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 Trump Media CEO, former Congressman Devin Nunas, has stepped down after the company lost seven hundred and twelve million dollars last year. We have such a great show for you today. The New Republic's Meredith Shiner stops by to talk to us about the enormous vibeshift changes
in Congress. Then we'll talk to the wraps on Michael Calderon about the upcoming White House Correspondence dinner and the immense drama we may see. But first the news.
So, Molli, you know you and I live in mom Donnie Stan the Social State, and you know we're always hearing about these giveaways.
But it's funny.
The place where all the corporations get the giveaways is really from the Trump administration. And we're seeing this with half a billion dollars going to Spirit Airlines to build them out. Now you can argue this is an essential way people get around this country, especially people.
No, you can't, No poorer people use Spirit Airlines.
Doesn't give him a fact, No, he doesn't terrible and also this is socialism. But the thing is, because it's the Trump administration, the question is why is the Spirit CEO making a donation to Like, if we look at Trump World, then we look at Mega. We know that there's something rotten in the state of Denmark. So what is it? Is it that the Trump administration has some kind of relationship with Spirit? Why is Donald Trump using
our tax dollars to bail out Spirit Airlines? Earlier in this season of Donald Trump destroys America, we saw him use some of that money to bail out Latin American countries. We've seen him use our tax dollars for any number of sortied things. But my big question is what is he getting back? The deal will be five hundred million dollars for Spirit equity warrants for the government, because what our business to spend tax payer dollars? And then airlines
notoriously stable. Actually, Donald Trump has already lost his shirt once with airlines. You'll remember the Trump shuttle. So of course, if there's an airline on the wall in the first decade, it will go off sooner rather than later.
Yep.
Okay, So there's lots of people questioning mister Trump's mental health these days. So this is where we get into some very fun modern stuff. So there is this man known as al Yakobe who's been caught many times making pro Israeli propaganda out of AI. So he today shared a meme that said breaking the Islamic Republic is preparing to hang out women and people who are good at detective AI are all digraphic saying this is the most AI that has ever AI imaged of all time.
The thing that's amazing to me about this story is that this is Internet people on acts. But the thing that they don't realize is that those of us whose son subscribed to the New York Post know that this was the cover of the New York Post today. So these women, quote unquote, if they're women, if they're not women, we're on the cover of the New York Post this morning. So maybe there AI. It certainly seems like they may be. But either way, they were on the cover of the
New York Post. So I don't know what is happening here.
Yeah, So Trump demanded that Aron not execute them, and now the White House has put out a statement saying that they've just been informed that they're not going to be killed and taking a win for saving AI lives.
We think that they're not real anyway, I think is the net net right?
It seems that the consensus on the Internet as of now is that this was made up, and because the person who initially spread this as such a bad past of making AI images and getting caught for it, it is not seeming very likely. And if that is the case, this is a real egg on the face of mister Trump.
Yes, welcome to post truth America, where who even knows what the fuck is happening? Did you really look very AI ish? One of them looks like Alena Habba, one of them looks like Kai Trump, one of them looks like none of them look like actual people.
Yeah.
Like my thing would be is like, if these are people who are captured, did they go to a bodilely agency into a kidnapping.
It is very strange. They're so attractive and they're also so blonde.
Well, that's what mister Trump loves to save.
That's right, He's very into saving blonde people.
Okay, So we saw a congressional here yet again this week with RFK Junior, and there was noises made that I didn't know humans could make from his mouth.
Yeah, the Darth Vader. This is we'll remember he's zinned. He did zin. We saw him zin before.
For people who don't know what zin is, it's a tobacco pouches you too. Mostly popular with twenty year olds who have millennial perms. But the line that is really sticking out to people is that he said I've never been anti vaccine.
That's the fucking brand.
Yeah, here's what's happened. Okay, Donald Trump is pulling through the floor. He's pulling is bad. He's not popular. Things have really gone off the rails. Now. Donald Trump has this guy RFK Junior. He represents MAHA. He helped Donald Trump win the anti vax stuff. It's super unpopular. So what does Donald Trump do. He's got RFK Junior out there doing a sort of was I anti vax? Maybe I wasn't anti vax and he's lying. These people really like to lie. But you've heard him under oath line before.
I mean, RFK Junior has lied under oath pretty much. That's sort of one of the central themes of this whole. So don't believe any of these people. I mean, this administration is just completely shock a block with people who don't tell the truth. But here's the quote, I have never been anti vaccine. It's like when Sean Hannity says he's not a reporter, he's a talk host. He has been anti vaccine. And later in the hearing he denied
things he said, he has spread lies. He is trying to get them to not use the know what's going on here. This guy is a total liar.
