Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics. Well, we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds.
And Donald Trump has raged truth, the words that will soon bring him much misery in his existence. I hate Taylor Swift. We have such a great show for you today, Kick Konger and Ryan Max dot By to talk to their new book character Women, how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. Then the nineteenth Samanda Becker will tell us about her new book You Must Stand Up the Fight for Abortion rights and post dobs America. But first we have the host of the Enemy's List, the Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson.
Welcome back to Fast Politics.
For Wilson, why do you sound so for Lauren Kamala Harris kicked the ever loving shit out of Donald Trump up and down that stage just three nights ago, like he was a rented mule. I mean, listen, you should be in a happy place right now. We got dogs and cats living in sin together. Oh, are being eaten one of the two?
I don't know, no one's eating dogs. And then they went to well, maybe not dogs, but geese. And then they went to, well, maybe not geese, but there's this woman. They just have nothing.
Yeah, they have one crazy person who's not a Haitian.
Who in a different town.
Yeah right, and a differency may have done something with a cat. But I mean the whole thing is, I know, you're shocked to hear this, a farrago of lies and horseshit.
Shocking, shocking, Yes, was shocked because those guys are known for being legit, and there's some possibility that taking Laura Lumer with you.
Listen, Laura Lumer. I like to think of her now as the campaign's general consultant, which I really like. I think it's going to make the campaign much more efficient. If Donald Trump really has waited this long to bring Laura Lumer into the family, it's been a mistake. I mean, she is so brilliantly able to catch the mood of America,
the sweet spot of American politics. I mean, yesterday calling out Lindsay Graham for being gay, being a nine to eleven truther, being a monstrous shit bag human being the first order. I mean, there's nothing about Laura Lumer honestly that doesn't make America say this is the right choice for president, because he's going to surround himself with the very best people.
Also, I would like to add that it was nine to eleven this week and he went to the nine to eleven services he went to.
I mean he was there, but was he really there?
And she was on the plane, so I don't know that she went to the events.
No, she was on the plane for the debate.
Also, Yeah, she's been going around to a lot of places with him.
Yes, and he's been not wearing his wedding ring. I'm not saying that Alina Habba has anything to worry about, but you know, tongues are wagging. You have me here to perform just that kind of stunt.
Rick Wilson, let me ask you a question. I actually am in a bad mood and worried more not in a bad mood, but more worried about a little stay called Pennsylvania. Yeah, so talk me off the ledge about Pennsylvania.
I will tell you Pennsylvania is the lynch pen of the campaign. That's real talk. I'm not going to bass you and tell you that Pennsylvania is not super super super important. It is very important. Without Pennsylvania, the world falls apart and we're all living as mutants in a radioactive healthscape that makes Mad Max look like sound of music. It is not great if we don't win Pennsylvania. But I think we're gonna win Pennsylvania.
Okay, tell me why.
I do not believe that we are in the same spot that they think we are. I think Pennsylvania, particularly in Bucks County, has a big, big number of pro choice Republican women and independent leaning conservative women who are pro choice. And I know we're working very much there at the moment. We're going to be in there with a lot of resources. We're feeling like there's a degree of economic uplift you're going to get when the rate cut kicks in in a week or so, when the
Fed kicks the raids down. Pennsylvania's an area that's been hard hit by housing, the explosive housing costs. It's going to be close run thing. I feel much better about Michigan and Wisconsin than I have in the past. I'm optimistic about North Carolina. I'm optimistic about Georgia. Don't quote me, but I'm even starting to feel much better about Nevada, which I was not super happy about for a long time.
Yeah, tell us why.
I think it's starting to come into a position in Nevada. So Pennsylvania's going to be tough. We got to win it. And there's a lot of angry, pissed off white bros there. That's a real talk, that's a real fact.
And she has been going to Pittsburgh, right, Explain to us the thinking there.
She's been going to Pittsburgh, She's been going to Philadelphia. She's been in the Tea that area between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia a couple times. Now Walls is there. I think he probably lives there now. He's everything but a permanent resident.
Now, well he should because he's the perfect person for there. Right, absolutely, explain to us why he.
Scans as a regular suburban, middle class white guy. He does not scan as a Democratic Party elite ready to make you eat insect low for whatever the fuck fantasy of them at the moment. And all of this is going to come down, I think too. You know, do we end up with meaningful African American turnout in the Caller counties around Philadelphia and those Coller counties are Look,
Hillary Clinton must be very very blunt. Her campaign did a terrible job activating African Americans in those Coller counties. And that's why Trump won the state. He did not win the state in twenty twenty. I gotta tell you, does anybody believe that there are more Trump voters now than there were in twenty twenty.
No? Are there?
No, there are not. They are a declining stock. They're a dying breed.
Why Biden did better in Pennsylvania is because they knew him in Pennsylvania, because Delaware shares a media market connects.
With Pennsylvania voters. And in fact, you've got in Walls a guy who is a familiar flavor. He's biden Esque in that regard. He is somebody they get. They know who this guy is, they know the type of guy he is, and he doesn't scare them. It's real hard, it's real hard for the Trumpers to go. Tim Walls is a communist socialist from liberal California. That Tim Wall's plan to make it to seize the means of production. I mean, come on, get the fuck out of here.
That guy does not scare people. And they hate it. But he doesn't scare people. They really hate it. They're like, they're frustrated as shit. They've been looking for, like any opo punch to hit Tim Walls with. For weeks now, and they can't make it happen. They can't make the sell.
Do you think that JD. Vance being in the state actually hurts Trump?
