White House Chief Of Staff Ron Klain, Rick Wilson & Tim O’Brien

in America today. Then we'll talk to Bloomberg Opinion editor Tim O'Brien about the subject he knows best, which is Donald Trump, and he's gonna tell us what to think about Trump's terrible, terrible week. But first, we have a moment that many of you listeners have been waiting for. It's time to reunite to former New Abnormal co hosts. Here's founder of the Lincoln Project, Rick Wilson and Molly John Fast. Welcome to the podcast. Rick Wilson, who wait,

what was so bad? He's back. Since I was exiled a year and a half into the chill, outer darkness of not having a podcast, since the cruel hand of fate descended on me, is continued to be quite famous and appear on television Rick Wilson, Molly John Fast, I am back with you from the state of Florida for Ston to be destroyed State of Florida. So it turns out that Florida is America, and America is unfortunately for US, Florida. I mean, what happened Like the last year, it's just

been the entire Republican Party is all Florida. Well, look here's the long understood national cultural and political phenomenon of Florida. It's a fucking magnet for crazy and it has been that way. And look, I'm a fifth generation Floridian. Okay, My people came here in the eighteen fifties. We're o g s. We're We're like the salt of the damn salt of the earth of Florida, and no one else is. It has become a state where disaffected people from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan,

New Jersey, New York have flooded. Now the New York New Jersey people flooded down to the Palm Beach and Broward County area, and the people from Ohio and Wisconsin flooded into the Tampa Bay area, and a lot of the people from Michigan went down to Naples and Cape coral Um. And so we have this enormous demo of people who've moved here in the last twenty five years, who were piste off about the high taxes in their states, who were getting older, and who wanted to die somewhere

warm and cheap. And I can tell you Florida excels warm and cheap, whether it's climate strip clubs or nursing homes without power during a hurricane. So, speaking in Florida again, we're going to talk about this Ron de Santis fellow, that's President de Santis to you, neither your friend nor mine, who you have a nickname for. Yes, there's a circle of never Trump Republicans in Florida who have decided and we know hit the irritates him now, so we use

it frequently. We call him Tater joey in appearance and starchy in attitude. He's Tater. He's a little he's a little dumpling. Okay, So there's a new ABC Washington Post poll that shows that Trump's popularity in the Republican Party

has dropped a Since I'm shocked by this discuss. This will definitely be the thing that takes him away from the Republican base, Molly, because it's not like he's talking about John McCain or disabled reporters are grabbing pussy or sucking Putin's dick, or saying that he wants to star in an anime homo erotic fantasy with Kim Jong un, or any other goddamn thing he did for the last seven years. Listen, Donald Trump still controls the Republican base.

I haven't looked at this particular survey, but I'm sorry wish casting is not a strategy, and he is. He is the presumptive nominee for unless he's dead or in jail, and both of those seem un likely since obviously we live in the hands of a cruel and angry god. This idea, though, that he's less popular, sure, maybe, so that means the only controls of the Republican base. Okay, tell me how Rohnda Santis or Ted Cruz or Josh Holly or Nicky Hayley or Christie Nome or any other

fucking moron who gets in the Republican primary. When you've got a guy who gives you pure, unadulterated Trump and you're offering them diet Trump they're gonna pick the real Trump every time. It's the Gresham's law of politics. Bad politics drives out good he he gives them the crack they want. And it is not gonna go the way a lot of people think it's gonna go just because he's in political trouble, because he's been gonna gonna be indicted.

I will argue all day long, an indictment makes him stronger. Now, should we indict him? Of course we should. Should we put him in jail, of course we should. Should we have a new punishment involving live wolves and rabies, of course we should rub yourself in the gravy, Donald, the little succumbing. But no, no, but let's just let's stay out of Game of Thrones for a minute here. I just, yes, I understand an indictment makes him more popular with his face.

But does an indictment make him more popular with the donor class? Does it make him more popular with who cares? He raises of his money from small dollars? And you know this, this whole story this week, like the strung super Peck didn't raise any more money. Yes, it's because they renamed it, and so did a new one. Because that the one that was the one that was sucking down all the money right now is about to be

in legal trouble. So they booted up a new one to move all the cash out of the old one. Why is the old one going to be in legal trouble? Criming? That just a supposition or do you have like no, Well, because they've been using the same America pack essentially to fund Trump's lifestyle. And a pack can do a lot of ship, right, but it can't go out and buy it do repairs on your jet. And you think that's going to come out? Yes, So I just want to

get back to this idea for a second. We have a situation where Trump can only get I mean, he can get. He can't get enough to win anything in a general election. Are you sure? Well, I don't know. I mean I think he can't. I mean, because I can. I can tell you that thirty or calculates in the populations of California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington. And guess what, it doesn't calculate him the populations of

