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 Congressman Rocanna says that the Democratic leadership is out of touch. We have such a great show for you today, the Joyread Shows. Joy Read drops by to talk to us about what Democrats need to do next, how they can recapture enthusiasm, and how we
can keep from being really disappointed with them. Then we'll talk to Detroit mayor and goubernatorial candidate Mike Duggan about his run in the Great State of Michigan. But first the news. II.
I haven't read the internet and seen more of a time where the Democrats have been more mad inside their base at a leadership, and it is unbelievable how much people are calling for this to be the end of Chuck Schumer's reign as the leader of the Senate Deems.
All right, so we're going to not even do news. We're going to talk about what I saw on the ground in my experience over the last three days. Okay, this is like literally the people I talk to. This is basically reporting, but it's my reporting of what happened to me. I heard from somebody very smart who I talk to a lot, that Democrats were about to cave. I was told by Leadership's office that Schumer was going to vote.
Now.
Here's the thing. If you vote now, it means either you do not control your caucus or what's the other choice. I want to talk about this for a minute because this is so important. If you look at who voted to reopen the government in this Senate group, everyone who voted to reopen the government are people who are either not up for election until a bunch of cycles from.
Now many which is twenty thirty right.
Or are retiring. What does that say? Do you really believe that every person who wanted to reopen the government had these very neat re election schedules. Do you believe that. If you believe that, then you are stupid. What happened here is that the Senate caved. And I don't know what Chuck Schumer knew when he knew it, but this does not happen without leadership spuying. So here's the question,
why would you do this? Why would you go for a shutdown then decide to reopen the government right after Democrats had a huge win. Why why why why? And I think the answer is I think that leadership got scared. I think they were worried that Republicans would never reopen the government. But fear is not a place to operate from. And Democrats need to have a leader who is more Mitch McConnell and less Chuck Schumer. So if you're going to shut down the government, you have to expect that
Democrats are going to have to take a lot of pain. Right. A government shutdown is a pain tolerance threshold exercise, and if you don't have the pain tolerance, then you shouldn't be shutting down the government. I personally have always thought that they should have had very clear deliverables on the shutdown, and that it shouldn't have been something like Obamacare subsidies,
because here's the thing. Even though it's good that they got the conversation going about healthcare, the reality is Republicans were never going to fund these Obamacare subsidies, right, they never were. They wanted a skinny Obamacare repeal, that's what they wanted. And by the way, this is going to be really bad for Trump. You know, Trump is losing on affordability while everybody's healthcare is about to get way more expensive.
Yeah, it's looking very bad for my own family. And as we're going to be some of the recipients of this, and I have to say that this is a no brainer. But also at the end of the day, like you know, we talked to a smart audience of people on politics, the optics of an old guy with a flip phone after we had an old president, when we can have
a fighter like Chris Murphy or somebody like that. There when they pulled democratic issues and democratic issues are popular, Democrats are not popular in brand, and the leadership is not popular.
And then here's the thing. There is no more time. Okay, Like there were four years of Americans being like, well, Biden's a good man, he might be. We're done. There's no more time for making excuses. It's over. Okay, it is over. There's no more time for making excuses. Chuck Schumer is a lovely guy, you know whatever, But this is not this is not it now. If American democracy is on the brink, which we believe, we're not saying stuff we don't believe here on this podcast, we absolutely
believe that American democracy and is on the brink. If it is, then it has to be Democrats need to have real leadership, and that's Chris Murphy and not Chuck Schumer. Senator Schumer has failed to meet the moment. He is out of touch with the American people, says Rashieta to Leib. All Right, okay, pretty lefty, Seth Moulton, not lefty even a little. If Schumer were an effective leader, he would have united his caucus to vote no. All right, we
got Mike Levine, we got Rogue Kanna. These are people. Here's what they have in common. They're savvy. We talk a lot. Remember we've been talking about this Marjorie Taylor Green news cycle where she's gone on to say she now believes that she doesn't believe in Q and on anymore. You know, there's been like is she a good person? No, none of these people are good people. They are opportunists.
But they see an opportunity, right, Like that's the thing, your political opportunist and you see an offer unity.
Yeah. I think with seeing move on dot org calling for his resignation and that the pulling of Dems is just overwhelming, like this, really it's time you served us. Okay, enough, sure, whatever, I'm not gonna say a lot of nice things that some people might say it's time for this to end. We have other fish to fry, though, probably a lobster, because we're going to talk about Maine because the Senator Angus King did some of the worst messaging I've ever seen in my life.
