Johnson, he is hurtling towards the shutdown right before Thanksgiving. I mean, do you think this will reflect or you think all of this will be in the rear view by twenty four and no one will care.
I think it will reflect the whole debacle by which we got this speaker. I think is a thing that will leave and what it's obviously going to lead to, which is an enormous amount of incompetence and miscalculation stupidity over the course the next nine months. I think it is.
It will definitely leave a mark on the House Republicans and their ability to have any chance whatsoever of keeping control even you know those by the slimmest margins of the House of Representatives, and I think you know that there there is the picture of Republican extremism and dysfunction combined together. You know, it's like, you know, fat, dumb and stupid is no way to go through college.
Son.
It's like, you know, it's like it's like extreme, dysfunctional and lunatic is not a great profile for a candidate a swing in a swing district, you know.
In America.
I think all of that will will add here. And I think if they shut the government down, you know, this speaker clearly wants to shut the government down. Like That's the funny thing about this is that it's like, will Mike Johnson come up with a clever plan to keep the government open. It's like, deep in his heart, the guy's like, shut this shit down. And I think, well, that that will hurt Republicans. I think Republicans are doomed in the House anyway, but I think it will further
doom them. Do I think it will play in the presidential thing? I don't really because I don't. I think Trump is suey generous. You know, you can try to make some attenuated argument about you know, Bannon and Gates and them being trumpy and like, you know, they are obviously, And I don't think anybody who is seriously contemplating a vote between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is going to be like, hey, the reason to vote against Trump is because of you know, I'm on the fence here about
these two. But like Mike Johnson is what I'm gonna is going to be the killer, the dagger to Trump's heart. I just don't see that as being like the decisive move and size of factor.
But it does.
It certainly does paint an incredible picture of Republicans unable to govern.
Yes, And I think, you know, we reach that point with the speaker fiasco where it broke through in the way that things that matter break through, which is like when the thing breaks through to the point that it's the subject of late night comedy or YouTube memes or you know, social media memes or whatever the you know, take your pick of the various four of the various platforms in which people who are ostensibly serious start to become the butt of widespread jokes. That's an issue of
political issue that's starting to cut. You know, where you could do an SNL cold open with a bunch of people in it who no one knows Like SNL is always like, hey, we do cold opens. We do them about presidents, vice presidents, you know, presidential two nominees of a party. Nobody's like at the level of Lauren Bobert, you know, has ever been honest at SNL cold open before?
Right?
But now we're at the place where the Republicans collectively are such a laughing stock that Saturday Night Live is like, yeah, you know what, we can put up a bunch of Republican backbenchers here in the cold open and people will get why this is funny. That's not a great place to be in for National Political Party.
John, I hope you'll come back.
Oh, I'll come back. When have I ever said no? Sometimes I say later, sometimes I say not this week. But I never say no to the Great Molly Jong Fast partly because I know that if I ever really said no, you would turn on me and say I am your retribution or I am my retribution, and then I just get fast, faster or fastest retribution. Who wants that.
Mitch Landrew is a White House senior advisor and the former mayor of New Orleans. Welcome back to Fast Politics. Mitch Landrew, Where are you at, baby?
People are not going to understand that it's been better if you're from New York. Where yet I'm doing great? Thank you for asking.
It's a year since you became senior Advisor and the Structural Court at the White House.
No, ma'am, I don't want to start off on the wrong foot. But it's been two years.
Two years. It's two years.
I don't understand. Why are you trying to shorten me. I'm two years, So explain to us what that looks like. Oh, it's just it's been so unbelievable. You know. When I was had the joy of being a Mariti Arleans during maybe the most difficult time in the history because we had to rebuild the city and it was really hard, but we did it and it was a soulful, wonderful
experience that I learned a lot of lessons strong. So when the President called me and said, hey, would you come up here and help rebuild the country, I was like, I'm all in. What you know, you're kind of starting off from scratch because the country hasn't done this in
a long long time. And I mean like Franklin del and R. Roosevelt long or Eisenhower long our royal electrification long shows a daunting task, and most people he didn't think it was going to happen, and be thought that if the bill passed it, we couldn't get anything done. So here we are two years later, we're bringing receipts
chapter verse daytime place. We have forty thousand projects that are under some level of formation right now in all fifty states, in four thousand, five hundred communities and the territories in DC. And so when the President said, hey, look, I have an idea. I have a vision for how you make America strong, both at home and abroad. The way you do that is invest in the American people, and you invest in real things that people need every day to make their lives better. That's what the idea was.
