Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds and.
Nazis march proudley through the streets of Nashville this weekend. We have such a great show for you. Today, the New Republic's Michael Tamaski joins us to talk about the media coverage of the twenty twenty four election. That we'll talk to the New Yorkers Jonathan Blitzer about his new book Everyone Who Is Gone is here, the United States, Central America and the making of a crisis. But first we have the host of the Enemy's List, the Lincoln Project, z owned Rick Wilson.
Welcome back to Fast Politics. It's Monday, and that means Rick Wilson, let's go. We're both in terrible moods.
Fucking cranky today. I mean, we're both just like bitchy people today.
The first thing we're going to talk about here is the Oh my god, let's just get this out here. No one is swamping out any presidential candidates period. Paragraph not happening.
You know what.
I am so fucking done with these people who think I'm going to propose a very clever political strategy and say.
That Jew Biden should retire.
Oh yes, we'll replace him magically with with who?
With who?
You fucking morons, There is no option here. You got to dance with the one that brung you, fight with the army you came to war with.
This is so goddamn dumb. I you know what it is. I'm sorry.
It's a luxury good for people who have never run a goddamn race, who've never worked in an actual election, who've never done politics at the retail level. This idea that oh, well, it's so simple, we'll just swap out Biden Harris for who who?
Exactly? True?
How about two white people, let's swap them out for right? This idea that there's some democratic machine that is going to go in there, right, the Council of Owls. He's going to come out and be like, sorry, Biden, you're eighty one. We've had a talk, we've decided it's enough, and you know, sorry, Kamala, you're the highest woman elected ever in America and the.
First African American woman in the vice presidential position.
Yeah, but we've decided, the Council of vows we know better, because this is the Batman movie, and so we're going to swap you both out for two. It just is so insane. It's not going to happen.
I mean, I hear this Molly so often. I know you do too.
And my question is always who, who exactly? Who exactly? Right now? Are you going to pick up the phone and.
Call Michelle Oh, a woman who has said she will never run for elected office?
Right? Get like?
Oh? Govin's ready? Okay, great? Sure tell me another. Tell me any practical political person, any professional person who has been in an elections, who has run a campaign, who has been a candidate in a national campaign. Every single person knows this is a process that begins two or three years before the actual election day. The moving parts are astounding in their complexity and their expense, and the time it takes to put them together, and the arrogance
of people who believe that they've got some simple option here. Look, is it hard? Of course? Campaigns should be hard. They're difficult, They're complex, and is by and old. Oh my god, you just fucking notice now, great people brilliant.
So is Trump.
And here's the thing that I've said to a lot of people who've done that, and have brought this up to me, and I said, who's the one person ever in history? Now, as of right now, in the primaries and general elections, twenty eight people have run against Donald Trump. Who's the one person who's ever beaten him. That would be Joseph Robin Att motherfucking bob. So they can stop
this bullshit. It needs to stop. It is the most a feat bullshit, counterproductive, self referential, home yoga dick sucking I've ever heard in my life. It needs to fucking stop.
Tell us what you really say. I been clear enough, not clear. I have a theory that I want to try out with you, which is that condonry has become completely removed from the real world. Yes, and part of it maybe because people are not reading mainstream media anymore. Right. We have a country of three hundred and thirty million people, right,
and a million tuned into The Daily Show. Okay, say twenty million people watch that dumb YouTube clip of John Stewart saying that Joe Biden was too old twenty even, thirty, even forty. You still have a country of hundreds of millions of people, and I think the pundit industrial complex is so removed from real voters that we're almost going on nothing.
There is a great gift that I have in this world. I have campaigned in thirty nine states. I don't live in Washington, I don't live in New York. I have a relatively greater exposure to America than a lot of people who write highly paid columns for expensive and elite publications. The stuff they think matters, and this is also the DC consultocracy. The stuff they think matters to Americans is completely disconnected from reality.
So on the opposite, yes you are, That's why we get along so well.
But at a heartfel conversation of the day with a Democrat operative and he really spent a lot of time trying to convince me that we need to talk about prescription drug coverage and labor unions, and I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about. Have you been anywhere in America in the last five years. No one's talking about that. They're talking about the things on the right. They've got their immigration machine pumped up to eleven, They've
got their hate machine pumped up to eleven. Everywhere else, people are terrified that democracy is falling apart and that women are going to be put into the Handmaid's Tale. This is not an easy lift anymore to just go out and do a simple focus script and go, well, here's what we're going to do. This is the fun issue. Oh, it's jobs of the economy and education.
No it's not.
It's stopped being that a long time ago. We need to rereel about what's happening in the country. And not everybody is gonna is going to fit into what clever pundits, and you and I are both clever pundits ourselves. But the idea that you can you can spin this way, to spin this thing out and say, oh, we'll just swap out Joe Biden. It's a luxury good by people who do not understand how politics works or the stakes at hand.
So aight point two million people watch the Daily Show on YouTube, which is good. That's good. I mean, look, I think it's probably about ten million Americans.
Look, I had the number one critique of Biden from all these people. Here's the thing that fascinates me. It's not how's the economy doing. Oh, it's terrible, Biden's really fucked it up. Nope, that's not their critique. You know, Biden hasn't sufficiently, you know, fought back against ops. That's not their critique. Biden hasn't been a strong leader in foreign policy. That's not their critique. Their critique is Biden's old. We aesthetically don't like old people, and therefore we should
have someone young and fresh to run against Trump. Where the exchange here isn't young versus old, it's old versus evil.