Let's talk about Maine. The other main senator is a Republican. Okay, so nobody is saying like Angus King has to go, because we understand Angus King is very much a product of where he lives. Okay, period paragraph, Angus King just needs to shut up. Okay, like he doesn't have to go. He says, to stop talking me. He's an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. He's a manor. And he said the single worst thing you can say, especially when you're
fighting authoritarianism, which is really what's happening here. He said, we tried to stand up to Trump and it didn't work. First of all, that's not true. It actually did work. Democrats decided to cave because of Schumer's bad judgment, but that does not mean that it didn't work. And then the other thing is that you know they don't have to they were wrong, this is a mistake, but they need to shut up, like going around to different places and trying to make this case doesn't it's not winning
any it's not winning any hearts and minds. It's just annoying the fuck out of all of us. And it's also helping the Republicans. It's helping this anti democracy coalition that Republicans have. So I would say, uh, just new step it.
But Malli, there is some good news for Democrats since last week's election. I'm going to turn to Utah, where a decision has really really helped out. Demon's when it comes to Jerry Rare sentence.
Donald J. Trump, you may know him as many things.
Let's stick the fifth on what we're gonna call him.
Right, he went to Texas. You went to the MAGA Republicans in Texas, he said, get me five seats. The MAGA Republicans, Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, people who have their own problems with corruption, they said, no problem, five seats, no problem. Okay, anti democratic. We're screaming our heads off. It's so bad. It's jerry mandering, it's anti democracy. Well,
I'm going to read you what Dave Wasserman. Dave Wasserman is a just a numbers guy talks about election coverage, not a partisan and we're going to talk about this remaster because okay, so Democrats will get this seat in Utah, that's what the court's saying. Let's go into what Dave Wasserman says. So in California, because of Governor Knewssom's amazing special election where he put together an election out of nowhere. In two months, Democrats have gotten four and a half seats.
It's probably gonna be five, Okay. So then we have Missouri, GOP has gotten one seat, North Carolina half a seat, Ohio half a seat, Texas four that's what started this fucking disaster, and Utah one. So at this point, ultimately, and again we don't know what's going to happen. This Supreme Court would very much like to do a lot
of crazy shit that could fuck everything up. So we're not gonna say anything yet, but at this moment, it certainly feels as if this could be a net neutral that after all of this work, after this insane mid season redistricting, which is not okay, which is a crack on norms and institutions in every which way. In the end, in typical Donald Trump fashion, he may not have done anything for himself.
Yeah. I think this is the thing that we always come back to for solace, which is that while these people clearly do have a plan, they're also not the most creative and bright at executing it.
Yes, the bad news is they're evil. The good news is they're stupid. Yeah, Unfortunately our side is due.
Fortunately, fortunately our ideas the wrong people at the top of it running the till. Anyway, speaking of the stupid, Trump claims that tariff's unwinding, if the Supreme Court decides to strike them down, would cost three trillion dollars.
So Trump is starting to really worry about these tariffs. Tariffs are really fun for him. He loves them. He gets to do them, he gets to put them in willy nilly, he gets to punish his enemies in reward his friends. My man loves a tariff. But now you know, if you listen to those oral arguments the Supreme Court, you know, Supreme Court A saw that election where Trump got she'll ACKed, and b they know that this isn't popular, that this is pretty wacky, and that this may ultimately
actually knock at them where they want to go. And so Donald Trump will now do anything to keep the tariffs going. And so Donald Trump loves a big fake number. His new big fake number is three trillion, three trillion dollars. By the way, unrolling the tariffs as soon as possible is probably the best hope we have to avoiding what
likely will be a big financial catastrophe. It's probably going to cost US three trillion to not unwind them, or maybe zillion, or maybe gajillion, since we're dealing with fake numbers.
I like the gajillion.
Joy Reid is the host of the Joy Reid Show. I can't believe I get to host you. Welcome to Fast Politics, Joy Read. It is so good to be with you.
Mollie. I miss you, girl. We gotta do this, Kurton, what's happening?
I know we need it DC, what we needed DC, you know. But we were just talking before and the question was like Trump two point zero is proof that you should never say it can't get worse.
That's correct, Yes, never say that, because then it will literally get worse.
I mean, this is and I knew it would be bad.
Like we were, like we were on airtime, we were doing Hey Project twenty twenty five.
Guys, it's gonna be bad. It's gonna be bad.
But you know what I underestimated was the aggressiveness of the grift and of the theft and of the destruction. I mean, even I and I've been a long time og anti trumper for a long time from visit my whole life, adult life, never did I get, in my wildest nightmares, literally taking a down a part of the White House, like literally just taking the White House apart, like you know, he might as well put like a little bomb in it.
Just blew up the East Wing like well he basically did. I mean, there's no more East Wing. It's gone.
It's gone, I mean, evaporating the East Wing was. It was not on my worst bucket list, but.
It's I have to say, like I wonder about the East Wing. Like we've seen times where like because Trump is has been so radical, you know, it's the every time there's like a wave of white supremacists or of like of pushing back of rights right road Leigh you know, both but in many different aspects of our lives, to many different groups, every time there's been a wave of that, there's been a certain kind of gaslighting that's gone along with that. Yes, and so something like the East Wing.
