Michael Cohen, Greg Sargent & Parker Molloy

who writes the newsletter The present Age. But first we're joined by Greg Sargent, who writes the plumb Line blog for the Washington Post. Welcome to Fast Politics, Greg Sargeant, thanks for having me on. We're seeing a lot of like really early voting and like crazy numbers of early voting in Georgia. You saw some numbers out of Nevada. But pundit Land is convinced that Republicans are going to

have a red wave. What do you make of those? Well, I don't really like to speculate too much on the meaning of early voting because you can never really tell whether it's just cannibalizing the the election day vote, especially

these days, right because after the pandemic. I think, well, in a way, this is really the first national election coming after we had an election in the pandemic, right, Yeah, so I think we don't really know whether kind of new habits have set in where lots and lots of people are voting early who otherwise would have voted on election day. But either way, I think it's you know, obviously a positive to bank them. But pundit Land is very convinced that there's a red wave. Yeah, for sure.

They seem to be bending over backwards to portray Republicans as swaggering and confident. Yeah. I would love to talk to you for a minute about the difference between the pundit classes reaction to the Georgia Walk or Warnock debate, which was Walker are better than we thought? To the Pennsylvania debate for Fetterman and Dr Oz. Can you talk to us about that? Well, the beauty of the expectations game, to use that awful pundit cliche, is that you can

just twist it fit whatever narrative you want. Right if you say, okay, well I'm gonna say that expectations are low for this guy, then you know, if he doesn't vomit on the stage, you can say, well, he defied expectations, right, or conversely, you know, you can just sort of say that someone still fell short of the expectations even though I lowered them, so they're even worse, right, they didn't even worse than I thought. It's just I think we

need to just end the expectations game entirely. It's an utterly useless construct for understanding debates, And and Fetterman is a really good example of this, right, Like you probably saw how there was a ton of punditry about how

you know Fetterman. Oh, you know, voters aren't going to see this through quote unquote ablest MSNBC frames at all, Right, And they couldn't even fathom the possibility that maybe voters would see his difficulties through the prism of their own challenges, which made them into the ones who are in a bubble,

which I thought was kind of funny. Yeah, I mean that it's so interesting because it's like, we talk so much about this idea that there's a bubble in this in these coastal cities, but then there is a sort of pushback to the like liberalism of coastal cities in the media, which is like to almost overcompensate to be conservative, to make it seem like they're balanced. Can we talk

about that? That is really a serious problem, right, I think that reporters and pundits are heavily inclined towards believing Republicans when they say that they're confident that they're gonna win. And nobody is confident of anything, at least with the Senate map, I don't think right nobody knows what's going to happen. Democratic victory or Republican victory in the Senate. They're they're pretty much it's a toss up. No one knows, and yet the press is filled with Republicans are on offense.

Republicans are confident. And the reason is, I think partly what you identified, which is when Republicans say that they're confident, reporters who are worried about being pasted as liberal kind of worry that, oh, no, I'm missing something. I'm missing something out there in real America, and I can't be seen to be missing something in real America. So yes, Republicans have good reason to be confident. And that's sort

of I think the dynamic. We've seen a lot of that recently, Like you'll have a sort of bad face ploy from Republicans and reporters will go along with it, and then you'll have a sort of a certain kind of like you know, normal play from Democrats and it will be you know, democrats claim it's so interesting because

it's like clearly everyone add some bias. Yeah, and also I think Democrats actually kind of lean in the other directions sometimes, right, Like you constantly see when the tiniest thing goes wrong, You constantly see anonymous Democrats getting quoted wringing their hands about this, that or the other thing. It's almost like they want to approval from the savvy,

you know what I mean. These reporters hold some sort of weird mystical power over some Democrats, where Democrats think they're in the club if they're seen to be not being in a bubble themselves. Right, Yeah, the realistic democrat recognizes that he's probably gonna lose. Okay, I approve, I mean, no,

I think it's true. And it's funny because I was thinking about this because there's a guy who writes for Axios, who comes from right wing world, who was, you know, telling me that I was wrong about Fetterman and that, and it was one of the first people to tweet this is a disaster for Fetterman. Right. This was about that interview. They said that obviously Federman is very pain and I said, well, I interviewed him and he was fine.