Right, Well, I also think like voters, and again I don't want to make sense here, but voters are old.
Yes, the average voter in this country is in their late forties, late forties, mollie.
And I don't know if that's the mean motors a median, but like, my sense is that a lot of people who show up to vote are are a lot older than that.
For the media and voting age is sixty one.
Yeah, I mean, so that's the thing is, like, I don't actually think people vote on agism.
America is a post policy country on both sides.
Frankly, we Democrats are trying.
Let me put it this way, Barack Obama, who is the most brilliant campaign and candidate of the twentieth century, and I mean that as a high compliment. He had a two word policy, hope change, And I remember sitting in focus groups trying to like pin it down, like when we were back then, it was like, don't you know liberal Marxist Barack Obama will impose.
Full communism And they were like no, I like hope and change. And on the Republican side with Trump, it's like it's like, I'm angry.
I'm a sixty five year old white guy who drives a truck and I haven't had an direction in twenty years.
Take revenge on my enemies for me.
Donald, right, exactly.
I've had too much coffee this morning.
Well we both have had too much coffee that, to be honest, but I think so I want to say, Biden is not being swapped out for Michelle Obama.
Nope, not happening.
The first person to ever tell me that Biden was going to be swapped out for Michelle Obama was Michael Moore. Well, Michael Moore once told me that, and I was like, right before the it was Hillary. Hillary is going to be swapped out for Michelle Obama or should be? And I was like, yeah, okay.
Look I get it. People like Michelle Obama. That's fine, And you know what, She's a likable person.
I like her too, She's great.
She has not spent a lot of her post Washington time being a terrible human being, you know, and Cobb Wesser for that, right. But this idea that any of this is mechanically doable or practical or easy, or that it will change the fundamental course of the election is astounding to me. I don't understand what mental breakdown is happening in the heads of elite pundits who keep saying this.
Okay, Jesse's bored. He just texted me, We've done this too much so and I don't want to you know, we don't want to lose the youngest I know. Right, Can we talk about Fanny Willis? Because I want to talk about Fanny Wellis.
Let's talk about Fanny Willis.
I'm watching Fanny Willis yesterday and I'm thinking, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but I'm thinking, fuck these fucking people who are dragging her through these Like in my mind, she was pissed, but I was more pissed for her, Like I did not feel like Republicans came out looking great yesterday. Now the people I talked to horror. Do you see people were like that was a little over
the top. She should have been less enraged. But I actually think that the rage that she showed a lot of women related.
To I actually agree with that, and I'll tell you why.
Because the idea that the Republican opo machine has come up with is, oh, well, we can disqualify her because of her personal life.
Is that really the game they want to play is.
That this is a problem they want it like, I just I wonder if that doesn't have a certain potential downside for a whole variety of Republicans.
I mean, this is the thing where they say Biden has dementia and then Trump goes on to make all these mistakes.
Right, and the Trump goes out and speaks at like ancient Sumerian.
It goes, yes, he's.
Right, French. Well, she's divorced, he's divorced. They are not even dating anymore. There's a whole thing about when she says, you know, we stop being physical, but we didn't have the talk for another month. And it's like, in my mind, I thought, like, this is such a bad look. They're all trying to protect this guy who had an affair with a porn star while his third wife had just delivered their child and then gave her money.
Does anyone want to make an argument that Donald Trump is somehow this figure of moral probity anybody, anybody out there at all, because I guarantee you Donald trucks, Donald truck, Wow, Donald truck a lot of coffee this morning, kids, a lot of coffee. Donald Trump has a sordid, grotesque personal life. And in his case, the MOGA's like, that's the sound of his viruinity and masculinity. But he'll fuck anything that moves,
including office furniture. Oh oh what Trump? And Oh I'm gonna get in trouble again because I just use the official mocking the Trump maga voter voice.
Well, I forgot Rick see it in.
I think that that's a really good point that you know, you have one set of rules for Trump and another set of rules for everyone else. So Fanny Willis is divorced, she's dating someone. First of all, Like, I actually do agree with the people who said, like he should have stepped down, like don't hire him. You have to be so careful when you're going after Trump people because they'll
take everything you do and blow it up. But that said, the case here is that somehow she did something corrupt and they just don't have any evidence to prove it. And then you have this other story running in the news, which is that Trump is taking over the RNC so it will pay his legal bills.
So this guy from North Carolina that they're putting in there, yes he's an election denier, but he's essentially fundamentally uninteresting in the RNC takeover the fact that they're putting Lara Trump as the co chair of the RNC. You know, Lara Trump is not qualified. During the roller meat station at a wah wah Okay, she is a profoundly unequipped person for this job except for the management of the grift,
and that is entirely what will happen. And they're putting Chris Losovita, his strategist, in as chief operating officer, so Chris actually knows where all the bodies are and it can bleed the turn up until it is absolutely fucking dry. By the time this is over, the Republican National Committee will be utterly bankrupt. They'll have to sell the building on C Street. It is amazing to.
Me what they're about to get away with here.