Florida or what does calculated? But but they're disproportionately underrepresented in the hard in the hard number of versus the electoral College count. I can absolutely draw you a scenario where Donald Trump, at thirty five or forty popularity wins the Republican primary and then wins the general election. I don't like that. I would rather live somewhere far away,

pre prefably another planet. But it's the fact. And we have to be real about this because the biggest failure of everyone, of the old Republican Party, of the media, of the Democrats, of the Hillary campaign, and damn near of the Biden campaign in is to underestimate the worst case scenario. Never never think that it can't get worse

and worse things can't happen because they do. Um so, so my point is, this is a This is a guy who no matter what has gone wrong in our world for him, the average Republican voter, when it's against Joe Biden again, they won't say, well, he's stole nuclear secrets, he kept a bunch of top secret stuff in a room with his you know, old clothes, signed newspapers, and

they will say. They will say, if I confided with a deep steak, because the pedophiles want to get Donald Trump saved the babies and enough of them will do that. And look, you go into a multiple candidate field in and let's say it's de Santis who but right now looks like the best of the match in terms of, you know, having the money, the campaign infrastructure, of the cruelty,

the psychosis to meet all the tests. But you also end up with Nicky Haley and Christine Nome and Tom Cotton and Josh and Ted Cruise and whatever other crowd

of scales and weirdos decide they're going to do it. Okay, you go to Iowa, and you know what, Donald Trump goes to Iowa and he gets starts, starts with the vote at a minimum, and the race is gonna smear that peanut butter all over the map, and you're gonna end up with He's goes and wins Iowa, and he goes and wins New Hampshire, and he goes and wins South Carolina. But we have to talk about the mid term as opposed to just my anxiety. Okay, hello, I'm

Rick Wilson. How many wretchet your anxiety? I mean, really, I'm just sitting here getting more and more anxious. I'm already stressed enough. Can we just talk about the mid terms. Well, the mid terms. If you had asked me this question eight months ago, when I was thrown off a podcast and didn't have one anymore and cruelly and cruelly thrown into the cold night, UM, I would have said that the Republicans were gonna win sixty five House seats and would have and would have a probably a plus four

or even plus five in the Senate. Now, Donald Trump saved us by picking the most outrageously weird, dumb, corrupt, stupid, creepy, funck wit crowd of absolute mouth breathing gutter snipe moron funk wits that I could have possibly imagined. I feel like you're censoring yourself so much. I know, right, I'm really I feel like I'm holding back. Maybe it's because I'm not used to being on a podcast anymore. I

don't know you have your own podcast. But the fact that you didn't get a Purdue in Georgia, you didn't get a McCormick in Pennsylvania, you didn't get a Tempkin in Ohio, and so on and so on and so on, Well what you got, Jesus Christ, Well, listen, I want to talk about Arizona a little bit in a minute.

That's a separate and horrible topic of its own, but it has opened up the possibility of winning in Pennsylvania, and Fetterman, you know, has has despite all the terrible personal stuff that has befallen him, the guy has well overperformed in an increasingly read state. Dr Oz is I could not have picked a worse, weirder, more Turkish New Jersey candidate than Dr Oz because you know, everybody is thinking themselves. I'm really looking for a guy who's both

from Turkey and from Jersey. You know, he voted in the two thousand in the two thousand eighteen Turkish elections, Yes, I'm aware. Do you know when he was in the Turkish military he swore an oath that includes things like allah. Now, I will say if a if a Democrat had done the same thing, I promise you it would be NonStop. Fox would have already spun off a separate satellite channel,

the Muslim thread, how we face it. If it if Oz had been a Democrat and it was in the in the boot was on the other foot, they would do that. It would be like yeah, Oz of Turkey all day long. They would do the whole for the drama. I want to talk to you about this. So you think those candidates are going to keep Democrats, it seems likely you're in the hunt. Okay, they're in the hunt.

And there's a degree to which the competitive nature of bad candidate selection in the Republican primaries where where's old crow. Mitch McConnell calls it candidate quality, credid quality, mall is real. It's very real, people say. Candidate quality is much like my sexuality, seething. Everybody was looking for Oh my god, you know, Molly can quality. Jesus Christ, No, listen, all kidding aside. This is one of the rules. The guys like me who came up in Republican politics from the

Lee Atwater era on, we learned to fundamental rules. One just when baby, and two candidate quality matters. And so in twenty twelve, in the wake of the Tea Party, the Republicans got heart on for crazy and so you ended up with you know, Christine o'donald and aching all these other subpar, low quality candidates got their asses kicked. Well.