And so as a consequence, we pass this piece of legislation, which, along by the way, with the Chips Act and Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan are creating I don't know, we're up to past fourteen million jobs now, eight hundred thousand manufacturing jobs, another six hundred thousand constructing jobs. People back to work making good money, and we're rebuilding communities, roads, bridges, airports, ports, waterways, high speed internet, clean air, safe water.
So I know what you guys have been up to because I listened to c SPAN. But for the people who don't listen to c SPAN, last week was a big week for trains.
Let's talk about trains.
Well, if you live on the Northeast cor this is something that you know very very well. And by the way, the only way that I can start off talking about trains is to say that the President of United States is a train guy. People should know his story fairly well that when he was twenty nine he was elected to the United States Senate, there was an incredible tragedy in his family. His wife was killed in a car accident.
He traveled back and forth on Amtrak home at night to take care of his two younger sons, and essentially did that pretty much every day he was in the Senate until he became Vice president. That is a familiar experience traveling on the Northeast Corridor from Washington, d C.
To Boston. And last week, the President and downd sixteen point four billion dollars, which is just a piece of the investments we're making to trying to have world class rail in the United States of America, so you can live anywhere along the northeast Corrida all the way from Boston down to Washington, d C. The Frederick Douglas Tunnel in Baltimore, the Susquehanna Bridge, the thirteen bridges in that area that over one hundred years old that are going
to get replaced. Everybody knows what the choke points are in New York around the hug And Tunnel and the Gateway Project, eleven billion dollars invested in finally fixing that really difficult situation that, by the way, is still suffering from some kind of saltwater intrusion from Sandy. A lot of investments there to make people's lives better. And then, of course they're huge numbers. More than that, high speed
internet's critically important. I just got off a call with the Majority leader about two hundred jobs that are being created in Syracuse by a company called PPC that is going to start making fiber optic cable there. And we have examples like that all over the country, and every one of the different kinds of investments that are being made. Everybody now knows, by the way, how beautiful it looks to have a great airport. Laguadia is just throwing it,
knocking it out the park. That is what the future looks like for aviation in America, and we're investing in airports all over the country.
What does this mean for me when I take my assella? Will my ascella be faster?
Like?
How will this affect me?
It's an excellent question. And how it affects me? That's pretty much what American citizens ask about. Well, what's this really mean to me? Not macro sets, but in the micro sets. Essentially, there are a couple of things going on. You know, Amtrak is a big player in the space along the Northeast cord Or. They have been given a substantial amount of money to do a number of different things. One of them is to buy and have manufactured in
the United States new train sets. Those are the cars that everybody rides on with the engine that moves it from place to place, and so those are in the
process of being constructed as we speak. I think that we are going to purchase over a thousand new train cars that have to be manufactured that are going to be much closer to being net zero than the ones that we have right Now the second thing that they are trying to do is along that a tie Northeast cord or they're trying to as best as they can find out where they can straighten some of the tracks without impeding on people's homes and businesses unnecessarily so that
the trains can actually go faster, and then the trains themselves will do that. On top of that, they are going to hopefully retrofit a lot of the stations that people have to use to make them handicap accessible. The other day out for example, I was in Wilmington, Delaware cutting the ribbon on a new trains station reproduction project. Where folks used to have to carry their bags up and downstairs and folks that had physical challenges couldn't move.
That's all been you know, fixed, and that's going to happen across the Northeast Corrida. So the experience should get safer, it should get faster, it should get better, it should need more climate friendly on top of that, outside of the Northeast Corrida, which I know that you're equally concerned about. Equally if you were in the southern part of the United States of Baracka, where I'm from.
I went there once.
Yeah, that's like not Florida, right, Yeah, exactly Are you happen to be on the West coast? Are you happen to be someplace in between? There are opportunities to create a really high speed rail that is gonna mirror maybe what you see in Japan or in China, and there are a lot of different proposers across the country that we're considering that way as well.