Just like game is out for me. You are a Republican donor. Okay, maybe you donate to Trump, but are you going to donate to the RNC when it is just in the service of Trump.
The rnc's major donor pool is going to dry up quickly. The rnc's small dollarpool has dried up a good bit, in part because the only thing that works for Republican donors now in their direct mail email campaigns is the name Trump.
Ain't nobody out.
There going, yeah, I need me some more of that, Tommy Tuberville, ooh no, it is now Donald Trump.
Unless the email says trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump trum trum trum trump tup trumpp trump, the small dollar donors go, it must be one of them cook establishment of Rhano Republicans. I'm not going to vote for him, and I'm not going to send any money, so RANA. They have bled their email list dry. This is a little secret in the industry side. The RNC email lists have been sucked dry.
They are desiccated, they are bled, bled, bled, and there's not much more blood to get out of the out of that particular turn up.
Oh well, lots prayers, whatever.
Yeah, thoughts and prayers. Look, there will be some money that comes in there, it won't be what it should be or needs to be. They're not going to raise for five hundred million dollars to fund a convention and everything else based on the fact that.
They need that money for other stuff.
I mean, right, but you're not going to get it.
It is also, while they're afraid and they'll give their money to Trump, they're not afraid of whoever this mooke is from North Carolina.
You're not really afraid of that.
They're going to spend a lot of time figuring out what the minimum dollar figure to give to Donald Trump.
Thank you, You are welcome. Did you know Rick Wilson and I are bringing together some friends for a general election kickoff party at City Winery in New York on March sixth. We're going to be chatting right after Super Tuesday about what's going on, and it is going to probably be the one fun night for the next eighty days. If you're in the New York area, please come by and join us. You can go to City Winery's website and grab a ticket.
Michael Tumaski is the editor of The New Republic.
Welcome back too fast politics, my bestie and also the person who taught me to write no pressure a mike to MASKI. Oh shucks. So let's talk about the unique moment in history we are in here. No pressure, Yeah, no pressure. I mean, you're not incredibly old, but if you were incredibly old, no, But you've been covering American politics for a long time, and it seems like right now we're in a period that is both terrifying and
also crushingly boring. Discuss terrifying for sure. Boring Yeah, well it's not boring, but it's repetitive.
Donald Trump has become boring. Although, yeah, it's a very weird thing. He is both of these things. He's a monster who is an imminent threat to you that I estates, but his stick is really boring now. And you know, I watched a little bit of from South Carolina. This was his most recent speech. It was Wednesday night. You know, did you see this jag about the photograph of him golfing and you know how he looked fat and then he complained about that. Did you see all this?
Now? The part of the seventeen hour speech that I watched. And by the way, as someone who's sat through these speeches. They really are like two two and a half hours. I mean they're fucking long.
Oh yeah, people walk out now, you know all the time. You know, you don't see that reported much, but it's true.
Yeah, because they're very boring. And he also has a couple lies. He just goes all in on and the people who watch him are like, I mean, again, this is an unfair comparison, but they're little like deadheads, right, like this is their thing, this is a raison.
Datra I think that's true of a big chuck of them. I mean, I know people that I went to high school with from my Facebook page, who.
Sharton Caveat you grew up in West Virginia.
I grew up in West Virginia. Yeah, so I know a lot of these folks were new. But I still see you know a lot of them say, oh I've seen him four times, I've seen him six times. So yeah, it is a little bit like that some folks. Half of it doesn't make any sense, right.
But it doesn't necessarily matter. It doesn't matter to his people, right because he occupies a different zone than all other normal politicians.
Right.
He gets away with things that even people like Mike Pence. The things that Trump gets away with are not transferable to anyone else except maybe Don Junior.
Yeah, and not even him in quote the same way. But I don't know how to explain it. But it's mystical, and that is fascist. Between the fascist leader and his followers, there is this mystical, inexplicable bond that exists that transcends any particular thing the person might say or not say, or do or whatever. So you know, like Trump makes all these he makes more verbal guests Joe Biden does.
But you know, they don't care, they don't pay attention, and so it doesn't become a mean well, there are other reasons it doesn't become because the Democrats don't push it.
They don't fight the way the Republicans.
Yeah, they don't fight the way I always do on things like that. But you can say anything. What do you think he could say that with Bosi's people. I don't know that there's any He could call them idiots and they'd love him. He probably has.
I mean, in all those hours of speeches, he said a lot of stuff. You know. I want to like talk for a minute about how difficult it is to write about what it is, this authoritarian because it's two things, right. It's Trump as a sort of Mussolini character, Mussolini asque character, right, someone who is bombastic and amusing in a way that makes him seem less dangerous. That's why I picked Mussolini because like Mussolini. Obviously there are many ways in which
Trump is not like him. But that sort of bumback, a humorous kind of we're all in on the joke is actually really does come from there. But I'm curious, like the problems we have now of covering this is that we know what it is, and yet it feels like there's a lot of anxiety in the mainstream media about how to not look like a partisan when covering the rise of authoritarianism. And I feel like we're maybe worrying about the wrong things. I mean, you and I are not, they are, yeah, right, right.
Right, yeah.