Mitch summoned to the tribe immediately after the election and said, We'll never doing that shoot ago, I'm sorry, that's sort of a Nixon m We got the idea, although I just I just had a great parody at idea called Songs of Passionate Rich McConnell, Jesus Christ please, Jesse and I are like, this is why you were thrown off the podcast. But here's a here's a question for you. If Republicans do not recapture they sent I think McConnell resigns, I mean resiscu me retires why he serves out, But

I think he retires. How well, he's up there for one thing, but that has never stopped an American politician ever. Yes, look at the leadership of the Democratic Party in the House, right, I mean look at everywhere. It's so young and sprightly and fresh. So you think he has done? I think he will see at that point two things. One is that he no longer controls his caucus because people that are coming into that caucus are increasingly not like Mitch McConnell.

They're like Tommy Toberville. You know who's the guy who's like an example of like lead paint warnings from the nineteen seventies, Well, let's your child drink lead paint chips. Tommy stopped looking that wall. Stop Tommy and Cindy Hyde Smith and even Rick Scott, who has done America an enormous favor this year by incinerating a hundred and fifty million dollars of donor money. Where did that money go? Nineteen million dollars went into text messaging, sixteen million went

into American Express bills. Now, I'm sorry, my superpack has taken a lot of ship. We only spent eighty five point six percent of our of our money, which is higher than everybody else, by the way, on direct voter contact. But nobody ever got their m X bills paid by the Lincoln Project. Get the funk out of here, these people. It is a gigantic grifta rama. Rick Scott brought in a bunch of people because and I'm not exaggerating, kidding

or joking, I'm just exhausted even telling you this. After Rick Scott, in one one of his senior stratagist came out of a meeting and said, everything we do from now on is running for president. I just can't imagine who thinks this person is going to be president. I thought, you know, we've had Barack Obama America's first African American president. We may someday have Hillary Clinton. At the time, I

thought this, you know, a woman president. But is America really ready for our first, our first reptile American president. I don't think so. I don't think so. Look, and I'm not anti reptile. God knows. I have an alligator in my lake behind my house right now. I have not killed shot him. No, that's that was another that's the new gator. Okay, I'm glad we've he stayed very far back in the back of the swamp right now.

He's only been like near the edge of the Virgin the back by the top of the meadow once this year, so he has been allowed to live. But but I do think it's a good point that there are a lot, a lot of Republicans in the Senate who have presidential ambitions, almost almost all of them strangely at well. I mean, I think Cindy Hyde Smith you can count her ound possibly and Marcia Blackburn does not see a world where she becomes president, you know, I hope not. I hope not.

I think I'd like Marsha to see a world where she becomes literate and chordates. But you know, these are these are lofty goals for that for that world. But what are you seeing in the in the House races? What do you think that? Look, the House races for Republicans have fallen off somewhat, But I cautioned Democrats who have been picking out curtains and deciding what bills are going to pass on the first day, you better watch yourselves because redistricting is still a powerful normative force in

this election. There's still a very very very very very very significant probability that Republicans are competitive enough to bring you to a tie ball game in the House. God, can you imagine? Who, I mean, how would that even play? Do you see a world in which McCarthy stays is as the leader? Look, I think I think at least Dephonic really wanted it. She was working it under the

surface for a while. And since at least Dephonic basically has the chrisma of dryer lint and is the Gretchen Wieners of Congress, you know it just it didn't come together like she thought. So she announced the the day she's got to stay and run for for Caucus chair

Conference chair. Excuse me, and It really comes down to whether or not Trump's sadism plays itself out right after the election, because there's nothing Trump loves more, as you saw with Jade Evance this week, than torturing someone who has ever offended him, right, And that was an amazing moment where he said, Ja d Vance is kissing my asses. If you did something like that in d C to

be that humiliated in Washington, I have some recommendations. They're friends of mine, not I'm not a client, but I do know who they are, who will perfectly happily abuse you, who will happily abuse you and humiliate you for a a less intensive thing than running for US. I feel like you're more unhinged than usual. Hey, but I mean that with all the love in the world. It did that Ja d Vance Trump humiliate, absolutely humiliating Jady Vans and then covering with yes, but Maga loves him, and

you know, I mean that was sort of amazing. Do you think Jade Vance Jade Vance wins though, because Ohio is so red? Right? Ohio is a very red state, and Tim Ryan has has a very credible approach, personality, temperament, all those things. But Maga Republicans in Ohio are by far the largest Demo in the party, and they look at Tim Ryan, a moderate Democrat by any scoring mechanism, and say he's a predator, pedophile, gay, communist, you know whatever,

and and we can't vote for him because of the children. Right. I will keep my counsel, but you come back to me after the election if if Tim Ran doesn't make it, because I have I will have something else to say about things at that point. Who are the Democratic candidates that you're really excited about. Well, I'm very happy with where Whitmer's ended up. We were we were worried about Whitmer earlier in the year and that was going to

be one of our big focus areas. And look, because we're in Michigan because you know, at this point, because Joscelyn Benson is actually the most important seat in the country in a weird way. Oh no, not in a weird way. I mean you mean Michigan could never go for another especially because the suite of Republican candidates in Michigan is practically Arizonan and its shittiness. Yeah, I mean,