Well, look, I tell you one thing. JD. Vance being in Ohio, being from Ohio has hurt Trump in Ohio. The number one lesson of every vice presidential candidate is that your job is to go to weddings and funerals. As a general rule, do no harm is the primary mission of a vice presidential candidate. And he has done harm. He has hurt Donald Trump in his home state of Ohio. And for all that Trump is a guy who loves people who suck up to him, what did we see
from Trump the other night with JD Vance? He sold him down the river. I didn't talk to jd about that. Who I think he's an intern, maybe a coffee boy. He may have been on the campaign for five minutes, but I've never spoke to him, met him, or know anything about him. That is all.
Yeah, so very good. Alec Baldwin doing.
Trump Molly, That's all I can do.
You know, it's very impressive.
I'm a man with many, many severe limitations, and that's one of them. Don't have a good Trump imitation.
But here's a question for you. So let's just game this out. North Carolina early voting has been disturbed by the worst person in the world, RFK Junior.
Discuss Look, the early voting has been problematic because we have RFK fighting to get off the ballot and to review the ballots right now. You also have today the Trump folks and their allies. They are trying to bring lawsuits to forbid college students and state workers and other people from voting early. The whole thing is, of course, exactly what you would have expected their usual fuckery.
Okay, does it work?
I don't think it works in the end. You know why. It's September. There's plenty of time to have early voting continue to successfully give us a real, meaningful lift for Harris. I don't think there's anything that's gonna stop that, given that, given that Trump has been such a bad candidate lately, has had no good days. I mean, Trump does not have good days anymore, real talk. I mean this in a serious way, not a dark way. Trump's best day
was the day he got shot. That was the last moment that his campaign felt like there was something there beyond just the angry, shitty conspiracy theory, crazy talk bullshit.
Well it felt new, yeah, right, Well.
It didn't feel it wasn't new, but it felt purposeful at least, right. Yeah, But right now, all it feels like is complaint to palooza and lies and weird shit, because right now it is just weird shit, and weird shit doesn't sell after a certain point.
Yeah, so you feel like North Carolina, that's not going to be a huge disturbance.
No, I look, I would I like it to be slightly less full of fuckery? Yes, of course, is it disqualifying levels of fuckery? Not really? I think again. Trump has a problem that he cannot solve with women voters. He did not solve it the other night in the debate when he tried to bs his way past and gave probably the most damaging single answer about abortion I could have conceived.
Yeah, let's talk about that answer.
It was so broken brained. I'm still marveling, because look, what do we know about Trump? He wants to brag. He wants to say, oh, I killed Rivy Wade. I put them on the court. Their active bravery on the court shows how great I am. Sorry, I'm doing it again, you have to just sorry going on with then he knows he Trump's feral animal cunning and his awareness. He knows just how bad, just how shit the the National
Band stuff is. He knows just how bad and how dangerous all the things the Republicans have done in the States has become to him. He recognizes that he's stupid, but he's not that stupid, if that makes sense. He is not in a good place, okay, he is in a bad, bad place. That bad place is getting worse by the day, and he understands it. He really does know. He knows how bad it is. But he couldn't get
out of his own way with that answer. He couldn't not do the I'm the greatest thing since prepared mustard, I'm the God king answer. And so you know, here we are with Trump pissing off the evangelicals on the one hand and pissing off the rest of America on the other. It was a bad play. It was a terrible play. So that those people are going to make a big difference in Pennsylvania in particular.
The thing that gets me incensed about Trump and Trump is and the way that people talk about Trump, including in the media, industrial complex of which we are members. Is that they always say, like, he just needs to get disciplined. Well, he just has to stick to script. Has no one been here for the last decade?
Right, Welcome to the Year of Our Lord twenty twenty four. We are nine years and five months into this fucking bullshit. Have you not noticed that Donald Trump has the personal discipline of an incontinent drunkard. Donald Trump cannot focus on anything for longer than it gives him an erection, a belief he's going to make money off of this, or some sort of cruelty. Nothing. In Trump's world. He is the ultimate add candidate. He has no ability to focus.
There is no better Trump. There is no better iteration of Trump. There is no Donald Trump where where he wakes up in the morning and says, why yes, I believe I should sit down with my policy advisors and develop a coherent rationale for this argument. Instead, it's like Laura Lumer tell me they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, and Stephen Miller, I think he has some blood in his mouth. He may have eaten the dog, but I believe him. And it's all fucking crazy town.
He will never be better no Republican who is empowered and enabled and kissed his ass for as long as they have has any excuse at all whatsoever. There is no excuse there. It is over, it is done. He has poisoned them in a way that they don't even understand how deep the rot runs in their own brains and their own party, because they're still rationalizing it. They're still trying to say, like, well, one of the people in the Reuters focus group was undecided and said that
Harris didn't have enough granularity on her policy. Trump's policy was to stand up there and talk about eating dogs and executing the Central Park five. The madness levels here are off the charts.
And I would say the false equivalency here is pretty amazing, like continually always expected to be normal, and Republicans are allowed to be insane, not.
Just allowed to be insane mally. Let's remember the mainstream media has consistently said things like Trump's energetic and transgressive performance, this appeal to middle class voters. You know what, There are some voters that they have appeals to, But there are some people that like to go to the zoo and watch monkeys throw shit at them.
So one of the things that got me upset was there was a Republican senator I've never heard of, which in itself has not nothing. He's in I think North Dakota maybe, and he was saying that he wasn't sure they were going to certify the election.
That's Mark Wayne Mullen. That's all one name, Mark Wayne.
Yeah.
Who the fuck is that Mark Wayne Mullen. Okay, first off, let's be very clear. Mark is a staggering, epic, world class dipshit the worst Mago cuckoo pants people are like, yo, Mark Wayne dial batshit back man, that's too much, brother. He is one of the worst human beings in that body.
Has he been there a long time? I never even heard of him.
No, he's only been there like four years now.
Okay.