Yeah, And this is what he does every time, is he denies things he said on podcasts that we have tape of every time. This is just what he does because he doesn't want to actually have to answer for these things because I'll shock you here. He would not go so well on the stand up. He had to defend things like what he says about black children and being raised and things like that. On podcasts. You can't
defend the indefensible, but MAGA tries anyway. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which many people may know as being the investigative body that goes after extremist groups, has been targeted by the DOJ and Cashpitel.
Yeah. So the Southern Poverty Law Center is a really incredible organization that has been around for a long time and works on trying to expose the KKK. Now, Donald Trump doesn't like that, because I don't know why he doesn't like people who expose the KKK. It's odd, but he doesn't like this is the guy that's good people on both sides. That guy does not want them to go after the KKK. So here's the idea. Southern Positarity Law Center has paid informants the way the FBI does.
They're called field sources. They engage in their informants and they get paid and they inform and thus this organization learns about the KKK and stops them from doing crimes. And also more importantly, they are able to monitor them. Now this administration doesn't like people to monitor the KKK. Another interesting thing, and so they are going after the Southern Property At Law Center. Again, like, this is Todd
Blanche trying to keep his job. This is Todd Blanche knowing that Pam Bondy got fired because she did not do the kind of what hunts that Donald Trump wanted. So Todd Blanche has cooked this thing up. It's never going to go. You know, he got an indictment from Alabama from the Trumpiest part of Alabama. It's not a real case, like they're going to go after them for wirefraud. I mean, it's just completely ridiculous. And this is what Trump World does. They twist the laws and the rules
to give the guy something. So there we are. Meredith Shiner is a contributing editor at The New Republic.
Welcome, Thank you, Mollie, it's so great to be back.
Let's talk about Virginia. Yesterday, Democrats Republicans Virginians voted on whether or not to redistrict Democrats one. It is now it has to be signed off on by the court, but it looks like it's going to be a ten to one map, which is really something. Republicans are very mad.
Yeah, I mean, this is a really big deal. First and foremost Republicans are mad because they thought they were always going to be the only ones.
Who could do this.
Republicans have been jerrymandering these maps. They've been trying to have mid cycle redraws of maps for a very very long time. And one of the things that they banked on was that Democrats were going to be so committed to the rules and democracy and looking like they were above it that they would continue to take state houses across the country that they would continue to read house maps to shape the power in the United States Congress.
And what you're seeing, I think in Virginia is a recognition from the electorate that that no longer serves us. It does not serve democracy. It doesn't serve the people of Virginia, and it doesn't serve people in purple states across the country. You know, it exists sort of on two levels. Even saying purple state, I had to take a pause because I think our conception of what a Republican state is, a blue state, a purple state, and a red state is actually really informed by which states
are overly jerrymandard and which aren't. States like North Carolina where Republicans permanently tried to entrench a super majority with the way that they drew lines. So I think this is a big step in the right direction in terms of how we think about local politics.
But I also think it's.
Really important in terms of how we think about national politics, how democrats can act across the country, and the kinds of steps were quiet to actually reclaim democracy that we have lost, because it no longer is beneficial to pretend like we live in an ideal world and.
Hope that it bounces back.
What you're seeing in Virginia is that fifty one percent of voters there see the world we're living in, don't like it and want to do something about it. And they're doing that in a world where there's been rampid misinformation, where the information ecosystem about what's even happening is completely broken. I saw a really great video from Jammel Boui yesterday and he was talking about the kinds of mailers and ads that he was seeing, right because he lives to
ma genulate democratic voters against this choice. And I think the overwhelming sentiment about where the country is going and that we need to actually act to do something superseded all of the other bad factors in play in order to send this message not just to people in Virginia, but I think people across the country.
And I want to talk about one of these sphereheads of this legislation, a woman called she's the President pro temp for of the Virginia Senate. She's a Democrat. Her name is Lois Lucas. She is eighty four years old and has been just a powerhouse, very tough black woman who has who represents Chesapeake Bay and has been in the Senate from nineteen ninety two. She represents the eighteenth district. The reason why I want to bring her up is
any number of reasons. But she's got a very good Twitter game, which again is cool, but she also just is very tough. And you know, sometimes we criticize the older members, and we're going to talk about that in a minute, because there's a member of Congress who has died in office. But this woman is just awesome. And
she did push back, you know, a lot. There was a real tension in Virginia between Democrats who wanted a jerrymander that was like the California jerrymander where you get it five seats and not like a jerrymander, which is like a killer jerrymander, which is ten seat, ten to one. And she pushed back and was like, no, we are going to fight back the way Republicans are fighting back here.