they're really don't believe in democracy even at all. Now they're really they're done with democracy, democracies and an inconvenience. We look, we're also very closely following Arizona because you end up with carry Lake as governor and what's his ding dong as secretary of State, and you might as well not go compete in Arizona if you're a Democrat, you might as well just, you know, put up a wall around the state. You want to all motherfucker's you

get one, here you go. We ran it out a couple of weeks ago after Carry Lake said I want to get out of the federal government, and the Voice ever guy said, because that would mean we lose all of our air traffic control. That will be fun. Look, listen, this is a year where two big factors, to look back to what I was saying earlier, have changed the

battlefield for Democrats. The first significant factor is, of course, the shitty candidates on the Republican side and the further decline of the entire Republican Party into this psychotic, angry, objectionist fury mongering. Every everything is a crisis, every single thing. Oh my odd, I saw a sign for an open gender bathroom. That means, you know, any second now, my kids will have mandatory reassignment surgery. And these panics they get into this catalog of imaginary demons they ride with.

It's made them less and less and less rational about everything. Now. The second big factor is Dobbs. The thing that Dobbs did that's bigger politically than I think a lot of people have worked through in their heads is the demographic of voters in the Republican Party. If you model it, about twenty two of Republican women are pro choice, about eight percent of Republican men are pro choice. There's also

a weird demographic. It's kind of me by the way, weird demographic that whatever you feel about abortion is a moral issue, you have a bigger concern about the overreach of government in your bank account, your bedroom, your bathroom, and your browser history. But but what I'm saying is that's what we saw in Kansas, US. That's what's driving a lot of this way way way over the over the expected margins of registration women registering to vote for

as Democrats. There's a lot going on here that is very meaningful, driven by the effective Dobs on the center, not on the left. There's also a little bit of like not buyer's remorse, but a sense that you know they've reached the pinnacle. This was the number one to three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten priority for social conservatives for years unless they and they know that gay marriage is not going to be as easy honestly as you saw this new rolling

American support gay marriage. Thank you, Rick Wilson for joining me. I hope you'll come back. I'll consider it. We'll see. Ron Klain is White House Chief of Staff under President Joe Biden. Welcome to Fast Politics, Ron Clint, thank you so much, thanks for having me. So I wanted to start by talking about gas prices because I feel like gas prices is a hard thing for a president of control, and yet things have been going great with gas prices.

Can you talk to us a little bit about that and then also talk about what's happening with OPEC in October and if you think that will affect Yeah. So, we have had a streak. We're doing this on the We're at nine seven consecutive days in a row of gas prices declining. It's one of the longest streaks in many, many years. Uh, it's every single day in July, every single day in August, every single day in September so far. So why did that happen? Obviously a lot of things,

some things are beyond the president's control. But President Biden has taken some very strong steps to try to give people relief on gas prices. One of those steps was ordering the largest release in history from the U S Strategic Petroleum Reserve, hundred any million barrels of oil. We're in the process of selling them off. Most of that is finished, but there's still too significant sales left. That

helps bring down the price. Were putting more oil in the market, oil that we're not pumping out of the ground, oil that has already been pumped out of the ground and is in storage for just such a purpose. We've also worked with our allies to do the same things. UH sales from strategic petroleum reserves in several of the

European countries also helping to bring this down. The other thing the President has done is has made it very clear to the oil companies and all the parts of this industry that is the price of oil declines, the price of gas needs to come down. Too. Too often we've seen cases where the price of oil comes down because price of gas doesn't come down. There's an old saying rockets up feathers down that when the price of oil goes up, the price of gas goes up super fast.

When the price of oil goes down, the price of gas goes down slowly. We've made it clear that's unacceptable. So the price of gas is still too high. We continue to work on this every day, but we do haven't moved in the right direction. And ask for OPEC is going to do they having us a very small production cut, we think that the next uh, sayale, we do from the strategic petroleum reserve more than offsets that.

So I think, barring some kind of event that disrupts the supply, like a hurricane in the Gulf or something like that, we think we're on track for continued declines on the price of gas. A lot of the inflationary stuff, it's not really necessarily in the presidence control, though the president does almost always get blamed for it. I'm curious, like, what you've tried to do that, For example, England has crazy high inflation. What are the things that you guys

have done besides with oil? Obviously, energy prices are a big part of inflations. Why inflation is higher in England than it is here. That's why inflation in the US has eased as the price of gas has come down. But we have much a much broader agenda to fight inflation than that. It starts, of course, with also trying to untangle the supply chains that have slowed down the

flow of goods to market raises their price. We've had a supply chain task force making a lot of improvements on how goods get from ports and how they get across the rails, and that brings down the price. That's important, but it's also important to kind of fight inflation where people are around the kitchen table, where they're paying prices for things. That's why we passed the Inflation Reduction Act.