He is a guy you can count on Mark Wayne to be the shittiest human being on earth. He's a guy who ran and cowered under a bench on one to six, but now is like the heroes of January sixth, must fight against the deep state imprisoning our beloved allies. Fuck this guy. He is a epic, epic piece of shit. There is a real possibility these people will vote to not certify the election. There's a very real possibility that that's what's going to happen. I think I think it's
like a seventy percent possibility. You're going to have people in the Senate who do not certify the election. We're going to have a constitutional crisis because Donny dipshit will not say to his people, I lost. Okay, you're right, you got me. I lost, and we're going to end up with an absolute horror show going into next year is going to be terrible. And everybody right now who thinks somehow that Donald Trump will be dignified, correct proper,
that he will say, why, yes, you're right. For the good of the country, I must declare that I I have lost this election and accept my defeat. On the field of battle. She could beat him by four hundred Electoral College votes, and that fucker is going to go out and go It was stolen. Stalin stolen. One of those things I like the dictator and the pastry. Also, the election was stalin.
Are we worried that this will kip to the Supreme Court and that they'll overturn the election results.
Yes, we should be. That is why the defeat has to be in such a scope it does have to be like Obama McCain, not like Biden Trump. She has to beat Trump in a scope well beyond how Biden beat him. I hate saying that because it's hard.
Do you think that can happen?
No, wait, it's going to be very difficult to get there. I wanted to. I'm working every day to make it happen. But we should not mistake that this is a very precarious moment in our history where you have a party and a president who will do anything to win. They will lie, cheat, and steel. We have to fight them every step of the way. Harris is running a great campaign, running the best campaign that we've seen in our lifetimes. That doesn't mean that Trump will not try to steal it.
He will try to steal it. There is no chance on earth that Donald Trump. Just like people say, oh well, Donald Trump needs to be mature, someone says Donald Trump needs to be a person who respects the constitution of the rule of law. Will good luck with that? Have fun storm in that.
Castle, Rick Wilson, Now I'm stressed out again.
Well, Molly, all we can do is just keep kicking his ass.
We have even more tour dates for you. Did you know the Lincoln Projects, Rick Willson have Fast Politics Bali Jug Faster. Are heading out on tour to bring you a night of laughs for our dark political landscape. Join us on August twenty sixth at San Francisco at the Swedish American Hall, or in la on August twenty seventh at the Regent Theater. Then we're headed to the Midwest. We'll be at the Vivarium in Milwaukee on the twenty first of September and on the twenty second will be
in Chicago with City Wiry. Then we're going to hit the East coast September thirtieth, We'll be in Boston at Arts at the Armory. On the first of October, we'll be in Affiliates City Winery, and then DC on the second at the Miracle Theater. And today we just announced that we'll be in New York on the fourteenth of October at Citywinery. If you need to laugh as we get through this election and hopefully never hear from a guy who lives in a golf club again, we got
you covered. Join us in our surprise guests to help you laugh instead of cry your way through this election season and give you the inside analysis of what's really going on right now. Buy your tickets now by heading to Politics as Unusual dot bio. That's Politics as Unusual dot bio. Ryan Mack and Kate Kunger are the authors of Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.
Welcome to Fast Politics Cade. Thank you and Ryan.
Hey, Molly, So you.
Guys did a book together. First of all, just give us everything about this book.
Well you said earlier twenty minutes right.
So the book is Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, and we take you through the saga that has been Twitter over the last several years, starting with sort of the twilight era of the company, the end of Jack Dorsey's tenure as CEO and Perogue Algarol's brief period as a CEO, and then Elon Musk of course swoops in, makes it offer to buy it, says he doesn't want to buy it anymore, says he wants to buy it again, and then we finished the story with the aftermath of
Elon's takeover in the way that he changed and transformed the company.
Yes, so this feels like the kind of book where you get going on it and you're shocked at how much worse it really is then you even thought is it discussed?
So the genesis of this book was we're reporters at the New York Times. Kate is the b reporter for Twitter now x I cover accountability and cover you know, billionaires and figures in Silicon Valley, and we reported on this deal from its start to the takeover, and yeah, we were getting so much reporting that we simply couldn't put it into every single one of our stories.
Like we just couldn't.
We couldn't do a justice, you know, right, And there were things we'd love to expand upon from you know, elon try to pull out of the deal, for example, or even after the deal, the types of cuts he made, things like not having toilet paper in the bathrooms because he cut the janitorial service, Like just details like that that we're just so confounding to us and so bizarre and so unprecedented in a takeover like this where one man could you know, essentially buy a company for forty
four billion dollars, you know, at the sap of his fingers.
Did you think it would happen? And were you shocked? It's sort of the process that it took, you know.
This is so funny because I think if you had asked me on any given day during that summer of twenty twenty two whether or not the deal was going
to close, I would have given a different answer. And even up to the moment that everyone's seen online where Elon walked into the Twitter building with a sink and made that hokey joke about let that sink in, I was still not sure that he was actually going to do it, because at that point it had just been such a chaotic process that it seemed like he might still pull the rug out from under the whole thing. And I think a lot of the people on the
Twitter side of the deal felt that way too. You know, even as he was there in the building saying he was about to buy the company, they weren't willing to leave him until they saw the money in the bank account.
Yeah. This reminds me a little bit of the Trump administration. It seemed improbable, impossible, undoable. It got done, but in a very haphazard way with a lot of unhappy people involved. Is it similar in that way?
Yeah? I don't know.
I didn't do much reporting on the Trump administration. I know the stories of like you know, he didn't expect to win, and then they find themselves in twenty sixteen having to run a government. If that's the framework that we're thinking of, then with musks takeover, there are a lot of similarities. Like you made an offer kind of on a whim. He tried to pull out. Everyone remembers the bot argument. You know, there's so many bots, there's fraud.
On this platform.