Reporters does some reporters covering this, and particularly editors, and I think there should be more focus on editors, Like specifically, the people who write the front page headlines, are the home page headlines for the New York Times in the Washington Post. Those people have enormous enormous influence, who are they. I don't know, Maybe you do. I don't know who they are, but like just every word they choose is so important, and everything they decide to hilight is so important.
So we saw the last weekend that her report came out last Thursday afternoon. It was a big story, and understandably so I'm not saying it shouldn't be a story. I mean whether her was behaving in accordance with prosecutorial norms in saying some of the things he said of that report.
No, I don't think he was.
Andrew Weisman doesn't think so. And he worked on a special council.
Yeah, you know, nobody thinks he did. But he said they were news. But they were news for three days or two and a half days, And so you know, I woke up Saturday morning. Of course, they led the papers on Friday morning. Then I woke up Saturday morning, getting my first coffee and walking my computer, wondering, oh boy, what's going to be the lead story? Don't tell me. And yes, Biden's mental acuity again for the second day running. Now that's a choice. That's a specific decision you know
that they made. Did they need to make that? Was? I don't remember what else was going on in the news that day.
But a lot.
Trumpet had rejected NATO and encouraged Russia to attack NATO allies, Yes, but for not paying their bills, the irony upon iron a. Yes.
Anyway, these are choices that mainstream media institutions made, and years another that I wrote about this in my piece on Monday when I was talking about all this stuff. Trump gave a speech Friday night before an NRA crowd in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and he referred to it as Saturday afternoon. He said, what a nice Saturday afternoon.
Believe me, I don't have to do this.
If I didn't believe the I'd be somewhere else, I'd be very nice place. But it was Friday night and he called it Saturday afternoon. Now, the New York Times in the Washington Posts both had reporters there. They both ran stories on this speech. Neither of them even mentioned that he did that. And that was one of about five guests. He called Biden Obama again and other things. None of them were even mentioned in the Times and
Post speeches. Now, if Biden had done those things, don't you think they'd be mentioned in the In the news articles I kind of do. I certainly do.
The way they.
Covered these things, it's it's just it's it's mysterifying something.
I was somewhere the other day with a bunch of really smart, educated political people and they were like, well, they need to get by and out there, and I was like, you guys, he gave a speech on Monday. On Tuesday, he spoke to whatever. I mean, you know, I watch c SPAN, so I see all the times he speaks. And what's happened is that he only gets
covered when he gaffs. So when he gives I mean, I heard him give a speech that was a very long speech, and it was quite he was speaking quite quickly, which for me, you know, and my father might be hereditary, we have some you know, we're not fast talkers. It requires a lot of like mental acuity, which I at forty five no longer have nobody covered it at all.
And so literally I'm with all of these smart people and they're like, well, they should get him out there more, and I'm like, he's out there every fucking.
Day, Yes, of course he is. And now he's not out there. I will say this, he's not out there necessarily like in campaign mode every day, you know, when when you're out there as president, it's not the same as being in campaign.
I mean unless you're Trump. Yeah, and everything is just running and trying to stay to jail.
Right exactly. So they could probably do a little bit more of that. But yeah, the other problem here, Molly, is like the way news organizations, mainstream news organizations, define news. News by definition is something that is new.
Now.
If Trump says for the five hundredth time, in some way, shape or form, that I'm going to subvert democracy if you make me president again, it stops being news. I mean, it's still shocking, outrageous, and it should be on the
front page even if it's the five hundredth time. But news organizations say, oh, that's not new this, And so that's how they diminish the threat and normalize it because the more he says and think about it's a terrible paradox, the more he says outrageous things, the less newsworthy they become, and the more normal two on that that's profound, Eh.
That's why they pay you the medium books. Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that's right. The other thing that I think is pretty interesting that we probably should talk about is this special election in New York's third Yeah? Where because I mean again, and everyone gets mad at me for saying this. Why everyone gets mad at me for saying this, I don't know, but like, so, the whole theory of the case with Biden is that Biden should drop out because the polls show he's behind. Okay, right,
I mean that's it. That's all that you know. And he's old, so that's right. I mean, there's not any other information here that I'm missing, right, No, not at all. Okay, So this is the whole you should drop out of incumbency, which is an enormous advantage. And he's been quite in my mind anyway, quite a good president. The Inflation Reduction Act, and I don't want to sound too smug here, but has actually done all the things they promised it would. But here is Joe Biden. So this whole idea is
based on polls New York's third district. Pole's show Swazi barely eking it out. He wins by six points, actually by eight points.
Yeah, no, I noticed Mike Johnson said Biden wanted by eight points and Swazi didn't. Yeah, he won by seven point eight.
Right, seven point eight points, so a sixteen point swing.
Sixteen point swing. As I heard you say on TV the other day, you argue that it's a bell Weather and Mike Johnson argued that it's not at bell Weather. I'm on tem Molly here. It's absolutely bell Weather. But you know, it's also like it's instructive of the way that the mainstream media unconsciously in bibes right wing medias and tropes and talking points. It was the right wing
media that said this post. I grant you Pols said it too, But the New York Post banging on about the migrant Christness and sanctuary Swazi and all this crowd.
I didn't see that.