So and he got furious with me, and he was like, you can apologize now in the d m s. And I was like, go fund yourself. I didn't say, go fuckers up. And I said, well, I'm not going to apologize from what I saw, but you were attempted to say that though, aren't you. Oh my god, it was my dream is in the movie version, I said, go fund yourself, But in the real version, I said, you know, no, that's what I saw. And he blocked me. Yeah, I mean, good for him, you know, you live in the reality

you want to live. And he got furious. But he wanted me to apologize, you know, for what I saw for because he was like, well, this woman saw something different, so obviously you're wrong. Why don't you And it was like, you know, good for him, man, We're worth trying. Right. And last night Tucker Carlson did a whole segment of veteran This Well defending herschel Walker. Yeah, I mean, I don't think he could ever expect anything remotely approaching much

honesty or consists and see from Tucker Carlson. But that's pretty even, that's egregious even for him. I think because you write so much, and I appreciate it. You've written a lot of stuff you wrote about the doctor Oz and Fetterman debate, and how this this idea of I mean, I actually think Oz looks bad when he attacks Fetterman's health, that he looks like kind of mean. Yeah, I agree with that, and I think it actually kind of resonates

with another plausible understanding of Oz. You know, the kind of supercilious, smug, entitled elite type who swans him and thinks he can just sort of snatch a sentency. Look, I mean, Fetterman really did struggle. I don't think anyone's gonna deny that. And we don't really know whether it will hurt him. It might, it really might, But you know, maybe something like that mitigates it a bit. Right. It kind of plays into Federman's narrative, right, like Edoman is

trying to portray himself with good reason. I think is someone who over is trying to overcome something very difficult and telling voters that that shows that he's a fighter against diversity and so forth, and then he'll understand their struggles. And so to have Odz kind of sneeringly put him down kind of feeds into the larger story and larger contrast Federman is trying to draw. I don't know if it'll be enough. I think we just don't know, but

it could be. It could help. I interviewed Fetterman pre stroke and post stroke, and Federman was always laconic, you know, he was never like a huge talker. Yes he's had a stroke, Yes he struggles, Yes there's auditory processing, but it's not like he was a huge talker to begin with. And so, I mean, I do think of that a lot.

Not that I'm defending him having a stroke. I don't want to seem like I'm saying anything nice about anyone, but I do think like it's not such a radical shift in my mind from the way he is before, at least speech wise, he wasn't like a super fast talk or anything. I want to talk to you about this piece you wrote about the magabase Trump. Let's slip about the Magabase intas to Pete to explain to us

because this is super interesting. Oh, this is the one about the phone call between Blake Masters and Donald Trump. I think, yeah, yeah. Fox News documentary has audio of a call between Donald Trump and Blake Masters after a Blake Masters debate in which Masters kind of surprised everybody

by saying he didn't see evidence of election fraud. And Trump got on the phone and rebuked him and said, look, Carrie Lake's doing a whole lot better than you, and and she's absolutely a hundred percent behind the idea that the election was stolen from me, and so if you want to keep the base on your side, you've got to keep saying that as much as possible. And everyone had a good laugh about that for for good reason.

But I think it's actually like it's it's like a pretty big confession about what's really happened to the Republican base. I mean, Trump is actually right that that in order to energize the Republican base you have to say that the election is stolen from him. And I just thought that was pretty amusic. I mean, at this point we treated as ordinary, which is just kind of bizarre, right, which or maybe something a little bit more like Trump

being Trump or crazy Trump beings any and crazy. But it seems like we should talk a little bit more about the fact that the front runner for the Republican nomination sort of said explicitly that the way to energize Republican base voters is to lie to them about what happened in the election. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really important data point. Ultimately the party has taken.

Really the only thing that everyone agrees on in the Republican Party is that they won in which they didn't and that if they don't win in two it's somehow fraud Right. At this point, what they're saying to their voters is, if you lose, it doesn't count, right, But if you win, it does it does. Right. I've tweeted this a few times. But election integrity, which is the dumb phrase that Republicans used constantly, actually means elections only

have integrity when Republicans win them. Right, That's literally what it means. I mean, that's not hyperbolic, it's actually what they believe. It's what they mean. Yeah. I do worry that we are not panicked enough about this. I actually went on medi show yesterday and Meddie talked about this a lot. He argued with this guy from Brookings about

it on Morning Joe. There's a lot of like, don't say that this antidemocracy is the road to authoritarianism because it sounds bad, but that's what it is, right, Well, yes, I mean I don't understand how anyone can really deny that. I think you're talking about the exchange this morning. Yeah, maybe it was this morning with med and uh, I can't remember the other guy's name from Brookings. Yeah, and that that got a lot of Twitter buzz going and people were kind of dunking on. I guess his name

is shod Yeah. But I side with media on this. I mean, it's hard to look at the Republican Party today and deny that non trivial swaths of the base and even the elected officialdom are are moving in that direction. I don't know how you can deny that. Yeah, but it is like you definitely are seeing there's a pushback,

and again I think that's that normal. As a you know, mainstream media is very worried that they're going to call fire in a crowded theater, so they're you know, in a certain way they're kind of you know, slow rolling at Yeah. I mean, I guess it sort of depends, right, Like, the major news organizations are in some ways doing really great work, right in the sense that they're documenting a lot of this stuff and and really grew some granular detail.

