Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And President Joe Biden said Trump didn't build a damn thing. Even though it's Infrastructure Week. We have such a fantastic show today. Congressman Maxwell Frost joins us to talk about.
How Republicans want to shut down the government.
Then we'll talk to tpm's Josh Marshall about President Biden's lowering of drug prices. But first we have the host of the Time of Monsters the Nations, Jeet here. Welcome to Fast Politics, Geet here, good to be here. So let's talk about we're back. The holiday is over, the summer is over, Congress is coming back, and they have a very ambitious agenda which involves doing everything they can.
To danger they're endangered. Republican Congress people discuss.
Yeah, it is sort of strange that it looks like they're going ahead with impeaching Biden, And on one level, kind of makes sense that if you don't really have an agenda you can pass, and you have a fractured caucus, maybe one way to hold it together is to unify against an enemy. On another level, it doesn't make sense because there is like roughly eighteen or so seats where Biden won, and I don't think there are people who are whating in those seats who are Biden one end,
they have a Republican representative. But I don't think in those seats they're going to like cutting up to the idea that that Biden should be impeached because his son Hunter has a giant hog. Then it seems like I don't think anything in the Constitution that justifies I mean.
I'm excited about this impeachment because I mean you ask them like, well, why do you guys want to impeach Biden? And they're like the border fent and all Hunter something I saw on Fox News.
That's it. That's it, right, Yeah, I mean it is a sort of a politics theater. And I mean in some ways, the Congress has become a sort of branch of Fox News. I mean, has a sort of symbiotic relationship of right.
I think that's really true.
Yeah, where the hosts and the parasite have become one. I mean basically, like every Republican congressman like they're dream, they're fantasy. What they live for is to go on Fox, and they're also watching Fox all the time and getting their perception and reality from Fox, and so yeah, it leads to the kind of absurdity that we're seeing now.
It is true.
I want to get back to this idea that like the Republican Party now is just the congressional Republicans are so Fox News, ad Jason, that they are actually like part of Fox News. And I think about your friend of mine, Trey Gowdie, who is neither your friend nor mine, but who is on Fox News and who sort of shot to prominence using Benghazi to get himself a job at Fox News, And like, I think about that because when you watch Fox News, you know, it's sort of
a revolving door of the craziest. And what I think is interesting about Fox News, which I think is also something we've seen with small dollar donations in the Republican Party, is that they incentivize crazy discuss.
Yeah. No, absolutely, I mean I think one way to maybe think about this is the lack of any sort of like governing agenda. And I mean they have things that they want which are wildly unpopular, not to privatize medicare, it's social security. Whereas I think that if they if you do sort of Benghazi type politics poll tics of pseudo scandal, like it's a way of riling up the base without actually having to make the kind of difficult decisions that you need to make about like taxes and spending.
I sort of see this as partially a flight from responsibility. It's also, oh, I think sort of tied in with the sort of gerrymandering or the regional sorting that like Fox is on a grand scheme of things, a niche network, like at the best of times getting three four million viewers, but the niche that watches it is the hardcore Republican base people. You need to get out there to win primaries, and you need to be sending you like twenty bucks
a month if you want to be viable. And just as like sort of Reroblicans have become a minority party, like they're trying to game the system so they can govern both in Congress, the Senate and the presidency with a minority of the vote. They sort of made this alliance with a kind of like you know, minority network, right, They're not like they're not like cv AS or ABC, which themselves are kind of not what they once were like when we were kids in the seventies and eighties,
where everyone watches those networks. So it is a sort of politics of niche casting.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I would also add that it's partially this sort of knee she thing. But I do think like this idea that they have these wildly unpopular ideas and that the Republican Party has really run out of ideas, I think is really important. And when we talk about this Republican Party and the sort of like way they've gotten themselves into this, it was like one of the reasons why Trump won. If we have to go back I would love to never
say that sentence again. One of the reasons why Trump won. But one of the reasons why Trump won was because he introduced some popular ideas, right, Like he said, I'm gonna punish China for taking away your jobs, right because there were places where people had lost jobs because of factories had moved to Asia or wherever, and so he was sort of like, I'm going to be your vengeance, right, He's I'm going to.
Get back at globalization for whatever.
And so I do think like those few ideas that were at least pop you list were in some ways like the first time that party has ever offered anything, not the first, but one of the very few times when that party has offered it, because I mean think about like lower taxes for businesses, I mean, who is that for besides rich people?
Absolutely? And then one side in like your twenty sixty nine years service seeing it now where like Trump was the guy who was saying like I'm not going to cut Medicare and Social Security? Who wants to do that? And even his critique ab Obamacare is kind of interesting that he lied, right, Like he basically to say something that's extremely popular, like well, Obamacare is out working, and I'll get you what Obamacare has but better, right, and how will you do that? I'll make a deal right now.