Yeah, yeah, there's a website Sanctuary Swas Jesus Christ. So it's the New York Post banging on about all this stuff, and so they put it into mainstream of borders heads that oh, this is going to be all about the border and it's going to be a disaster for Democrats, and then Democrats start panicking and Republicans start looking over as it turns out dramatically overcome, and everybody expects a close race or even for him to lose, and that
it's not remotely close, called it ten o'clock. Yeah, it wasn't it all close? And he won every part of the district as far as I can see. And this keeps happening, as Simon Rosenberg keeps playing out, it keeps happening. There was the Pennsylvania House race that night too, on Tuesday night, where the Democrat won. That was a more democratic district than this one was. But still Democrats keep
winning these special elections. And there really is a correlation between these special elections and how things turn out in November, because it tells you where people's heads are, and people's heads are. Republicans are extreme, Republicans are against the board. They've taken away abortion rights. Now they this nonsense of the border where they're refusing to fix a problem that
they're highlighting all the time. So yeah, so all the what political scientists called the fundamentals are totally in the Democrats direction. The unfortunate fact is that Joe Biden's eighty one years old. Of all the things he can do, the one thing you can't do is get me young if you were seventy five seven points ahead.
But it is interesting to me The New York Times again, which both of us have written for and both of us appreciate, and there's a lot of good stuff in there. The New York Times opinion page has literally like you know, trans panic and Biden's age, Like you know, if I see Ross, both are the idea that Republicans are operating in good faith, even Ross, who a lot of people like whatever, I don't have a sense that they're operating in good faith. I want to talk about the border
for a second. So I actually was listening to the MPR Politics podcast, which can both be maddening but also great. They were talking about how like there's so much emphasis for voters on the border, right, like Republicans. It's the same with the Biden stuff, right, bidens Old, bidens Ald. And then Trump gets up there and says something that is a gaff like Saturday morning, and with the border, it's sort of the same thing, right, the border, the border,
the border, the border. And then it's like, well, Republicans killed that legislation because Trump told them to.
Yeah, I don't know if people noticed. You know, Greg Sargent, who now is my oll leg at the New Republic, There's been New York guest many times he wrote a piece last week for T and R picked up a pole that said, people haven't really yet noticed that this was Trump's fault, so Democrats really have to drive that. Oh maybe they did notice it in the New York Special District because they're paying more attention. There were ads of stuff.
Right, But it's an opportunity for Democrats.
Yeah, it is, it is, and Democrats I think again. You know, this is where like Corses went on this smart jag last night that there's something I've written about a lot too. Republicans just kind of like reflexively assume that they represent Middle America and that Democrats represent Burke and the Upper West Side. Well, that is not true. It's just not true. Republicans are extremists. Their positions are extreme.
Most Middle Americans, most swing voters in Michigan and Wisconsin and so on, tending to support Democratic positions much more than Republican positions. They don't want extreme, harsh policies on the border. They want the border police, for sure. They want us to have a border, and they want there to be a process, but they want a human process.
You know.
They don't want to treat people like dogs. They want to treat people like people, and they want opportunities for past to citizenship and so forth.
But the reason they want those things is because they've been told that the border is chaos and that migrants are flooding into the country, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, the reality is, yes, you have to have a path to citizenship because these people can't work. So you're having these people come in be poor, be forced to stay poor because they can't work because there is no path. But ultimately, the only way the economy survives, especially as
birth rates decline in wealthy nations, is with immigration. Katherine Rampell had a really good piece about this in The Wasting Bos that actually immigration is a huge economic boon, and especially in a tight labor market.
Yeah, absolutely huge.
I think your average person doesn't read reports about this, but they kind of instinctively know it. They know it from their communities, they know it from they see you know, Salvador and restaurants and so on and so on. They just know an anecdote that immigrants add to our economic well being. And so this is why, as I said, you know, I mean, yeah, people want a policed border, but they don't want families to be separated. They don't
want what Donald Trump and Republicans want. They want a reasonable middle of the road policy, and so Republicans know they don't represent Middle America, but that idea is fixed in the media's collective mind.
So interesting and right. Thank you so much, Mike TAMASKI. I hope you'll come back.
I will come back at any time, your Molly. Thank you.
Jonathan Blitzer is a writer at The New Yorker and author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here? The United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis.
Welcome to Fast Politics. Jonathan Blitzer, Thank you so much for having me son of Wolf. No, I'm just kidding. You're not related to Wolf Blitzer, right, This is a PSA. Yeah right, this is the most brainworms nepo baby thing I do every day. It's like, I'm like, oh, yeah, obviously it's Wolf Blitzer son. You'd actually be Wolf Blitzer's grandson. As I was thinking about this, very stupid all right, So, anyway,
you wrote this incredible book about the border. I always wonder when books come out during the time when everyone is talking about you know, books take years and years and years to write, so they're almost impossible to time, So what happened.
Well, it's funny because in a certain sense, obviously all of the drama and stress of the Southern border right now is good through the book insofar as people are talking about this issue. The thing I was primarily interested in was the arrival of Central American asylum seekers at the Southern border and kind of telling the history of how that came to be, which has been for the last decade at least, the kind of main story of how life at the border and beyond have changed in
the United States. And now that remains the case. I mean, there's still huge numbers of Central Americans from mel Salvador, Guatemala, and Duras coming to the US seeking asylum, but now the situation has gotten even more global, and so now the main population of people showing up at the Southern border are Venezuelans, But then there are also people from a number of other countries in Latin America and in the world, and so it's kind of a collision of
two things that were happening. And my sense of writing all of this was, this problem isn't going anywhere, and I wanted to try to go back into the actual history and really understand some of the lives that helped kind of open up site lines into what the politics
and policy and history of it all had been. And so now there's kind of a dual phenomenon to account for the one in my book, which is the last decade, and now we're entering kind of this new phase which is messier and even more dramatic in some ways.