And that gives Democrats a little bit of a buffer in case the Supreme Court does something really insane or Florida.
Push it in case or when with a Supreme Court, it's more of a when or not if. Look, when we talk about the jar intocracy. I think in a lot of ways, what we're doing is using a technocratic word for out of touch. And for some members, I think the issue is not that they are old. It is that they're completely out of touch with the lived experience on the ground for the people that they are supposed to represent and paying attention to these issues, understanding
them fully. It's not necessarily a function of age. You could have a twenty five year old in Silicon Valley who doesn't really get the fall of democracy or the rise of authoritarianism, and so I think what you saw here was someone who has lived through some of the changes that we've had in this country since the nineteen sixties, right, and the process of progress and retrenchment, and is familiar with the opposition and their tactics and wanted to adapt
in a way that was commensurate to the moment. And that is not a function of age. I think that's a function of awareness of living in some of these state legislatures, like what happens in Washington, I think because we see capitol buildings across the country, and we see the US capital and we see politicians, there is this tendency to flatten them, or to flatten what their work
is or how they engage with their constituents. And I think what you saw here was an example of a politician who saw the reality, who saw what was happening across the country, and who recognized her own agency and power to do something about it. And that's the second piece of I think why people are complaining about the gerontocracy or writers in Washington is because they're out of
touch with what's happening. They're trying to pretend that they're living in a different reality than the one we live in now because grappling with that reality is uncomfortable for them, and they're denying their own agency in any context where they could make a difference. They're not choosing to pull every arrow in their quiver in the way that some of these people in the States are, because we've been living with the collapse of the federal government for a
really long time. And conversely, and I think this was an embedded eater question. Also, Molly, we've seen what Republicans do at the state level and how that can really ladder up to national politics. Republicans forever have wanted to use the states as a peatrie dish to practice some of their policies or their oppression and try to export
it to the rest of the country. It has been probably two decades since Gail Collins is as GHEs Texas, But the entire theory of that book was how everything that happened in the Texas State House and in the governor's mansion in the eighties and nineties ended up in some way creeping into our federal law making, you know, decades later.
Yeah, And so.
We're looking at this map, we're looking at how everything has become fractured. And I think the people who are going to far the best in the eyes of history are the people who look at reality, look at the kind of tools they have available to themselves, and really carve out of space where they can fight and make
a difference. And that's what you saw in Virginia, and I think it's what you're going to continue to see in states across the country, especially if we're not seeing as much action in Washington as we should be.
And Fox News, trying to silence her, made a big graphic that had a picture of her face, right because Fox they want you to know that she's a black woman. They can harass her, And underneath there was a quote that said you all started it and we fucking finished it.
And they were doing this in order to get Trump to retweet it to harass her, and she just retweeted it herself, which I think is such a great example of what to do when mag verse comes after you, which is to just because the moment you start apologizing for yourself, the moment you start saying, oh, maybe I did something wrong, that's the moment you engage them. But the moment you are unapologetic about the about what pushing back looks like, about meeting Republicans where they are, that's
the moment you have real power. Yeah.
You know where my brain immediately went when you started talking about Fox News was also this week, Fox News has been attacking Elmo and Sesame st because Rommy Yusef did a bit on Sesame Street where he called Elmhabibi and it was just like it was such sweet, wholesome content.
And I remember the second that I saw that video post from Sesame Street and Rommi Ramy's an Arab American comedian, a Muslim American comedian, and I was like, Oh, Fox News is gonna have a field day with this because they have a formula, they have people that they're looking for, they have things that they're looking for, and their rage machine runs on just the most fabricated rage.
Yeah, and black women. It turns out people who.
Are super cool and contribute to our society but don't look like old white men are people they don't want actually in a discourse or us familiarized with. And I just feel like there's a natural ceiling to that kind of propaganda. And I mean, when you look at what happened in Virginia, I think that that shows it that they have a particular base that they are activating, whose
minds they are melting. But then the rest of us are out here and in some ways reachable, And how do we think about telling people concrete steps they can
take to make change? And I think that's sort of the last part of you know, Okay, Republicans are creating this cartoon version of who a state representative is versus thinking about the people who are looking for change we are, you know, I would say, like six seven months away from a midterm and wanting to know concretely what they can do to make a difference in our lives and
for our democracy and to make government work again. And I think the cool thing in Virginia or California pursuing this proposition is it something concrete, it's tangible, it's easy to explain why it is necessary, and people are voting
for it. And so if there is there's a lesson here, it's that Republicans sure they're going to continue to try to find tweets or paint this reality that makes it seem like Democrats are the aggressors now, even though they're just showing up, you know, twenty five years late to the table that Republicans set, and we can't take that bait. You're right, you know, we can't. We can't let democrats be like, well, we don't. We don't want to be positioned as the bad guy, so we're not going to
be assertive. I don't think that's the right tactic. I think the takeaway year should be voters want this, voters want to fight, and they believe in a democracy in a country that works, and so let's give them options and let's state it clearly and let's see what happens.