On the one level, obviously a grift care at a combat But that's very different than the standard Republican message, which is like you get nothing right, We're gonna think this these things away from you. And it's interesting, I
mean at the other remocns. I mean, this is there's many reasons why he's gonna be the nominee, but one of them is that, like if you look at the other people the alternative that they're offering is like sort of a return to austerity, right, like both like you know, Nicki Haley and the sad as, they're all saying like we gotta raise right, and that's really striking, Like Nicki Haley is the reasonable saying Republican. She says, well, people are living longer, that's.
Not we got to pay for this.
Well, luckily for Trump because of his incredible COVID response and the anti vax stuff, people are actually.
Not living longer the good news. Yeah yeah, and at least in America.
At a time where like life expected to see in America is going down. She wants to raise retirement age, which means like literally like youn have like just a butch smaller period of retimerity if she gets her way, and like I'm looking at them, like if the alternative is between that and Trump, who says he wants to want yeah, yeah, yeah, I have you ice cream and that won't make you bad, Like could have all the sex you want without venereal disease, like just gonna like
apaily like high in the sky. But that's still more attractive than saying like you gotta work till you die.
Right, right, right, which might be soon.
I mean, the thing I feel like the greatest trick the Republican Party ever played was not somehow being blamed for lowering the life expectancy in America. I mean, you have a party of anti vaxxers, right who have basically said that all public health messaging is wrong and that people should be taking or Steve warmers, and those people are not blamed for lowering and then like, surprise, surprise, the American life expectancy goes down, and it's like, oh,
we can't blame those guys. I mean I think you should.
Oh yeah, no, absolutely, I'd get to some more vigorous opposition party that would do that. But I mean there's obviously not what we have, but still, yeah, I have the policies that they have, like the actual policies up like Trump's pilots guy stuff. Actual policies that they have are just like wildly unpopular because they're basically like, let's give more money to Uncle Scrooge and Richie Rich and Tiburn's and everyone else. All you Homer Simpsons out there,
you gotta work till you die. Like I would think that's a hard sell. So what's the alternative, Like it's like, oh, well, like Hunter Bidens, he's doing shady stuff, and the immigrants are crossing the border. There's a border crisis. These scandals at least have moret at least they have the appeal that you're not telling people that work till they die. Right, that's a better message all things considered.
Right, I mean, that's the work till you die message. Seems like not a winner. But again, I mean, I just this Republican Party. I mean, I don't want to talk about the GOP debate again because I think we have another one coming up and it's just going to be we're in this, like, I mean, the debate without the front runner.
I just think is kind of a meaningless matrix.
But I do I think it's ultimately kind of like we are finding ourselves with the Republican Party that has no ideas, right, it has these unpopular ideas, or it
has these trumpy ideas. I think the thing that I'm a little bit interested in besides this Republican Party's problem is that there is a pretty interesting moment in American media right now which is a sort of underreported story, which is this idea that like a lot of us are pre depressed about the idea of having to do twenty twenty over again discuss.
Yeah, it's not great. I mean it looks like it's shaping up to be Biden and Trump. Having said that anything could happen, right, especially out of Trump and all these criminal cases, you got to think his health is not that great. But if it is Trump versus Biden, you feel like you're trumped in an endless loop, right, Like this is groundhog Day, but not fun at least Bill Verry in grandagg Day, you got to improve himself
and he came better and escaped the loop. But like I imagine a groundhog Day where it's actually like actually things are getting worse and where you're reading yourself and it's getting worse and worse, and like in terms of psychology, I mean that is actually a bad mental health state to be in that sort of repetition compulsion, right, like where you have to do yet another I get speak
for myself. I tried not to write about Trump because I just feel like I've sort of had my say and don't occupy the mental space where you have to be thinking about Trump and thinking about this like really monster, not just monstrous. Like he's not an interesting monster like Dracula, Right, He's just like this mean, petty, nasty little man. And like the fact that we have to be thinking about him is very depressing. And conversely, like, I mean, I
think Biden has done a lot of good stuff. I mean, I think there's a serious argument if you've made that Biden is the best Democratic president on domestic policy, says like Linda Johnson, And he doesn't have the Vietnam War, which just makes it even better.
And by the way, I'll go along with you on this.
Like one of the things that I think is really important to talk about is like last week Biden started this prescription drug negotiation, which is the first time any president has done it since Medicare part dy right number one. Then we had this bilateral South Korea Japan meeting at Camp David the week before. I mean, the man is doing a lot of stuff. It's just that all we hear about is Desantus refusing to meet with him in Florida.
Yeah, no, that's right. I don't know like how Biden can overcome that sort of grip hold. I mean, it's part of the same story we're talking about how like Fox News and the GOP of breached as what and if that's the case, then Fox News is also setting the agenda for the rest of the media because if he has to pay attention to what the GOP's doing, he's one of the major parties. It is a real problem. I would say Biden has done a lot of great stuff.
Whether I don't know, it's really his decision, and the party has decided like there's no one serious that's running against him, so there's nothing really no one could do. I would have actually thought that they could have gone a different way and just said by I was the guy who came in to defeat Trump, and now that I've done that, you know, the party can move on and we have to go in new direction because I actually think that the party has a lot of really
good people. People are more kind of able to engage with the times.
