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