Could that actually happen? I mean, is that a real thing that could actually happen.
It can happen from New York to Los Angeles. It can happen from Vegas to Los Angeles. It can happen from Sanford, just go to Los Angeles. It can happen, for example, maybe one day between Georgia and North Carolina. You know, I think you have regional things that look like that. It just depends on, at the end of the day, how much you want to invest to get us from here to that. But I don't think there's
any doubt. So I'm from New Orleans, we don't really have high speed rail, and we don't We've got some am track, but not the way that you guys in the Northeast live on this and it just turns out that I think eight hundred thousand folks travel every day on the Northeast Corridor and you wouldn't even think about necessarily taking a car or taking a plane. The President's like, look, we got to make this faster, better and easier for everybody,
which is what the goal is. So for the first time really in the last fifty sixty years, the President was able to get this money in place. We're trying to get it down to the ground, which the President announce the other day. Biggest announcement on the on the whole thing was for the Hudson Tunnel to eleven billion dollars a piece of change to fix the old tunnel and to build a new one, and then to fix all the gateway projects that everybody up there has been
arguing about forever. So the President finally brought you know, New York and New Jersey together. The governors were there the other day, the majority of Leader and Senator Gillibrand were there, all of the secretaries for DOT and everybody's as I like to say, gihunt and working together. And this is going to be a real deal thing going forward in your Life's hopefully going to be a little bit safer, fast, easier, and cheaper.
That's a good So talk to me about the lead pipes, because you guys are dealing with the drinking water situation too well.
The other thing, too, is the President and the Vice President are adamant that everybody in America are to have clean and safe air and water. And quite frankly, of all the projects in this bill, the three hundred and seventy five of them, and as I told you, they criss crossed the country. I've actually, by the way, traveled to one hundred and thirty one cities, towns, and counties and tribal communities and traveled over one hundred and ten thousand miles. I've talked to a lot of folks about
a lot of things. I have to say that the clean air and clean water pieces of this are so basic that people just can't believe that in the United States of America we're not there yet. And so there are happened to be some places in America two million people don't have into a plumbing. I know this sounds kind of amazing, but that is in fact true. So you know, I've been down to Lowndes County in Alabama
and working on projects like that. I've been as far north as in the Pokiok, Alaska, which is like, way the hell up there? All right, prob committed me. That's the best way I can describe it.
How do you even get there?
By the way my boat?
Oh wow?
Oh it's insane. I mean, you fly and then when you get in anchorage, You're like, okay, well I got to get up there. And they're like, well, let's put you in a little bitty plane. And then the plane lands on a dirt runway and then I'm like, we're we there yet, and they're like, no, you got to get in the boat. And I'm like, oh man.
And it's cold when you get up there, right.
Well, it wasn't. I went. I went when it wasn't cold, because I'm smart. But it was wonderful and wet. We met the tribal community up there. And of course, the point here is that nobody is too far away for the president, whether it's in the Black Belt or whether it's down in the Delta, or whether it's in a tribal community in northern Alaska, which by the way, you can actually see Russia from. That's true.
Actually I feel like if you're stealing somebody else's stick here, I'm just saying.
When I was there, I felt bad because I thought that was a joke. But it actually turns out the big clothes. So in any of that, the ability to get clean air and clean water to people is critically important. Now we know about this a lot in the country because of what happened in Flint, Michigan, which by the way, they're all new piping in Flint, Mishigan. That project is lead.
Thank god. It took way too long, but the President the Vice President were able to put in this bill fifteen billion dollars to help eradicate all the lead pipes in America and I and we're well on the way, working with cities and states to get this done. We have twelve hundred drinking and wastewater projects, including funding to replace hundreds of thousands of lead service lines. So we're on track. But again, this is a hard thing, and by the way, it's done by cities and counties. Federal
government's not doing this work. This money gets pushed down to the states, it gets pushed down to the mayor's and they have to do the work. And they're in the process of doing it as we speak.
So interesting, Yeah, crazy, it's a lot of work. Let's go to broadbands and.