I mean, okay, so let's talk about this, because I feel like this is a very common conversation that I hear a lot with Democrats is like Biden is old, we should have someone else, and like, I want to talk about this because I feel like, again, if you were running against Ron de Santis, you could say for sure, Ron De Santis is forty four years old. Biden is eighty. Not cool, but Biden is eighty. Trump is seventy seven.
Biden defeated Trump before and again, like, yes, I agree, there is certainly a case to be made that he's too old. But from what I understand, right, he thought and again this is not sort of my sense of the case, and this is sort of my own suppositions, but my sense is that he felt that he was the most likely to be able to defeat another old white guy again. And remember the power of incumbency is humongous.
It is true, that's true.
Yeah, it is incalculable.
And then the other thing is that we have these polls like this poll today, this Washington Post poll, fifteen hundred people, six hundred of those polled were registered Republicans.
It is a poll by Trump's favorite polster, Fabrizio. And again, is it an accurate poll? I don't know.
I mean, it's a poll that asks is Biden too old? And that poll which is more than a third registered Republicans, which is Trump's base, and they're not even registered Republicans. They are primary voting Republicans, right, so they are the real Trumpey base. They you say Biden is too old, but Trump is not too old, So.
Like do with that what you will?
Yeah, I don't know. I mean I think that Trump's baggage is so much greater than anything Biden has. I think that, like if it does come down to a Biden Trump thing, I think like aside from that GOP base, I don't think Trump gets the independence. I don't think anyone wants to go back who's not a hardcore Republican wants to go back to those Trump years. So I'm not that worried about Biden. And to be honest, like I know you're very sort of do me pessimistic. I
think the Democrats are in good shape. More broadly, like I keep seeing all these special elections, and like you know, Democrats keep overperforming, like you know, what their base should be, and especially they're overperforming what they're doing like with a Democrat as a president. Right, but we should normally like bring out the root against and Democrats would be complacent to stay. Oh, but that's not happening, and it's not
happening even like in Iowa. Right, So I think we would make a mistake to under some how motivated the Democrats are, And I think they're motivated in a very good way. They're not motivated a cultu personality way like Trump or death. Nobody's saying Biden or death. They're motivated by like an actual political agenda and buy an awareness that their party is what stands between America and the abyss.
Yes, it's true.
Again, there are a lot of things to happen in these four hundred days, and I think that we have what's four hundred days.
November will be a year until this fucking election, So I.
Mean, we do know that, like this is very early to sort of get quarterbacking. But it does certainly seem like since this trumpy Supreme Court overturned Row, they really have caught the car and made Americans very mad at them in ways I don't think they thought would happen.
Yeah, No, absolutely, Yeah. And that's the other thing at Dobbs effect. And then more broadly, I mean, I think that dobs have back is interestingly interacting with the fact that the GOP has decided to react to the fact that they've enraged fifty percent of the population by saying, like, well, we're just going to keep like pushing their buttons and
going even farther. So if you look at like all the stuff, like the Republican media types are saying, like so much of it is sort of baiting single women, right, saying that like single women, these cat ladies, these losers, they're bad for America. I shouldn't even have the vote, and like I'm thinking, like, okay, okay, we took away their fundamental constitution, right, and we're going to keep badgering them.
Like that's a pretty good formula, bir like getting out the voters that hate you the most and making sure that they will show up. So thank you, right wing media, I salute your service.
Well it is, and it's funny because it's like one of the sort of over reported tropes of this summer was this idea that single women or younger women actually saved the economy this summer because you had this block combuster feminist movie, Barbie. If you don't think it was feminist, don't send me a message telling me you don't think it was feminist. I think it was feminist period paragraph And I'm sorry if you don't think it was feminist. I'm speaking to the people who are gonna yell at
me about this. This was the summer of women saving the economy. These three young women, Beyonce, Taylor Swift and Greta Garwegg are responsible for keeping America out of recession. So there is a sense in which do you target these women at your own peril?
No?
Absolutely, Yeah, yeah, I'm like again, this sort of strategy of badgering and harassing the people that hate you the most, and Vicky sure that they understand everything that they could lose if you stay in power. Like to me, that doesn't seem like the smartest thing. But oh, I'm the guy who also thought that it's a bad idea to have like policies that kill off your base. Like, I'm just the very simple person. I don't have the strategic genius.
Yeah, a simple Canadian man. Geet here. I hope you will come back.
I will always come back. I will never leave. You will just stuck with me for life.
Okay.
Good.
Congressman Maxwell Frost represents Florida's tenth district. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Congressman Maxwell.
Frost, thank you so much for having me on.
We're so excited to have you on, because first I want to talk to you about being back in Congress now with what we know Republicans are planning.
What is happening?
Well, that's a really good question. It seems like not many people have the answer. It's interesting because ever since I before I got sworn in, find myself going to members who have been there for a while, who have experience, ask them questions, Hey, what the hell is going on?
And most of the time I met with I don't know.