You know, there was an AP story about the insanity in Arizona. The Times on you know, the Post do a lot of that stuff. I think maybe where we all struggle a little bit is in getting the language right to describe this, which is kind of a different matter from reporting in a granular way on it, which the news organizations are doing. It's hard to find the right language for this stuff, don't you think. Yeah, I think it's twofold. It's hard to find the right languages

for this. It's hard to write about it. And also you don't want to be wrong, right, And you know, I think there's probably a real, a widespread worry about appearing to alarmist and it appears partisans sort of automatically to just be saying that one party has gone off the deep end. And that's kind of a hard thing for news organizations that are nominally wedded to a kind of I don't know, not particularly well defined ideal of objectivity to do right right? No, No, I agree, I

think it's really important. So what are you watching in this last eleven days or twelve days or thirteen days? I don't I want some good polls out of Pennsylvania. Are there any polls that you trust? It's sorry to be unfun here. No, absolutely, I mean I think that I think we all know that the industry is in something approaching crisis and if something goes wrong, if there's a major miss this time, it's going to be even worse.

But all we have are are the polling averages, right, And I'd like to see three or four quality polls out of Pennsylvania. Another thing I'm kind of looking out for is a surprise by Catherine Cortes Masto, who I think could conceivably survive against Adam Um. I had to use the word expectations. But this is why I'm paying

attention to that one. If she can hang on, and I think it's possible, right, I think it's getting written off as being treated as she's being treated as the most vulnerable incumbent, and I can kind of see that. But if she survives and the Latino vote goes to her by size of little margins. I think people are gonna have to rewrite their front the narratives in a

big way. Conversely, if she loses in the Latino vote is part of that, then I think we've got a really the Democratic Party is going to have some major reckoning to do. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean I think either way this could be a very bad night

for polsters. Yeah, well, right, it will go the other way, and I think everybody, I mean, it's almost comical to watch some of the big data people kind of hedge their bets, and that I think of like in two sixteen they were wrong right with Trump, or they were off enough to really be wrong, and then they were wrong on all those Senate races like Sarah Gideon up by eight points or something. Oh yeah, no, that's true. I mean, the state polling is is a real mess.

And then of course the House races. I have to say, I don't remember exactly what the prediction models were showing in the House, but I don't think anyone expected something. Democrats underperformed on the polling in right, They underperformed the polling right, so the polling didn't really capture the kind of the deterioration on down ballot for Democrats, which I guess is you know another that was a very challenging

thing to get right though. I mean, you really had this kind of anti Trump majority across the country that was really hit unprecedented turnout levels both in and but in a weird dynamic kicked in where that anti Trump coalition wasn't entirely a pro democratic coalition, Right, Greg Sergeant, please come back. I will. I'm always happy to. Michael Cohen is the host of Mayakalpa and the author of Revenge, How Donald Trump weaponized the West Department of Justice against

his critics. Welcome to Fast Politics, Michael Cohen. How you doing, Molly? Long time, long time. You have a new book and I want to talk to you about it. It's called Revenge.

Why did you write this book? And who's getting the revenge? Well, that's the interesting The revenge should really be considered as the revenge of the entire um country as against an individual who, for some unknown reason has decided that he was going to ignore what forty four presidents before him had done, and that is to protect our democracy, as opposed to trying to create an autocracy, something that our founding fathers were always always concerned about, that there would

be a president that didn't really want to be a president, that wanted to be a dictator. But the reason that I wrote the book is I wanted people to understand the true story, the real story, the accurate story about me and what happened to me. So the way I look at revengees, it's really the dissection of the most corrupt investigation into a citizen of the United States, literally in American history. And the part I really want people

to understand is what Revenge does. It demonstrates using my case, is the example what happens when you have an autocratic, fascist minded president who elects to weaponize the Department of Justice in order to silence a critic. Because I promise you, if we allow ever back into the White House, if we allow someone like Donald Donald Trump two point oh, that's the end of our democracy. So I want to push back on that for a minute, because do you

think Trump will run again? No? No, But I'm not even worried about well, because, as I've been saying all along, this isn't a new common for me. I've said it all along. This is the big grift. The man has seen what he can do in terms of fundraising off of we'll call them the stupids of society that give to a billionaire money that he can keep and use of it as his at his total and soul discretion.

They're giving their their needed money to him, and he's already raised what over a quarter of a billion dollars doing it. This is the greatest grip to him, and it's really only the remaining grif that he has. This all stops if and when he becomes you know, a candidate. Explain that to me a little more. What ends up happening here is he has this superpack while he is just the will call him power broker, which he legitimately is.