So let's talk for a minute. I would love it if you would just talk about what drives immigration here, what that looks like, so why these people want to come here, and what the factors are there.
Yeah, so I would say kind of three ways of breaking that down, starting with the most recent developments at the border. So right now, what we're seeing is that the world on a whole is experiencing more mass migration than it has in decades. And the people who are showing up at the US southern border are people fleeing all kinds of things over a kind of a range
of different countries and areas. And so you know, you have Venezuelans fleeing collapsing totalitarian regime and they've been fleeing in huge numbers since at least twenty fifteen, I mean
millions of people. You have, for instance, Haitians who have been displaced for more than a decade following the twenty to ten earthquake, who had resettled in other countries in South America, but who were uprooted again as a result of the economic fallout from COVID, and so they're now back on the move and have been on the move.
You know for many, many years. You have Nicaraguins fleeing a repressive government in Nicaraguile, Cubans fleeing a repressive government in Cuba, people leaving their homes in large numbers because of the ravages of climate change, you know, hurricanes, major storms. People have lost their homes, their livelihoods. You know, you have all of these things happening at once. And what has been going on in Central America for many years
has been really nothing short of a mass exodus. And that story is what I'm primarily interested in the book, which is a story that kind of goes back to the nineteen eighties, but the kind of primary reason, I would say, on the whole to explain why so many
Central Americans were seeking asylum in the United States. This over the last decade, from maybe twenty fourteen up until the last couple of years was a combination of things like, you know, massive crime, really horrific gang violence that had kind of dominated the region, and that incidentaly was the result of US deportation policy in the nineties. You know, corrupt regimes that the US had in some form another help prop up, and that we're running they their countries
into the ground. And so you had kind of all of these things happening. And what the through line is in all of it is the asylum system at the southern border, which is a fraction of what the United States immigration system is. All asylum is is a mechanism by which people showing up at the southern border seeking protection you are allowed to gain entry into the country.
The problem is that the immigration debate in Washington has been stuck for so long, I mean for decades in fact, that the immigration system hasn't been updated in any sense really since nineteen ninety and so you know, you have labor shortages all across the country, you have visas that have been capped, you know, visas to reunite with family, temporary work visas, all of these things that should facilitate people's legal entry into the United States and would make
this all orderly and more manageable. These have been channels that have been blocked because of inaction in Congress, and so what's happened increasingly is the pressure point for the whole drama has been the border, because people who otherwise would have legitimate and good reason to come to the US, either seeking protection or opportunity, have no choice but to show up at the southern border and apply through the asylum system, which is badly backlogged. There are millions of
cases in a backlog. It takes years before someone's case is actually heard, and the worse that system fares the better, the more of an incentive it provides to people who are desperate to come and present themselves at the border because the government is overwhelmed is in many cases letting people in on the idea that in several years they'll eventually have their case be adjudicated. But that's years down the line.
Last week I read someone who wrote a really good piece for the Washington Post about the border, who was bilin Gal. Really long piece and she talked about what the fundamental problems on the on the border were, and she said that ultimately it came down to the fact that you know, there's been no legislation for twenty years, no legislation, no money, so of course you know you have no path, so the only way to come is
to use this broken asylum system. So it does seem to me to be kind of shocking that you know, you don't have the judges right, the reason why this takes so long. You don't have the judges to look at these cases. It's just a money and a legislation problem.
By and large, I agree completely.
I would say there are kind of two rough ways I've come to understand just the gridlock on it. The first is, without question, if the US government could devote more resources to the border in the form of more immigration judges, more asylum officers, you know, more agents with customs and border protection to process people who are arriving, you know, facilities that allow space in which to process people as they arrived. That it would definitely reduce the
pressure at the border. But and this is the second thing that wouldn't be enough on its own. I mean, basically what we're seeing now, and this gets to something you've also said, because the overall immigration system hasn't moved an inch in decades, there's no way for people to come to the United States legally, even though there's all
kinds of good reasons to admit them legally. And so, you know, the asylum system was never meant to address the kind of scale of people arriving that we're seeing now and honestly we were seeing ten years ago. But because nothing else changes, that's the only aspect of the system that kind of gets worked and stressed to this degree.
There's no pass turns out, ignoring something doesn't make it better exactly.
And you know, it's funny what the Biden administration has done, and we can talk about it. I mean, the Biden administration,
it's been a mixed bag on immigration stuff. But one thing that's interesting that they've done, which kind of reflects just the general stalemate in Washington, is they've acknowledged that, look, because there are no pathways, we need rather than to just process everyone in the worst place possible at the border, we need to give people a chance to begin to you know, file claims and papers with US before they reach the border, and we can then parole them in
that's the authority that the president has to basically give people legal cover to enter the country, and they've done that for populations that we've seen a real rise in immigration from so Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and they created a program, a parole program where thirty thousand people from these countries can enter the country legally each month, and one of the consequences of that was that there was a ninety percent drop in those populations showing up at
the southern border, which is to say, you know, if you create legal pathways, people will avail themselves of them. The problem is that the people now who have come into the United States through these parole programs don't have a path to legal status either because the same forces of gridlock or at play when it comes to you know,
they're eventually getting legalized. So basically, the Biden administration is in a bind because the only entity that can open up legal pathways in a meaningful way, in a kind of thorough going way as Congress. But Congress is a dead zone. And so you're kind of in this You're you're sort of in this catch twenty two situation if you're the administration, where you want to make it more orderly at the border and again, we can talk about it.