To bring down the cost of prescription drugs, which sadly is one of the fastest rising elements of inflation in the United States. To bring down the cost of insurance premiums, which also really bite people's wallets. To bring down the cost of energy in terms of the cost of heating your home or cooling your home depending on what time of year it is, and the cost of energy by

having more energy efficient appliances and things like that. So we're tackling the kinds of expenses that really take money out of people's wallets and trying to give people, as the present likes to say, a little breathing room, try to make their their budgets, their cost a little more affordable. So one of the things Jesse and I are we're talking about earlier is like, how do you decide what to deal with in this White House? Well, look, I

don't think it's a decided situation. I mean, with inflation, you had to, but I mean, like you guys did this student loan forgiveness? Like how do things you know become what you you know? Where you go with them? Look, I think the starting point for us he is the agenda that President Biden ran on. And you know, I think there was obviously a lot of noise in the race and maybe people didn't pay as much attention to

the agenda as they should have. But the president ran on a very clear agenda things he was going to do. He said that he would tackle four great crises facing our country. The economic crisis. People forget, but just two years ago when he was running for president, had twenty million people out of work, We had an unemployment rate that was a ten percent. We had lines of people in cars waiting for a box of food, he said.

He tacked that he has He has created more jobs in the first two years of his administration than any president in history, bought the unemployment right down to a fifty year low. He said he would tackle uh COVID, and we have. We have brought down the number of cases by, brought down them of deaths by We've made boosters and tests and treatments widely available. That's made a lot of progress in our country. He said he would

tackle the climate crisis, and we have. We've brought along the most significant climate change legislation and American history, possibly in world history. President signed in the law last month tackling that. And he said he would tackle the racism crisis. President has an administration that looks like America for the first time, first time ever in history. Then the majority of the cabinet is not white, first time ever in history, had the kind of percentage of African Americans in every

aspect of the government. He's also signed a police reform executive order to change the way we police in this country. Given tremendous a to HBCUs we've brought down the black unemployment rates significantly. So those four crises are kind of the center of our gender and what we have been dealing with since we got here. So you have in a sort of interesting and delicate trade situation. Can you explain to us a little bit about the Inflation Reduction

Act and what's happening in trade. It's so interesting to me because I have seen in my lifetime such a sort of an about face on trade too. Yeah, I think, Look, you know, right now, the US dollar is very very strong because our economy is very very strong, and that's really leading something that we haven't seen in a long time, which is the major factor in global trade right now, is US exports. Not things we're buying from other countries, things we're selling to other countries. Said an all time

record for exports last month. But most of this country has ever exported in a single year. And that's creating a lot of jobs here in America. We've seen this resurgence of manufacturing jobs. We've created more manufacturing jobs these two years than any time since the early nineteen sixties. America is making things, and the world is buying what we make, and that is a tremendous boon for our

economy and for our workers. We're always off, always trying to work with partners on you know, having effective trade regimes. Obviously right now a lot of trade we have with Europe is critical to keeping Europe in good shape as we fight this war. As the Ukrainians fight this war of Russian aggression and supplies from Europe, they need backing from Europe. So our trade relationships with Europe are a very important part of that overall effort of backing up

Ukrainian security. You know, trade is a vital element of what we do. Do you think there's an opportunity for the US and the UK to have a certain special relationship because of England leaving the EU. There's two issues there. I think one is do we have a special relationship with UK? We do, obviously, it's uh the long time relationship and probably our closest relationship with another country. And then the question is would we wind up with a

separate trade agreement with the UK. That could happen at some point in time, but Prime Minister trust Our Sofa said she doesn't expect it to happen anytime soon, and I don't think it will we have this situation with the chips. Can you talk about this for a minute. Chips are going to be a big, big, big part of the future, and there's really been a Biden push to manufacture chips here, which I think is exciting, but

also it's been sort of a conflict with Asia. Right. Well, look, I think that the world is highly dependent on chips manufactured in Taiwan, and they are great chips. Were certainly happy to import those chips, but the need for chips has just escalated out of control. I think we all know virtually everything we have in our homes has a computer chip in it. Not just our computers, but are our toasters and our coffee makers, and you know, just almost everything in your kitchen has a chip in it.

Now you're smart refrigerator and smart oven and all these things, and so many of them go into our cars. And so there aren't enough chips. One of the reasons why we've seen higher prices, one of the reasons why it's hard to get a new car is because we don't have enough chips to make all the cars we could make,

and to make all the things we could make. So the President said, look, we're gonna make this a priority so that we're not dependent on a foreign source of chips, so we're not dependent on long import times on those chips, so that we can re really rejuvenate American manufacturing, advanced manufacturing of these more high tech products, and so that we can bring down costs. And so he proposed, along with bipartisan members of both the House and Senate, legislation

to really stimulate the production of chips. And in the State of the Union address earlier this year, we had the CEO of Intel, which had promised to build the largest manufacturing facility in the history of the country in southwestern Ohio if Congress had passed this build to encourage the manufacturing of chips. Congress did pass that bill, and the President was proud or this month to be at the groundbreaking for that facility outside of Columbus in Ohio.