You're just like, he just tore down part of the White House, right, and he'll do more.
And I think what we have to do And I used to always say with Trump, you have to use your lurid imagination, right, you have to think of things you could not imagine in your worst nightmares.
He will do them all.
Because I think what we have to fundamentally understand is Donald Trump is not an American president, right. I mean, there's a there is a certain kind of range of behaviors. Even of the worst American presidents, Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, you know, you know, I would argue Woodrow Wilson was a horrible, racist, shitty human being, but they all fell
within a certain range of behaviors. Right When you said to Richard Nixon, you are violating the law and you are going to be impeached, he said, you know what, let me resign. Right, Like, there was a range of behaviors. Trump is far outside of those. There is no no that you cannot compare him to any previous president because they were American presidents. Whatever their other issues and problems and faults, they actually fundamentally believed in the United States Constitution.
Trump does not no Eland. Trump doesn't believe in any of this.
He looks at the Russian system and says, that's better. He looks at the Chinese communist system and says that's better because she is absolutely treated as a god king. He looks at like a mabutu. He's like, I want that, Like, he's not an American president. So I just think we have to stop trying to frame and I think the media makes the mistake of trying to treat him like an American president. You just start treating him like guten right, like no, that's what he wants to.
Be, right, And I think that's a really good point. And it gets me to like one of my favorite hobby horses, which is norms versus laws, right right. So much of American life, American politics especially, is this idea that norms will that you don't need laws for certain things, like you don't need a law. You can't rip down half the White House because it won't happen because norms.
Well, here's the thing that's so interesting, and you know, I have this working theory that one of the reasons that we are here is the founders that it is in the end, it is their fault because they were such patrician elites and so out of touch with the common man that they built a system designed to never be run by the common man. They just presumed that all presidents and senators would be patrician men like themselves,
who were of the great families of Europe. You know, George Washington is literally like, I believe related to you know, Mad King George, like their family members. So in their minds, this this system was built to perpetuate that white male elite and that no one of the common class would ever become a leader in this country. Wouldn't be a senator, wouldn't be a congressman, wouldn't be a president. And so they built a system saying, well, we don't need to
make these things laws. He gads, these can simply be the north George Washington can simply fail to run for a third term, and all of the you know, the people who follow will do the same, And they all did until FDR said, yeah, no, I'm gonna stay. I think I'm just gonna say, and then he did four terms, I think we might need a law, and so they had to do a law to get him to go. But he was you know, the consent of the people said we wanted him for life, and we got president
for life and so. But Trump is not even at least a FDR. Was still of that same elite class, but he was just a trader to that class.
I'm willing to be traded.
Trump comes of the kind of immigrant that came in long after all that shit was created. His family gets here in the late nineteenth century that the granddaddy, you know, the progener is a pimp. He's like, I'm a pimp woman, and try to find.
Gold, you know what I mean.
They come from like a common But his whole thing was just from the grandfather, the parents on the dad, all of them are just about the money grubbing grift that America and its freedoms provide. They never bought into the sort of the sort of dreamscape of democracy. They just are like, oh, we can get rich here. And this is all Trump inherited was the grimy, grubby grift.
That's what his family was about. Escaping Bavarian laws, about you know, conscription for the draft, raft dodging, grimy real estate and Queen's where we're going to keep the lax out of our buildings. We're gonna say, we like the Jews, but we kind of hate the Jews.
We're gonna like that he's anti Semitism right too exactly.
So it's like, yeah, they would have been quite at home in Nazi Germany. These these these drumps, and this is what we've got. And so they are norm breakers because they don't believe. I think people just presume he's breaking the norm. No, he doesn't believe in them.
But there is also this question and this is like Trump but this is also I think America right now, which is we have hit a moment where there is there is no such thing as too much right, Like you have someone like Bezos where right, or you have someone like Zackerberg. You know, these people have decided that trump Ism will help them get what they want, despite the fact that so talk us through how you think, because that seems like part of this.
It is it's the same thing, right, These are I mean, and look at all this the PayPal mafia. These are white South Africans whose people dragged every resource and you know, possibility out of South Africa, rinsed it clean and then bounce to America to do it here. They took and stole everything that they could from South Africa, left its
indigenous people with nothing, destroyed their lives, enslaved them. These are the you know them and the Africaners, and then moved in and said that God said we could do this.
We're taking everything.
We're going to rinse this country clean of its resources, leave it empty, dry, a shattered hule, and then we're going to come to America and reproduce the same thing. That's all these people are jeff bezos. These people don't they don't care about democracy. They're just there like Trump. They they you know, they're not doing this at under duress. This is who they are. Mark Zuckerberg, he literally he and the winkle Vasses, the winkle Vai as they call
them at Harvard. Facebook was just a way to rate girls' looks. Yeah, it wasn't some high mind did idea of creating a public square. No, it was to rate women in the most nasty, misogynous way.