When you live through COVID, if you didn't understand it before, you understand it now that nothing happened. And if you don't have access to knowledge, and the access to knowledge is through Internet. And the President made a commitment to make sure that everybody in America is stressing everybody is going to have access to it. And so that two
things going on here. One of them is making sure that we lay fiber optic cable everywhere in America where it is not or some other kind of technology that is absolutely necessary, for example at a far away place like the Pockeyac if you can't get five of there. And the second is connecting people who actually have access to high speed INNT but can't afford it. So just in the past two years, through what they call the Affordable Connectivity Program, which you can find that get Internet
dot go. If you're living at our below two hundred percent of the poverty level, you actually can get free internet for one hundred bag of bytes per second. And we're signed up twenty one million Americans for this project is called Internet for all, and we're going to keep doing that, and we're going to keep laying fiber op to kid. Now, every governor in the state has already received what they know is their allocation the federal money they're going to get to actually start putting fiber in
the ground. And you can see that on our website invest dot Go as well. And by the way, every project in America is on that website. If you want to find out what a project is, go on there's a map. It's got a bunch of dots on it. It looks like a serot painting. You can just push the dot and the project will come up and you can tell how much it is, where it is. And we did that for transparency for the taxpayers of America.
You know, the governors are in their process of submitting their plans to us about where they're going to lay it. We're going to say, yes, they're going to get to work. But there's already been billions of dollars that have been sent to the states through the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Treasury to start a lot of this work. And as I said just today, like ten minutes ago, I just got off of a press call with Seid
of the Schumer about a company in Syracuse. It's going to manufacture the stuff that you need to put to build fiber so you can put it in the ground. It's going to create a five hundred plus job, which was one of the points of all all of this stuff anyway, not just to give people better roads and bridges and airports and ports, which are all critical, but to build them in a way that created lots of high pay of jobs so people could build generation well,
have some dignity in their life. And by the way, use products that have made in America so we can rebuild communities that have gotten burnt out from offshore. That was President Biden's vision. And the truth of the matter
is he's bringing receipts. There have been lots of people that have been in both public office, some of them that sat in the White House that said they did things that they didn't do, took credit for stuff that they and this president can bring you receipts in chapter and verse and instead of just talking about an infrastructure week, we're actually in the midst of a massive rebuilding that's going to be an infrastructure decade.
Tell me what project. Are you the sort of most excited about or what is a project that we don't.
Know about that we should know about.
Well, first of all, I wouldn't be doing my job if you didn't know about it. But the big cathedral projects. The bread Spence Bridge is a massive bridge that connects Ohio and Kentucky to Red States by the way, that carries about three percent of the nation's gross domestic product on any given day, moving goods from ships to shelves. That project is a really big project that is pretty
symbolic of what the whole thing is we're doing. I don't need to tell you about the symbolism of a bridge, but it actually connects people and then it spiritually connects people as well. We've put a billion dollars into the restoration of the Great Lakes, So if you live anywhere in or around that, you understand the significance of that a billion dollars into the Everglades. The biggest project really is one in New York in the Hudson Tunnel. That's
the big one. That's the one that is going to touch more people than any singular project in the country. We're rebuilding the Frederick Douglass bridge. So if you're coming from New York into Washington, d C. And you know you kind of heading towards Baltimore, that train slows down to thirty miles an hour.
Yes, I have some experience with that.
Well, here you go. Here's how it's going to improve your life. You're going to have to do your homework faster because that's trying to go one hundred and ten miles an hour, not thirty around that turn turn running into that. But then, and let me just say this,
those are big, big, big. There are some small projects that are exciting, like making sure that we get into a plumbing two folks in Lowndes County, Alabama, or you meet somebody like Diana Branch and are two kids eight in Jada in Milwaukee that make sure they've got to have clean water and you see their faces. Are the guy named Walter who was a tribal leader up into
Pockiac who we met. Or a guy named Slim if you can believe this, who is the mayor of a small town in New Mexico called Hatch, which by the way, has the best chili in the world, who really is concerned because it's flooding too much. To me, those are the things because that President Biden said, look, we got to see everybody. This is really easy, you guys. If we can do things together, we can do big things. If we can't do big things together, we can't do anything.