This hasn't never happened before, from when we couldn't elect a speaker to when the government was held hostage with the debt ceiling to now we're about to get into the budget season here and we have members of the ass representatives who are saying, hey, you know what, we're not going to vote on the budget of this country, the paramount job of Congress unless we can vote to impeach Joe Biden for winning the presidency. And that's what
we're up again. So I don't really know what's going on. Well, I mean it's we'll see, you know. The It's really unfortunate. It's hard because it's not just like, oh, we're dealing with people we disagree with. We're dealing with conservatives kind of thing. That's part of it. The biggest part here is we're dealing with people who want to see chaos, like they will manufacture a bomb threatened to detonate it
unless we do what they say. And oh also half of them actually kind of want to push the button, like they're curious to see what would happen.
And that's what we're dealing with.
It's interesting.
I'm really glad you talked about this sort of unprecedentedness because it really is. This marthy Congress is really sort of the lunatics for running the asylum and every time McCarthy is able to I mean a lot of this is meant to be payback for the debt ceiling.
Right, So the.
Far right had decided they were going to use the dead ceiling to ruin the full faith and credit of the United States in the hopes of destroying the Biden presidency. That didn't happen, and now they have blamed Kevin McCarthy.
Yeah, no, exactly. And the other thing too is Kevin McCarthy is the weakest speaker probably in.
The history of our right.
I mean, yeah, personally like him, I would argue him as a leader he's weak, but also just he's given up a lot of the institutional power that the speaker usually has because he was held hostage by members of his own caucus. And so these folks, I would argue to say, they're not bluffing a lot of the time.
I mean they hold the.
Tools that they were able to get. And so you're right, the speakers at a very tough spot. We can get into this and we'll see how many more Freedom Caucus members come up and say, hey, it's either a featured voter or no budget. And the Speaker will have well three options. One, he'll have to come to Leader Hawk
Kim Jeffries and ask for Democratic votes. If that happens, Hakim Jefferies isn't just going to say, all right, here's some modern members, right, I mean, we're going to need some concessions in this budget and we're gonna get some stuff out of it. But the problem is if the Speaker does that, the next day, he'll probably wake up with a motion to vacate the chair out there and
Democrats will vote with the Freedom Caucus on that. The other option is he moves forward and impeachment vote an inquiry, which I personally believe in many people would believe would really politically harm their Republican Party as we get into twenty twenty four. Or he can get his people in line and we can and they can pass it. I think that's the least likely thing to happen.
I mean, it's like we shouldn't be laughing because these people really do want to destroy the federal government, Like that is the goal, Like make it so that retirees don't get their checks, make it so that your roads don't get paved, and your public schools don't get books. And I mean this is a very dark vision they have for this country. But they are morons, thank god.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean it's I go between laughing about it, crying about it, and feeling them about it.
And I'm sure everybody has a similar thing. It's just hard to figure out how to respond to it.
Because you're right, I mean, they have no problem with blowing everything up in the federal government because they don't believe that government can be a force for good. They are in it to destroy it. And I'm not making this up. I'm not just like saying this for the podcast giggles and laughs, like they literally say this all the time. And so it's hard to figure out how to deal with folks like that when there isn't really a north star, right, there's not like a policy goal here.
It's just let's blow it up and resist for the sake of resistance. And it makes it difficult to speculate all what can happen. It makes it difficult to strategize on how to deal with it. You kind of have to just do your best and hope and pray that they don't actually use the tools that they were able to get to really destroy a lot of the hard work that so many people have done for generations. And we have to work at these elections to get these people out of office.
So history, if we were to look back at history, says that the party that shuts down the government for no reason tends to get punished. Kevin McCarthy the United States of amnesia. He has not seen history. So in some ways, I mean, they have a five seat majority. There are numerous Republicans sitting in Biden districts. I mean, this does seem like Kevin McCarthy's last best plan to give the House to Democrats.
Yeah, I one hundred percent agree with you on this, and I mean, I think it's twofold. I think at number one, it does have consequence for the next election. I will say I do believe that it's important we always remember that not just voters, but just people have kind of short attention spans. We tend to forget things and move on pretty quickly. And a government shutdown is interesting because it is very bad and it impacts a lot of people. For the average person, though a lot
of times they won't feel like a material chain. And I think because of that, and because it's it just happens all the time now and it's always hyped up, I think a lot of people are becoming a little bit more known to what a government shutdown.
I think.
I think that's part of the reason why when we were knocking doors during the debt ceiling debate, we'd hear a lot of outrage of concern from our prime voters. Right like I could look in van, I could look on minivan and be like, all right, this is an MSNBC voter, right like they care about the debt ceiling. And then when we do our canvases that we do oftentimes off van canvas thing where it's kind of like we're not really knocking prime voter doors, or we're just
out doing regular things. Like people will talk about it but they're not sure what it is, or they'll say, oh, yeah, this happens all the time. Then explain to that, well, this actually doesn't happen all the time. A government shutdown happens all the time. This is much worse and different. And so I feel like it's becoming the norm for the government to shut down and all this where people are feeling like, oh, well, I guess this is how this is just how it is, and it's very unfortunate.