While he's power broker, he has the super pact that, if you look at the fine print on it, he is permitted at his sole discretion to use of the funds that come in anyway that he wants. If he becomes a formal candidate, it has to go into a formal candidates coffers right, which then of course gets disclosed in the whole nine yards, But he cannot use it there. It's regulated um More to um rules that don't permit this sort of we'll call it abuse, right, that makes sense.

I'm still kind of shocked because I always think of Trump as someone who, when there's a possibility to do the worst possible thing, he almost always does it. Well, that's probably true, But another reason why he won't run is because he knows statistically that he cannot win. Now, he may be successful, maybe successful in winning a primary, but he cannot win a general election. Even his support

amongst the Republicans is waning. Now, I'm not talking about the fringe whackadoodles that have decided that he's the next coming of Christ. I'm talking about Republicans that voted for him the first time but are actually skids shitless that the guy could end up back behind the Lincoln desk, you know in d C. Let's not forget Molly. This this whackadoodle, and there's all the way to describe him.

Took documents from the White House, top secret classified documents that we just learned our nuclear in nature, that deal with Iran, that deal with China. Actions of this man are so illegal. Immediately be indicted and incarcerated. Anybody else would have already had the full force of this government, you know, breathing down their neck and you know, kicking

down their doors, as he likes to say. Except for him, he has no care in the world about what he does to this country, to our national security, to our relations, to our international relations, both positive and negative. He is a true menace to society. He is a menace. There's no other way for me to describe this. I mean, you know him better than probably ninety nine point nine nine nine presented population, right, Okay, I mean I think you know him pretty well. You work with him for

a long long time. I do, accept Molly. Remember when I worked with him state company, there was media involved and so on. The Donald Trump that you are seeing now the worst version of himself imaginable. And it's a totally different Donald that we are now contending with versus what we used to deal with. Okay, he had fights with pain contractors, he fights with developers or with the carpet people. You didn't matter. That's the point I'm trying

to make. Once he tasted the full power of the presidency, that's when he really became the worst version of himself. So so, now that he's not president and he's not platformed. Do you think he's gone back to sort of more of what he was like before, or do you think that the presidency is like a is sort of like a bell. They can't be unwrong. It is definitely the bell that can't be unwrong. The fact that this man was sitting with thousands of pages of documents that belonged

to the National Archives. The fact that he got Christina Hobb, a lawyer, to sign a document to which was sent to the National Art Type stating that he does not have any more documents or he doesn't have any documents. Then they figure out that he does, then they raid the place. She's now in trouble. He should technically be in trouble. We're now learning that there are potentially additional documents. This man is completely uninged. So let's talk about those documents.

Because you know him, So why do you think he took the documents? Like do you think because there's so many different theories and like I've heard very smart reporters say things like, well, he's just messy and disorganized. I've heard other theories. I mean, you know him. Do you think he took the documents because he was hoping for a black mail scenario, or do you think he took the documents because he was messy and disorganized in or in a hurry, or do you think there's some other

reason that we are not fully processing. No, I've been very um consistent in my statement, which is he took them for money and power. This was his get out

of jail free card. He would use these documents too, either extort the country in the event that an indictment was forthcoming, where he would state I have nucle ar secrets that I mean I in August thirty one, I had stayed several of these things, including my fear that he has additional documents that are being stashed in other places, like you know, maybe the kids houses, his apartment here in Fifth Avenue, wherever the man was and needs to look.

But it's all about the money and the power. So you think he took those documents with the hope of blackmail in the United States government or blackmailing the the other governments. But well, we don't know the answer to that one. But it's definitively to blackmail the United States government. The statement that I can see someone like Donald saying, is really you want to indict me, You want to incarcerate me. I had documents that will destroyed the national

security of the United States of America. Do you really want to take that risk to put a seventy nine year old guy behind bars. I think the answer is probably no. There's an alternative, and I have an alternative theory as well, which is that this is his four oh one K program right whereby he'll turn around and he'll have Jared or Um somebody on don or Eric go meet with, whether it's g Pain or whether it would be Pootin or whether it would be Mohammed Ben Salmon.