And oh, by the way, don't leave anybody behind. So Mitch, get your butt out there and go find these people and talk to them and make sure that they're involved in the work that we do on And for me, that's been the most uplifting part of this entire process.
What do things look like now from this point on, is just watching these things get finished?
No, no, no, no. You got to first of all, remember when we started, I said, we haven't done something this big in a long long time. And so from my perspective as a mayor, which is a more of a not what you want to do, but how to do stuff job kind of where the pedal hits the metal or the rubber wrists the road. You got to get stuff done. You have to set up what I call a mouse trap or scaffolding. You got to make sure the federal government and all the cabinet secretaries are
working together. You got to make sure they're working every day with the governors. The governor's cabinets have to be working together. You've got to be working with the mayor's you got to be working the community leaders. That takes
a lot of work. If you ever raise a lot of kids, you kind of understand what I'm saying here where you got to get everybody dressed at the same time, because I got five kids and I had four of them in different schools, and you got to know what you're on, on what you're doing, or you lose a kid like in the parking lot, that's not a good thing.
Yes, I have some experience with this.
So in other words, if you can think about how to herd cats, you have to do that every day, all day to make sure one of the kids running the street all right. So you can put some technical language around all of that, but it's about what I call horizontal and vertical integration across federal, state, and local authorities, both horizonally and vertically. And that is the team of people that have to get stuffed doune of it. They're
not communicating, collaborating, coordinating every day, then you're not. Nothing's happened. So that's important we do that every day. It's like running drills, running stadium steps. We work on that. The second part is, okay, well, if that team's ready to go, they got they can't do anything and they don't have the money. So you got to get the money out
the door. And in order to do this in a transparent way where we do these projects on time and on task, on budget, with no wayte fraud and abuse, you've got to make sure that the applications are good, that they're smart, that if you give these folks money, they'll actually be able to make it happen. Then you've got to get the money to them, and the money
gets them in two ways. Some of the money goes straight to the governors, and then some of the money you have to apply for that goes to the mayors and the county executives. So you got to run that whole process. And then the third thing you got to do is what you and I had done today, which is telling people about it so they know it's coming.
They can kind of check on how we're doing. Pick us in the butt when we're not doing it the right way, demand that we go faster, and then when it looks good, say, oh my god, I love that. Can we have more of it, and so that's it, and so that requires nurturing every day. I do think that we are organizationally in a much better place. The country's going to be learning now how to build big things again. We have to prove its people because nobody believed that we can do it. And I'm just really
hopeful that as we go forward in the country. Remember we only end this two years. It takes a long time to build a strong foundation that can't ever be reversed, and so we're in the early stages of that and a lot more work to do, and we're at the point where as my grandma would say, she would say, it needs a lot of elbow grease. You gotta work it.
I call it the hard work of governing well and demanding that people get off of their high horse and quit arguing about extremes and get focused on the thing that we all care about, which is a road, filling the damn pothole, getting home as fast as we can so we can do homework with our kids, to do the things that people need to do in a way that makes our lives easier. And that's what the presidents wanted to do from the beginning.
Mitch Landrew, thank you, thank thank you.
We thank you for everything. I appreciate it. You take care, you two.
Danielle Nickinyon is editor in chief and founder of Bolts magazine.
Welcome, Too Fast Politics. Daniel Thank you so much. You are here.
Because you are the editor of this very good magazine called Bolts. It does local elections, but on a micro level.
Is that fair?
Yeah? I think the goal is to connect these local indued elections with all the issues that readers' voters would care about and would look at Washington Floor usually, but in fact it's also happening, you know, at the county level, at the municipal level.
Yeah.
And this is something I'm very interested in, and we should all be interested in what's happening on the local level because ultimately it has enormous national implications, as we've seen again and again. So I want to talk to you first. We're going to talk about an election that no one has heard about.
To accept you and people who live in Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania judiciary elections, because there were three judges elected in Pennsylvania. Tell us a backstory. Explain to us the situation.
Right, So, Pennsylvania was the only state last week that was holding elections for its for its court system. You know, in a lot of the country judges are elected, not everywhere, but in most places. Obviously, Pennsylvania really is the swing state I think, I would say for twenty twenty four to watch. You know, it really is so important for deciding the presidential race.