There's a lot there, but you want to make it more orderly at the border by allowing people to come in a more kind of ordered, lawful way. But then they're in, and now what happens They have a sort of temporary legal standing for you know, two years, but what happens after that. That's a big question, right, And that is a big question. This gets my sort of next question, which is Republicans. This is why I love Trump so much, and I love I mean Jesus fucking Christ.
So Trump was like, they don't need a border bill because obviously you didn't want a border bill because he wants a border to be bad. But there are a lot of Trump people are like, Biden can do this with an executive order, she doesn't need legislation.
Explain to us why that is just not true.
I mean, honestly, and I obviously spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff.
I don't even really know what they mean. It's when they say that.
They're objecting already to the idea that the president is taking a unilateral action in the form of this parole program. So you know, they want him with a kind of you know, sweep of the pen to shut the border down, which again that's also a nonsensical claim. The border cannot just be shut down. It doesn't work like that. So what they essentially mean when they engage in that bit of ridiculous hyperbole is for the president to suspend asylum
process thing. But again, the idea that not doing anything or the President simply bowing to be tough and to just kind of, like in a symbolic gesture, say well, that's it, We're closed, which is what Congressional Republicans literally say the president should do. They say he should simply just clear the air once and for all and explain to people that quote unquote we're closed. I mean, I've had Republican congress members tell me this.
I love that members of Congress have told you that.
Yeah, is weighing in on this.
Yeah. Right.
There's not any one thing the president can do to turn this around. And the thing is that he's trying to do which are extremely kind of narrow and technical, but like would help to some degree, for instance, getting more resources to the border just to reduce the sort of temperature of what's going on there. The Republicans are blocking and so it's a perfect circle. It's a perfect
circle for them. They're not saying really anything in good faith here about what the president should or shouldn't be doing.
Right. But I mean, I want to pull back for a second because this is my obsession when it comes to immigration, and I feel like we don't talk about this because I guess whatever, But we actually need immigrants. You have a tight labor market, you have a population that is not keeping up with the numbers. I mean, we're going to keep people out because that works so well for Japan. I mean, what's the thinking here.
I mean, I don't think that they're thinking here it's mine ending, honestly. I mean, there's you know, this isn't just a kind of aggressive call for more humanity. You know, this is like a bottom line, it's.
A capitalist call for more workers. I mean exactly. So that's what I don't guess.
Yeah, I mean I think, you know, I think it's kind of I mean, this is going to sound sort of reductive and obvious, but it's sort of the baseline reality of what we see in Washington, which is just the simplest politics here of getting re elected and people, you know, they're playing off of resentments and confusions and fears that people in the electorate have, and that's the kind of be all and end all of how they're
gaming this issue out. I mean, it's incredible to see there are Republican governors do state and local officials who are very plainly saying, look, we have labor shortages.
We need workers.
I mean, what we're seeing right now this is in primarily in blue states, but it's incredibly dramatic, and it kind of just shows that sort of the tragedy and senselessness of what we're experiencing. The governor of Texas has been busting all of these migrants to blue cities and blue states and doing it deliberately to so chaos with coordinating with state and local authorities. So large numbers of people are showing up in cities like you know, Denver, Chicago, Washington,
New York. And I was recently speaking to the mayor of Denver who said to me, you know, every day we're getting calls from employers all across the city saying, look, we have so many jobs we need to fill. There are thousands of people who are arriving here who want to work, Please help us. What are we missing. How do we connect these dots?
And you can't hire them legally because there's no.
Pass exactly, they don't have work authorization, and there are kind of different bureaucratic ways of doing that, but it's, you know, the gears of government. Government kind of grind slowly in that regard. And obviously the numbers are overwhelming cities because the governor busting them to these cities is trying to overwhelm them. So it's just you're kind of in this bizarre situation where like this solution is crying out. No one's even got really a question about what some
of the needs are. I mean, obviously, in Washington on comprehensive immigration reform, that's just a morass. But in terms of some of these more straightforward things like meeting labor needs, you'd think temporary work visas. There's not controversy on that. And if you talk to conservatives their game, I mean, if you talk to them away from the kind of combat zone of Washington, they'll say, yeah, of course, we definitely need more temporary worker visas.
This is what the Co Brothers want. I mean, these guys are they're not humanitarians. The Co Brothers actually there's only one brother. Now. One of the things that I'm struck by is actually, in these red states, you see governors changing child labor laws and lowering the fines for companies because they know that children are working in these factories.
And we had Hannah Aronson from the New York Times on to talk about that, and she said, they know they have children working in these factories, and that's why they're trying to lower the fines. And these children are spending all night working in factories, falling into Cheeto dusters, you know, breaking their arms, being paralyzed, trying to go to school the next day. I mean, we are in the middle of like Upton Sinclair Land.