And so you know we're gonna see and and even since then, my Crowns announced a major chips Manu factoring facility up in Idaho. When we're seeing more US investment in kinds of batteries we need for electric cars and all kinds of very advanced manufacturing. So they have one additional benefit on top of all the other benefits I've mentioned so far, which is they create thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of good paying jobs, manufacturing jobs.

Six figure manufacturing jobs don't need a college degree. We're talking about people who either have one or two years of specialized training or maybe a community college degree. They don't need a four year college degree. So part of what the presidents also said is he build an economy

that work for everyone. We're obviously trying to get people to college who want to go to college, trying to make it affordable for them, trying to deal with that, but we also think that people should be able to have jobs they can raise a family on, they can live, and they can live a good life on even if they choose not to go to college. And uh ramping up our advanced manufacturing is a critical part of that.

You have this unique situation and with the Biden presidency of having an ex president who is continually in the fray and trying desperately to insert himself into the discourse. Is that hard? Well, look, I would say that Donald Trump is certainly unique, and I definitely want to be carefully or not to comment on any of the investigations, the matter of Marlague and all that. We're leaving that

to the Justice Department. But in terms of his no longer Twitter feed is truth, social feeding rallies and all the all the noise coming from Trump. The presidents made it very clear to us, our job is to do our jobs. His job is to do his job. And he got elected I think in large part because he promised people that he wouldn't be that kind of president. He'd be a very different kind of president, and it'd be a president be focused on doing the things our

country needs done. Progress Donald Trump when he was president, he announced almost every single week would be infrastructure week, and an infrastructure bill never passed. Biden said, you know what I'm gonna do. I'm actually gonna get it passed, and he passed with bipartisan support, the largest infrastructure bill since Eisenhower was president. So, uh, you know, we're here. We're about getting things done, about making the country a

better place. We have to stand up for democracy. It's vital and I think we have to respond to the things Trump says that are anti democratic, in the kind of movement he leads that is trying to derail our democracy. But on a day to day basis, I think our fundamental goal here is to deliver on the economy, on COVID, on race, on climate, and uh, you know that Trump owns two truth, social own the truth, and we're gonna get things done. Thank you so much, thank you. Tim

O'Brien is editor of Boomberg Opinion. Welcome Too Fast Politics, Tim Obrian Molly, I feel like we're old podcasting leads at this point, and we totally are. And I had to talk to you because nothing happened this week before we started taping. You were just saying, we were talking about what a good Donald Trump impression you do. I apologize, and you were saying, continue, Well, we He and I were at marl Lago for a weekend in let me think it was probably two thousand and five, the spring

of two thousand and five. He had a Ferrari there that he wanted to sort of show off to me, and he did not know how to drive it. You know, those Ferraris have gearshifters, paddle shifters on the steering wheel. They've probably changed since then. You know, that was I think the first and last time I was in a two car may He was still wearing his golf clothes, and he said, I really want to show you something.

So we drove into downtown Palm Beach. We pulled up to a stop light, he put the windows down and people on the corner began pointing at him, and he goes, isn't that amazing. Later that same night, I had dinner with Milania and him at marl Lago and she went to bed after dinner, and there was a sort of an event around the pool and there were these giant, like six ft high speakers arrayed around the swimming pool and Donald and I were standing at one end, and he was in a navy blue BRIONI suit. I am

not kidding. The song that was blaring out of the speakers was played that funky music white Boy, and he was doing the kind of white guy bite your bottom lip dance in his blue suit. And he asked him to really crank up the speakers and and he said, you know, I love blasting this music as loud as I possibly can, because all of these m efforts in Palm Beach never wanted me to be here, So I just played as loud as I possibly can now to remind that I'm here and I'm not going away. And

then he was president, right, right. You really get the award though, for the only person who covers Donald Trump, though, that's good at this invitation. Everybody else, if you cover him, you're bad at it. And I know you're happy to hear this. So let's talk about this week, because it was a very bad week for Donald Trump. You know, yeah, I mean, I think the consequences of Donald Trump choosing a run for the presidency and have come home to

roost on Donald Trump and his children. You know, it came home to roost on the country and the Constitution and people of color, and women and and a lot of other groups prior to this. But he had somehow escaped the consequences of his own decisions, as he has so often throughout his life. And you know, in this case, it was the New York Attorney General, Leticia James, indicting

him for financial fraud. So that was Wednesday, but even like on Monday, Maggie Harman had a piece in The New York Times which talked about how that Eric Kershman had warned Trump that he was taking a legal stuff back to mar Longo and there could be in other words, you know, and in Hershman was a star witness in the January six hearings too, in which he testified that you know, they they told him not to go down to the ellipse and that what he was doing there