You really think that.
I feel like Pennsylvania is sort of like largely blue at this point.
I mean, I think it is such a huge part of the blue wall that if Democrats exactly Democrats kind of secure Pennsylvania, they don't need that much more or all of the other states Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, Wisconsin ate, they only at that point really need one perhaps, which which is a big, big style. But Pennsylvania really is essential, and I think Mali very importantly. It is the state in twenty two that Trump kept trying to go after in the court system. You know, he kept filing all
these lawsuits in Pennsylvania. Obviously did it everywhere, but Pennsylvania was arguably the state that sought the most lawsuits, and a lot of these lawsuits went to die in the state Supreme Court. In November December twenty twenty and what one of the seats was empty on This was vacant because a Democrat had passed away last year, and that's the seat that voters in Pennsylvania were going to sail.
So Democrats were sure to keep the majority. On the corporate matter of the result, it was in me five two or four to three. But there have been instances on this court that things don't exactly go according to party line, and especially when it comes to mail voting. There's been so many cases in recent years in Pennsylvania around whether mail ballots should be tossed, should be counted.
We're talking about an advocate in Pennsylvania told me tens or thousands of bad ballots could be affected in twenty twenty four depending on the result of this election. So all of these have made it very important for just voting rights. I'm not even going to go into all the other issues that are important. And Democrats won that seat.
They won all three, right, there were actually four to judge SIPs on the ballot, so there was one for Supreme Court and then there were three for intermediate courts that are right below the Supreme Court. Democrats swept all four and they actually flipped what's called the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, which is right below the Supreme Court. A lot of cases that end up in the Supreme Court go through it, so obviously it's very important that that cases be be prepped for a side or on the
other on lower courts. And what's really interesting is that it's not at all usual for Democrats to sweep these down ballot elections on an off year. In twenty twenty one, Republicans that very well in judge elections in Pennsylvania. Those are not years where Democrats usually are eager to go vote. So this was very yeah election results.
Do you think that.
Speaks to a Democratic electorate that is enthusiastic about the voting.
I mean to look at Pennsylvania specifically, I think definitely, because you saw that same pattern County, per County. You saw Democrats do very well in Pennsylvania. So they really kept control of the suburban areas of Pennsylvania. They even flipped the new Republican areas blue, and in place after place, there was heavier enthusiasm and turnout in blue areas than there was elsewhere. So for instance, and in Philly, the electorate was a third higher than twenty twenty one, whereas
in the state at large only ten percent higher. Now that's not going to exactly hold into twenty twenty four, but in vacations definitely are that Dobbs, Trump's comeback and a bunch of factors have really energized the base of Democratic Party.
The reason why I'm thinking about this is because and now we're going to go to Kentucky in this Kentucky gubernatorial so there were two off your Googer tutorials. And in Mississippi, obviously that was a little bit different circumstances.
It's very red state.
There was sort of a hope that Brandon Presley could break through what is a very whatever an R plus I don't know, very high numbers twenty thirty forty, but he wasn't able to.
But in Kentucky, one of the things.
We saw Burscher grew his electoral margins, he won by even more, and he ran on abortion unapologetically. But the point I wanted to make was that Republicans had a real turnout problem in Kentucky.
Can you talk about that.
We saw the same pattern in Kentucky as we saw in other states. I discussing Republican parts of the state just didn't turn out as much as they should have for the Republican to have a strong chance.
You know.
One a little addendem to this as well in Kentucky is that the governor of Kentucky was a Democrat. When he came into office in twenty nineteen, he did a couple of things. One, he signed an executive order that restored the voting rates of about five percent of residents of the state. Just got their voting rights back, just like that, with one stroke of the pen of the governor.
And there was a lot of efforts by organizers this year by bye, by people who used to be in prison and have regained their rights to reach out to people who informed people and get them to Tornado as well. And the other other is that there was an alliance between the governor Bashir and the Republican and some Republicans to make it easier to vote by mail, to make
it easier to vote in some ways. And you know that there were efforts done by Democrats with some alliance with says as centrist Republicans to make it easier to vote. So it's a little too early to tell, you know what produced what effects last week. But those things aren't random. They were definitely efforts by Democrats, even in the state like Kentucky, which is very difficult for them to make voting voting easier last week.