I'm not going to buy it. He tries to back out. He's then forced to buy it at the price he admits to overpaying for forty four billion dollars, and he kind of comes in shooting from the hip. There's really no plan here for what he's going to do with this thing. He's he's talking about these kind of pie in the sky concepts, building a quote unquote everything app wanting to bring in payments to Twitter, but fundamentally misunderstanding that this is a social platform and a very human platform.
You're connecting humans to talk to each other, and when people talk to each other, there's all these messy things that happen, And you know, I think that misunderstanding is led to the cast that we see today, from the multiple rounds of layoffs to the issues with governments all around the world to just the loss of advertisers and the decrease in valuation. I mean the company is now
worth internally less than twenty billion dollars. You know, that is a stunning kind of devaluation over two years, done by the man who's supposed to be one of the best businessmen in the world.
Yeah.
I think there are just a lot of parallels between him and Trump. I mean, both of them just sort of command Internet attention. Both of them have this sort of rotating cast of characters surrounding them, where people are in one day and then cast out the next. And there's even this one photo I think it is from when Elon Musk attended the met gala, but he's in a tux and he's given the thumbs up post.
Yeah, and I saw.
That photo, I was like, whoa, they look eerily early similar when he's in the right costume and doing the right post. I think there's a lot of parallels between the way that they conduct themselves.
Yeah, I mean I knew some people inside Twitter. I mean there was a sense there it felt to me like they had sort of built this little paradise and that it couldn't be destroyed so easily. And then it really was what is the feeling of the people who are in there or were in there because most of them are gone.
Probably part of the reason why we wanted to write this book is we wanted to kind of dispel this myth that like everything at Twitter was perfect Elon.
This was a.
Company that had a lot of issues, from its balance sheet and its business to employee happiness, I guess, and content moderation decisions. You know, this is a company that had to deal with COVID misinformation and the platforming of President Trump. I mean, these were the New York Post article about Hunter Biden, monumental decisions that drew it a lot of flack. And you know, the company was a lightning rod constantly. So I don't know if i'd call
it a paradise. I mean, it certainly wasn't what it is today. You know, this kind of mess under Elon, But it wasn't a happy place. It was, you know, a lot more stable. It was a place where you could build a career.
Yeah, and I think Twitter is such a unique place even within the tech industry, and I think pretty much any tech job you get the founders or the CEO is going to try to convince you to come with a real sense of mission, right.
But I think you know, a lot.
Of Google employees, for instance, feel pretty divorced from the notion that they are there to like help people access and catalog the world's information, Right. But I think Twitter was the place where people who worked there really grasped onto the mission and believed in it in a way a lot of other tech employees are just kind of like rolling their eyes. And I think Bright and I shared that sense that there was something uniquely important about
what Twitter was doing as a company. In the way that it was creating this platform for political speech was really fascinating. But as Ryan said, we also wanted to portray some of the bumps and lumps that were in there, problems that were going on at the company, because that narrative just got very distilled down into like good Twitter and evil Elon and and we want to take that a little bit.
I don't think we can discount how much there were a group of employees in the company who were excited about Elon's takeover, or at least wanted to give him a chance. You know, this is a company that had stagnated with product production, like they couldn't launch a product if their life depended on it in some way, you know. He Compared to some of the other tech companies out there,
things were going really slow. There was little innovation, and they thought that Elon was the guy who would kickstart all this. You know, he had electrified cars, he had put rockets into space. Why couldn't we do better things under him? And they saw this as kind of the lightning bolt that they needed to get things going again. But it was the lightning bolt that essentially started an inferno inside the company and burn the place down.
So yeah, right, it totally did. And I know there was a lot of that. And also like fundamentally the business was not profitable, right.
Yes, that's pretty much true.
There was a period of profitability that the company had, I want to say, pre COVID, and then during COVID actually they were doing fairly well and then had kind of fallen off of their numbers by the time Elon came in and proposed the acquisition.
Yeah, I mean, this is a company that gets compared to Facebook or Meta a lot, you know, and that's a company that has more than a billion I think it's close to two billion users across all its platforms now. Twitter at its peak had hundreds of millions. You know, this was a company that wasn't drawing in the ad revenue that a meta draws in, and it was just
kind of this kind of floating business. It was stagnant in some ways, it floated along, and it was kind of ripe for the picking for someone like you On to come and swoop in and make an offer.
The large request I feel like with Elon was to try to make or as Trump call him Leon, to try to make Twitter profitable, right, And he's done a number of different things to try to do that. He has done a lot of businesses, and many of them have struggled with like actual profitability or being priced for what their ebuita is. To talk to us about that, sure.
I mean Tesla was not profitable for years. I mean, the car business is incredibly hard. It's why a lot of car startups fail. And he went through periods where he was on the verge of bankruptcy almost to his last dollar, and was able to pull it out. You know, I think as something like twenty eighteen, for example, where he can't manufacture enough Model three cars, this kind of low cost car, mass market car, and is in this
thing called production hell. And he's really, you know, kind of at his wits end, sleeping on the factory floor or on the couch in the factory, trying to make enough cars. You know, it's part of his mythos. And he gets out of that period and the company survives, and you know, the stock price shoots to the roof, and he is where he is today with this net worth of more than two hundred and fifty billion dollars.
But he's kind of lived life on the edge and making these big bets on the idea that these companies, you know, are going to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. SpaceX the same way. It's still private, but it went through periods where was on the bridge of bankruptcy. If you know, the next rocket exploded, they wouldn't have any more capital to build the next one. And he sees himself as this kind of hero, this kind of generational entrepreneur who can do things better and more efficient
than the last. That's how he came into Twitter. He thought Twitter's past management was inept, corrupt, fraudulent, and he thought he could do these things way more efficiently and just simply cut and cut and cut and cut and get things to where he thought they needed to be, as well as you know, generate these unthought of business lines, things like selling the verification badges, which he thought he
could do for millions of people. He thought millions of people would buy these badges at eight dollars a month and create this new revenue stream for the company, And that's just been a complete disaster and miscalculation. This idea of must being a generational entrepreneur has become under fire with this takeover. You know, it's kind of chewed away at as mythos.