Whereby he would say, look, we have these documents, want them. It's gonna question you xam amount of dollars. Just don't tell anybody you got him from me? Right. I mean, it's interesting because if you think about these tapes, what word has all these Trump tapes? And Trump gives Woodward some Kim Jong staff, and it's sort of like, isn't this cool? I mean so, I guess. I mean. The thing that I'm sort of impressive with the Trump is he's still kind of in awe of the kind of

stuff he got to see when he was president. He has not come to the realization. Yet and this is where I state that I believe he is unhinged. Yet he is not the president of the United States anymore. And the problem is is he walks around his maral Lardo golf club and all that the social club people are calling him Mr. President, and they get up and they they clap for him, they chiff to him. So

in his mind it's very Kim Jung nish. But I want to draw your attention to something that we don't need Woodwards tapes to know that Donald would show stuff like this, you know, to somebody else. We've already seen it happen. Did it happen when for some unknown reason, the Russian ambassador or the um, the the delegation that came to the United States, he showed um documents. The guy is a fucking moron. And he doesn't care about democracy. He doesn't care about process or protocol, None of that

means anything to him. He just doesn't care, right, no question. But I mean, where does he go from here? Hopefully to prison or at least to some form of a home confinement, because unless we stop him, look it goes. Let me just take this back to revenge for a second and I say this, Molly, because you're probably on his enemies list. You really don't want to hope because the consequence is a very significant. It upturns your entire life,

it destroys your family, it's financially destroys you. So you really don't want to hope. One of the reasons again why I wrote Revenge is I really wanted people to understand that what happened to me can happen to you if you allow somebody like Donald Trump into the White House, somebody that has no compunction use the Department of Justice as his hit squad in order to prevent people like

myself from speaking out against him. This is again very dictatorial, autocratic, monarchical, supreme leadersh kind of stuff where he's something negative about Putin. We've seen what happened or what eight nine um oligarchs, negabillionaires that all of a sudden, you know, decided that they can fly and they start flying out of tents, you know, tent floor windows and so on, or have

some sort of a suicide scenario. They realize what's going on in These are people that irked him by making statements that he didn't like, and the result is death now. I even say in the book, I believe if Trump had the opportunity for me to get killed, he absolutely would have liked that. However, he was unable to effectuate that, so instead he decided to settle for my incarceration not once, but twice. And what I do in revenge is I go through the entire case, from the fake steel dot

cier to the unconstitutional remand. And I used that a guideline, a roadmap to speak where it's not me telling you that this is what happened. We speak to former FBI agents who you know and the current FBI agents would be, to former prosecutors, to judges, we speak to just a plethora of individuals that all turned around due to the same ultimate conclusion that this whole thing was concoct by Trump, you know. And again he used the Department of Justice

in order to silence of critic. This is not the way that our forefathers ever expected. I'm not sure our forefathers were such fans of Jews, Listen, I don't know. I never asked any of them, you know, as you myself. I always think like these guys probably would not have been big fans. Michael Cohen The book is called Revenge. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, it's always good to speak to you, Molly always. Parker malloy is the author of the newsletter at the present Age. Welcome

to Fast Politics, Parker malloy. Hey, how's it going, Molly good? I'm so excited to have you. First. Should we talk about Elon mush buying Twitter? I think we should? Yeah, yeah, probably it's it's probably going to affect the whole world, so I guess it's worth mentioning. So let's talk about this because this is super interesting to me. We're we're sitting on this precipice. It's supposed to happen tomorrow, or

maybe it's already happened. There a lot of conflicting reports, but you tweeted out something really interesting, which was that actually, already the Twitter algorithm has a right leaning bias, which is sort of hilarious because we always hear right wingers complaining about that. Can you talk us through that a little bit? Yeah, sure, of course, you know, and this is something that conservatives have kind of done in every

aspect of our lives. They've they've complained that there is a a liberal bias in whether it's mainstream media or whether it's Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, there is always this this sense that they are being discriminated against. And usually what it comes down to is that they just break whatever rules are in place, Like all of these platforms have rules, because you have to have some rules.

Even Elon Musk the as we're recording this, tweeted out a note to try to keep advertisers from from leaving the site. That was the fakess note. Oh it's amazing. Yeah. Well, also it doesn't help that he has a long history of just being a wild liar about all sorts of things, you know, I mean just just look at his uh his support for hyper loop, which was really just kind of a plot to to derail you know, to reinventing

tunnels all the all the time. But with this, part of the argument has been on the right with Twitter is that it has an anti conservative bias, and by that they usually people will point to like, oh, look, this random conservative got their Twitter account suspended because they tweeted something that broke the rules or something that didn't break the rules, but it just got swept up, and so you get all of that kind of mixed in there.

But the difference is when when a conservative account gets gets suspended by Twitter, what you then get the next days you get Fox News putting that person on and being like, tell me how Twitter persecuted you personally. And it's the same thing that they do with with Facebook too.