And it turns out, at least this week in Virginia it was successful and what kinds of ideas, platforms, messages are you going to cultivate and expand upon in the next half a year before midterm, And what kind of promises are you going to make in order to motivate people in the way that they were motivated at Virginia yesterday.
And I would add just to go into Fox News for a minute, and it's anti Muslim racism for lack of a better word, because that's what it is, xenophobia. Yeah, we saw Obama this week and Obama has not done a ton of campaigning, so I think is really notable when he sort of gets involved in things. He went with Zoran to do some photos with these pre k kids in the South Bronx. This is a free pre k It's a big thing that Zoran is highlighting, and I think it's important. I have like two things I
want to say about it. One which is that I think it's good politics, good retail politics, and seeing Obama highlight it shows that I think Obama also thinks it's good retail politics. But there was another thing that Zoran did that I'm really impressed by and I want you
to weigh in on it. He was on Meet the pras yes this week and Kristen Walker, who I think it does a very good job in a very tough job because this is not you know, network television is really hard, pushing these people a lot of times, very hard. But she did this question that journalists often do with Democrats, and Democrats always fall for it, which is, who is your twenty twenty eight pick? It is not the midterms yet, it is an insane question, and I think even it
was worse than that. I think it was like, oh, do you support Harris running for president? And twenty twenty eight? Yeah, but it's a great if you're an interviewer trying to get a viral moment, which is part I mean she is. That's what she's doing, right, and that's what a lot
of people do when they're in this job. And he said to her, I am laser focused on affordability, which I think is the only way to answer that question because it's not up to him, it's up to the midterms, it's up to primary voters, and honestly, who cares what he thinks? What do you think about that?
Well, to break apart the two parts of your question, I frankly thought you were going to ask me about his moment yesterday where he was asked by a reporter whether or not he'd curse the Mets and whether he could uncurse them because they haven't once since he hugged mister Met, right, which is my back, my favorite Zora Mandabie moment.
That's well, that's because in your post, which is owned by Rupert Murnoch, had a big story yesterday about how he did curse the Mets.
The Mets, which have always been in the metal team, are genetically cursed. Like that is the point of the Mets, is that they are cursed. But I don't want to side rail our conversation more than I already have with.
The Barack Obama visit.
I the thing that I took away from that was that zoramm Donnie is really good at this, and he's really popular, and Barack Obama actually wanted to attach some of his currency to that person, which yeah, and I think that's really notable to show up there and to be like, you are doing really good work. This is a really good opportunity and I want to be there for it. And we haven't seen Barack Obama do a lot of that with other politicians and I think that is a little bit of game recognizing game.
Trump. But both Trump and I love mon Dami because they see game.
And that's not even really engaging with the ideological questions of where Zaura mom Dannie is or where Barack Obama was in terms of their impact. But I think it's this recognition that you are doing this in a way that is compelling to people, and I want to maintain my relevance in being compelling to people.
So that's the first part.
The second part is that I think it's really important to not engage with questions that don't matter to other people. So this idea of who's going to be the nominee in twenty twenty eight, that is a parlor game question that is more interesting to people within the beltleigh who want to talk about it at cocktail parties afterwards. And you're right, it doesn't say anything about what the task at hand is. It doesn't say anything about how do
we win the midterm. It does say anything about what kind of assurances do we need to make to voters in terms of investigations, accountability, and change in order to win back the House.
And aside from that, that's not even soral mom. Donnie's job.
He is Mayor of New York, and that is a big enough and busy enough and hard enough job without actually playing the role of political pundit. And so you saw in that moment that he was really capable and competent at that. There was another moment recently where Secretary Mayor Pete Buddha Judge was on CNBC and he was fighting with I forget the token Republican.
He's not a toe.
He's not a toe.
There are a lot of token Republicans on there, but that was that was the best frend of Donald Trump. Joe Kiernan also is often whenever you watch him, whenever he is a Democrat on he makes them disavow, either find a Republican to disavow, or a Democrat to disavow, or someone who they he thinks is last I've seen him break people making them disavow Hassan Piker.