And they took that paper. It wasn't even an original idea.
They used to just take the Facebook and circle girls that are a ten and girls that are a two. Then they took and digitized that and created a thing that's only purpose is to make this Mark Zuckerberg rich. The only purpose that Amazon isn't about making the small family store taking it digital. It's about making him rich. This is the new ethos of America. And I hate to say it. The founders were like, what we got to do to be rich? Oh, we got to enslave
these blacks. Okay, we're gonna kidnap them from where napped. Okay, we're gonna take them, put them like kindling, tie them up in a bowl, and okay, if that's what we gotta do, So we want to give them all of this credit for high mindedness. They were just like, no, we're going to do slavery to get rich, and we don't want to be taxed revolution And so you've bequeathed a nation who It's why a lot of our families come here, because it's like, oh, this is a place where you
can prosper financially. This is a country built solely on capital, but it's layered over with this sort of false morality that says it's Christian, but all it really is is just rubby, grimy, greedy, fucking capitalism. So Trump is the perfect president. We actually deserve this. This is the president America has earned in some ways. I mean, it's the president America wants apparently, so heart's desire.
Yeah, And it's funny because it's like, I feel like we've been through so much. I was thinking about that Psyche gall with the Biden Relax. In my mind, a lot of mistakes were made, and you know, you can't I don't know that you can necessarily blame one person for it. What it feels like. One of the things that I've been really happy, one of the very few
things I've been happy about is that Trump. One point, now, it was like, if you were a Democratic politician, you could say Orange Man bad and you could raise five million dollars. Yeah, right, have a best selling book and like, and this time that's not true. And ultimately, actually I think it's better. So, like I'm thinking about Gavin Newsom, like I have never seen a Democratic politician do something like, oh, yeah,
they're gonna take five seats. We're gonna fucking take five seats and we're gonna do a special election for it. Have you ever seen that? Because I'm still seeing Chock be like, we won't go I voted No, it discussed.
They don't get it because I think, and again, if you go back to why eighty million people knowing that Donald Trump was responsible for a million dead in COVID, knowing that that happened, why would they choose him? Again, if you ask people why they voted for him, I go right back to my original thesis.
They say, he made me money. I made more money.
Why were they mad about COVID shutdowns? Because we couldn't make money?
Right?
Because Americans have been groomed to think that the only real, true American.
Value is greed. Greed is good.
It is the American primary value. All of the religious lies and bullshit is just a way to control women, control blags, and make more money.
Right.
So in a.
Money culture, of course, people said, I wasn't making money with Biden.
I'm making money with Trump. Give me that, right.
And now they're realizing, oh shit, you're gonna deport me and my friends and my family, and the tariffs are gonna get they But in their mind, a lot of Trumpers, a lot of these voters were not like mega cultists. Some of them just were like, he's going to get me money.
You know.
Even a lot of the Latino voters. People think immigration is their number one issue. No, when you pull Latinos, it's economics, it's financial so because this is the country building. But I think what happens with the Democrats, they are not that. A lot of Democrats like the Shumers.
Of the world.
They're goo goo good government people. They're the kid who ran for student council.
Prevent the nerds. They're nerds, and so.
In their mind they're like, no, it's about the government, and Americans like, nah, man, it's about the coins. I want Trump And now that it's not working out, what's happening is the kind of Democrat who's built for this is the kind that understands the culture. The culture right now is crass, it's memes, it's vibes.
You gotta be and Gavin gets it.
Gab is always kind of in ahead of his ahead of the curve a little bit.
He was on gay marriage, right.
He just understands the vibes and so he's like, no, I'm going to ride this vibe, but I'm going to ride it at a time when people are realizing what we need now is to ameliorate the greed culture and.
Go to an affordability culture. Yeah, you know what I mean.
Because if you can't make it, if you can't financially survive, then greed culture isn't helping you. Right now, I need like what mom Donnie is doing, which is survival culture. And he's now we've moved from greed culture to where people are kind of disgusted by greed culture.
Because you can.
If I can't make it, then I'm disgusted by greed culture.
And he gets it. Now it's survival culture.
And also it's pushing back on cruelty, on the cruelty culture of Trump and saying, oh, I can give it right back to you, and that's what people want.
I don't want Schumer being like.
We did forty days of a holdout furnving.
Let's just gaming this out. Had it been you, what would you have done. You definitely have to shut down the government. I know it's coming right, but what's your asks?
First of all, I don't believe Chuck Schumer when he pretends that he was against this, because they're either they're only two choices for Chuck. Either, you are a week leader who had no control of your caucus and eight members went behind your back and changed the policy that you were leading on without you and then left you to vote know for it, which means you shouldn't be leader.
Okay, so that's choice hey. Choice B is you hid behind.
Those eight people because none of them are up for reelection next cycle.