This is part of the reason why so many people have lost faith in government. And it's not like, oh, they've lost faith in Joe Biden. It's just they've lost faith in the institution, no matter who's in it. And part of it is because it's now.
Normal, you know.
I mean, if you like at the past twenty years, it's become a normal thing for the government to shut down and for it to be used as a political tool, and it's really unfortunate, right.
And more like dysfunction is sort of something that people have gotten really used to in this country.
Yeah, that's the perfect way to put it. It's the normalization of dysfunction. And it's hard to because look, I mean, I think that when you're back's against the wall and you don't have many opportunities to implement the change that you want, a lot of times you'll look at the tools or I even say, all right, I mean the budget is what I have. How can we use the budget to further our beliefs. But the problem here is it's not like, oh, this is a group of people fighting for We're.
Going to use this tool because we need to ensure.
More people get healthcare, more people get food stands, more people get this. It's to say we want to use this tool to ensure less people get benefits, less people get this, and that the government is worse off. And I think there's just a fundamental difference there between those two things. I think oftentimes we try to draw parallel. You know, it's extremes on both sides and et cetera. And that's true, but when we talk about the people
in government, nothing can be further from the truth. To draw a parallel between me saying like we need healthcare for everybody and someone from the other side saying we need to abolish the Department of education. I just like don't see that being the same side of it personally.
So I want to talk to you about Florida, because Florida is really a state that is like experiencing a lot of the climate change things that we saw coming very quickly, and you have a Republican governor with a lot of political aspirations who is very rejected the money from the Inflation Reduction Act for the state because he's auditioning to be the Trumpiest. So talk to me about I mean, I feel like there's so much happening in
your state. But you've got flooding, you've got hurricanes, you've got just climate, climate, climate, talk to me about and then you can't get flood insurance.
So talk to me about all that stuff.
Yeah.
So, I mean, this is the result, like you said, this is the result of a governor who is more interested in running for president than running the state of Florida.
And he is his campaign strategies to out Trump Trump.
It's not working, and a lot of us here in Florida especially have been enjoying in front row seats the major flop of his presidential candidacy. But someone brought something up to me a few weeks ago. That really had me thinking, and he said, yeah, it's all funny and stuff, but I'm worried about what he's going to do when he gets back, because he's still governor for three more years.
And that's very true. It's very true. And the fact of the matter is, even if he loses this race, which it looks like he's gonna not win the primary, but anything could happen.
He's not an old guy, I mean, and even.
Though his voters get to know him, they dislike him and they like other people more. If you look at the numbers, it's not like his favorability is super low. I mean, if Donald Trump weren't a factor be the front runner. I say this to say that we shouldn't just revel in the funniness and just kind of dismiss him as a threat, because this is it's more than just oh, twenty twenty four. We got to think about four years after that and the four years after that.
And that's something that Republicans are really good at. They're good at looking at the landscape and looking at the next twenty years versus Democrats. We tend to look at things cycle by cycle. And I've noticed that from being a field organizer to now like being in a lot of the rooms, these conversations are not really based on long term power building, and I think it's to our detriment. So a word of caution here to everybody to laugh. I mean, it's hilarious, the putting all of it.
I love it. But let's keep in mind that Let's think.
About what happens after President Biden, right, And I mean, like after we win this reelection, because we're going to win, after we take back the House, after we retain the Senate and we have four years of great work, that's the goal. What happens after that, And I think we have to talk about it. I think it's it should deeply influence how we organize now. And this is the drum I've been beating on the youth vote, the youth
vote and the way we interact with young people. It's really important because yes, it's about out the votes today, it's about winning now, but it's also about the realization that in eight years, like GENC, millennials make up a third of the electorate right now, one third of the electorate right now, in eight years, it will be much much much more than that. So when we pour our messaging and love and resources into young voters now, it
helps us create lifelong voters. We might speak to a ton of young people who just won't vote in twenty twenty four, and it doesn't mean it's money wasted, because that messaging and that love and those resources will yield results two years later, four years later. And that's really important, and that's how we can really we have an opportunity to change this country forever from an electoral point of view. But that work starts now, I mean, and it has
to influence the work now. So either way, I kind of went on a tangent there outside of Florida, but it's important.
It's a really but I think it's a really important point and something that Democrats do a lot of handering you about. And they happen to have in you someone who is young and also a person of color, and also someone who grew up in Florida, which is theoretically at least a swing state. I mean, you actually speak from really a place of knowing such things, if that makes any sense. You're not some like elderly white pollster telling me this. So I do think it's important. It
is something that the Democratic Party. Really, I think both parties are really struggling with.