Yeah, it seems to me that he was doing a lot lot better before he bought Twitter because there was this sort of deniability about his political beliefs. It was a certain right. I mean, now it's all out there. Do you think that this myth kind of has hurt him?
It has to some extent, you know, I think in buying Twitter, I think, you know, Elon sort of put himself in the dangerous position that a lot of people in the media industry that have done where now spending time on Twitter.
It's supposedly part of his.
Job, right, It's true. It is a good point.
You know, Hey, that is it is part of my job. Don't take that red from my kit, but it is.
He really does need to sort of touch grass, right, I mean that's what you're saying.
It's on Twitter all day, every day, and I have notifications turned on for his account, and it got to the point I used to have like an older iPhone, like a iPhone eight or something, and I had to upgrade because it was killing my battery because I got so many notifications about you. He's prolific, and I think it has hurt his public image. I think it's also really started to chip away at his fan base within Tesla,
which is at financial risk for him. You know, his Tesla shareholders are not happy about the amount of time and attention that he spends on x rather than at Tesla. And because he is such a big PERSDA, that's a big draw for retail investors to Tesla, and so Tesla actually has a disproportionate number of retail investors who are invested in the company because they like Elon.
They're drawn to him, they think he's cool.
And so as he chips away at that public persona and kind of bursts the bubble for people. That affects Tesla's stock a little bit more than it might if it was a different company.
I also think, you know, this has hurt his mythos, this idea that he is this great entrepreneur. And I don't think we can and take this away from him that he ushered in the electric car revolution in the United States, and he put rockets in a space and privatize the space industry. But just because you can do those things and build kind of generational companies doesn't necessarily make you the best fit to run a social media company. And I think it was that hubris that he came
in with, you know, why can't I do this? Why can't I run Twitter? It must be so much easier than putting a rocket into space and have it land on a platform. These are different problems, and these are you know, some some are engineering problems. You know, some are electrical engineering problems. But this is a human problem. This is a social interaction problem, and I think not grasping that has really hurt his image in the public eye.
Yeah, for sure, Explain to me where the company is now and where he is now.
I mean, I think X is in very precarious shape at this point, and he obviously cut the company back a lot, and now I think his engineering time, energy resources are somewhat split between x the social media platform and xai, the sort of AI company slash chatbot that he's trying to build. And you know, the platform itself is increasingly partisan and focused on Musk's politics in particular, and it's also in you know, pretty decayed financial shape.
You know, we've seen.
AD revenue continue to fall and fall on fall. Some of these big projects that the company has tried in order to bring back AD dollars have sort of faltered.
You know.
One of those was doing these long form video shows with big personalities, and I think Tucker Carlson is probably the only example there of someone who's had a successful show built on X and even he has kind of migrated and started airing his show on his own platform around his own website now, I believe, so they really struggled to figure out a way to counteract that decline in revenue, and at the same time, you know, I think there's there's a core set of users who are
attracted to the partisanship of the platform, but more and more that alienates people and drives them to competitors like threads.
Can he just keep this going forever? Will he need to sell the platform at some point? Or can he just ride into the bottom?
I think Ryan and I disagree about this.
Good, Yeah, just tell us about that and then we're.
I kind of don't know if there is a bottom, honestly. I mean, I think he can just keep going should he choose to do so, and has the financial resources to do it, and certainly the interests.
Right, and then that's not a lot of seat fail. But I don't know. I think Ryan disagrees a little bit on this that.
There is no bottom, or there is a bottom.
That he'll have to sell it at some point.
I don't think he'll have to sell. You know, we haven't really talked about the debt payments that he has. By the way, he raised billions of dollars in debt he has.
I think he.
Services to service that debt. He pays more than a billion dollars in interest payments a year, which.
Is kind of this.
Yeah, can you I don't if you can relate to that. That seems like a lot of money.
Yeah, yeahs are lower.
I don't know what your credit card bill feels are looking like, but but yeah, I mean, like I think that that's if we're talking about pain points for Elon, that is certainly one of them. This is not a guy who has a lot of cash on handy. I mean, he has a high net worse, don't get me wrong, more than two to fifty billion dollars. But he's not liquid on that. That's a lot of tied up in a lot of equities in Tesla at SpaceX. He leverages his Tesla shares to raise money and cap and cash essentially,
which is allowed. But you know, we're talking about unrealized gains right now in the election. It's exactly that, and I think he'll start to feel those pain points. Whether or not he'll sell it is another question. I think he still personally drives a lot of value from the platform.
I think the.
Platform is exactly what he wants it to be. I don't know what price you can put on that kind of personal enjoyment.
In the end. Do you think there's some conclusion to this or do you think this is just him like having a hobby.
You know, I think in all of our reporting, we were never able to find what the greater plan was for Twitter. In fact, over and over again, you see these moments of just his sort of profound impulsivity and unpreparedness, the things that he encounters during the deal. And I think that his political leanings are similar of just this is something that interests him and fascinates him, and he's
just kind of dabbling and going with the flow. And I don't think that there is some sort of grand master plan tacked up on the wall with all the red yarn behind him.
I think he's just I think the way to view him is how we view him when he build his companies. There is this kind of centered hero complex. He is the man who's going to bring us to Mars. But if you view it, you know, in this, in this relationship, he is the man who is going to help stop
the immigration crisis at the southern border. He's the man that's going to solve election fraud and all these and wokeness and all these things that he thinks ails the company, and the way to do that is by supporting Donald Trump. And it's that hero complex that has serving well in the past, and it's how he views the world, and I think it's how it's going to serve him in the future. So I think that's the kind of number one way to analyze what he's thinking about this election.