You know, when you pan out and look at the broader history too, I mean that's all obviously, it's horrific, and it's sort of in plain sight now thanks to Hannah Driver's recording and others. You know, when you pan out too, though, and look at the history that there's always been that tension, particularly on the Republican side. I mean both parties, look have had to have a very vexed history of dealing with immigration policy, to be clear, but on the Republican side, one of the kind of
interesting strains, kind of the intra family tension. There is, you know, on the one hand, a kind of more classic nativist populist sentiment which is sort of always sloshed around the party. But then you also have more of the chamber of commerce of you which is look, I mean, this is what you're describing. There's a kind of capitalist.
Bottom line here.
Why would we block people from working in industries where there are needs? But then within that community on the on the right, is some disagreement about, you know, the degree to which people can continue to work in an undocumented fashion. Obviously it's easier, more profitable for big companies to not have to pay people, to not give them labor protections. That's a very scary fact, and that's been
a fact for decades. The intractability of reform on this issue has also turned into a profit bottom line for companies and for Republican politicians who defend them.
Yeah, I'm hoping you could sort of give me a little something to make me not so depressed.
So I spent years working on this book, and the deeper you get into it, you know, this is a book about the history of the United States and Central America and how American foreign policy and how American politics have contributed to all the sorts of strife in the
region that leads to mass migration. And so the book sort of narrates the interconnectedness of the US and the wider region, but also the kind of infinite loop of it that the US does things that generate more migration, that leads the US to do more hasty things, and
on and on and on. And I have to say though, that the silver lining and doing this reporting for me because obviously, on the policy and politics level it's just donningly upsetting, and on the human level, there's just so much suffering, so much needless gratuitous suffering.
I have to say that.
And this is going to end up sounding really corny, I'm sorry, but you know, writing about people who have been kind of buffeted by these forces of history that are just so vast that no single person could keep them at bay, who nevertheless kind of refused to be defined by those circumstances that honestly made me, I mean, even just as a journalist. And again again I realized that this sounds sort of pie in the sky, but no, no,
I'll take it. Yeah, I mean it made me feel like, Okay, you know, there's there's more of a need than ever to fight on, to tell these stories, to try to get to the human dimension of this because the politics are so stupid, but the people are so endlessly interesting and full of surprises, and that mismatch on the one hand is tragic and upsetting and on the other does kind of give you hope.
I completely agree. And as much as I feel like it's it's so crushing and sad, and the stuff we hear is just every day, it's just horrendous, I do feel very much that like we beat on into the sea. That's a quote from Butcher to a So we beat on, So we beat on. Yeah, but as I butchered this show quote. No, it's gonna talk, but it is really true. Thank you so much, Jonathan. I hope you'll come back.
Oh, I would love it.
Thanks for having me.
A moment ou Rick Wilson. Yes, it's time for our one segment, What is your moment of hackery?
The one segment of my moment of fuckery this week is the inevitable moment of fuckery that is the entire Republican Party. Alexi Navolney has been murdered and they are already like, well, you know, it doesn't mean Putin's a bad guy, per se. He can't lose. He's at the top of his game.
Y'all.
If you're in the Republican Party and you're still kissing Vladimir Putin's ass and you're stra, say, do you want me to start in the front of the back this guy?
Oh Jesus christ Rick, you're offending my genteel sensibilities. All right, go on. I mean, I don't know that we need a.
Full but look, the moment of fuckery is at this goddamn party. For all of its other wild sins, excesses, mistakes, errors, violations of decency, dignity, intellect, and human rights. The fact that after Vladimir Putin has straight out murdered somebody and they're still kissing his ass, but at least they have nice subway stations, right.
Tucker, Yeah, Tucker Carlson goes grocery shopping. I do have the sense that he does not spend a lot of time grocery shopping. After watching that video.
I have the sense that he sends his second second deputy under kitchen maid scullery made to the shopping.
Is chief of staffs chief of staff. My moment of fuckery is is, first of all, I can't tell if I'm like, if I'm the problem it's me, or if everyone else is a problem. So it's probably me, But I think I might be the problem here. But I feel like my moment of fuckery is that I feel like everyone is losing their minds over the wrong presidential candidate.
Yes, yes it is.
So if you're a good natured liberal, stop it, stop it. And if you're a bad natured conservative, you do whatever you want. I don't care. You got Donald Trump. Good luck.
My other micro moment of fuckery is that the star witness in all of the bullshit about Hunter Biden turns out to be a line liar who lies and has now been arrested by the federal government because he's a lying liar who lied.
Right, And we're talking about Merrit fucking Garland, So like this is the slowest of slow rolling DJs ever, So like this guy must have done so much criming for him to even get indited, like right, because this is merit. I don't want to put my finger on the scale. I just let people, wait, let James Cally release that
fucking latter and that motherfucker by the way. As we go on with this moment of fuck, I just feel like Jesse's going to cut this but don't ever buy James Comy's books, like that fucking guy lost the election for Hillary Quinton.
Thank you will, folks, have a great day.
Jesse's like, I hate both of them.
He's fuck up both of you right now.
Jesse's like, I can't tell which one I hate more.
Stop.
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.