Yeah, exactly, and it's less to do. I mean, we know for a fact that gen Z it's the most progressive generation in the history of our country, even when you look at gen z Ers who consider themselves to be conservative. And so that's great and it's good for us. Now, seventy percent of gen Zers voted for Democrats last cycle. Amazing good statistics and polling shows that, unlike a lot of other generations, it looks like we won't grow as conservative as we get older. There's still going to be
some of that, but there won't be as much. So the question is how do we keep those numbers where they're at. And the way you do that is by continuing to put resources to not taking people for granted. If you want a story about taking people for granted, you don't have to look any further than South Florida and see that for the first time in a long time, even though it was close, Republicans won Miami date last year.
Crazy And it's not like one year Democrats wanted by a ton and then this year Republicans want to buy a ton. No, it's little by little it's steady. It's a thirty year plan that is starting. We're starting to see the benefits.
Of it, right, And I mean I do think like that is a really good point about how and I mean part of that is because the Democratic Party infrastructure in Florida has really had problems, right, Will you talk about that?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, the Democratic Party in Florida's had problems for a long time. I think oftentimes we try to pin it on one person, and people exacerbate problems, people especially who have a more like dogmatic way of thinking, well, continue the status quo. And that's the reason we're in this situation. I think our new chair, Nikki Freed, is showing a new path that has a lot of promise for people here. And the grassroots folks here in Florida
are really excited about that new path. And I think we're seeing a new crop of electeds too, a lot of new people being elected.
Who are like Anna who I interview the.
Podcast exactly, Yeah, representative honest Kamani. Actually yeah, later today I'm going to her kickoff for her re election campaign, which is exciting. And so we have a lot of new people all across the state, not just in Central Florida, and we are all very active all the time on the campaign side, year round. And that's really what it's going to take. I mean, it can't just be up
to the Florida Democratic Party. It has to be up to everybody, all the organizations, all the electeds thinking about this. And when we do that, it's how we build power. I mean, I'm starting to do it here locally. I was looking. I'm a nerd, and I'll just read ballot Pedia for like an hour or two. So I was looking at PIA and I made the spreadsheet of all the city council and county commission elections here in Orlando
and Central Florida. I realize, Wow, over the next eight years, the local government here will just completely change because of term limits, just and that will happen in two to three years. There'll be a two to three year period in my area where just everything changes. And then I took a step back and I was like, as a progressive movement, are we ready for that?
No.
I could think of maybe like a couple people that might run for something, but I can't think of like a whole apparatus. And so now I'm working on that and I think it's important that we do that across the country.
It's really important.
Maxwell Frost, I would love to run over, but Jesse is now sending me the dragon emoji, so I have to end.
But I hope you will come back and talk more about this.
Of course, of course, thank you for having me on.
Thank you.
Josh Marshall is the editor of Talking Points memo Welcome Too Fast Pump Tics.
Josh Marshall, how are you?
I am surviving to talk to you about last week? Biden did this blockbuster drug negotiation. Basically, no president has been able to do it since Medicare Party, since there was this sort of thing written into Medicare Party, which was that you can't negotiate drug prices. Now here we are, Biden has done this. We spent the whole weekend reading about DeSantis.
Right, well, I don't have an answer for that exactly. These things don't play necessarily for the intended constituencies the way that we see them play out, right. I mean, yes, they've been trying to do this for about twenty years. What is it Medica Party I think was in two thousand and three, so this has been going on for twenty years. And it's been blocked for all this time. But that's not as exciting or impulse driving as what the latest descientists crash and burn stuff, or what Elon
Musk is doing on Twitter. An extent, that doesn't surprise me that much. But yeah, I don't think we know necessarily how these things are playing politically. I know that there's a lot of people who say it's the press's fault. I do think there's a limited truth to that. Half the people in the country just listen to Fox News. I mean half are in the maybe thirty five or forty percent, or in the information stream that is generated by Fox News, even if they're not directly listening to Fox News.
Yeah, I mean, I think we need to talk about Elan. He's not not an anti semi discuss.
Yeah, I don't really know what to say about him. I mean, people are really what they do, not what they think in their heart of hearts. There's this guy John Gantz who was reading something by him.
Well, I love John Gants, He's really smart.
Yeah.
So he was saying something and he said he had this kind of good turn of phrase or way of turning a standard discussion. We get into that there's just not that much to be gained for thinking about what people really think.
Right in their hearts.
Well, most people are not thinking that much at all.
And that was a very elegant way of saying something that I think a lot of us sense, even if we're not able to quite articulate it. That we live in an information world where people are picking up chunks of words and chunks of thought and repeating them back depending on what team they feel they are on, and so most people are not actually thinking that much at all. But kind of to go back to that famous onion story,
some people end up always going in one direction. And with Elon Musk, you don't see him happening on to getting really excited about Medicare price negotiations or any number of other things. He always seems to get ginned up in the direction of the rights of very hateful and
evil people. And yeah, things are very hard for them, and it's the company he keeps, and at some level it's obviously his sort of core drives the kind of thing thinks are unfair, the kind of people he thinks are bad and good, And that's just who he is.
And if you see how he operates he largely.
I think we can call him an influencer, right, a kind of a prominent person. He has one hundred and fifty five million followers on Twitter. He's the richest man in the world still despite having some shed some net worth.