So interesting. Thanks you guys, Thank you so much.
This is really great.
Are you concerned about Project twenty twenty five and how awful Trump's second term could be? Well, so are we, which is why we teamed up with iHeart to make a limited series with the experts on what a disaster Project twenty twenty five would be for America's future. Right now, we have just released the final episode of this five
episode series. They're all available by looking up Molly Jong Fast Project twenty twenty five on YouTube, and if you are more of a podcast person and not say a YouTuber, you can hit play and put your phone in the lock screen and it will play back just like the podcast. All five episodes are online now. We need to educate Americans on what Trump's second term would or could do to this country, so please watch it and spread the word.
Amanda Becker is the Washington correspondent for the nineteenth and author of You Must Stand Up, The Fight for Abortion Rights and Postdobs America.
Welcome Back, too fast politics. Amanda Becker, Hi, thanks for having me. We're delighted to have you. I want you to talk about the Nineteenth for a minute. Sort of just give us this landscape of the Nineteenth. A lot of us know about it and have been big fans of it for a long time, but not everyone. So explain.
Yeah, So, The Nineteenth is a nonprofit, independent newsroom focused on the intersection of politics, policy, and gender. We started about four and a half years ago and officially law about four years ago, and I have been there since the beginning as the Nineteenth Washington Correspondent. So we are really focused on the women and LGBTQ people in politics,
on the policies that matter to them. And so, you know, we're covering everything from you know, the fall of Row and kind of the chaos that has followed that, it's impact on the elections, all of the anti trans legislation in the States, and really anything that's important to women and LGBTQ people.
You know, Harris is a Democratic presidential candidate. She's a woman. There has been some discussion about the sort of shift from Hillary Clinton, you know, when she was the candidate. She's also a woman. We live in this country of sort of hyper misogyny that a lot of it's really, I think, institutionalized. And how have you seen a change since twenty sixteen?
You know, I've been thinking about this a lot, Molly, And actually my family was texting me when I was standing on the floor at the Democratic National Convention kind of watching Vice President Kamala Harris give her a speech. It just felt different. And I've been trying to explain to myself even kind of what felt different about it. And you might have some ideas about this as well, but I think that she is felt as like a
new generation of leaders. You know, she's not that much younger than Clinton, but I think that that difference matters in terms of their ages. And it just felt really different. I mean, I was with Clinton following her campaign for two years in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen, and now I'm covering this election, you know, a little bit less day to day as I was then, as I was at a wire service at the time, But it just
felt really different. And I think that women in this country have realized the impact of Donald Trump being elected over Hillary Clinton in a very real way, right because it led to the loss of forty nine years of abortion rights in this country, and there's really no denying that that is evident in the way people are thinking about voting now, and so I think that also has something to do with the enthusiasm for Kamala Harris's candidacy.
I agree, but I'm just trying to sort of figure this out. If this is true, which you know, this would mean sort of that the women can make up the difference. Like one of the things I've seen in this campaign is Trump has gone like all in on misogyny. So like he's going on these far right podcasts of young podcasters, he's selling NFTs. I mean that I think maybe more scamm than misogyny. But like you know, he's
got Whule Cogan. So many of the speakers at the RNC had like allegations of domestic violence, right, Like this was like if you were it was like big divorce dad energy, right. Bill Ackman is his greatest champion. Like you know, anyone on their first wife is not going to necessarily respond to this message. But how do you think that, Like, I mean, I think his calculus is that he's going to be able to run up the numbers with divorce Dad energy and that he'll get enough
white women so he'll be able to win. There certainly are white women who identify more with their race than their gender. I mean, do you think that's shifting.
So if you look at polling, and I know pulling is incredibly imperfect, we are seeing shifts among white women and among married women, and that would be different than in twenty sixteen or even in twenty twenty because right white women have broken for Trump the past two elections. And I know that's hard for a lot of liberal white women's stomach, but that is the truth. I remember getting hate mail in twenty twenty when I wrote about
how white women back to Trump. That is something. Honestly, I think that that is one of the stories of this election. Unfortunately, you know, it takes six months or so to get the validated voter data, so all we're going to have close to the election to kind of look at what happened is except pulling, which is you know, just as imperfect as any other type of poll. I think this election has the potential to be the one
in which white women break for the Democratic candidate. And I don't know how much of that will end up
being because it's Kamala Harris. I don't know how much of that will end up being because this is the first presidential election without Roe v. Wade in place, or a combination of things, including what we're hearing from the Republicans, which is you have Trump's kind of strain of how he looks at gender and masculinity, and then you also have Jad Vancis, when this is somebody who has talked openly about what he sees as the negative impacts of
the sexual revolution. He thinks no fault divorce can be a bad thing. And these reflect larger trends in the right wing of the Republican Party that you know has floated legislation and states to kind of roll back no fault divorce and a variety of other things that we're seen as empowering women over the past fifty years.
Yeah, I mean, vance was really a choice to double down on that. I think a lot of us wondered if picking someone like Nikki Haley might give again, Like so much of this election on the hair side, anyway, has been about creating a permission structure to give Republicans to vote for a Democrat. So, for example, Dick Cheney endorsement is not for liberals, It's not even necessarily for normal voters. It's for very far right people who can't stop MacDonald Trump and who you know, see Dick Cheney
as that permission. So on the Hair side, we've seen a lot of that. On the Trump side, we've seen none of that. So the question is right, like, he could have picked Nicki Haley as a vice president and he was like new go. He did nothing to sort of grow the electorate. Now there's a world in which that doesn't matter. But don't you think that eventually that comes back to bite him.