Yeah, and that's a really interesting situation because you really do have a red state with a governor who grew his margins and also ran on choice. Let's look at Virginia, because Virginia is so interesting to me. My opinion was I was very worried about Virginia because I had seen you know, Virginia is a purple state. It's maybe getting a little bit more blue. But I really thought young Kin he puts.
On that vest.
He says some stuff that sounds like a moderate. Remember that fifteen week ban had been very well tested, right, Like, this guy sticks to his talking points.
He's not like Trump. He goes out.
There, he says, I'm you know, give me the legislature and I will enact this very well polled fifteen week abortion man, which was really made in a lab to appeal to moderates. And he couldn't do it. If anything, he lost the other chamber.
Talk to me about that, No, I mean, you're absolutely right that Governor. Youngkin put a huge effort into recruiting into this new vision of the Repulican Party that he thought he was building on the backs of like very conservative policies, Like he went out and said that he will introduce new restrictions on abortions and was hoping that that message would make him seem like a centrist, which is a bit odd and didn't work at the polls because it was odd he was going out and saying actively,
I'm going to make abortion on an issue. If you give me power, I'm going to use new restrictions. But that's a compromise position, so obviously there was something here that didn't quite add up. But you're right, Ted, it was very suspenseful, right.
At least like he's a little bit disciplined, whereas Republicans usually have like Trumps.
No, definitely, But I think one thing that's important to remember is that his own election in twenty twenty one, the story behind it and was that there was a lot of anger around schools and rental choice in twenty twenty one.
Really peak COVID education fuckery.
There was this idea by young Kin that the cultural wars are going to help him, which actually we saw not not just so Republicans failed to flip the state Senate, the actually lost the state House in Virginia, but we also saw similar results if you go further down, were school board elections did not go well for conservatives last
week in Virginia. They were trying to overtake a bunch of suburban school boards, really increased the presence of Moms for Liberty, book bands, and all these issues that were supposed to have been central in twenty twenty one, and
that also failed. You know, so I think if you combine the abortion result and the school board result again, what we see the same thing as we saw in Pennsylvania, where the left side of the spectrum was there and did not want the book bands, did not want abortion restrictions, and showed that itself is not going to sleep through these issues.
Talk to me about Moms for Liberty, because this is a fascinating little bit of fuckery. Republicans got very excited that COVID restrictions were going to lead to school choice, which is going to lead to book bands, which was going to lead to them taking over the world.
Moms for Liberty, you know, they sort.
Of got the most crazy people they could find it didn't work for them, did it.
This is so important to follow because my Momum's Liberty has this sort of smart underd rat or strategy for their purposes of going in at the last minute and endorsing candidates in the final week seven elections. And it's very hard. There were so many elections for school board, Molly, We're talking about hundreds in the state.
It seems like a nightmare. Yeah, to keep track of on.
A given day. There were one hundreds in many states at once. It's very hard to keep track of, including for local media, because the candidates are very good at not necessarily saying what they think until there, like self, last endorsement at the last minute.
It's very misleading, right, the idea is I love normal, but that at the last minute they're like, yes, I'm crazy.
And what we saw this year on like priories, is there was much more effort on the other side against Mom's Liberty to put the spotlight on people before even they had the chance to do their play. And what we saw in the result obviously there's so many elections that of course Conservatives won some school boards. They want some seats that are important, but overall, in so many states, the slates for candidates for conservative school board candidates did very poorly.
And I think.
Wherever you are listening to this, you you can go online and search for your own state. And you know, I was just yesterday reading articles on Kansas, on Iowa, so not you know, we're not We're not talking about loose states here. We're talking about states where the cultural wars are supposed to be very important, and overall, conservative slates did very poorly. I think the epicenter of this
was in suburban Philly. There were school boards that had already been or overtaken by by by the right in recent years, and that we're reading the headlines for policies on book bands, policies on transgender students, especially in Bucks County, which is a very large suburban county in Philly. These these two school boards slipped back away from conservatives. So you know, those are a very important election. We're talking about so many students who are going to be affected.
I want you to.