He'said some bad investment, Yeah.
Made some bad investments, but he still has the dominant position in spaceflight and electric cars and even in its sort of degraded state Twitter or whatever. I don't really care what he calls it, but he he acts like any number of other middle aged guys who are kind of cranky and hateful. It's just that he has a rather larger mega phone, so it matters a lot more in a way what he's saying his whole shick isn't that surprising he is.
I think there's this sort of interesting phenomenon which is discussed sometimes, which is this sort of idea that you have billions of dollars, You have more money than you or your heirs could ever spend. Right, you have incalculatable wealth. Right, you have fame, but you still all you really want is to be as powerful as a member of the New York Times editorial board. Like, what you really want is to be taken seriously as a thought leader, which I think is like a little bit. I mean, this
is clearly what a lot of these guys want. And it's sort of like you think about David Rubinstein, like he has a Bloomberg show, Like, these guys want to not just be wildly and calculatively wealthy, but they also want to be famous. And they don't even just want to be famous. They don't want to be famous the way like a reality television stars famous.
They want to be famous the.
Way that And again I use this example with all the needed caveats, Henry Kissinger is famous.
Yeah.
The way I would put that is they want respect. They want to be respected, and they want to be respected by people who they think have a lot of cultural capital to use the sort of the fancy way people put it, the people who have I don't know, yeah, cultural capital, whatever that means.
And you see it with Musk.
In some ways, it's been in a slightly different vein that this has been the story of Donald Trump. Right, Trump, despite his overstating his wealth, obviously a pretty wealthy guy. Right, He's a pretty powerful guy. But he's been driven in a lot of ways by not people always thought Donald Trump was a joke. They used to think he was more benign joke, kind of just a kind of clown character as opposed to a really dangerous or malevolent person.
But he didn't get respect. And that with Musk is kind of the story too.
So there's a.
Huge amount of our public culture in this country that is about people's grievance about that, and it sort of it expresses itself as this kind of faux populism, and that has traction because there is some truth in that, in the sense of people with fancy degrees and fancy titles and who get published by fancy publishing houses have a lot of clout, and there's a lot of other people in this country who don't have that and who feel some like Ben Shapinia, our resentment about it.
Well that's where I'm as.
You're talking, I'm like, oh, you mean Ben Shapiro. I mean my favorite moment was that Barbie movie. He's like, it's gonna sink like a stone.
Yeah, yes, But I would say that what I think of more is just everyday people, right who aren't particularly powerful, celebrities, wealthy, et cetera. But you have this weird Eddy in the public culture that someone like Ben Shapiro, who is must be a very wealthy man, is kind of ubiquitous in social media. He's everywhere, he's a celebrity, he's wealthy, he's powerful, and yet that kind of grievance essential to his whole shtick.
Yeah.
No, he just wants to be published.
By kanop Yeah. I mean, clearly what Elon wants is that same kind of acceptance of polite society. But I think what is so silly about it is like you have billions of dollars just build a new polite society, which actually they're doing outside of San Francisco, where billionaires are buying up land to start their own city because they don't need San Francisco. That is an incredible bit of sorcery.
Yeah, it's funny because the people who are involved in that are not all right, Elon must time. So you've got a lot of people.
The quote unquote good guys.
Yeah, it kind of you know, yeah, Riet Hoffman, the progressive billionaires, and in some ways kind of on its surface, a lot of it is it's going to be a walking based place and there's a light, it's going to be carbon neutral and Yeah, there's going to be solar panels and everything. So it's not just a kind of what is that thing they have whatever in coal where these guys soup up their pips and you know, all that kind of stuff.
But it is this idea which billionaires seem to be very hot on. And again I'm not saying they're wrong, though I think they're wrong that they can do government better than the little people. And I do think you'd be hard pressed to find a billionaire who doesn't think they can do government better than the government.
I think that's unquestionably true.
You have some exceptions, but billionaires are obviously very powerful. That's one of the issues with billionaire edom in our society, and particularly with Musk, who obviously it's not just that he's You've got various billionaires. You've got George Soros, You've got Rieed Hoffman, you've got Zuckerberg, and these people at
least at some level, range across the political spectrum. But in Musk's case, I'm sure many of your listeners saw or saw that article, that big article very impressively put together in the Times. Oh that one too, But the one in the Times was about that, like something like more than half the act of satellites in the skies are controlled by Elon Musk.
Yeah, it's kind of bad.
Yeah, and that actually has played into when the US is dealing with the Ukraine War, they needed to get Elon Musk sign off for the communications stuff to So there comes a question in any democratic society, or in a sort of a global society, when when are you just too powerful that an individual billionaire becomes so powerful everyone else's civic democratic freedom comes into question. And that is definitely something that is part of the sort of
the issue of billionaireedom in our society today. But Musk is in a special category because he, for various reasons, kind of holds the commanding heights in several critical parts of the global economy. But yeah, it's sort of natural for billionaires to think they could do it better because they've look at every certainly every billionaire who didn't inherit their billions, and probably a lot of who yes, yeah,
they've had a great run of luck. Now they wouldn't say, look, they would say it's skill and they're doing but sort of whichever it is, your rolling the dice, and they're always coming up in your favor and you sort of think you've got a knack for it. So again, it's sort of it would be surprising if it weren't the case.