I had to say, I was shocked when he chose jd Vance. I'm from Ohio, I grew up there, so I followed the politics there pretty closely still. Actually his grandparents are from the same region of Kentucky that my grandparents are from. They settled in Cincinnati, has settled in Middletown, which is about, you know, twenty five miles away from where my family is. And so I followed his story right over the years. And his story has shifted, of course, and he frames it in different ways.
Yes, like his name, his story has shifted, yes.
Yes, And when Trump chose him I just thought to myself, frankly, what is he thinking, Because from my perspective, picking jd Vance did nothing and not only didn't hunting to bring in any more people who weren't already backing Trump. It was a play to like the base. It was potentially
a move that would alienate people in the middle. And I have to just think it was related to the assassination attempt and kind of like flying high after recovering from that and coming out of that and feeling invincible, and of course Joe Biden was still on the top of the Democratic ticket, thens they just thought this was a lock. But I don't see how jd Vance boosts Trump's chances in any way in November, and could potentially in fact hurt them.
Yeah, I mean that's my sense. But again, it just seems like a calculus with no thought of growing the electorate. But Trump has never had much interest in growing the elector right.
No, I think what they're going to have to rely on is the loyalist and churning out as many of them as possible, you know, running kind of a fear campaign based on immigration in particular and the economy as well. To a certain extent, and hope that that's enough and that they can get enough men and drive up enough men and maybe get some men of color in there that didn't support.
Them the last time.
I think we could potentially see a bigger gender gap than we've ever seen. And there's been a gender gap in politics and it's been growing, and I think that that will only be exacerbated this year.
So talk to me about your book.
Yes, So, it came out last week. It's called You Must Stand Up The Fight for Abortion Rights and Post Dobbs America. It is the first year. It opens in June twenty twenty two at a clinic in Tuscaloosa as the Dobbs decision comes out, and it ends a year later at that same clinic talking about kind of what
could be next. It's primary geographic settings along with Tuscaloosa, Alabama, our Phoenix, Arizona to a slightly lesser extent Maryland, and then also some chapters from places like Wisconsin, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio to just show the absolute chaos in the.
First year after Dobbs.
Told from the perspectives of doctors, healthcare providers, people working at clinics, but also lawyers, students, moms, friends, everyday voters who were mobilizing trying to protect abortion rights in kind of that pivotal first year after we lost to the federal right to an abortion.
Sometimes I take a moment to talk about how I was right and glowed. This is one of them. I was right, and I hate it when the Supreme Court let SBA ride right when they took it on the shadow dock it and did not overturn it in Texas. When Texas overturned Row a year before the Supreme Court officially put the knife in the legislation, what did you think? Did you think it was the end? I thought it was the end, but I'm very negative, so.
I also thought it was the end. I think anyone working in this space, whether they were at a clinic and in a clinical setting or you know, working on policy at the national level, also thought it was the end. The title of my book, You Must Stand Up is from a doctor in Arizona, and it's from a blog that she wrote in I believe it was twenty eighteen, may have been twenty nineteen, but I think it was
twenty eighteen. So, you know, while the Dobbs decision in the fall Row took many kind of rank and file on the Americans by surprise, for the people who are working in this space or in space is adjacent to reproductive health. They saw this coming even before SB eight, but certainly when the Supreme Court let sbight go into effect.
That is when, for example, the chapter I have set in Massachusetts, which is really a chapter about how can a state where the vast, vast majority of its residents support abortion rights, how can they make sure that they're delivering for the people in their state and giving them
what they want. Massachusetts SB eight was when they mobilized, was when they got a coalition back together that had worked on this issue before, because they thought, you know, this is the end, and it doesn't matter that this is in Texas, it doesn't matter that it's going to be, you know, worse in red states. They're going to try to come for people in Massachusetts too. And so they got together and passed one of the strongest abortion provider shield laws we have in this country.
Right now.
Yes, when you look at this, how this happened, What do you think the greatest driver was of the push to get rid of row overturning Row?
Yeah, I think it really depends whether you're talking about the average person who might oppose abortion or be represented by some of the groups or some of the kind of behind the scenes architects. There are many people in this country, including women, who believe abortion is wrong, and they you know, it has been a fifty year project to overturn Row. The anti abortion movement wanted to establish
beetle personhood back when Roe was decided. That is still their end goal, and they've been working for that, and they truly believe that they are working on kind of like the moral fight of their time. Now I am not convinced. Let's say that a lot of the funders of this are motivated by that same moral conviction necessarily and a lot of arts behind the scenes. I think what this is about is power. Who has power, who can amass more power, who can take away power from
other people? And it's about politics. And you know, abortion was not a political issue until the eighties and even into the nineties. You know, it is when it really took hold, and that was a story about power, right they were reorganizing. It was a few Republican strategists who were trying to make evangelicals a reliable voting block for Republican candidates, and it's related to kind of the decline
in the acceptability of fighting for segregated schools. And they came up with, you know, being anti abortion as a new way to appeal to those voters. Now, that was just about winning races, right, So it all comes back to power, and so they knew if they kind of combined that new voting block of Evangelical Christians with US Catholics that had traditionally been Democrats or trended democrat, they
could get a lock on power. And so this is a story about power, and this is story about what it means to be an American and what rights you have as an American.
So interesting and I think really important. There's so much in this story, but what's the solution to the real problem.