was inappropriate and possibly illegal, and that Kirshman told other members of Trump's inner circle that he wasn't onna planning partner. So this is the second time that Hirshman, a lawyer, has get him a lawyer's inside account of telling Trump don't do something, it's wrong, and Trump doing it anyway. And in a criminal case, that is evidence of intent. And that's the hurdle of prosecutor has to overcome in a criminal case if you're pursuing something that might end

up with Donald Trump in prison. And so I think the Hirshman testimony is significant, and you know this, he is mired in a tar pit of existential legal threats. There's the Tish James case. Obviously, there's a an electoral fraud case with with very hot tangible evidence in Georgia, right, that's Fanny Willis another black woman, Yes I responsible, I mean, And then we have Tish James has said that she will refer this to the Southern District of New York,

which is different than Alvin brag Right. Well, but she's she's referring I think, other evidence she's uncovered that she thinks amounts to a federal crime, and she's referring it to both the U. S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District and to the I R S. So it suggests that what she's sending is evidence of criminal tax fraud.

And you know, one way out of for Trump, out of the civil charges that tish shandas filed, is the allegations are that he duped banks, that he gave them false information and these unsophisticated, poor little banker people didn't understand, which is a hard, hard hurdle to overcome because banks are sophisticated lenders. It's really a lot harder when you say that I R S people should be equally sophisticated and vigilant and the birdhas on them to make sure

that you're not lying to them. And in a way, I think that you know that referral could hold possibly more peril for him as things play out. Should should the I R S and use Attorney's office pursue it. And also I think that it's interesting. I mean, I still think like this all makes Alvin Brag the New York d A continually look terrible, right because what is he doing well? You know, Molly, I have mixed thoughts

about that. I think within that office, I think there was a disagreement among the prosecutors themselves about whether or not they had the goods for an air tight criminal fraud case. And I think the tension within that office revolved from I think some members of the prosecutorial team saying the stakes are too high, We've got to take this to court no matter what, and others saying, if we go there, it's a former president and it has

to be air tight. And there was reasonable arguments to be made on both sides, and you could argue that sy Vans should have taken care of that before he left office, and let left this giant, kind of complicated sandwich on Alvin Bragg's desk. Interesting. So I think, you know, I think, you know, Bragg is indicted, Weisselberg, Trump's CFO. There's a good chance, you know, he's prosecuting the company still, so I don't think Trump's gonna just fly out of

that without consequence. But it's certainly I had thought for a long time that that was the most perilous case he was facing. And I don't investigation he was facing, and I don't think it is any longer. Oh interesting,

So what do you think it is? I think if Merrick Garland gets his boots on and collects the evidence that you know, the January six Committee has surfaced so robustly and and wonderfully that there should be a federal indictment there for fraud on the American public and interfering with a congressional proceeding and you know, in one word, what could just be called a coup. Right, So interesting.

The thing that I find fascinating is then he decided, like a normal person would say, like I'm I'm facing all of these legal problems. I should probably take a

low profile. But instead Donald Trump decides to go on Sean Hannity's show and accompanied by the two Krakens in his midst his two sons who took to Twitter and said politics and nothing wrong here, which is just you know, they also are both defendants, so you would have thought they would have been more judicious, but you know, being judicious is not a Trump family traite now, and then the Potter familius goes on Hannity and just starts spouting

the same kind of nonlinear, unhinged word salad that he always does at moments when he's really cornered, and he clearly feels cornered, and he's you know, he doesn't have a good legal game. You know, his default is to play media game, playing it really badly right now, right, I mean, that's what's interesting. What I thought was interesting was I think that the takeaway from that interview that many of us took away was different people say different things.

But as I understand and it, if you're the present thing to United States, you can declassify just by saying it's declassified, even by thinking about it. Well, so you know what's interesting to me about that is, you know,

Donald Trump famously sued me. We we deposed him for two days in December of two thousand and seven, and during the course of that we asked him a lot of questions about is everything, but we were zeroing on how he valued his golf courses and because he had provided no paperwork for how he actually got to these kind of crazy valuations he had and and my attorney said, well, do you have a profit and low statements for the for the golf course and he'son, no, I don't have

any of those. And they said, well, then how do you decide what they're worth? And he said mental projections? And uh. And you know, Donald Trump sense of himself, the world around him, his history, his abilities, and how he conducts himself has been one big mental projection. So of course he's going to say that he can mentally project the classification of state secrets when it suits him. Unfortunately, that's actually not how the law work. But it is interesting.

I mean, he basically is going along this Richard Nixon. It's not a crime if the president does it. Well, Nixon was wrong too, And it's always interesting, you know, it's always interesting when people think they have superpowers that enable them to blow off the constitution and the law.