The one thing I want to sort of get back to here is there is a kind of like the federal government seeded these things to Musk, right, Like this musk has had so many advantages from tax rebates to I mean, to research that was funded by the government.
I mean, and I'm not saying he's the only one. I mean. A great example is this drug negotiation right now that Biden is doing. So the pharma companies are pushing back and saying, if you negotiate the drug prices, you won't be able to get cancer drugs right, we won't be able to use this money that we need. That seven hundred and sixty four dollars a month it costs for your heart medicine, for your elderol or whatever it's called, for your heart medicine that you have to
take for heart failure. If you don't pay seven hundred and sixty four dollars a month, we can't do the research we need to do to secure cancer. Now.
A lot of this research, so the biggest thing is they're clearly underinvesting in drug names, right, exactly right, because if they're calling your heart failure drug elderoll, I mean, what the fuck?
Right?
I don't know if I can say that. I probably can't say no.
You can absolutely say weakurse here all the time.
But I think like, so, I mean, they're saying that, and then we look over and we see that actually the federal government is very involved in R and.
D drug development.
Not always, but certainly a lot of this money is actually just going to paying their executives and thinking about marketing and television ads. So I do think like there are many many people in this country who have gotten rich off tax money that should not be going to them.
Yeah.
Well, there's a lot of very interesting, funny, you know, kind of quizzical things about Elon Musk. One of them is that, you know, tech is built on software. Most much of tech, a lot of the tech that we know of is built on software and network effects. The one case where Musk has gotten involved in that is Twitter, and it's been a catastrophic failure in economic terms. And the irony is what Musk is really as a pretty strong record on is heavy industry, building cars, building spacecraft, right,
that is not usually the thing. You know, Apple is sort of in some ways the exception of the in the big tech players being largely hardware based, as opposed to Facebook, Google, Amazon blabblah. Obviously Amazon has some footing in hardware. And with the electric cars thing, I mean, yes, he built that on public money, but we put public money there to help start an electric vehicle industry, so
that was kind of the idea. And with certainly with SpaceX, he's built that entirely on government contracts, right that he got the NASA contract basically, that's how he built it. He beat out, rightly or wrongly, Jeff Bezos, who also has his own little space company that so certainly the point is that Elon Musk's money is entirely based on navigating the policies of the federal government and the money
it puts behind things. Sort of the most generous thing you can say is that we're now able to send a lot more stuff into space because he's been successful at that, and how he's being able to get the price down for a freight to neuroth orbit and all that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, it is not a libertarian vision. It all comes from piggybacking on federal government spending. He's a product, ironically, he is a product of the Obama and Biden administrations.
Right, So one last question exactly is a product of the administrations he's now trying to remove.
One last question is Elon mus R Henry Ford.
He really seems like to me.
I just mentioned that in a post I did like earlier this morning, that Ford was a true innovator in this sort of the assembly you know, we don't think of that as high tech now, but the assembly line and all the different sort of management stuff that goes into it. And then he became kind of a virulent anti Semitic crank and he had his own little newspaper up there in Michigan and everything, and so yes, he really does seem like that. And his Shenanigans didn't seem
to heard Ford Motor Company. They're still chugging along, so maybe it'll be the same. I don't know, but he really does seem similar, because that's the thing with it's not just luck with Musk. And I'm about as anti Musk as you can be. I don't think you manage SpaceX and Tesla without bringing some element to the equation that has enabled his success. And I say that as
someone who really reviles the guy. But even when you make economic decisions that work out well for you great in our system, you make a ton of money, but you get the money you don't. It's it's always important for the republic, the state, the public to say you can get all your money, but you don't necessarily get to make all the decisions because you can't be more powerful. You can't become so powerful that everyone else's power becomes
a footnote. And that's kind of in some ways where we are with us on some of these fronts.
Thank you so much. I hope he'll come back.
Well, thanks for having Me'd love to come back.
No, Jesse Cannon, Malli Jong Fast that Ken Pexton. He's a real wallless guy, real model Trump mega guy. And what are you seeing here today?
Is an incredible day. It is the beginning of Ken Paxton's impeachment trial. Ken Paxton is the attorney general. He's the most he considers himself to be the most conservative attorney general ever.
He is. He's going to be impeached.
He's being impeached again by a jury of his peers, a lot of very conservative Republicans. The netnet of this is he tried to hide his affair from his wife on his voters, and one of his one of his biggest donors, gave his mistress or his alleged mistress a job.
I want to say that one of the really fun things about this trial is that Ken Paxton's lawyer is a guy called Tony Busby and he is completely orange a la Donald Trump, and he is totally hilarious and you can watch it live streamed and it's pretty great. So go to the Texas Senate and watch the guy who had the multiple indictments get impeached. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes
sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.