And some of them are retiring and some of them are for they are exactly like if you look at each one of those eight, each one is in a unique position to be able to vote yes.
Correct, correct, you know Durban's leaving Jean Shah like there, you picked the exact right group of people to tuck yourself behind, and which is also you're not a good leader, so either way, it's not good. But then the third piece of it that to me is the most egregious is that you let this happen anyway, the shutdown happen anyway, with no plan to win, no plan to what the
finish line looked like. So you didn't think through that, which means you're not a good leader, and also no plan to ameliorate what you knew would be the suffering. And you're the only political party of the two that actually cares about the suffering. Republicans, let me be clear, they don't care if their own people starve to death and sy They don't care if their own people have no health care and die. They genuinely do not care about the life and death of their own citizen, their
own constituents, and voted for them, Nor does Trump. None of these people care about anyone. The Democrats actually are the Google government people who do care. But you're tell me you had no plan. So if it was me and I'm the leader, I would say, first of all, no one goes off my message. If you we're gonna all do the same thing together. And if you don't, good luck with your reelect because you won't get a dime.
Your reelect won't happen.
All they care about is getting reelected and say I'll promise you you will be funded. So I would Nancy Pelosi them, you will stick with my plan.
Okay, so that's number one.
But next I gotta have a plan. The Democrats said, no health care, no vote. That was there.
That's what they set up as their metric for success, which they knew was never gonna happen. That was millions of dollars like it, ye god, they know it was right.
They knew that these people fundamentally hate Obamacare and The whole point is it's a skinny Obamacare repeal, so like it is, Yeah, it's a skin and they want health care costs to go up, up, up, up, up up up right, So you don't have an endgame that you know can be successful.
But what you could have done is you could have put on the.
Table a series of things Republicans would have to say no to in public.
So if you're gonna, I think no healthcare.
Novte was smart because they did rally people to say, even people who were literally losing their jobs and hungry, and they were like, keep fighting, because we can't afford to let these subsidies go down.
They did.
They never, though, proposed a series of things that were very hard to say no to. You know, you could have done things like first of all, they never highlight I was highlighting it on my podcast every day. They were not highlighting the fact that you all made the tax cuts permanent. The tax cuts were just as temporary as these subsidies.
If you could do one, why can't you?
Why weren't you saying that every day, Chuck, you made this one permanent, which costs four trillion dollars. This one costs less than a trillion. This is only a third of a trillion, so this one's cheap. So they should have But number one, that messaging was poor. They should have made that very very clear. They should have made the point that the Speaker of the House is literally saying, no food unless you let me make your health care
cost gout right, you starve unless you let me. They should have been saying that people on social media were saying it. They weren't saying it. And then you just keep ratcheting up the ask. You say, okay, we want the healthcare subsidies to be made permanent. You're saying you don't like them because you don't. The Cato Institute says, the subsidies go to the insurance Company's fine.
Our ask is flip the subsidies making go to the people.
Can you imagine how powerful the ass would have been if we say that we the Democrats have said we ourselves are willing to update Obamacare, and we're able.
We want to make this change.
The subsidies will go to the people in an account the people can control. And we want the same amount of subsidy. But rather than sending it to United health Care, let's send that subsidy to the people. Dare you to say no to that? Now, the American people have a stake in no health care, no vote, because now you're saying money for me, because I remember, we're in an
economy that is about the benjamins. It's about money. And now if you say to people, we the Democrats are saying, you get the ultimate stimmy your money, not in a subsidy to your health care company, but a subsidy to you make and then say are you gonna vte for that? And you keep ratcheting up that ass publicly so that people know what you're fighting for that is going to benefit them personally. And then if they say no to that,
then you say, okay, you don't want that. What if we just do single pair and then explo am to people what that is and say why don't we say that where.
Everybody gets you. Now you don't pay nothing.
To go to the doctor, and can you imagine listen, just keep making a public ask. And then if Republicans, well you know they're going to say no, but then you they were already losing the shutdown war. But if Democrats had been putting out there literally the subsidy people don't even know what the subsidy going to. Can you imagine Republicans having to say no in Missouri to their Missouri constituents, white folks coming up to them and say, why can't I have this subsidy in my account?
Why can't healthcare? Why can't I have free health care? Why? Why? Why? And I have to say that I think my family. The worst moment of the whole thing was Angus King saying, well, we stood up to Trump and it didn't work. Like what, First of all, it did work, you fuckingmore. But second of all, like my head nearly exploded.
At a certain point, it's voter suppression. You had people come out and seven million people came out minimum for these No King's Day protests. This is fueled by them supporting your position, Democrats. Then you have an election day that was a blue wave wipeout for Republicans, and it's all the strength of these same issues. And then you're like, yeah, but that didn't work, Let's go ahead and lose.
Unucking believable read thank you for joining me, thank you, thank you, thank you for having me.