And that's why I think this moment is so important, because we have to stand up for the rule of law and for institutions, and for the idea that you're not allowed to stick nuclear secrets in your stocks and store them in an old closet drawer at your beach club. Slash house in Palm Beach. How do you think, I mean, you really know Trump and you're very smart, how do you see this plays out? I don't know. I've been wrong so many times. I think one of the myths

about Trump is that he routinely escapes culpability. He got past the Mueller probe and past two impeachments, and that he's had a life of the this and the that, and it has never been held accountable. Well, law enforcement never chose to hold him seriously accountable throughout his life. It happened once when he and his father got investigated for racial discrimination in their housing projects in the early nineteen seventies, and they got held accountable for that. After that,

he never did. The stakes went up when he became president. I think people began circling him and trying to make sure that his worst tendencies didn't unravel the national fabric. And he now, as we said earlier in the show, you know, he's now got very existential legal consequences facing him because of his own actions. He lacks the power of the presidency. His celebrity is not enough to save him from this. Neither are his personal finances, and his

business is under siege. I think there's a very high possibility Donald Trump is going to get indicted in at

least one of these venues that we've talked about. Yeah, and it also seems like this legal team has to be so expensive, right, And you know, I really want to I hope that part of the investigation of Trump includes how he's paying his legal bills, because if they're coming out of campaign donations that all of his credulous small dollar donors have have made to him, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars um, I think there's a real, I think question about whether or not

that's a fraudental use of the funds. And you know, his packs are being investigated now as well. You know, Donald Trump is a wealthy man. Even if he's not a billionaire, he has ample resources. I think he can probably afford to pay his legal bills on his own. But he's also a wildly cheap person. And if he could find another piggy bank to dip into, he might have done that, even it would have been wiser for

him to use his own money. The two p is paying for some amount of Trump's legal bills, right, And I don't know enough about campaign finance law to know whether or not that's appropriate. But apart from that, the fact that the GOP is willing to pay for some of these bills is an indicator of, I think, the kind of twisted integration that exists between Trump, Trump is um and the modern Republican Party and the fact that even now the party elders are afraid to completely alienate him.

And supposedly the sense is they kind of told him, or what was announced recently, was that they would stop paying whatever part of the legal bills they were paying if he announced before the mid terms. You know, he's not going to pay attention to anybody. I mean, he's just not going to listen to what the party needs, what Republicans voters voters need. He's going to think, Donald Tree, you can understand everything Donald Trump does through two lenses,

self aggrandizement or self preservation. From July Jonathan carl Scoop r n C warning to Trump, if you run for president, will stop paying your legal bills. Officials say, yeah, you know, those always feel to me like trial balloon kinds of stories. And he is a huge fundraiser. Still, he has a huge draw for money, for the party. He makes or break certain kinds of candidates, though not all of them.

And you know, in a lot of ways, the GOP is his party now, even if he's not sitting at top of it, because Trump is um is the coin of the realm. Yeah, Jesus, so depressing. Thank you so much, Tim, This is great, Thanks Molly, thanks for having me our special guest for a moment of fun. Gray is going to be one, Rick Wilson, So do you want to

go first? Or should I go first? Sure? My moment of fucory is every fucking reporter in the country who doesn't understand what Rhonda Santis did to them this week when he jerked them off about the second flight to Delaware. They should have understood right then, stop covering the bullshit. This is a twenty twenty four campaign operation. Treat it like that, and you can see exactly why he's doing it.

He's looking to drive into the Republican valence where Trump triumphed over all the other morons in the field that was immigration. Trump knew that they would say, you can't say that about Mexicans. And Trump knew that they would say, oh wha, how impractical, and it didn't matter because he understood the base better. That's a that's reporters thinking this is about immigration are making are totally missing the boat on what this guy's doing immigration. This is a subject

object collision problem. The entire operation is the Republican i'mary, that's what's happening here. Yeah, that's my moment of that was which if I had a podcast, I might have thought of having one. All right, well, my moment of fuckery is the Michigan GOP candidate for governor Tutor Dixon sampire poor. Wait what does that mean? If you just go ahead and google Tutor Dixon vampire porn, you will be illuminated. No, I don't want to do that right now.

She was in showtime like softcore porn movies in the ninety nineties. Anyway, when not getting eaten by zombies, We've gone down a real fucking rabbit hole. Tutor Dixon was making fun of Gretgen Whitmore for almost for the kidnapping plot where she was almost kidnapped. The sad thing is that Gretchen will tie your hands, put a gun to your head, and ask if you're ready to talk for

someone so worried about being kidnapped. Gretchen Whitmer sure is good at taking business hostage and holding it for Rance him and I think that's quite fucked up. And so that goes from my moment of faery, which you have now staged. Rick Wilson again. You know, Molly, I have I have a few gifts and I have to just make take full advantage of them. Thank you for joining us. You're very welcome. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.

Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to your the best minds and 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.