In sen you kind of saw Facebook freak out because there was an article Gizmoto published that said the Facebook apparently sensors right wing content or a one of their former moderators said that, and so so you had that, and then immediately Zuckerberg freaks out invites like all of the worst people on the right to Facebook to find out what he can do to help them. You know, the rest is kind of history. They got rid of the people who were curating the trending section, so suddenly

the trending topics ended up having totally fake stories. You know, back in the day when we used to when fake news meant like actual, fabricated, invented stories rather than just content we don't like. So yeah, you know, you had like stories that were like Megan Kelly endorses Hillary Clinton, the Pope endorses Donald Trump, like none of those. Yeah,

so you know, Twitter is kind of the same. They do the same thing where they complain and they whine, they say, oh, it's biased against us because no one saw my my tweets this week. All that's going to happen here, I think, is that it's just going to kind of keep going more and more to the right, and it's it's just gonna slowly, I think, become unusable, especially if he makes the kind of cuts that he

wants to make. Like people say they want total, unrestrained free speech, but if you actually look at like, you know, what Musk originally said was that he wanted speech that was, you know, in line with whatever the law says, so anything that you could legally say should be allowed on Twitter. That was his original point before we tried to walk it back earlier. And if you look at that, I mean that's four chan that which is kind of not kind of it is a cess pool, and it's okay

for cess pools to exist on the Internet. I just don't you know, advertisers won't want to put their ads. You know, look, if you look at for Chance, they're not exactly getting the big brand names buying at space on there. It's so funny because it's like I think that Kanye is a really good example of this. So Kanye said something anti semitic, all his advertisers dropped him.

A week before that, Donald Trump tweeted, Jews better watch out and be more grateful about what I've done for Israel, or out before it's too late, Right before it's too late. Pretty fucking anti semitic. Bardy was silent, like, so does that mean that corporations? I mean, obviously I understand this is about losing money, but like I felt like there were a lot of times in the Trump administration where the sort of third the only kind of third rail

we had, was that corporations were worried about bad publicity. Yeah, and this is something that I wrote about recently. You know, the past several years, there's been a big focus on cancel culture. That's been kind of everything everywhere. And it started when people started to talking about that. They were like, oh, yeah, should someone be fired for a tweet they sent a

decade ago? Probably not, you know, like that was kind of the original idea, but then it's sort of morphed into you know, this this belief that you should be able to say or do whatever you want not face any negative consequences. Now of course you could. You could receive positive consequences for something you say. You could gain followers and gain friends and gain endorsements. But oh no, nothing negative you say should ever hurt your career or

anything like that. And so it just sort of functioned as a way for people to say and do whatever they want, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But you end up with Kanye West ranting and about all sorts of nonsense. I mean, I've been watching some of the Look Longer interviews he's done recently, and it's it's just all over the place, and he doesn't seem to get that what he's saying is wrong or bad. But yeah, there's this there there. There was this thing leading up

to the twenties six team election. You had you know, remember when when the Access Hollywood tape came out and you had Tic TACs putting out a statement being like, we do not condone this. The tic Tac brand should not be associated with this, you know, which is hilarious.

It's sad, but you know, and the same thing happened when Donald Trump Junior we did a meme that was skittles, yeah, comparing asylum seekers and and migrants to Skittles, you know, like, well, what if one of these skittles was was a terrorist and skittles had to be like skittles or candy, not not people. You know, so this sort of thing. Before Trump won, I feel like that brands were like, yes, this,

we have a line. It's fairly clear. If you say something or do something that doesn't kind of that that hurts us in any way, we're going to cut ties. And that's that's why people who are spokespeople for organizations or companies tend to be fairly middle of the road, kind of non controversial type people, not like bomb throwers. They want to avoid controversy because no one wants you to go, oh cool those shoes, the ones that that that the Nazi promotes, you know, like like something like that.

You know. I think trump selection kind of kind of changed the calculus there, and it maybe possibly is starting to come back in a in a small way. But obviously there was there was really great Washington Post column about this bike. Karen wrote it, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, no I know her at yeah yeah yeah, I think I'm butcher her name. Yeah, I'm so sorry, Karen. I love your work. If you if you're listening to Yeah

she's a genius. Yeah, but she had she had a great column that kind of talked about this about how what Kanye is seeing is one thing, but the fact that when a white dude will will say something that is racist or anti semitic, it's at a t t I h yes, continued, Sorry, yeah, so that you know, that's just kind of the I thought it was an interesting point she made that where it was like, Okay, yeah,

everyone can kind of dump on Kanye. And part of it is that once one brand makes this sort of decision, the rest have the sort of cover they need to follow through. That's sort of what you saw like after January six when Twitter suspended Trump and then Facebook was like okay, yeah, we're going to do it too, and you know, it's it provides that sort of level of cover that they need to not do anything controversial to

not alienate people. It's interesting to me because I feel like you have a situation where Jerry Fallwow is less moral right than skittles or tic TACs were a great example of tic TACs, right, Jerry Fallwell Jr. Was stuck with Trump after that Access Hollywood tape came out, but tic tax did not, right, So tic TACs have the moral high ground over a liberty university. Yeah, you know, I'm let's give tax free status of a church. Incredible step.