Maybe these Democrats will learn one day, or or they go listen to one day.
Mike Duggan is the mayor of Detroit and a candidate for the governorship of the Great State of Michigan. Welcome to Fast Politics, Mike.
Well, thank you role.
This is a it's not a hyperlocal story, but it's a story that you kind of have to be in politics world or live in the Great State of Michigan to understand. So I would love you to just explain a little bit about the job you have recently done and then about your race for the governorship of Michigan.
Well, I am finishing up my third term as the mayor of Detroit, and when I got elected, the city was in bankruptcy. People will remember when Detroit was the largest municipal bankruptcy in history. Half the street lights were out, the cops didn't show up when you call, the parks were closed and overgrown, and we had forty seven thousand abandoned houses. But mostly what we had was a politics that was just device. It was us versus them, black versus white, city versus Summers.
And I ran first white candidate in forty years.
I ran in an eighty three percent African American city by going house to house and sitting in people's living rooms and saying, you know, the Detroit I grew up in was a special place, and we can build a great city again. And Molly, the building I'm sitting here talking to you on on the old Hudson side is a forty five story building that wasn't here three years ago.
It's part of the recovery of the city to try and we're very proud of it.
What was your background before you became mayor of Detroit.
I ran the Detroit Medical Center, which was the big hospital system here, eight hospitals, eleven thousand employees. We saw a quarter of the Medicaid patients in the state of Michigan, and the board had voted to close the big hospitals because they were going broke. I had been the elected prosecutor at the time. The Medical Center board offered me the job, and I took it on the condition they give me six months to turn the hospitals around and
not close anything. And we upgraded the care. We cut the weight times of the emergency room from three hours to thirty minutes.
People showed up.
We grew from eleven thousand to fourteen thousand employees, and so people in the city all had a very strong opinion of the job I had done running the major hospital system, and but will they give me a chance as the mayor city Detroit.
There's so much interesting stuff and everything you've just said, I wonder ay you decided to run for office. One of the things I see when I talked to people is that a lot of very good people, we just don't have the stomach for it. So just talk us through that decision.
I grew up in Detroit.
In the course of my lifetime, everything that we knew was taken away from us. The auto plants moved out, the banks moved out, the movie theaters moved out.
A million of our neighbors moved out.
And when I came out of law school, I just wanted to do something in the city, and I had one job after another until I became the prosecutor. But if they had closed the hospitals that saw three hundred thousand patients a year in the emergency rooms, the city
would have been devastated. So I literally quit the prosecutor's job midterm, and I went in and I was actually criticized some of the papers saying I wasn't qualified because I hadn't done healthcare and the chairman of the board said, well, we just had a doctor and he lost one hundred million dollars a year for five years. We're going to try somebody from outside. And I just said, why are people sitting on plastic chairs in the waiting room for three hours at a time. You guys want to keep
blaming Federal government doesn't pays us enough. State government doesn't pay us enough.
How about we upgrade the state edited a care.
I tore a part the entire process and kicked off the thirty minute guarantee. If we didn't see you in thirty minutes or less, we gave you two tickets to a Tiger gate. Now that was two thousand and four in the Detroit Tiger's lost one hundred and four games that year, so the team was willing give be a really good deal on those seats.
But people just poured back in.
And I had this idea that a lower income people in Detroit deserved exactly the same standard of care as the wealthier people of the suburbs. And when you deliver care, it's amazing how profitable your hospital is.
I feel the way you feel about Detroit about New York City. Now New York city is much less shitty than it was when I grew up here, So I'm very you know, it's different. We've watched it go the other way, but I certainly understand loving the place you're from. Detroit was really a city in trouble. Is Michigan a state in trouble? And what is your plan for the state.
As everybody knows, Michigan is a purple state.
From your national perspective, that means it's in play for the presidential If you live here, the implication is much worse. Every two to four years, the State House, the state Senate, the governorship, they flip back and forth between Republicans and Democrats. And the last few times, two of the three thousand votes statewide decided who whether the Republicans or Democrats, were in charge of the legislature.
And what has happened is they are so close that that the Republics and Democrats have become completely obsessed with am I in the majority? Do I get the majority?
And now the last state report, more than sixty percent of third graders in the state of Michigan do not read a great level.
It's just that's not Detroit, that's the whole state. Of Michigan.
We're near the bottom of the country, and every two years is the Republicans and Democrats take control. They changed the curriculum, they changed the measurement on the schools, they changed the requirements of the teachers, and these teachers and principles have literally had five changes in how schools are measured in twelve years, and they wonder why our.
Teachers can teach.
And so I looked at this and said, I could get elected governor as a Democrat and all the Republicans would be against me because they tried.
To be of the legislative races.
And in two years, even if the Democrats won, the Republicans win the next time, and I wouldn't be able to get anything done. So I thought, maybe we need a different kind of politics.