So if you are someone who supports abortion rights and would like to see something row like back in place, that's kind of what my book is about. The second half. It's people trying to figure out. I like to think of it as the book is a story about democratic erosion and how we got to a place where much of the country has laws in place that the citizens do not support. But also it's showing you people in a variety of roles who have figured out what their
role is to play in strengthening our democracy. So it's everything from doctors and even medical students realizing that it's not an option to not be an advocate or an activist. It's actually an essential part of your practice if you're going to be an bgyn and want to take care
of patients. It is young mothers in Kentucky who found out about how they could get involved through a Jewish women's group and started trying to defeat a ballot measure there that would have you know, abortion is already banned in Kentucky, but there was an effort to actually add that to the constitution. They were able to push back on that amendment and defeat it. They actually took to the streets, one of them for the first time, to
go canvassing and door knocking for that issue. I think if you talk to the people who the legal strategists, they say that we're in a kind of spaghetti at the wall moment where, you know, the abortion rights movement on a national level has been accused by some of being kind of gatekeepers on strategy for the past couple decades, and you're seeing kind of the universe of organizations bringing really high profile cases expand beyond kind of the one
or two usual groups that were doing that and the build up to Dobbs. A lot of people across the political spectrum, include being a main character in my book, have started likening the period we're in right now to prohibition right and looking the repeal of prohibition as a template for how we could restore abortion rights in this country. Because what we're seeing with these ballot measures right across the country, any time a ballot measure has been put
before the people, abortion rights has won. There are ten states that right now that are going to be voting on abortion rights ballot measures in November. And while that's great for the people in those states, and the reason they're doing it is because voters have realized, like legislation can be fleeting, it can be overturned, it can be the best way to protect a right is to have
it in your constitution. While that's great for the people in the states who have a citizen referred ballot measure process, not every state has that, So in Alabama that's not an option for them. And so when I was talking to one of the women who works at the clinic in Alabama. She was saying, I actually think you know, ultimately what we need is a constitutional convention and anment to the US Constitution that is related to bodily autonomy.
Yeah, I think that's right. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, No, no moment good.
My moment of fuckery is one of these classic high order mistakes. New Coke Land War in Asia, Parachute Pants. The magas have decided that they're going to take on the cultural juggernaut that we all know and love. S Taylor Swift. I welcome this decision on their part because it is truly one of the dumbest things I've ever heard in my life. The idea that jadvancewroled and said, I don't think anyone's going to be persuaded by a billionaire entertainer, like, bitch, have you met your boss?
But he's not a billionaire. That's somewhat difference.
That is an effering and a distinction. But look, she's going to be a force multiplier in this campaign. It's not going to decide the campaign, but she's going to be a major force multiplier in the campaign. It is going to make a big difference because there is a generation of young girls who grew up with Taylor Swift who are now voting age this generation of their moms who grew up with Taylor Swift and taking their daughters
to Taylor Swift. You know, Andrew Breitbart was not right about a lot of things, but he said one time that politics is downstream of culture, and that's why Republicans are always so desperate to get any kind of star. And even like these d minus celebrities, We've got Scott Poe, but she is the biggest cultural icon of our time. She is a big deal. And their sense of denial and despair about this is just sweet, sweet maga teers
flowing in a beautiful river of fuckery. They're attacking her, they're bitching about her, they're complaining, I'm here for all of it, all of it.
Yeah, it does seem like the party that is at war with women right as at war about Troyce.
I mean, why not go to war with the most beloved female pop star. Oh, I don't know of you know, since Madonna. It is a painful I'd argue of all time. You can make the all time argument. Yeah, you could you absolutely could.
She does a thing that Madonna doesn't do, which is she's wholesome. Yeah, so here they are going to war with the wholesome, self made American billionaire.
I'm pro Madonna and I vote, but I take your point. Yeah.
If she were even the slightest bit Maga, they would be obsessed with her, right, She's the dream. Remember the news cycle when they thought when they discovered she wasn't Maga and they were so upset.
Yeah, well now they're so upset at a level that makes that look like they couldn't find a parking space. They are losing their minds on her. And please, guys, I want you to continue to call her a dumb slut and call her a failure and call her stupid, because nothing could ever go wrong with the Swifties finding out about what Mauga's doing to Taylor. Nothing could ever go wrong there. Guys, y'all just keep tearing it up. You just keep criticizing her all you want, Just go for it.
I await your capitulation on the field of battle because she is undefeated.
Thank you. Rick Wilson, all right, all right, Jesse Cannon.
Molly Jong Fast, jd Vance he's really showing that he's a member of the Trump administration because he's taken on Trump's trade he let the mask slip.
No, I disagree. I actually think that by admitting you were lying, that's like not what you're supposed to do. Like you like, what Trump would have done is he would have said, yeah, no, that's what I said. You know, something along the lines of Paul Mattaford right where you'd make enough confusion so that you never really admit that
you're lying, even if everyone knows you're lying. This was actually, I think like one of the I mean, I would say it rare, but it's all missteps with Jada Vance, Dana Bash did a really excellent job of asking him a very specific question and then following up.
The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I start talking about cat means. If I have to, it's just mean, create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people. Then that's what I'm gonna do. Dana, Because you just said that you're creating the public policy.
Sorry, you just said that you're creating the story.
Is that, Dana, you just said that this is a story that you created, so that the eating dog re acting.
Not we are creating, we are, Dana. It comes from first hand accounts from my constituents. I say that we're creating a story, meaning we're creating the American media focusing on it.
What I thought was really interesting about this was obviously it's not happening, but it's also they finally just you know, for whatever reason, but Vans couldn't keep it going. And then Mike DeLine, who remembers the governor of Ohio and ran about twenty points ahead of Vance, even though Vance's campaign had to pour money into it. Dwine actually really just set him, you know, really, he said, I think it's unfortunate that this came up. But let me tell
you what we do now. We know that Haitians in Springfield are legal. They came to Springfield to work. Ohio is on the move in Springfield has made it great. The point is that this was meant to be a sort of standard other the way Trump often does it, you know, the same as what he did to Muslims, the same as what he did to Mexicans, the same as what he did to all these other ethnic groups.
He targets, but instead in this one, they just went too far and they made up a completely insane lie which is now debunked, and that is our moment of fuck Ray. 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.