Part of that, I think has to do with, um, the sort of you know, it's not an entirely unreasonable view of politics to be like, hey, so and so

did something that that I strongly disagree with. But I think that as far as policy is concerned, which is what elections are about, to me personally, used to be Yeah, I can understand why someone like Jerry fault Wall would be like, yeah, I'm going to stick with Trump even though he's the he's a horrible person, because he'll get the policies that I want through, you know, And I think that that happens a lot in a lot of races. You know, That's why people justified voting for Roy Moore

and herschel Walker and all of these. And it's not necessarily a wrong way to think about politics as a whole. But at the same time, it's a little scary that there doesn't seem to be any real penalty for being horrible at this point, whereas like a business like Skittles doesn't have those sorts of political calculations involved. Doesn't have to be like, well, I don't know, we really care about abortion, you know, like that's just not something that

factors in. So I kind of get that, But at the same time, yeah, it's kind of kind of a sad statement that that skittles me may have the moral high ground here. I want to talk to you about one of the things that's happened in these mid terms, and it's become a big trope in the Republican Party is attacking trans people. I think a lot As a Jew, it strikes me as a lot like what happened is what happened with Jews, you know, where they've decided that

there's a good group to target. And I'm curious we Abigail Spamburger. There was an anti Abigail Spamburger ad. I'm curious, Like, I can't imagine what it's like to live through this election cycle. Honestly, it's because you know, for anyone in the audience who doesn't know, I'm trance, So it's very difficult for me. So when I when I was working at Media Matters, which is where I was before I started started my newsletter, I would read through the transcripts

of Tucker Carlson's show. Every night I would read through the transcripts of Sean Hannity Show, and a lot of this stuff has been bubbling up on the right for a long time, and it was getting to me. It was eating away at me because you know, it's it's difficult to sit through, you know, all the segments where it's just people speaking to an audience of two or three million people telling them like, hey, this group, there are a bunch of freaks. They shouldn't be accepted in society,

you know, which is essentially their their message. And in ten I was working on a on a story about what I called Tucker Carlson's local news Broadcast from Hell, and that was basically, he curates the weirdest stories from around the country and turns them into national news stories where it's just examples of of liberal overreach. That was

kind of the the idea there. And so what he what he creates is like, it's an hour long of look, look look at what the liberals are doing in this country, look at all look at how how terrible things are. And no one in no one on TV talked about mentioned trans people more than Tucker Carlson. There's no no one on the left, there is no one in mainstream

media who does that. Tucker Carlson talked about trans people, brought trans trans issues up more than any other person on TV in that year, and I haven't checked since, but he still covers this NonStop. And so part of his argument is the left is obsessed with this topic. The left can't stop talking about this topic. As he

is single handedly fueling an international discourse. It's very frustrating and it's very difficult because after after the marriage equality decision by the Supreme Court, a lot of the anti marriage, anti LGBT groups kind of regrouped and they rethought their process, and they rethought their targets and they went trans people, we can go after trans people. And so they have

and they've been aggressive with it. And it's scary because as they're going state by state passing laws, you know, and in various states banning trans people from participating in sports, making it so trans students can't have access to, you know, locker rooms, or won't be acknowledged by their their name or what have you, you know, and and all of these come with their own justifications to that make it hard to hard to argue with because back in the spring,

it was no, no, no, no, Look, we don't have any problems with trans people. We just really care about the integrity of women's sports. One was sports that was the most Yeah, yeah, we just love We're so feminist. We just care so much about women's sports. Yeah, if someone wants to talk ab out trans people in sports, I think that that's actually something where there there is room for. And this is just my opinion, but I think that there is room for some sort of compromise

on that. But it wasn't about sports. It It was never about that because the people who were saying, look, we don't have anything against trans people, We just we just have have an issue with sports. They were not like signing onto bills that protected trans people from discrimination and employment and housing in public accommodations. It's not like they were like, hey, we agree with this, but we're going to create a sports carve out Like that would

be one thing. But I guarantee if you presented them with that bill, if you presented Ted Cruise with a bill, that would Although he's been pretty vocal about just not liking trans people generally, so he's a bad example, but you get the idea where where these are not people

who otherwise support trans trans people. So it's shifted from you know, we're just really concerned about women sports and integrity of that and all of this stuff with when you think about the fact that they're applying that to bills that deal with kindergarten through twelfth grade, I mean, it's it's one thing. If you want to talk about like hey, n C, double A, Olympics, professional sports, sure