And you have so far really knocked the race into something totally different. So I am very curious to know a little bit about how you did that, because the Democrats had a candidate they picked, and the Republicans have that poor guy they keep running. So tell us sort of how you got into this race and probably didn't everybody tell you not to do it.
I tell you, the people who live here are tired of it. And you know, I watched Rick Snyder, who was a Republican governor for eight years, and he did a lot of things I didn't agree with. But when the Democrats got a trifecta on the Democratic side literally in two years, they reversed everything that he had done in eight years. And then we got a Republican House, they ready started to reverse what the Democrats have done. And if you live here, you say, this is crazy.
We don't have an economic development strategy to attract businesses that ever last more than two years.
So I write, what if I do this? What if I run as an independent?
I'm not going to get engaged in the Senate races of the House races. It's just like I did in the city of Detroit when I put the black versus white politics behind us in twelve straight years, I got city council to work together for Detroit's recovery. What would happen if I worked with the people from the two parties and pass things on a bipartisan basis. So every election isn't the most important election in history because we
actually agree on things. There's nothing about teaching third graders to read.
You need to teach them filects. You need to have them in small groups. You need to have tutors for the kids who are falling behind. You need to have the same curriculum for five straight years and not change it. There's nothing about that that's Republican or Democratic, but Republicans and Democrats use the school rules basically as political weapons right now, the way the parties are using the SNAP program nationally as a political weapon.
I said, what if I just try this? And the response has been unbelievable. And I started out way behind, and in May they did a poll that I was within fourteen points to the top candidate. And then the last poll that came out, Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic likely nominee, is at thirty. John James, the Republican likely nominee, is at twenty nine, and I'm at twenty six. And the interesting thing is half of my supports coming from Democrats
and half my supports coming from Republicans. And basically it's just people who are saying, you're not solving our problems. We spend all your time final with each other.
That is wild. And what do you think of yourself as?
Oh?
I think of myself as a problem solver, and so as mayor Detroit, it is hard to describe. Imagine a city sliding into bankruptcy for years.
How do you get re elected in that situation? You know how you get reelected.
You are the best person in blaming somebody else for the problems. You don't have accomplishments to run on. And I came in and said, this is going to stop. I'm not blaming anybody. The black versus white city versus suburbs stuff is going to stop. If you vote for me, We're going to build a city that's opened everybody. And I got re elected the second time with seventy two percent,
and the third time was seventy five percent. And last night the city council president, who was my partner, just got elected to succeed me with seventy seven percent.
Mary Sheffield.
This city is coming back dramatically because we have gotten the US versus Them politics behind us and people here in southeastern Michigan. You don't have to explain to anybody. Come downtown and you see the crowds on nights and weekends. It's unbelievable what we have. We got ten billion dollars in investment going into the city today auto plants and new hospitals and new distribution centers and new tech companies,
and so people in southeastern Michigan get it. When I go to the outstate areas that are in the Detroit media market, I'm having to introduce myself to largely rural Republican fall folks who say, what does the marriage Detroit know about our problems? And it's been a fascinating process, and I'm making some traction.
I completely get that, you know, as someone who comes from my political world that I think of myself as a seventy percent in the middle married to a venture capitalist. So I'm hardly, you know, from some kind of wild lefty stock, though my grandfather was a communist. But you have a state where you have like the Michigan Militia, right, you have a group of people who tried to kidnap the governor. So as much as like I want desperately to solve problems, you're going to hit some partisanship.
And if you saw what happened in the city every time we do a development project. We brought a Jeep plant here with five thousand employees, and Jeep promised and lived up to the commitment that every single hire would be from the city of Detroit. Even with that, I had protests on the far left about the fact that we were giving tax breaks to what was then Fiat Chrysler.
But I had the United Auto Workers with me, I had the construction trades with me, and I had the people of city Detroite those who were protesting on the far left. We listened respectfully, came to the meetings, but they didn't represent the majority Detroit, and we approved it quickly.
It's the same thing.
The Michigan militia is not going to support me, and the far left isn't going to support me, and I don't worry about that. There are Americans. They are entitled to their perspective. But I'm talking to the person of the middle who wants their kid to be able to have a job in Michigan not have to move out of state. And the great majority of those people are saying, where's the economic opportunity for us?
I look at what Mike did in Detroit and all those jobs that came back to the city. What would it be like if they came back to the state.
So what will it look like for you now to campaign and you have a year. What does Michigan look like? How do you campaign in Michigan? Every place is different. Talk us through it.