So this clip was amazing because Joe Kiernan was like, oh, well, inflation is so bad and Democrats promise to like get rid of inflation, and inflation was so bad in COVID and people did just didn't take the bait. He's like well, the president promised to do this and he has it, Like you said, it would be X, and it's why. And when someone was like, well, why don't you talk about Z, He's like, I'm not here to talk about Z. We're talking about X and Y and its basic math.
And it was so simple and it was so straightforward. And I think that there has been this preference or habituation to fear from Democrats because while there's overall a discourse that the media is biased towards liberals, part of the correction I think that reporters do, even if it's subconsciously, is to take some of those Republican talking points and put them towards Democrats in sort of this proof that
they're not actually liberals. But what that has done is fundamentally skew our discourse towards Republican talking points and made democrats, I think, fearful to either reject the premise at the outset or speak their peace because all of the rules of the game are designed by people who functionally are not aligned to their outcomes. Right.
No, I think that's a really good point speaking of gerontocracy, and you and I both critical of this often, but today we have a Democrat, an eighty year old Democrat has died in office, David Scott. He is one of the many backbenchers in Congress. He is eighty. It's very sad he's died, but it also means that the shift in the Democrats do not have the majority. Republicans of the majority, but it's very tight. Let's talk for a
minute about what last week. We saw Eric Swawell, who has been on this pot guest and who I knew and was friendly with then who turns out to be accused of some pretty heinous stuff. He resigned, And at the same time they had a Republican called Tony Gonzalez resign. It was sort of a one from one. Gonzalez had an affair with a staffer who set herself on fire and is accused of having other affairs with staffers and also perhaps sexual harassment too, so both were both resigned
at the same time. There's also another member of the House of Republican, Corey Mills, who is accused of some really heinous stuff and also has an ethics investigation against him. Plus we have Cheryl Scherphilis McCormick who has resigned. She was long story, but she's alleged to have taken five million dollars in COVID funds and use them for campaigning.
Discuss So you're gonna have to invite me back so we can spend more time talking about the culture of misogyny and absolute ethical morass that exists on Capitol Hill. But to your question, I actually think this relates back to what we open with and the idea of gerrymandering and what is fairness and what undergirds our democracy. Any chamber where one person dying could upend the balance of how we function as a government is probably not a
really stable system. And the idea that Tony Gonzalez could not or would not be released from Congress until Eric Swalwell also proved to be a monster in this insane sort of eye for an I Hamabi's code of bad people who need to be kept on a ledger because one vote could make the difference on whether or not the current president of the United States gets to run around completely untracked and with no congressional investigations.
That's a bad system.
And when we think about everything that has contributed to this moment, whether it is jerry mandering, whether it is the Electoral College to determine our president. Whether it is a Congress that has pretty much self neutered itself and stepped away from its Article one obligations because Republicans.
Are in charge.
But you have the quote unquote people's House where people are being held around, unethical people, bad people, people who hate women, people who hate laws are being kept around because that one vote makes a difference. That is not in the service of the American people. It's not in the service of their constituents, and that's a really tough place for us to be as a country.
Meredith, thank you, thank you, thank you. Will you please come back? Yes, I will come back anytime you want to have.
Me, Molly.
Michael Calderon is the media editor of The rep. Michael Calderon, Welcome to Fast Pontank.
Thanks so much, Molly, you're here.
You might beloved an editor for like five years or something.
We had a form of this phone call like every day.
Yeah, so it's great to have you here. And you've come on to talk about the White House Correspondence Weekend, which is at best. You know, there was actually Paul Fari, Yeah, was a really smart Washington Post media critic. Washing Post died, and now he's at the Atlantic and he had a really good piece today about how even at its best, the Correspondence Dinner is highly fraught, but this is not at its best discuss no.
I mean, there has been a running critique of the Correspondence Center that it just shows the kind of coziness, the chumminess of Washington between reporters and the people that they covered, the people they're supposed to be holding accountable.
And so a lot of people have criticized the dinner over the years.
The New York Times stopped going in two thousand and seven and hasn't come since because of this. They just felt it's bad, the optics are bad, it's a bad look. We can just cut the whole thing. The Correspondent Center always invites the president, whether it's a Democrat or Republican, and they did that throughout Donald Trump's first term.
He never came.
The first year of his second term, he didn't come. And now they're coming. And that's where the problem is. It's not inviting a Republican president. It's inviting a president who has attacked the press mercilessly throughout the last fifteen months and whose administration has clamped out on press access, has threatened news organizations, and Trump personally has sued news organizations.
So you're going to have the guest of honor a guy giving a speech sitting up on this platform who has undermined the press, you know, throughout his second term.
That's why it's not normal.