talk about those things. But when they're trying to apply it to like second graders, they really show their hand because at that point, no, no one in second grade has an advantage one way or another. But it's about setting up that wedge to to go, okay, now that we've now that we've moved them from from sports, now we need to find a way to remove them from schools. And so then they tell the students, you have to use the restroom that corresponds with whatever is on your

original birth certificate. And that's another thing that they've been working in the word original into a lot of their legislation that they're trying to pass, because in some states it is possible to update your birth certificate. My my birth certificate says female, My driver's license says female, my passport says female. But that's not what my origin, no birth certificate said. It's a pain to update these things

and no one's just like doing it for fun. And this comes a few years after their argument was no, no, no, we don't have anything against trans people, but we, uh, we worry about what happens if if people who aren't trans go in restrooms and attack people. You know, that was that was a big thing. So that's where the okay, well what about people who have who have gone through surgeries, been on hormone replacement therapy for years? You know what?

What about this? And they've taken all these extra steps and it's not just someone busting into a bathroom to attack someone and they don't know. We don't like that either, right in my mind, as someone who's like comes from Jewish parents and grandparents, like, it just seems to me like a way to try to otherise a group in order to have something to run against, you know, and like it just strikes me that everything they've argued has always been in bad faith and it continues to be.

It's so frustrating, and it's hurtful, and it takes a toll on me. I don't like writing about trans issues. I don't like writing about LGBT issues generally. I did that for a while when I was first trying to make a living as a writer. I wrote a lot about these issues because a there weren't many people doing that, and be when they were, they were writing in really insulting kind of ways. So my my goal was, like, I'm going to try to put things out there that

the frame this in a more humane way. Then in the in the year sense, I tried to branch out, tried to kind of avoid being I guess, you know, typecast as as the writer who only covers this stuff. And so, you know, I started pitching stories various places about politics or media, and media kind of became the the big focus for me, you know, analyzing media and trying to think about how to improve it and that

sort of stuff. But with the way things have been, it's it's hard not to see this through the lens of my own personal fears and frustrations, because that's what it comes down to. It's I'm really a afraid about what happens in the next five to ten years. Right now, I'm personally safe. I live in Chicago. I mean, that's that's about as safe as can be. I mean, the Republican candidate for governor is probably going to lose, but he's pretty extreme. He's he's very anti trans, very anti

LGBT generally. But you know, he's not going to win this time. What I worry about is what happens when the right keeps fighting this, this same culture war, keeps trying to essentially push trans people out of public life. I mean, if if you make it a law where trans people can't use restrooms that correspond with their gender identity, what you're telling them is that every time they're in public and they happen to have to use the restroom, they need to out themselves as trans to every single

person who can see the restroom door. It's it's dangerous and it's it's scary, it's dehumanizing it. Yeah, no, it's set up that way. Tell us what the name of the newsletter is and where people can find out. Absolutely. So the newsletter is called present Age, and you can find that at read t p A. Read the present Age. So read t p A dot com. Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. Molly, I

really appreciate it. No, I really appreciate you. And g d P expanded by two point six percent, reversing a six month slump. Molly Jung Fast, Jesse Cannon, this Rhona woman not a fan. And you may know this. There was a Pennsylvania Senate debate between Dr mehmet Oz and John Fetterman. And John Fetterman has had a stroke and has some auditory processing issues. He was on this podcast a few weeks ago. You know, he had some answers where he was stuttering. He had some answers where he

wasn't stuttering. The same people who are defending herschel Walker as being completely fine are furious and believe that John Fetterman is not fit to serve in the United States Senate because they haven't seen the United States it But anyway, no, that's not the point. But yeah, Republicans are very mad at Fetterman and do not want him in the Senate, though they do think herschel Walker will be a fine senator.

On the radio show of One Hugh Hewitt, he had Rona McDaniel on, and she is the RNC chair but she's also for those of you who remember she was forced to change her name, she is Mitt Romney's niece. So basically, she was making fun of Fetterman for his stroke and making fun of Biden because they all are very obsessed with this idea that Biden is not with it, and that her line was, I think all the candidates got together and said which one of us has to

campaign with Biden? And Fetterman drew the short straw hilarious and then also she said, so Biden said, between the two of us, we may be able to finish a sentence. I want to point out this is a piece in the Washington Post that just sum this up. But my favorite part of this is in the second to final paragraph. The piece says, McDaniel is not the first prominent Republican

to mock someone with a disability. During a two fifteen campaign appearance, Donald Trump mimicked a reporter with a congenital joint condition that limits movement in his arms. So, congratulations, Republicans, you have like a new brand. And for that making fun of people with disabilities, Rona Trump himself, all of them get our moment of fun. 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 towards what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening mm HM