January one, I will no longer be the mayor and that will free up a lot of my time. So you could imagine the last twenty four hours I've been consumed with dealing with the snap crisis. Residents have had their food benefits shut off, and this nonsense going on between the Republicans and Democrats in Washington doesn't like it's going to be solved anytime soon. So the last week we set up eighty five emergency food distribution site. I turned to Detroiters on social media and I said, we
need volunteers to staff them. A thousand Detroiters volunteered, and I spent the whole morning out at one of these sites. But it's heartbreaking to see these blocks of cars. We got cars lined up three blocks deep to get food for their family because this week they should have had their monthly check to buy the food for the week. This is the kind of stuff I haven't spend way too much time on. But that's my job for the
next eight weeks. But between that, I've been going up to farms I've been going up to small towns and it is absolutely fascinating to sit with folks who say, to me, what does the mayor Detroit know about us? We've been ignored, We've been forgotten. Nobody cares about us. I said, let me tell you about talking representing people who have been ignored and forgotten. Come to some of our neighborhoods where I had families on a block with
four abandoned houses, no park, no street lights. Cops didn't show, I didn't complain about it. We solve the problems. Let's talk about your problems. And it's amazing these folks these rural areas. Their shoulders relax and they think, maybe I've got more in common with Detroiters than I ever would
have thought. And then we start talking and I see the same kind of dynamic when I first ran from Ara, going from a house to house in the city, saying we do have more in common, and I think I can actually build a bipartisan coalition to win this thing.
And of all people on food, salm to our children.
It is ridiculous.
And the notion that they are all poor and black in the inner city is absolutely not true.
It's like significantly more white people on it than And.
It's really interesting as I can go into some of the rural areas, there are a lot of areas where they are starting to get disenchanted with Donald Trump. We've got a lot of soybean farmers here who lost their exports to China. We've got autoworkers who are starting to lose jobs over the Canadian tariffs. But when you talk to them, they're not turning to Democrats. It don't see the Democrats is their solution. And the question they get is we voted for Democrats, we did badly. We voted
for Republicans and we do badly. And right now there's so much fighting with each other. Is there another choice?
And I'm just going to see whether people I will try a different path.
Yeah, I'm sure you know about this that in rural areas there's a democratic penalty if you have a D next to your name, which is something we saw Dan Osborne and Nebraska run on. We're probably going to see more of that.
So Molly, I went up to a small town called Lexington.
Here thousand people in a town one hundred showed up at a bar to see me on a Tuesday night, which I was like, I can't, I can't believe this, And the grocer across the street took a special sign down for the week and said, welcome to Lexington, Mike Duggan. And after we started talking thirty forty minutes and they got relaxed and laughing and comfortable. I said to him, how many of you would have shown up here tonight
if I were running for governor as a Democrat? And about a third of the hands of the room went up, and then they looked at each other they started to laugh. But these are their friends and neighbors in a small town. But it's what you say, if you put a D in front of your name, there's a whole chunk of the country that won't even listen to you. And the same is true if you put an R in front of your name, as a chunk of the country that
won't listen either. What I'm finding is, I'm running is an independent and I'm not saying they're there yet.
But boy, are they interested in having a third choice?
Right.
I understand you know a lot of the hospital administrator stuff. I understand how you maybe fix the city, you get people to build factories, but it's a lot of organization, it's a lot of detail work, it's a lot of putting what works best first. But I just wonder, is there some other secret sauce I'm missing here?
So the secret sauce you're missing is this.
Every Democratic candidate right now has their talking points off of their polsters.
And it says costs are rising too fast.
I will bring them down. Donald Trump is bad for you. I will fight him, and I will be on the side to teach. But you look at their life. They've never done a thing on any of those issues. And what people here see is that when I ran for mayor and set in living rooms in an eighty three percent black city and said I believe I can change politics a we could get investment. We did land ten new auto plants and cut the unemployment rate from twenty
percent down to eight percent. We cut the homicide rate more than a half by both putting cops on the street but running great prevention programs. We rebuilt the riverfront to the point where it is spectacular. The crowds downtown Detroit are huge on nights and weekends. So what I have going for me is while the other people are repeating what's on their pollsters talking points here, they look
and they say, Mike actually did it. And that's really the reason I am almost in a dead heat is because I have something to the other two don't have. I actually have a track record of accomplishment.
Mike, it was great to talk to you. I hope you'll come back as you keep going, maybe February and March. Check in with us, tell us how it's going, okay.
Would love to and thanks for Mally.
No moment, Jesse Cannon, Molly jun Fast.
Would you be shocked if I told you that Jesselen Maxwell sitting down in a country club prisoner is being waited on hand and foot for some reason. I just can't figure out what it could be. Any ideas, no, no, what. Well, Jamie Raskin has this whistleblower who says that's what's going on.
I am shocked to hear that the Trump administration is protecting the partner of Jeffrey Epstein. But why it is a mystery, and certainly not that Donald Trump is implicated and Ebstein files because that would be breezy and no one's that.
Are you saying the pedophile cabala As call is coming from inside the house.
Not I. I am not saying that. I am absolutely not saying that. I would not say something like that.
Neither would I, especially since I like not being sued.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.