Yes, he has undermined the press again. Like one of the big problems. One of the big themes we see in Trump world is like norms versus laws. So there are a lot of things like like smashing the East Way that is not illegal technically, but nobody ever tried to do it until now. So talk us through this sort of There are a lot of When you look at the Washington Press Corps, they are governed by a lot of norms.
Yeah, you know, there's no law that reporters have to be in the West Wing that they get to ask the Press Secretary questions on a given day. These are all these are all built out of relationships between the Press Corps and the White House, regardless of who's in power. These are the negotiations that happen in terms of access,
in terms of getting questions of the president. And so, for instance, the White House Correspondence Association has long been able to determine which reporters covered a president as part of the pool. This is like, you know, if he's in a small setting in the Oval Office, he's traveling, he's at mar A Lago. It's very important to have small group reporters that can cover it for the wider
press corps, for hundreds of other journalists. And one of the first things this administration did in the second term was take that away. They put it under the control of the White House. One of the other first things they did was bar the Associated Press from covering the president up close because they refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And it was these types of restrictions that start in the beginning. And it's
not just that the White House. We saw this at the Pentagon where the Pentagon put forth restrictions last fall that drove dozens of news organizations to leave, including CBS News, which is invited Pete hegset to sit at one of their tables at the Correspondence And I think that's why it feels different than past years, and that you have administration officials like Pete Hegseth and even Brendan Carr, the FCC chair who has targeted broadcasters, was invited by Paramount.
And of course Donald Trump is going to be sitting up on the top of the stage.
I want you to talk about what's happening right now with Paramount CBS. Barry Wise is a favorite of the right wing billionaire class, is very involved in this Paramount murder. CBS is about to to be part of this enormous engine that is both TikTok and CNN if it passes. She has not increased viewership at CBS, but she has undermined a lot of the really good reputation that CBS had as being nonpartisan. A lot of people of theories about her are like why she's brought in or what
she's doing? What's yours?
Yeah, I mean, I think David Ellison, who his company Skydance merged with Paramount. Now he's trying to merge and take over Warner Brothers Discovery, which is even bigger. It means that not only will he control CBS, but would control CNN potentially by the end of this year or early next year. And you know, Ellison then bought The Free Press for one hundred and fifty million dollars and installed Barry Weiss, and I think he's given her a
lot of leeway. She has a lot of latitude to make changes, and she is And I think one of the issues with her early on was she abruptly pulled a CBS sixty Minutes segment, which was extremely unusual. It was hours before in a broadcast, this was after it was being promoted. And I think one of the questions with her is she making some of these moves for political reasons, and certainly some people inside CBS think so, Or is it just that she's a novice. She's never
worked in TV news. She hasn't even worked very much in reporting or investigated reporting. Primarily, she's been a commentator, and she's somebody who started a website that is largely around her worldview, a kind of more right leaning, anti
woke point of view. That's fine, but she has never done the type of journalism that you see at a place like sixty Minutes And so the big fear now at sixty Minutes is that their season is over in May, and there's an expectation that she's going to really shake up that broadcast. Now she already shook up the CBS even news put Tony de cooppele there. She's made changes elsewhere. But the issue at sixty minutes, this is their highest rated.
TVD crazy numbers, right, what are the numbers on sixty minutes?
This is a show that brings in ten million people.
It's crazy. By the way, there's nothing that brings in ten million people.
It's an anomaly.
And so if you have a show that's doing really strong journalism and is popular and you want to break it up. So that's the issue right now inside sixty minutes. And then so you have Barry Weis is going to be at the dinner, David Ellison presumably be at the dinner. They're reportedly throwing some kind of private function that said it was not even an honor of just sixty it was not even just an honor of CBS journalist, but in honor of the Trump White House.
And yeah, playing out as they need.
Regulatory they need a regulatory approval to finish the Warner Brothers Discovery merger. And that's the big one down the line.
You know, it's funny because there is another Fed governor who I've talked to before, and she is constantly talking about she's the one Democrat still on the committee, and she talks about how a lot of stuff friend of Carr is threatening, he can't actually do. Like, so much of what we've seen is that the right has threatened
things and people have just rolled over. I'm thinking of like Sherry Redstone canceling Colbert like things that just they're just doing it because they're like, whatever is more than obeying in events, obeying plus plus plus in advance. Where else do you see that?
Yeah, I mean we saw this last year when Paramount was trying to merge with Skydance, and within weeks before they finally got that approval, you know, Paramount negotiated this multimillion dollar settlement with Donald Trump over his loss and fifty minutes.
We've seen this before.
Abe Disney also settled with Donald Trump just as he won the presidency over him suing because of something.