Talk for a minute about trans panic, because this is an amazing thing that Republicans ran on. They basically decided that parents would and again this was based on some polling which is why I think we should all remember that polls are not necessarily the best indicator that parents really got upset if their kid was doing sports against a kid which they where they felt their gender was giving them an advantage, that they thought they could win elections on that and they did not.
Yeah, you know, I was always kind of skeptical of that narrative because sort of the first big national moment where these issues, you know, captured the national imagination was a law in North Carolina about seven eight years ago. Now that was the bathroom Billy had got a lot of attention. The governor lost the following year, not to say that that is why he lost exclusively, but Hueenly became the embottom and of that issue. There was a
lot of business backlash at the time. A lot of businesses left the state and that was definitely a big issue. And in a good year in twenty sixteen, that Republican governor lost the election, and I think we saw the same It's so easy to I think when the media expects that something is true, like when you expect that there will be a backlash against tread treat trans rights, or when there will be a backlash against reformation of a crual justice reforms. Any example of that backlash then.
Becomes confirmation bias.
Yes, it becomes a momage, right, it becomes gospel, and then it becomes used in every story as, oh, you know that that famous election, And I think that's sort of what we saw in twenty twenty one around those issues, when in fact, what we're seeing, I think in twenty twenty three, which is reassuring on the issue of trends rights, that it's not just that people are at best indifferent
towards the rights of trans people. But there again, they were definitely organizing in the school board elections, people who came together, formed slates of candidates, campaigned in their communities on this issue and wanting to protect the rights of transtudents.
Look, there are a lot of dumb Republican issues, but this one happens to also be deeply cruel and evil, and so that's why I wanted to bring it up. You know, the gas stoves also didn't work, but people aren't necessarily affected by an obsession with gas stoves the way that children are affected by being targeted by Republican politicians.
With the new Speaker of the House who are a very anti gay agenda and hi gay past. You know, at this point Republican Party is going to bring back anti game measures of all sorts that really go beyond the trans rights and trans Americans.
Yeah, that will be a real disaster, which for them electorally, which will be well deserved, so because they've done it to themselves. The Virginia races were quite expensive, really you know important If Democrats were to sort of take a message from those races, what do you think it is.
I mean, it seems like the one message that our guys are getting out of every election for the past twelve month is that abortion is very important to people.
You know.
I think there was this I think there was a fear on a part of people who you know, were very worried about Dobbs that just by virtue the fact that twenty twenty two was a midterm with the Democratic president, that Republicans would just happened to do well because that's what happens on the midterm, and then they'd be this like story that forever that that Dobbs didn't create a
backlash and that would be there bad for abortion policy. Instead, what we've seen in every election in the midterms, in the Wisconsin elections in April last week, that abortions is really on Deepo's mind, and that is true in places that have abortion bans, and that is true in places that where the abortion ban is a threat that obviously could come in the future, and that is going to be the messaging that the Democrats are going to continue using.
Another messaging lesson is that in Virginia and in Kentucky, Republicans were very again like last year, messaging around the issue of crime, and they were trying to put the blame on rising crime rates on on Democrats. Echrinal justice reforms that in some places aren't even like Kentucky, haven't even been a big a big storyline and that and Democrats are sometimes a bit defensive on it, but sometimes not.
And in fact, in Virginia right now, the new speaker of the Virginia House was going to be incoming is someone who had a criminal record himself and in the past. So it's interesting to see that that that that issue also isn't playing out the way that Republicans were expecting it to.
So interesting. Taniel, I hope you'll come back, of course whenever. Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
No moment, Jesse Cannon.
Molly drunk Fast. I'm going to tell you I had to like look up if there was a full moon and people were turning into werewolves. Because the fighting in Congress today was out of hand. Every hour or there was something new.
So it was a normal Tuesday on Capitol Hill. McCarthy shoved but later denied it. Congressman Burchett in the hallway, Senator Mullin, who was an MMA fighter who knew tried to fight Teamster. President Sean O'Brien Comer called Congressman Moscow, it's a liar and a smurf, and then MTG said that darryl Isa lacked mail anatomy. Congratulations Republicans. We were told that Trump is a doesn't scale. We were in fact wrong. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
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