George Stephanopoulos said.
Donald Trump issued a lot of news organizations, and usually these ins organizations fight back. The Wall Street Journal has, the New York Times is, the BBC is But we saw Paramount settle as they were trying to complete this merger, and so you know, you're talking about Brendan Carr can't control everything, and in some ways, the FCC is they largely control even broadcast and radio. They can't control cable and you know, other sort of platforms.
So he is limited in what he can do. But the threats he can make.
You know, if a company has a merger down the line, that's obviously going to make them think twice.
But it is funny because it's like, if you think about Elon and the way in which Elon has really done illegal stuff right with his companies, and even we've seen him, you know, he'll say things like if Democrats really investigate this, I'm going to jail, you know, that kind of thing. That's not verbatim, but he's definitely intubated that he's done stuff that has at best flaut of the laws and at worst is illegal. But Democrats don't seem to threaten that same way. They don't seem to Yeah.
They've never done with Brendan car did.
Which is an FCC chair saying that the president is
quote winning against the fake news media. I mean he's taking a victory lap for Colbert for other instances in which the media has seem to cave that has never happened before, and we can we can play this game a million times of could you imagine if Obama's FCC chair was going after Fox News day in and day out coverage was looked like it's something we've we've never seen this, this kind of brazen this before, or you know, trying to take a win for the president and it
comes as Trump as attacking. So to have the SEC chair kind of echoing that the president is winning, it's a whole new ballgame, and it's it's why all of this is not particularly normal moment to invite the president and his cabin and other officials to the Correspondence Center.
When you talk about the media, a lot of times we end up talking about because the media is sort of owned by a lot of rich, powerful people like Jeff Bezos, like Loreen Pale Jobs. Now, Loreene has been a really good star war right, she owns the Atlantic, She's very building up right. Bezos has tried to crush the Washington Post and has made it as small as possible and has undermined the editorial page any which way.
So when we have this conversation about media, it often just goes up to billionaires because billionaires own media, a lot of billionaires on media. Do you think, as we're watching this that we're a year and a half into this Trump administration, what we've seen is that billionaires have just signed off on everything, and as the normal people who have been the brave ones, are you surprised by that?
Because remember we all live through that news cycle where like Jeff Bezos was going to save democracy.
Yes, I mean, I think I think it was the most telling moment was on day one of this whole second term when we saw Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg all standing there with other captains of industry, in the tech world, in the media world. And I think the relationships between media owners has come under more scrutiny in this term because we're seeing how is Patrick Schushan, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, interacting with both
Trump and with Magoworld, Or what about Jeff Bezos. I mean, and you know Jeff bezosg you know Amazon MGM, you know, bought the Milania Trump documentary. Now, Jeff Bezos has said that he wasn't involved in that position, but clearly his company spent a tremendous amount of money to buy and market a documentary, a flattering documentary about Malania Trump at the same time that he's cutting.
Three hundred jobs from the Washington Post.
And so, yeah, I think it's I think it's it's it's imperative to look at ownership and what are there other you know, what is their other business before government? And the thing is Amazon has other business for government, so does you know Apple and Meta, but some other media companies, you do have some individual owners who don't have that. They don't have broadcasting license that could be threatened, and they don't have, you know, other regulatory hurdles that
they have to get over. If you're just an independent, rich person and you own a publication news site, you might be in a different place than a bigger media apparatus that has to worry about the broadcast license for you know, TV and radio.
I want to talk about Trump has been doing this thing where he when he gets into trouble, he calls reporters. So he's been calling around reporters.
Now.
Maggie Haberman, who's been covering him for a million years and who covered him when he was just a New York Whealis guy, said that this is kind of what he's always done where he calls around reporters. The New York Press Corps is a very sort of tough group where you like, this is sort of the tabloid culture of calling up reporters and giving them scoops, and by giving them scoops you can shape the way that they cover you, and also that you can make news by
saying lies. Explain to us what you see there and why he seems to be able to use it to such great success.
Yeah, I mean I have to back up Maggie. I mean, she's covered him closer than anyone. But I say this when I was very young, before I was a media reporter, as a real estate reporter in New York, and one of the interesting things was probably the easiest famous person to get on the phone was Donald Trump, which as a very young reporter was surprising. This is somebody who seemed larger than life, big in New York. Real estate
was on TV. But if he called his office, they would often put you through to him because he wanted to give quotes, he wanted to be out there publicly, and he's he's always lived that way. And that's why with when the Iran War starts. Most of what we've been hearing heard from Donald Trump, especially early on and even throughout the past month or so, is little bits of pieces that he tells reporters on the phone.
And there was a period where he must.
Have called a dozen or two dozen reporters over a week period, and you know, oftentimes saying things that conflict from one call to the next, but each one is kind of treated as a headline. It's treated as big news. And you see the White House reporters often going on X and saying, just got off the phone with the President.
He tells me such and such about Iran. And you know that can have an impact. I mean that can move markets.
He's the president that can also generate other headlines, and so you know, it created, especially early on, this kind of fog of war where Trump was talking so much to reporters and bits and pieces, and that's that's just how he operates. And even reporters like Maggie Haberman he attacks on true's social and it reportedly will have her to the White House because she's writing a book on Trump.
It was all sorts of I think almost every reporter who's been close to him has probably been attacked publicly, but he still takes their calls and he often calls them up when he has something to say.
He clearly is able to a lot of times win the news cycle. One of the dynamics that I think is really interesting about the Iranians is that Trump will say things about Iran and the Iranians will be like, s true. How unusual is it to have an American president who's being debunked by the Iranians?
Yeah? I mean, but this is the challenge with this administration at war. You would think being.
At war you would have kind of very sober press conferences daily. At the Pentagon, we haven't had any of that. Pentagon's press conferences are few and far between. They're certainly not day and when we do have them, half the time is Pete Hegsath berating the press corps, even though half the people in that room now are from conservative, right wing outlets, right wing influencers, because most of the traditional press corps is gone, sometimes they let some of
the you know, major news outlets in there. That's the thing that it's it's attacking the news media saying they're against Trump, saying they're you know, unsupportive or the Pharisees or whatever he's saying. That's one of the biggest problems
with the administration getting just accurate basic information. It's hard to trust when when we've seen time and time again Trump say things that are not true or dependagon, you know, attack reporters instead of just giving the basic information at the start of a press conference.
Yeah, and it is also just nuts. So I have one last question for you, Cash. Patal is going to sue The Atlantic for writing that he was an alcoholic. Is he going to win?
Is it going to win?
I think I think it'd be really hard. Anyone can sue for defamation. He's suing for two hundred and fifty million dollars. Trump has sued outlets for ten million dollars. I mean, you can put any number you want on it. But he's going to have to prove that the Atlantic acted with blatant disregard for the facts. They acted with actual malice. And I think that's going to be our just knowing the Atlantic and knowing the type of reporters.
And there's no doubt that lawyers vetted this story before it was published, There's no but probably multiple editors read this story and the thing about you know, anonymous sources, they're not anonymous to the reporter, so that the reporter and their editors know who these sources are and they have trust in these confidential sources.
So no, I think I think it'd be very hard.
Like a lot of defamation suits, it's very hard to prove that an outlet, especially like The Atlantic, is doing this to get him versus they're trying to put something
out there in the public. But it's with hit me right to sue, and it just goes, it goes across with this whole thing we've been talking about, which is like Trump and his allies in the administration either attacking journalists, suing journalists, threatening journalists, and this is all playing out as we're going to celebrate the First Amendment on Saturday.
Unbelievable. Michael Calder and I hope you'll come.
Back, definitely, thanks for having me.
There.
No cool Jesse.
Cannon by Joan Fastoo.
You know, one of the things that we always thank our lucky stars for is the competence in the Trump administration, But rarely do you hear from a voice inside the house just how bad it was. And a ex Pam Bondi aid a profile on Todd. Blanche is saying what we all know, which is these people are so incompetent and bad at their jobs that they can barely make it happen.
Yeah, thank god. So the career prosecutors, the smart people don't want to do the job, only the dumb people and also the alcoholics. I mean, that's what we're seeing. So right now, the people fighting for the Pam Bondi job are har Meet to Dylan and Judge Box of Wine, a crew that is like they can't even shoot straight period.
Paragraph.
But this is Chad Mizell. He is Pam Bondi's former chief's deaf, so he knows what goes on in that office, and he thinks she was too dumb to ever get anything done, something all of us have long suspected about MAGA world, their dumbness, and it's nice to see they are just as dumb as we thought they were. Bonnie's biggest failures in the eyes of the public or her handling of the Epstein files her incredible stupidity, you know, and Donald Trump felt she did not move fast enough
for him. So this is something we say all the time on this podcast, which is thank God, they're stupid, because otherwise we would all be in even more Trump.
You know if this makes me think of one of Ashley Sinclaire's recent videos where she talked about how she'd go to these right wing conferences and it would be like party, Party, Party, everybody's fucking each other, doing drugs and drinking. Then she'd go to the Democrat ones. They're like, all right, I'm gonna leave now, my families in the hotel, see you later everyone.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're all that substance abuse problem. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.